Edward Lorn: Crawl

Oh , Juliet thought, that’s not pretty . Fat lot of good that airbag did.

She should have been more concerned. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, she knew this, but was still punch-drunk from the accident. Not really all there, was she? No. Not at all. For some reason, that bunny still bothered her. Sure, Colton screamed. He wailed and wailed, but that bunny was louder. Where had the artist gotten off to?

Juliet shoved her door open, not surprised in the least when it gave no resistance. After all, the majority of the damage had been on Colton’s side. It was he who’d been trapped, not her. She spilled out into grass, her hands and jeans becoming instantly dew-damp. Crawled two feet forward before pushing herself up. Shuffled out into the road. Spun languidly, assessing the scene.

The truck with the smashed in rear panel lay right-side-up in the culvert just beyond the breakdown lane. A vaguely human shape was hunched over behind the steering wheel.

The Subaru sat at an angle in the median. The front of the car was nonexistent, looking like a cab-over big rig.

No , she thought, that’s not right. It looks like an accordion that’s been put away for the night. Collapsed. It looks collapsed .

Like the red bunny before it, something new sat in the corner of her eye. This time, to her left. She turned, numb all over.

The ginger was approaching, head down, shuffling like—

Dawn of the Dead . Colt hadn’t wanted to see it. He had strep. I wouldn’t kiss him.

—a drunk after last call.

“Hey,” she said, without much tone to her voice at all. “You… you all right?”

The ginger stumbled forward, went sprawling, and pushed himself back to his feet. As he rose so did his head, and Juliet was allowed to look upon his face. Or what was left of it.

The entire left side of his face had been crushed in; it looked as if he’d been punched with a flatiron. Juliet recalled the red bunny. Didn’t the ginger’s squashed face resemble that strange ruddy hare in the backward way a stamp will look before being dipped in ink? She thought so.

The ginger reached for her, and she saw that two of the fingers on his right hand had been torn off—the pinkie and ring finger. She shuddered and was sick on the pavement. Wiping her gorge from her mouth, she glanced back up at the shuffling dead man. But he wasn’t dead. Dead men don’t bleed. And this poor boy was still bleeding. Fat drops of crimson spilled out of the mangled nubs where his fingers used to be and splashed down onto the street.

The teenager glowed. Brilliant light enveloped him. Juliet tried to step right, to get a better look at the source of the illumination behind him, but stumbled and went to her knees. She relaxed back on her haunches, watching in stunned disbelief as the Mercury pulled to a stop behind the boy with the shattered face. The red priest stepped out into the fog, and the moisture in the air seemed to part before him, giving him free passage to the teenager.

“Help,” Juliet asked quite calmly. “Help us.”

“Jesus saves,” the red priest said. “I do not.”

And Juliet had one thought before she passed out. A rational thought. A thought so unlike the ones she’d had up until then that it seemed ludicrous. That thought was: Why is he smiling?

The first thing she felt upon waking was a piercing cold. Her arms were above her head, and her shoulders ached, as if she’d been sleeping in that position for some time. But she was upright, not stretched out on her bed, at home. A chilly wind blew against her exposed midriff and she shuddered under its touch. She looked down, finding that she still had on her blue blouse, but that it had pulled up because of her posture. She tried to reach for the fabric, to pull it back down, but realized she couldn’t feel her hands. Glancing up, she screamed.

Everything came rushing back in a tidal wave of reality. The accident. The engine in Colton’s lap. That poor teenager with a face like a kicked-in watermelon. The Mercury—

JXSAVES… I DO NOT

—and the red priest. Her asking for help. Him smiling.

After all that tragedy, someone had chained her to a post. Her hands had fallen asleep because they weren’t receiving circulation from the wrists. The cuffs were cutting off the supply of blood. They weren’t really cuffs, though, not really. More like shackles. The kind of things they used to use on witches before they burned them at the stake.

She smelled smoke.

Ten feet in front of her, a hunched figure worshipped at a campfire, his hands clasped together over the body of the teenager with the pushed-in kisser. He’s praying for him to make it, Juliet thought. She was well aware of how crazy that sounded.

A thick wood surrounded her, seemed to press in from all sides. To her left, a road. The boughs of the trees came together over the damp red clay, creating a corridor. At the end of that tunnel was a light so beautiful and welcoming that Juliet thought she would cry. If she weren’t already crying, that was. Deep sobs racked her body, and it was the weakness of her knees that told her she was standing. Her feet burned, though. They burned so badly it felt as if she stood over an open flame.

A witch set to burn over a bonfire repeated in her mind, and she glanced down. Her knees were bent and in her line of sight. She couldn’t see her feet. She tried to move them to the right, then the left, but they wouldn’t do as she told them. Finally, her knees parted, and she stared down between bare, milky thighs. She’d lost her pants, but that fact barely registered. At first the nails in her feet didn’t compute as such. The pain ebbed the more she gawked at the aluminum heads, ten in all, gazing back at her. She knew how many nail heads there were because she counted. Somehow, knowing how many had been driven into her feet helped ease her agony. The respite from the burning in her feet only lasted half a minute or so, before she remembered her aching shoulders and the shackles holding her arms above her head.

So many things to focus on, so little time.

“Why…” she blubbered, but her voice was barely audible, even to herself. The second time, she shrieked, “ WHY ?”

“Shhhh…” the red priest hissed. “I’m sssspeaking with the Lord about our fallen brother.”

“ LET ME DOWN !” She sounded like a weak horror movie cliché, one of those useless bitches that tumble and fall on thin air with the killer right behind them. She hated the sound of that weakness. Hated herself for making it.

“You’ll be allowed to leave,” the red priest said. “Shortly.”

Juliet jerked her limp arms forward, expecting resistance but getting none, and began to tilt out over the ground below. Everything seemed to happen so slowly that she had time to think about the nails, those ten horrible nail heads and what they would do to her precious, fragile feet. She continued to drop, a scream vibrating her throat and painfully thrumming in her head. Then the nails caught. They tore, and she felt her feet coming apart, splitting, cleaving in two. The pain was transcendent. The pain was God. A fiery, torturous agony crippled every muscle in her body, and she slapped down, cheek first, onto the grassy clearing where she’d been trussed up like a biblical whore awaiting the first thrown stone. She lay there for some time, twitching and rolling feebly from side to side, bawling. Through her tears, she could see her hands out in front of her, the shackles still clasped around her wrists, the chain stretching out into the grass, a wooden peg impaling one link. Needing to take her mind off her cloven feet, she craned her neck and gazed up at the post. An empty notch, which had been drilled into the wood a foot below the top, stared down at her like some mocking cyclops. Two feet above the ground were the nails. Ten heads glistening with gore in the firelight, clumps of pink and purple flesh still clinging to the wood.