Highway 24 by Jeff Chapman

 
Highway 24
    by
    Jeff Chapman
     
    A moonless autumn night loomed under a vaulted sky bristling with stars. Paul steered his car along a dark stretch of Highway 24, heading home from a sales trip. A straight, level highway lengthened before him, a thin gray scratch across a landscape of shadows. The road cut through miles of pastures and open farmland devoid of human dwellings. A few rolling hills interrupted the flat monotony, and tree-lined creeks carved ribbons across the expanse. In the primordial darkness, absent of man’s probing lights and rationality, every light flared like a beacon, a candle flickering for the lost soul. Dash after yellow dash glowed like a spark from a fire before fading into the darkness that folded in behind him the way black curtains close off the stage at the end of a play.
    He had been driving for hours, trying to make time on an empty road. The words WAILING CREEK flashed in his headlights, emblazoned in reflective white across a green rectangle. Guardrails marked the bridge, and trees hugged the river banks, stripped of leaves by a relentless southwest wind. Paul didn’t pay much attention to the bridge, another unremarkable crossing over a minor tributary, but a speck of color etched the scene into his memory, a patch of luminescent pink beyond the creek and behind the trees. He leaned over the steering wheel, his mind rudely wrenched from its wanderings. Nothing should be glowing out here and definitely not bubblegum pink.
    As he crossed the water, he observed it again and again. The aberrance bobbed as it grew larger. His eyes widened. His dulled senses roused. He had grown up with the stories of cattle mutilations and alien abductions spiced with gory details and told at lunchroom tables. He knew it was a bunch of hooey to titillate preteen boys, but out here in the dark, alone, those stories took on an unsettling sense of reality. He gripped the steering wheel as one would squeeze the handle of a club. His instincts prepared him to flee, to press the accelerator to the floor.
    When he cleared the bridge, he spotted the source of the curiosity, a girl in a long-sleeved, pink formal, running along the gravel shoulder. She waved at him with one arm while holding up her dress with the other. It was just a girl. His hands slackened their grip. His shoulders relaxed. What sort of dumb high-school kid would be out here in the middle of nowhere? For a moment, he found her comical and chuckled at a spectacle so incongruous. He intended to stop. Maybe her car had broken down. What man wouldn’t want to help a pretty young girl in distress?
    He pressed slowly on the brake pedal. She looked pretty from a distance—expensive-looking dress, coifed hair, and flawless makeup no doubt—the kind of girl that wouldn’t have given him the time of day when he was in high school, let alone go out with him. He figured she’d smell like a bottle of perfume. He remembered girls from high school who left an overpowering wake of scent as they passed.
    She jumped onto the road. Paul’s thoughts jerked back to the present. Her eyes darkened to black dots as her face blanched in the blinding beams of the headlights. Her mouth gaped in a scream. She waved her arms in a flurry of pink and white, a crazy, spinning pinwheel of motion.
    Paul slammed the brake pedal to the floor. “Shit! You idiot.”
    His shout joined the screeching wheels. Not enough distance. He was going to hit her. Feel and experience told him the distance to stop, and only one rational answer came to mind. He lunged for a faint hope as a drowning man grasps at the tail of a rope. His analytical side was wrong. Had to be. The car would stop with inches—even a single inch—to spare. The girl would place her hands on the warm hood and glare at him. What else could he do?
    He locked his elbows and threw his shoulders into the vinyl seat. With every muscle, he pressed the brake pedal into the carpet. The car lurched beneath him, an animal