David Wisehart - Blood Alley

Claire looked out. She saw Joshua lean into the wind, a cruel sandstorm that nearly knocked him back, as if the desert were trying to keep him off the road. He reached the cab of his big rig and pulled himself inside, stepping into his armor.

Dakota said, “Let’s go back.”

Ethan smirked. “You don’t believe him, do you?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but started flipping through his flash cards again.

“The funeral’s tomorrow morning,” Dakota said. “We’ll never make it, anyway.”

“We’ll make it,” Trevor insisted. “The car will be ready in a few hours.”

Dakota gave the window a worried look. “It’ll be dark in a few hours.”

Trevor dismissed it with a shrug. “We can drive all night if we have to.”

Claire heard the petroleum tanker truck start up its engine. She watched the big rig ease onto the road.

Blood Alley, she thought.

The old trucker seemed to believe the story, but that didn’t keep him off the highway. Maybe, like the waitress said, he was just trying to scare the out-of-towners. In any case, Trevor was right. They had to continue with the trip. The Fowlers lived up ahead, and Claire wanted to see that farmhouse.

She said, “I vote we keep going.”

“Great,” Trevor said. “Show of hands—who wants to stick to the plan and keep driving tonight?”

He held his hand up.

Claire and Ethan added theirs to the count.

Trevor stared at his sister. “And who wants to chicken out and go home?”

Dakota looked pissed, and stared right back.

“Three votes to one,” he said. “Cedarview, here we come.”

The mood at the table was a little tense. Claire excused herself to the restroom to fix her hair and makeup. Seeing Joshua’s burnt face had sent shivers through her soul. In the bathroom mirror, Claire’s own blemishes looked smaller now, but these imperfections were her own and she knew how to fix them. The routine of it calmed her nerves.

When she was done, she left the bathroom and wandered over to the memorial wall. It displayed dozens of photos of those who had died, mothers and fathers and children all struck down on Blood Alley.

She read a few of the articles. One was headlined, “LAST STOP FOR TEEN IDOL.” It told of Frankie Lamarque, a seventeen-year-old singer who wrecked his 1957 Chevy on the highway. He was drag racing with the drummer from his band.

The article focused on Frankie, the teen heartthrob. There was a girl with them, Samantha. The drummer, Darren, was her boyfriend. The article speculated about a love triangle, and quoted several friends of theirs. The singer and his drummer had gotten into an argument at a diner, then settled their fight on the road. The girl was the prize.

But nobody won the prize that night. All three had died. Frankie’s car overturned, and he was killed instantly. Miles ahead, Darren’s car went over a cliff.

Strange, Claire thought.

The article didn’t say why Darren drove his car over the cliff. It left the riddle unsolved. After Frankie crashed, why did Darren keep on driving? Did he know the singer was dead? Was he afraid of being blamed?

His Deuce Coupe had smashed through the safety rail and plunged more than a thousand feet before hitting the trees below. Some said the driver lost control. Others said it was suicide.

There was one thing everyone agreed on: Frankie Lamarque died young and full of promise.

He had only one hit record, “Last Stop Car Hop.” Claire couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard it before.

Oddly, the diner where the drag race started was named after the song. Frankie had bought the Last Stop Car Hop with his own money. He wanted a place for him and his friends to hang out and escape the hustle and bustle of L.A. He was known to take girls for long drives in the desert. Frankie loved the desert.

And it killed him, Claire thought.

The article didn’t use the phrase “Blood Alley.” It didn’t mention “The Highwayman.” If there was a local legend about a ghost on the road, it went unreported at the time.

Maybe that’s how the legend started, Claire thought. With the death of a celebrity.

The idea made sense. Teenagers would trade stories, the stories would grow in the telling, and the legend of Frankie’s death would evolve over time into a myth about a haunted highway that took the lives of young drivers who crossed it at night.

Claire chuckled at the thought.

But as she scanned the other articles, her amusement died.

In 1972 there was a school bus accident. A girls softball team was traveling from Palmdale to Cedarview after a night game when the bus overturned. All the girls were killed. The article offered no explanation, but a photo showed the bus severed in two pieces. Black sheets covered a dozen corpses in the road.

A gruesome image. Bloodless, yet horrifying.

Claire thought of the girls under those anonymous black sheets. In their final moments, what had they been thinking? About the game, or boys, or school? Claire imaged them in the moment before impact: sleeping, reading, checking their make-up in the window. Gone now were their petty jealousies and their fondest dreams.

All gone.

Something had happened to those poor girls on that road, something sudden and terrible.

And then silence.

But why, Claire wondered, had they all died? Yes, the bus rolled over. One would expect severe injuries—perhaps a few fatalities. But no survivors? None at all? It hardly seemed plausible.

And what tore the bus in two?

The cause of the accident remained a mystery. Desert roads were full of animals crossing at night, rabbits and dogs and coyotes. Deer were common enough in the mountains. Big horn sheep were known to live in the hills.

Something made the driver swerve. A car or an animal or…

A ghost?

Claire imagined a ghostly figure standing in the middle of the highway, and the bleary-eyed driver catching a glimpse in his headlights. He turns to avoid the phantom in the road, and then… what?

The bus overturns?

Everyone dies?

Unlikely.

Claire read the other articles. They were long on tragedy and short on answers. A woman trapped in a car fire. A collapsed bridge, with two semi trucks down in the ravine. An overturned bank truck.

One headline read, “TUNNEL FIRE AT DEVIL’S PASS.” Nineteen people had died in the inferno. Horrific. Incomprehensible. Unexplained.

The most recent article was an op-ed piece that summed up the history of accidents and called on state officials to close the road. Next to the article was a color graphic illustrating the deadliest collisions over the past sixty years. All of them happened on the fifty-mile stretch from Dinah’s Diner to the Devil’s Pass, with most of the casualties in the tunnel itself.

There were no answers in any of the articles, none that would satisfy Claire. The answers lay on the road ahead.

I’ll be down that road soon enough.

Trevor wanted to be alone. His sister was getting on his nerves.

He went outside and stood on the porch, where a strong wind whipped at his clothes. Tumbleweeds rolled across the desert and over the road like soccer balls spinning out of bounds.

Trevor squinted against the angry dust, walked into the wind, and crossed the highway to check out the ghost bike memorial, but once there he quickly got bored. The dead kid meant nothing to him. It was someone else’s tragedy.

Returning to the garage he found the mechanic at his desk, writing up an estimate.

“You need a new timing belt,” the man said. “Lucky it didn’t damage the engine.”