One Minute to Midnight (36 page)

"I'm sorry, do you mind? It might be my
husband trying to reach me." Dianne said.

"No, no worries." Hugo smiled at Dianne, but
sweat stood out on his brow as he began to fiddle with his suit
jacket.

The text read:
Are you home yet? I'm calling the police. There's a car out
front with some guy's head in a pickle jar. Not safe, probably, I
don't know. I'll call you in a few minutes.
Dianne's faux smile faded as she looked up from the
text.

"Who are you, really?" She stood and backed up
to her refrigerator.

"I'm uh, Jason, uh Huxley, you know, the guy
you called." He began to giggle nervously.

"You mean Wembly?" Dianne asked. The stranger
in her house suddenly looked out the living room window and saw
Felix dialing a number on his phone next to the Cadillac. Dianne
reached for her pistol as the man ran over to their
window.

"No, no, no, that guy is going to ruin
everything." He reached for the door handle and threw open their
front door.

Dianne had not used their pistol very often,
but she had been given a tutorial on how to check to see if it was
loaded. With trembling hands, she pulled the slide back a little
and saw that there was a bullet in the chamber. The stranger was
running out of the door now and Dianne could see that he was
approaching her husband on the lawn. She ran through the door and
aimed her pistol at the back of the stranger who was now wielding a
large knife over his head.

"Stop!" She screamed. Felix had not seen the
approaching man and dropped his phone in surprise.

Felix's limbic instinct told him to put his
hands up in a defensive gesture, and as he prepared for the attack,
a single bang rang out in the late afternoon air. The attacker fell
to his knees, but managed to regain his footing once more. Dianne
fired again, this time the shot went to the left and entered his
trunk where it penetrated one of the gas cans, igniting it into a
ball of flames. The trunk began to smoke as the second gas can
blew, knocking the trunk lid off its hinges and hurling it through
the air like a deadly Frisbee.
"My car! You shot my car!" He squealed in fury. Hugo turned back
around to run at Dianne when she fired another shot into his
abdomen.

"Ouch, lady. You're gonna' pay for that!" He
screamed.
The pain in Hugo's body felt like he was being thrown into a
roaring fire. He had been shot in the back, and now his stomach had
a hot coal lodged in it. The resolve to keep going after her had
been broken, and now all he wanted to do was get away. Hugo limped
toward his flaming automobile and jumped in the passenger side as
Felix ran toward his wife. She dropped the gun and began to sob as
he picked it up and held her. Hugo fired up the engine, and as he
did the fire surged through his fuel line, causing the engine to
explode through the badly rusted firewall of his Cadillac. In a
moment he was a screaming, writhing torch, trapped inside the car.
Dianne watched as the man who was not Jason Wembly grabbed the
pickle jar beside him, held it to his chest, and went
still.

Later, after the police and fire department
left, a detective explained as much as he knew about the
disappearance of Jason Wembly, and also told the couple they had
been fortunate. They linked the car and license plate to a dozen
vanishings of men, women and children in Iowa. For years Dianne
would see the image of that man in her dreams burning like a
marshmallow on a stick over hot campfire coals.

The next week, she was at the call workshop as
she promised to do every week, only this time, she was greeted by
the sympathetic eyes of her friends who had seen all of the horror
on the news. Tina looked across the table at Dianne and placed a
gentle hand on hers.

"Are you sure you want to do this now? I mean,
after all that's happened? You might need time to sort things out
before firing back up again."

Dianne looked at her with calm serenity, and
smiled at the three of them.

"You know, I thought about bailing on this,
but then it occurred to me what a simple phone call can do. You
really do meet all kinds of people in this business. After my
encounter with that guy, making calls doesn't really bother me
anymore. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen, right?" Dianne
laughed and began to dial a number from her stack of business
cards. She was first in the circle to call from then on.

danger in the swamp

Four college students traveling home for the
Holidays become lost in a bayou forest where the GPS in their
phones doesn’t work, they have no map, and the locals are hostile
to outsiders.

