Highway to Hell (2 page)

Something stung my leg. I slapped at it, and found a mosquito the size of a quarter squished on my palm.

“Let's get out of the grass,” Lisa said, and I didn't argue. We retreated to the road, where the wetness on the pavement gleamed iridescent in the spill of the headlights. Over the metallic tang of blood, the petroleum stink was thick.

“It—the cow, I mean—must have torn the gas tank.” I contemplated the carcass, the broken ridge of its spine and the scars on its red-brown hide. “Do you think that other car hit the cow first? Maybe it went off the road.” Shielding my eyes from the Jeep's beam, I scanned the dark landscape, but saw no taillights, or any other sign that we weren't the only people in the entire world.

In the near distance, a coyote yipped, and another answered. Lisa gathered her hair into a ponytail and lifted it off her neck. “Some psychic you are, not to see this coming.”

I glared at her and slapped another mosquito. “That might be funny if we weren't stranded at the corner of No and Where.” That wasn't the way my mojo worked. “Why don't you just whip out your cauldron and conjure us a new gas tank?”

“Don't be silly. I don't take my cauldron with me on vacation.” She reached into the pocket of her jeans. “Fortunately, I have my magic cell phone.”

I headed for the tailgate. “And I have an emergency kit in the back of the Jeep.”

She raised a sardonic brow as I passed. “And you say you can't see the future.”

My gift was not foresight; it was overpacking. I believed in being equipped for as many scenarios as possible. Nancy
Drew never got caught without her flashlight and magnifying glass, and neither would I, if I could help it.

I also had flares, a first-aid kit, reflective triangle thingies, a whistle, one of those thermal blankets that looks like something from
Star Trek
, and enough bottled water that, added to the copious amount of snacks we'd brought, made it unlikely that Lisa and I would have to resort to eating each other before someone found us.

The Jeep lurched and I jumped back, my heart thudding against my ribs. But it was just Lisa, climbing onto the front bumper and holding her cell phone skyward.

“What the hell, Lisa? Are you summoning the mother ship?”

“Looking for a signal.”

My peripatetic heart plummeted, all the way to my gut. “You're kidding me.”

“About being stuck in Nowhere, Texas?
Not
a laughing matter.”

Scrambling to grab my own mobile from the dashboard, I stared at it in disbelief. Not even zero bars. Just a “no signal” message across the screen.

The isolation was complete. I stood in the middle of the highway, the island of light cast by the headlamps the only outpost of reality. What if, like some episode of
The Twilight Zone
, the world had ended, only Lisa and I didn't know it?

“We should turn off the headlights,” Lisa said calmly, “and save the battery.”

That's what we did. What we always did, really: put off blind panic with sensible action. Well, action, anyway.

I turned off the lights and put on the hazard blinkers. In
the intermittent red glow, my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, which made it seem less like a wall of dark separated us from the rest of the world. Lisa assembled the reflective triangles into pyramids and put them around the Jeep. I grabbed the flares and the flashlight, and steeled myself to approach the cow.

My flip-flops stuck to the asphalt; with each step, the rubber soles released with a sucking pop. The smell of blood grew worse as I neared the carcass, and the Maglite wavered. I swallowed, hard. It was going to be a long time before I could even think about eating a hamburger.

Sensible action, Maggie. Barfing is not sensible.

The cow lay on its side, head twisted unnaturally toward the sky, glassy eyes reflecting the stars. Lips pulled back from flat, herbivore teeth, and a thick tongue hung out. Blood pooled from the neck, which gaped open, muscle and glistening sinew exposed in the beam of my flashlight. I thought at first that the laceration was from the Jeep's impact, but the edges of the cow's hide didn't look torn from a shearing force. The flesh had been … incised.

The word popped into my head with a clarity that wasn't random. Incisor. Tooth. Fang. I stretched out a curious finger and touched the blood, thick and clotted on the ground.

