Weekend Horror Story

 The Lone Road

   

I always found driving peaceful. There’s something almost serene about just cruising along at a steady pace down a long strip of road. Coincidentally that’s exactly what I was doing on this cool September night. A little road trip I’ve been planning for awhile set me straight in the middle of rural Kansas. I don’t usually frequent the open country like this, I’m more of a city person.

  If you saw my car you wouldn’t be surprised. A 2015 Toyota Camry, she isn’t exactly an off-roading machine, but she gets me where I need to go. Anyways back to the very long stretch of highway; all I could see were rolling fields. I wasn’t sure what kind of crop was planted in the fields; like I said a city boy.

The sun was starting to set; bathing the landscape in an orange hue. It transformed the fields into a sea of flowing gold. Shimmering in the wind; it was almost like I could swim in it. I was starting to lose myself in this real life painting when I noticed something. On the horizon about as far down the road as my naked eye could see; I saw a silhouette of what looked like a person; standing completely still. I instantly flipped off my cruise control and pressed on the brakes, slowing down to a crawl.

  I stuck my head out of the window to try and get a better look. It was too dark to make out any defining features, but from the build it may have been a man. I was starting to get a bad feeling; I’m a pretty paranoid person so I thought of this as some kind of setup. Someone stands in the middle of the road so a car will slow down and then his buddies jump out of the field and carjack him, or something along those lines.

  A little unsettled, I swung my head back inside; rolled up the windows, and locked the doors. Unfortunately there weren’t any turn offs, and I would have to drive back miles to actually find one. I really didn’t feel like wasting a gallon of gas and my time to turn around; so I set off forward at a steady pace keeping my eyes on the figure. After about five minutes of driving with the worse case scenarios playing in my head, I noticed something that sent a chill up my spine. Even after driving a mile the figure didn’t seem to get any closer.

  There he stood in the middle of the road as still as a scarecrow, right on the edge of my perceivable vision. I was starting to get frustrated; was this figure moving away from me? But the figure showed no signs of movement, so how could he be running away? I gave it some gas and picked up the pace; the speedometer read thirty miles per hour. After five miles the figure still wasn’t any closer. My head was starting to spin, what the fuck was going on? I sped up to forty, fifty, sixty.

   There he stood like a watchful sentinel; unwavering in the wind. Seventy, eighty, ninety! My Camry was starting to shake, the engine was gasping for air. I no longer confined myself to the right side of the road. I was streaking towards the figure going straight down the center of the road. I noticed the sky was starting to change color. Instead of the sun setting, and plunging the rolling fields around me into darkness, the sky was taking on an amber color. Like the entire world was on fire.

  Our eyes locked, and I have no idea how. He was too far away for me to see his eyes, but I knew they were there. Gazing into mine, they felt sinister. It made my hair stand on end. He was smiling at me; no he was grinning. Full on cheek splitting grin, I knew he was, I couldn’t see his face but I knew he was. I tried slamming on the brakes, but all I was greeted with was the brake pedal giving way with no resistance and slamming into the floor of my car. I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t look away.

  I’m losing my mind; my hands felt glued to the steering wheel; I was struggling to breath. Suddenly the radio blared to life, an ear splitting scream filled the air. It sounded like a man in agony; a combination of screaming and sobbing. I couldn’t move my hands to turn off the radio, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the road. Tears started to run down my cheeks, and my ears began to ring from the shrieking.

 He was coming for me. I knew it before he even started moving. He took off down the road towards me, sprinting at inhuman speeds. His limbs spun and twisted as he ran, almost as if all his bones were broken, but he ran anyway. He seemed faster than any car, and was on me in seconds. Only a couple of feet away from the hood of my car was when I could make out his features.

 Pale green, leathery skin, horribly disfigured with scars as deep as ravines. As if his entire face was taken apart and put back together. The worst part was his grin. It was way too wide for anyone to consider it normal, so wide that I could not only see all his front teeth, but his molars too. He slammed into my car at full speed, flying into my windshield, sending cracks like a spider’s web through the glass, and flipping over my car.

  I came to a screeching halt. Rubber burning, I struggled to keep my car from spinning off the road. Gasping for air I sat with my hands clenching the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. The sun finally decided to set. The silence was almost deafening, only my raspy breathing filled the car’s interior. I slowly looked in the rearview mirror to try and catch a glimpse of his mangled corpse lying in the road. Straining my neck to try and see every possible angle. I couldn’t make out anything lying in the road.

  I  was too terrified to leave the safety of my car and continue my search on foot. Think dammit, maybe I could try and call the police, but I was in the middle of nowhere; somehow I got a signal.

“Why didn’t you slow down?” whispered the back seat.