Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

Anyway, Serena and the boy left The Den together. It was around one or two a.m., she thought; she wasn't sure. She was wired from the Ecstasy, but the booze made everything go out of focus. The boy was drunk, too, and they were both staggering along the sidewalk, his arm around her shoulders.

As they went, a big car pulled up on the cobbled street. It was an old green Cadillac. There were some boys inside. Their arms snaked out of the open windows and their hands slapped the flanks of the car as they shouted and whistled to get her attention. She looked and recognized the boy behind the wheel: Jamal. She hooked up with Jamal sometimes. The other boys were part of his posse. She didn't know any of their last names. They were just guys she knew, guys who hung around with Jamal.

They laughed and banged on the side of the car and invited Serena and her date to get in. They said a friend of theirs was throwing a party at his house upstate. It wasn't just a house, it was a mansion. Their friend was crazy rich, they said. They said there'd be all the drugs in creation there, plus celebrities and caviar and champagne and all that other rich-guy shit. It sounded good to Serena and her drunken white boy, so they crowded into the car with the others.

They drove out of the city on the western parkways. They drove a long, winding way. It was crowded in the car. It was stuffy. There were a lot of guys all scrunched in together-six guys total-and the car was filled with the dense musk of them. After a while, crushed between her white boy and some fidgety, gassed-up brown guy, Serena began to fade. She leaned against her white boy's shoulder and closed her eyes. She felt the rhythmic bumping of the car. The deep, laughing male voices all around her grew distant and intermittent. She remembered only certain moments after that, certain words that broke through to her. For instance, at one point, she remembered one boy saying, "twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two," three times like that, urgently. Right afterward, she felt the speed and rhythm of the car changing. She remembered someone else saying, "The Great Swamp-grea-a-a-at!" dragging out the word until they all started laughing.

She woke up stretched out on the backseat. She was alone in the car. She thought she'd been awakened by the Caddy stopping, but she didn't know how long ago it had stopped.

Slowly, working her dry mouth-rubbing her eyes in the crook of one arm-rubbing her whole face with her two hands-she sat up. With a groan and a sniffle, she looked out the window, blinking heavily.

Where the fuck was she? It looked as if the car was parked on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of endless night. Was it the middle of a swamp, maybe? Or did she just think that because she remembered someone saying the word swamp? No. No: She could see a little now. There were trees on every side of her, branchless trunks of trees standing like guardian phantoms at every window. And there was water, too-she could see water glinting in the light of a quarter moon. She could make out tall, weirdly shaped reeds and thick, tangled grasses. And she could hear frogs, about a million frogs all around her. Some of the frogs were incredibly loud. In fact, at first, because she was still half asleep, she thought maybe it was the boys. Maybe the boys had gotten into one of those boy things, like a belching contest or something, and maybe the competition had driven them to the level of Belching Gods. Then, as her mind got clearer, she realized, oh, wait, she'd heard that sound before. Her mother had once dragged her on some overnight to the country at some house one of her boyfriends had and she couldn't sleep all night because of that noise, that same noise, and in the morning her mother's boyfriend told her: That was frogs.

She pressed her forehead to the window, trying to get a better view, trying to see where the guys had gotten to. She looked out past the tall, eerie guardian trees and over the glint of the quarter moon on the water and the reeds and the high grasses. But where were the boys? She couldn't see them anywhere. She couldn't see anybody or any sign of a house or anything like that. She started to get scared. It wasn't that she thought the guys would just abandon her forever, or anything. She knew they wouldn't do that because eventually they'd have to come back for the car. But what if they'd tried to wake her up and they couldn't? Or what if they saw she was fast asleep and figured, fuck her, they'd just leave her there? They might've parked out here, somewhere near the mansion, and gone on to their rich friend's party without her. And now what if she couldn't find the place? She didn't see any lights anywhere. What if she couldn't find the place, and the party went on all night, and they didn't come back for her until morning or even afternoon? What was she supposed to do until then? Wander around in this swamp looking for them? There could be alligators out there. Or snakes. Or some crazy guy who lived in the forest and took women back to his cabin and tortured them to death. And she couldn't just stay locked up in the car either. She'd have to get out and pee eventually. In fact, she needed to pee already. Where the hell were they? What would she do if those assholes had left her to stay out in this swamp all night alone?

She began to feel the first flutterings of panic-and she really did need to pee, too. So she pushed the door of the car open. The Caddy's toplight came on. That calmed her down a little. It cut through the dark, gave her a view of a couple of feet's worth of dirt road just by the tire. No snakes there that she could see, although she knew there could be one under the car, just coiled there, waiting, licking its fangs with its forked tongue, drooling for the first sight of her heel.

Gingerly, she stepped out. She edged quickly away from the car and whatever snake might be hiding under it. Not too far, though. She kept within arm's length of the open door. She made sure she could stretch her hand out and brush the side of the door with her fingertips. She wanted the door open for the light, but she was shy about peeing in the light in case the boys came back. But she was even more shy about the darkness where the snakes might be, not to mention the horrible frogs which were even louder now that she was outside, so loud she thought the slimy things must be huge. She couldn't stand the idea of one of those huge slimy things leaping onto her or walking across her foot while she was peeing. Somehow, though, she managed to find a clean, dry slice of shadow between the car and the night. She rearranged her clothes and squatted down and relieved herself.

While she was at it, she kept watch on the darkness with darting eyes. It was warm and still here. The air was unpleasantly thick and damp. Her glance leapt from one moonlit tree-specter to another, then lifted at a sudden noise to scan the branches above. The branches silhouetted against the purple sky looked like grasping hands poised over her. In fact, the whole scene seemed to her so much like something in a horror movie that she became more certain with every moment that a killer with a butcher knife was sneaking up behind her as she squatted there helpless. Her panic started growing. It felt like a big bird inside her-an eagle, maybe-opening and closing its wings, getting ready to take off. She made a little whimpering noise and bit her lip. She felt like crying.

But just then, just as she finished her pee, she caught a glimpse of light up ahead. She felt a burst of hope.

She straightened, pulling up her underpants quickly, smoothing down her party dress. She peered hard into the horror-show tangle of the forest, thinking please-please-please, trying to catch sight of that light again. She even pushed the car door back. She didn't shut it because she wanted to be able to jump inside if anything attacked her, but she pushed it toward the car until the light in the Caddy went out so she could see better into the darkness.