Hot, crimson spray on white, sharp teeth. The sensation of it flooded my mouth, coated my tongue with salt and copper.

I reeled back, met pavement, and kept going, crab-walking away as fast as I could. I'd dropped the flashlight, and couldn't see anything but red-tinged blackness. My lungs gasped for air, yet nothing came in but the stench. I was drowning in it.

“Maggie! Snap out of it.”

Light hammered my eyes. I flung up a hand to shield them from the flashlight beam that Lisa pointed at my face. Her gaze went to my upraised hand, and I looked at my palm, coated with blood, sticky and cold.

“There was so much of it.” My voice sounded distant and strange.

“Well, duh, Mags. What did you expect?”

Not sympathy, obviously. My brain slogged toward a retort, but my stomach had already reached a state of full-scale revolt. I stumbled to the dry grass beside the road for a humiliating digestive retrospective.

By the time I was done swearing I'd never eat Twizzlers again, Lisa had gone to the Jeep and returned with Handi Wipes from the glove box. She offered one silently, and I cleaned my face and hands.

“Thanks.”

“Don't mention it,” she said dryly, and handed me the last of my Coke. I uncapped the bottle and washed the acrid taste from my mouth with a little high-fructose nirvana. Thank God for artificial flavoring.

I'm not much of a badass demon slayer. Superheroes always have a cool origin story, but not me. I'm not on a quest for vengeance or atonement. I'm not the Chosen One. I'm just a girl who can see things that most people can't.

That's what clairvoyance is. My Gran calls it “the Sight,” but it's more than that. All my life I've had freakily accurate hunches, great intuition, even though I haven't always listened to it. Then last year, I started to sense things. It began with dreams of something stalking my classmates, and then I was
seeing
the thing in real life.

After that, I paid attention to my intuition, and worked on focusing on those feelings. But last fall, my weirdness got a major boost when I met the sorority from Hell. I started getting flashes when I touched things. Not just vision, but sound and smell and taste. Emotion, too. You know how you can tell your parents stopped arguing right before you came into the room? Like that, times a thousand.

I thought it might go away after Lisa, Justin, and I dealt with that particular baddie. But the sensory flashes seemed to be a permanent development. Mostly I pick up little things-moods, recent events—and usually it isn't intrusive. I can tell when the barista who hands me my coffee has had a fight with her boyfriend. I know who's calling me without looking at the caller ID. But this was the first time since December that something had, literally, knocked me on my butt.

So, needless to say, I was almost more shaken up than I was grossed out.

Lisa started back toward the Jeep. I fell in alongside, keeping a careful distance from the carcass. “I'm an idiot. I know.”

She stopped, facing me with her hands on her hips. “You knew it didn't die peacefully. What did you think would happen when you touched it?”

I shot her a cranky glare and sank into the passenger seat. “Tell me again why we're friends?”

“Who else is going to tell you, ‘Don't poke the dead cow, Maggie, because you might get a vision of its horrible and vio-lent death’?”

A shiver ran through me, like my body was trying to shake off the image. “It was awful. So many teeth.”

She paused, maybe picking up on my disquiet but not ready to ask. “Probably a coyote.”

That was how we were going to play it. Lisa rejected my unspoken suggestion that this was something … other than normal. I let it go, for now. Middle of the night, middle of nowhere—we had plenty to worry about without my adding the eerie to the mix.

“Probably so,” I said, and tried to sound convinced.

Lisa picked up the flashlight she'd set aside. “I'd better go put up the flares. Stay here and don't touch anything else.”

“Yes, ma'am.” I saluted her Roman-centurion style and she went back to business. I sat in the dark, slapping mosquitoes and jumping at the unfamiliar noises of the wilderness.

My arm ached, and I rubbed the knotted muscles along the ridge of the scar. I used to think of myself as two people. Logical Maggie: honors student, journalism club, yearbook photographer. Nothing weird there, except maybe my obsession with science fiction movies. Freaky Maggie had stayed nicely compartmentalized until I'd needed her.