Darkness enveloped Rob Weller's Toyota
4Runner as it sped along I-59 on the way to New Orleans for
Christmas vacation. He was bringing his three friends home with him
for the break and it had been a nonstop party from UNC Charlotte in
North Carolina all the way through South Carolina, Georgia,
Alabama, and Mississippi. He had been wearing a Santa hat through
all four states and it was beginning to itch, and his scalp was
soaked with sweat, but he kept it on anyway. They had a briefcase
full of illegal drugs and were using them to stay awake and
energized for the trip. Susie Wainright was riding shotgun, Doug
Tramp sat in the right rear seat, and his girlfriend Jackie Ross
was beside him.
"You're gonna' get us busted by the cops if you keep speeding man."
Doug said. He was about five foot eleven with long shaggy hair, and
often wore John Lennon glasses even when it was dark outside.
These, he hoped, would cover his blood shot pot smoke-filled
eyes.

"Dude, I'm driving fifty-five miles an
hour, in a fifty-five with the cruise set. How much acid have you
taken?" Rob asked.

"I'm not quite sure. I accidentally
held the blotter sheet for a few minutes while I was cutting one
off and I think it soaked through my skin."

"You're a dumb ass, you know that?"
Jackie said. She was pretty, with long brown hair, and had smooth
brown skin. Her family had emigrated from Mexico when she was three
and Jackie had grown up in Concord, NC.

"Yeah, I think I had too much, the
back of the chair in front of me is breathing." Doug began giggling
in the uncontrollable manner that only hardcore drugs can
invoke.

"Wonderful, now Doug's going to be
wasted for eight hours. Pass me a jay, Jackie." Susie asked. Jackie
lit one up, took a hit and then passed it to Susie.
With the windows rolled down, they could smell the dankness of the
swamp as their SUV cruised alone through the darkness of what felt
to Rob like a never-ending night. Two more hours went by, and Rob's
caffeine was wearing off and the cigarettes he had smoked were
becoming less effective. Rob was falling asleep at the wheel, and
after hearing Mr. Jones and Me by The Counting Crows for the fifth
time on the MP4 rotation, their music had become like white noise
in a crowded room. He was dozing. Jackie was snoring in the back
and Doug had taken to staring at a Baxter Stockman Fly toy from the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon and was catatonic on his LSD
journey. Susie put her head back on the seat and had been sleeping
for an hour with her face tilted toward the roof.

"That's gonna' suck in the
morning." Rob mumbled. He had trouble feeling sorry for her in his
current state of road exhaustion. Not one of them had volunteered
to drive and chose got high instead, leaving him to do all the
heavy lifting, which was at this hour, his eyelids. "Tis' the
season." He said to himself.
The dashboard clock read two-thirty and they were miles from
anywhere, according to the GPS. Suddenly, a young girl covered in
blood darted in front of his car. Her arms at her sides and
standing like a mannequin, she stared straight at Rob as if she
were waiting for the vehicle to hit her. Before he could react her
body slammed into the windshield like a rag doll with a loud
thud
. Up and over the
car she went, hitting the ground behind them and rolling along the
asphalt, her long blood-soaked hair flying about her head like
tassels on a child's bicycle handlebars. Rob could no longer see
the road due to the streaks of black blood smeared across his field
of vision and slammed on the brakes.

All passengers inside the vehicle were
thrown forward and violently awakened as Rob gripped the wheel of
his SUV.

"Jesus Christ! What the hell was that
about!?" He screamed.
Jackie was prying her face off the back of the drivers set and
Susie was massaging her sore neck while Doug looked out the back
window at the body lying in the road. This type of trauma could
send the average LSD user into a bad trip, but Doug was experienced
and had been doing it so long and with such frequency that nothing
fazed him once he was into the ride.

"Holy shit, Rob? Why'd you do that?!"
Susie said and saw the windshield. "Did you hit a deer?"

"No, some chick ran out in front of
the car and just stood there waiting for me to hit her!" Rob was
breathing heavily.

"Dude, that was crazy! There's a girl
dead on the road, wow!" Doug said with a Keanu Reeves in Bill and
Ted's tone in his voice.

