Rattle Car

Summary: A ghost appears.

Before opening the car door, I took a deep breath of the night air to help center myself. Feeling the way my lungs expanded to accommodate the stinging cold air, burning my throat before coming back out in a puff of condensed air. My heartbeat in my ears and drowning out the crickets and other night musicians beneath a heavy thrum-bum. Josh honked the horn with an impatient gesture from inside the car. Shaking, I slid into the passenger’s seat, avoiding eye contact with the backseat and its single silent occupant.

“Breath, Jerk.” Josh said, obviously trying to sound normal and push our shared anxiety away, but I could hear the quiver in his voice. What we had done, what we were going to do, would not be thought of lightly.

“I’d be dead if I didn’t.” I try to joke but it falls flat. We say nothing while the old rattling death trap of a car grinds down the road. I stare out my window after the city lights fade, watching the abyss stretching for eternity. The dim headlights doing very little to cut through the darkness and I allowing me to believe that nohting existed beyond Josh and myself. The window occasionally fogging beneath my breath, in my mind, was the only thing keeping the two of us from being engulfed and lost forever. The sound for the the rattling car wheezing up the steep narrow winding incline of a cliff, I convinced myself, would be the only sound I would ever hear again.

Without warning Josh yells after coming around a blind curve, I jerk my head around to look out the windshield as the breaks scream and the ass end tries to fishtail us off the road. My hands reach to catch myself against the dashboard just before the seatbelt lock, surprisingly, engages digging the nylon strap against my shoulder. The dust begins to settle revealing an empty road. I imagine I can hear the gravel trickling down the side of the cliff over the shuttering engine.

“Fuck dude, did you see…”

“Don’t fucking say it, Greg! Don’t you fucking say his name!”

“But-”

“Do. Not. Say the name of the dead damn it!”

So I don’t.

We sit in silence staring at each other, then the road, then each other again for a few moments. Then slowly we turn to the backseat together, I stretch my shaking arm slowly towards the corner of the blanket. I don’t know if I am more afraid to see the corpse of Hank, our ex-business partner, under the blanket still or to discover that he is gone.

TAP. Tap.

Josh and I jump, yelp once then again as our heads thunk against the ceiling of the car. Shinning a flashlight into the car is a cop with a raised eyebrow. Josh gives a nervous chuckle as he rolls down the window.

“You boys need to turn around. There’ll be detour signs now. Bridge is out over the canyon.”

“Er…thanks, sir.” Josh nods. We watch the cop get into his car and back up to one of the few wide sections and turn around. Using the same turning zone, we also turn around, and Josh let it start coasting down the road.

I slump into my seat and stare blankly at the black abyss ahead of us. I feel something in my chest slowly swelling up, pushing its way into my mouth before escaping. At first as nothing more than a huff, then a small chuckle, and then I was covering my face as my body shook with nearly hysterical laughter. I felt Josh send me an uncertain nervous look but I couldn’t bring myself to care. We had spent so much time belittling and putting Hank down, spending hours upon hours arguing with him and feeling as if he was in our way constantly. He had been questioning every decision we made. Killing him, we thought would finally free of him, but there he had been. Standing in the middle of the road. But, this time it was as though instead of getting in our way, he had come to our rescue. I knew the bridge and knew, if it was out in the right spot, we would not have noticed.