But try finding out that the natural world, all that stuff you learn in physical science, is only part of the picture. There's this whole other stratum of
super
natural reality, with its own rules, that the rest of the world has no clue about.

If my experiences last fall had done anything permanent to me—other than the damage to my right arm—it was that I'd been forced to integrate the parts of my self. Freaky had to work with Logic, or I was going to wind up dead. Worse, people I loved would be hurt. You can't come back from that.

Which meant that I could pretend for a little while that I believed that we were only dealing with coyotes, but I couldn't entirely let it go.

“Car!”

I jolted out of a not-quite-doze, glimpsing Lisa's back as she swung out of the Jeep. It took me longer to untangle my brain and my legs. By the time I joined her on the road, she was waving the flashlight in the direction of an oncoming vehicle.

“ What are we going to do if it's an axe murderer?”

Lisa kept her gaze on the rapidly approaching headlights. “You can always go up and touch him and see what you See.”

I eyed her profile. “Do we not have enough on our plate without a side of sarcasm?”

The grille of a large pickup stopped in front of the bovine roadblock, motor churning down to a throaty idle. The door opened, and boots hit the asphalt with a crunch.

It was hard to make out details of the guy, backlit by the truck's headlights. Mostly just a silhouette, tall and whipcord lean. Low at his waist was the gleam of one of those plate-sized silver belt buckles. He set his fists on his hips and whistled.

“Daaaaaang.” One syllable, stretched long. “This is some mess. You girls all right?”

Lisa glanced a question at me, and I shrugged. I wasn't sensing a threat, but I wasn't ready to commit myself.

“Ladies?” Cowboy Joe repeated, sounding more concerned. “You okay?”

“We're fine,” I said, appointing myself spokesperson. “But our Jeep isn't going anywhere.”

“Dead as this heifer, huh?” He circled the carcass with a don't-you-worry-little-lady amble. I saw Lisa's left eyebrow climb, and knew she was thinking something sarcastic, so I jumped in before she could speak it aloud.

“I think the gas tank was sort of … gored.” I swatted a mosquito that hadn't heard from his friends that I'd already been bled dry.

“What happened?” he asked, heading toward the Jeep.

“The cow was lying in the road like that. We went over the top of it.”

“You're lucky you didn't roll over.” He crouched to look underneath the car, which gave us an excellent view of the back of his jeans as he bent over. I caught Lisa checking him out, her other eyebrow shooting up to join the first. Not so sarcastic now.

Since I have a boyfriend, my interest in his Wranglers was purely aesthetic. I swear.

He stood and dusted off his hands. As he turned, I got my first look at his face. Tanned skin over sculpted cheekbones, deep-set dark eyes, tidily cropped black hair. He wasn't obviously Hispanic or Native American, but he was definitely the thoroughbred product of a nice mix of bloodlines.

“I can't tell much in the dark, but it's a pretty sure bet …”

He hesitated and Lisa finished for him. “That we're screwed?”

“Something like that.”

This was not news, but it was hard to hear. I felt light-years away from home. If I'd had even half a bar of signal on my
phone, I would have called my mom. But she would just tell me not to be ridiculous. Sensible action, Maggie.

“How close is the nearest town?” At least some part of my brain was functioning.

“Well, Dulcina is not too much farther.” He pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable. Dul-SEE-na.

I imagined “not too much farther” could be anything up to fifty miles. “Is there a garage that can send a tow truck?”

Thumbs hooked in his belt, Cowboy Joe considered the question. “There's a garage of sorts. Buck usually takes care of tractors, flat tires, that sort of thing. It's a start.”

“We couldn't get a cell phone signal.” I pulled my phone from my pocket to check again.

“All kinds of dead spots along this highway.” He glanced at his watch. “You don't want to call now anyway. Wake Buck up and he'll charge you an arm and a leg.”