"I think I busted my forehead!" Jackie
said. She had a large bump on her head, and a trickle of blood ran
down her nose from a cut above her eye, but she was otherwise
unharmed. "Shit, dude!"

"Oh my god, I hit someone. We gotta'
call the cops or something." Rob said.

"Are you crazy?" Doug asked. "You know
we're all high as balls, right? There are also enough drugs in this
vehicle to send us all to jail for more than a few days. Think
about it, dude!" He shook his head and actually began to feel
himself slipping into the negative zone of a bad time. Doug stared
at the fly toy again, trying to rescue his good mood, but the
mention of cops and conversation about jail time was enough to kill
anyone's buzz. Doug looked back and the body was gone.

"It's gone." Doug said. "The body in
the road, it's gone."
"What? No way she’s still alive after that. I must have hit her
going seventy." Rob replied.

"I thought you had the cruise set to
fifty-five." Susie said.

"I took it off to make
some time along this stretch of
only God
knows where we are
highway."

They all looked back and saw that Doug
was right. The evidence was gone, and for a moment the four of them
began to breathe a sigh of relief. The sound of crickets chirping
in the early morning hours serenaded their drama. There is a
certain point in the night when your body knows you are up way past
your bedtime and everything becomes a surreal experience. You begin
to feel as if you have been transported to an alternate dimension
where you and those who are with you are all sharing the same funky
dream. Add hard drugs to that experience, and a major traumatic
event like slamming into a human being on the highway, and
everything takes a left turn toward crazy town.

"We should call someone and let them
know what happened anyway. Maybe a gator got her?" Susie said. She
looked down at her phone, and saw that there was no connection.
"Crap! I got nothing over here. Any of you guys have a signal?"
None of their phones had cell reception this far out into the
backcountry.
"I say we keep going until we get to a town and then we can make an
anonymous phone call from a diner or something. Sound good?" Rob
asked.

"Let's see. Call the cops from a pay
phone and jet out safely, or lead them right to our briefcase full
of drugs and confront them while high as kites after telling them
we hit a girl on the road. That's a tough one, bro." Doug
said.

"You don't have to be a smartass about
it." Rob said. They all voted to keep going, just as soon as Rob
could clean the windshield.

He asked Jackie to hand him an old
shirt from the back of the vehicle and, against protest from Susie,
Rob got out of the truck to clean their window. He felt eyes on him
the second his feet touched the ground, and although it had seemed
like a festive and celebratory gesture at the beginning of their
trek, the Santa hat atop his head suddenly felt childish and
immature in their present situation. A clump of hair had been
caught in the wiper blades when the girl's body had flown over the
4Runner, and he had a large dent in his hood. As he wiped with his
shirt, the blood smeared around in circles making a bigger
mess.
"Susie, hit the washer fluid." Rob said.

"Hey boy, you look lost or sumpthin'."
A man's voice said from behind. Rob felt ice in his veins as the
cold hand of fear slid up his spine. He turned around to see a tall
young man staring at him, no more than twenty with a nappy red
beard and acne. He had a scowl on his face.

"Uh, we just had some car trouble.
We'll be on our way in a few minutes." Rob said. Susie was watching
through the smeared windshield while Jackie slunk down behind the
driver's seat.

"Car trouble, huh? Looks more serious
n' that." The man was grinning. Rob looked down and could see that
the man was holding a long wooden axe handle.
"Rob! Get back in the truck and let's go!" Susie yelled.
Rob turned back around to see where the man was and that's when the
business end of the axe handle connected with his temple. The last
thing he heard while falling unconscious to the asphalt was Susie,
Doug and Jackie screaming. When he woke up, he was in a dark, dank
room that reeked of foul meat, and he had no idea where he was. The
room was constructed from slat boards and looked like a nineteenth
century cabin. His head was throbbing, and the Santa hat, covered
in blood, was sitting in his lap. He saw a shape moving across the
room as his vision returned, and realized it was Susie tied up with
a gag in her mouth. After more time to focus he could make out the
form of Jackie, and she was either asleep or knocked
out.