The condensation was on the inside of the windshield. I had to wipe the water off with my sleeve while trying to avoid the parked cars. After clearing a small section away, I realized I still couldn’t see the road fully, but it was also immediately apparent that where I was driving was the least of my concerns.
A naked humanoid creature was perched on the front of the Pinto. The thing’s skin looked as if it had been pulled extra tight over a wiry, muscular frame. Under the nearly translucent gray skin were highly visible black veins running in interlocking paths through the creature’s body. Its head was a skull, the dull bone the same color as the rest of the body. It reminded me vaguely of Jack Skellington, but a more accurate way to describe it would be if a zombie and a skeleton had a baby with a power lifter in the world's most bizarre threesome imaginable.
Five long fingers that looked like they were designed specifically for clawing and tearing were doing precisely that to the car hood. Deep scratches marked its path. It shrieked and clawed closer toward the windshield. Its gray claws reached for me, then thunked off the glass. The skull head looked confused. Not much experience with glass, I suppose. It shrieked in frustration and began punching the window, which thankfully held, though I knew it wouldn’t last forever. Perhaps the magical Duct tape was doing its job after all.
I instinctively slammed on the brakes, making Jack Skellington fly off the car into the middle of the road. It skreeched again, a pair of shadowy angelic wings unfurling from its back. What WAS this thing?
I floored it and slammed into the creature, which only put us in the same situation we had been in moments before–me driving like a maniac, with the creature trying to claw its way up my hood.
I swerved back and forth, trying to dislodge my new friend. Nothing I did seemed to shake it, and it was getting closer to the windshield again. I swerved to avoid an oncoming SUV, inspiration striking.
“I just leveled,” I muttered to myself, desperately reaching around for my phone. My left hand continued yanking the wheel back and forth as I tried, in vain, to dislodge Jack. My right hand finally found what I was looking for.
The phone glowed on just the screen I wanted.
Congratulations, Max!
Your license is now D3.
New Vehicle Unlocked: Dodge Omni
New Upgrade Unlocked: Extra Loud Horn
That was what I had been looking for. I doubted, very seriously, that switching my vehicle to an Omni would do any good, but an extra loud horn might be precisely the thing I needed. How loud was “extra loud?” I was about to find out.
Dropping the phone again, I slammed on the horn with all my might. A crack came from within the innards of the steering wheel, and a sound like an air raid siren began to emanate from the engine. Jack reeled back and let go with one hand. Its body flipped back and forth from its lone handhold, its skull head bouncing off the hood each time I swerved the car.
“Get off my car, motherfucker!” I screamed, my voice drowned out by the earsplitting sound of the horn. Strangely, yelling seemed to mitigate the pain in my head from the siren. I punched the horn again and again, realizing when nothing happened that my overzealous pounding earlier must have gotten the horn stuck in the “on” position.
The siren continued to blare, and I imagined that I was waking up all of Charlestown as I drove down one of its main arteries. There was nothing to do about it now. I had done my job. Now, I just needed to stay alive, and the thing still trying to reach into the car didn’t seem very friendly.
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The good news was that the noise was bothering it much more than the physical beating it was taking, bouncing back and forth on the hood. But all the same, I decided to double down on whatever physical damage I could cause. When the creature flipped so part of its body hung off the left side of my Pinto, I yanked the wheel to my left, crossing the center lane and scraping at least three parked cars, trying to smash the thing between my car and the parked cars.
It mostly worked. Sparks flew as the vehicles scraped together. The siren from my broken horn stopped suddenly, and in the silence, I heard a wet sound as the creature let go of my hood and tumbled away. Silence then. I repositioned the car into the correct lane in case of oncoming traffic and sat up a little straighter in my seat.
There was nothing I could see in the rear-view mirror. Nothing in the side mirror… Oh, I was actually missing my side mirror. A victim of my evasive driving, it seemed. I took a deep, calming breath, feeling pretty good about what I had just done. Sure, I was freaked out to the core, and had no idea what that thing was, or why it had attacked me, but all in all, I thought I had handled myself pretty well.
As I was busy congratulating myself, the driver's side window exploded inward. Claws reached through, cutting deep gouges into the flesh of my neck and left shoulder. Blood gushed, and my arm felt heavy and dull.
My mind flashed to the night with Johnson on the back roads, behind the Bull Run. Something similar had happened with him. I slid to the right, reaching desperately. The creature took that as an opportunity to begin pulling itself into the front seat through the window. Now, no one was driving. The car swerved back and forth. It was only a matter of time before we slammed into something.
My feet kicked at the thing that was trying to fall on top of me, but my hands closed around what I needed. I’d struggled at first to get the glove box open, but once I had, the object of my interest had practically fallen into my waiting hand. Jack lunged with an open maw, its jagged teeth preparing to bite down on me. Eventually, it reeled back when I stabbed the Bowie knife’s blade into one of its blackened eye sockets.
Another screech rang out, this time at point-blank range, and my ears rang. The damn thing was almost as loud as my horn. The Pinto slammed into a parked Hummer before I could find out how badly my stab had hurt the creature. The car instantly stopped in its tracks, throwing both Jack and me through the windshield. I careened off the hood, which was only the start of the pain. The finale of the pain performance was when I crashed, ass first, through the windshield of the parked Hummer. Somehow, I ended up in the back seat of the oversized SUV.
My vision blurred around the edges, and I struggled not to pass out. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but when the side door of the SUV swung open, I fell through it onto the sidewalk. A man and a woman helped me to my feet. I was dizzy, and the world spun around me. The creature didn’t attack us right away, so I considered that a positive thing, despite my apparent concussion and blood loss.
“You'd better sit down,” the man said, trying to help steady me. “We’ll get help.”
I shrugged him off to get a look at my Pinto. The thing was like a tank! The bumper had mangled the entire front of the much larger Hummer, but the car lights were still on, and I thought I could hear the hum of the engine.
I limped over to the driver's side door and, when the door failed to open, slid myself in through the broken window with a groan. I definitely earned a few more cuts taking that route, but in the grand scheme of things, they felt like nothing in comparison to the claw wounds.
The man shouted at me, clearly trying to stop me from leaving. He waved frantically at the woman, who I could hear was already on the phone with 911. I waved them off, throwing the car into reverse and gunning the accelerator hard to dislodge the Pinto from the Hummer. The sound of scraping metal made the couple back up, but I didn’t wait around to see what they might do next. Sirens sounded from somewhere behind me, and I knew that I only had a few moments before the emergency crew–and police–would arrive. From there, it wasn’t a stretch to end up caught for both the murder of one Ashley Ryan and the hit and run of someone’s assholishly large SUV.
I accelerated down High Street, braking just long enough to take a hard left onto Sullivan Street, where I felt the Pinto shifting back into an old, but undamaged Honda Accord.
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