C. LaSart - Ad Nauseam - 13 Tales of Extreme Horror

Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.

Her gravelly voice made the hair on his arms stand up. “I’m hungry,” she said.

“I know.”

It was hard for Jack to remember what she looked like when she’d still been beautiful. He lost track of how much time passed since the nightmare began. In his mind, he pictured her while he slept, dreamt about how perfect the days went at first and how the nights flew by after they first met, back when he loved her.

He’d been hitchhiking from town to town searching for work to put food in his belly. The pickings were slim then. As soon as he exhausted all his resources in one town, he hitched to the next.

In this current town, more jobs than average presented themselves to him and he made enough extra money that he felt he deserved a beer for his efforts… despite the fact his parole officer might throw him right back in the penitentiary if he got caught. Of course, they’d have to find him first.

He wandered into the local watering hole and found himself a seat in a dark corner. Fresh out of the joint, he wasn’t comfortable socializing with what he thought of as “regular” people.

Jack had been nursing the one beer he allowed himself—wishing it was Jack Daniels, though not quite trusting himself with whisky yet—when he noticed a pretty woman at the bar. She was staring in his direction.

He avoided eye contact, certain a woman that fine never intentionally looked at a man so average and unclean like himself. Yet when he dared a second glance, she hadn’t turned away. Instead she smiled—at him.

The woman stood and walked slowly to his table. His palms began to sweat and he thought he might just slide off the chair and die from a nerve-induced heart-attack. She was so lovely and graceful. He couldn’t pry his eyes loose from the sway of her hips.

Jack was hooked before she even spoke.

“What’s your name, stranger?” she asked.

Her voice was even prettier than he imagined, and terrifying in that she actually used it to speak to him . Years had passed since he’d been next to a woman, let alone one so stunning. All the spit in his mouth seemed to dry up at once, leaving his tongue a thick, foreign appendage no longer his own.

“Um, Jack,” he said, amazed he found the words at all.

She laughed, the look upon her face ripe with both mischief and promise. She held out her hand. “What a delightful coincidence. I’m Jill.”

Not much later, Jill took him to her house in the country. They made love most of the night. For Jack it was unbelievable, the first sex he’d had in too many years. For him, she became an instant addiction. He would do anything to stay between her thighs back then.

Of course, that was before he knew what she was.

Hell, he still didn’t know.

Jack stared out the windshield at the darkness of the highway, broken only by the glow of his headlights while he traveled south for the better part of two hours. His eyes felt full of grit. He’d gone too far already and decided to turn around at the next town to head for home.

Some nights proved successful; some, not. She’d make him go out again tomorrow. Absentmindedly, he fingered a deeply ridged scar on his left hand, a gift from Jill when he failed once before. He hoped she wouldn’t get too angry this time. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Now all of the rest stops were equipped with video surveillance.

After turning around to head north, Jack only drove about fifteen miles when his luck finally changed. Sometimes it went like that—once he was sure that the night’s foray would be a bust, someone strolled across his path that suited her needs perfectly.

At times, he wondered if maybe she held some sort of power that stretched out from that old farmhouse to bend a man’s will her way—but that was ridiculous, right?

The boy stood by the side of the road, his skinny shoulders covered by a lightweight jacket that was no match for the evening’s chill.

At the sight of Jack’s headlights, he stuck out his thumb, the universal sign for “How-about-a-ride, man?” Jack eased off the accelerator and gently braked to a stop half a block from the young man. He didn’t want to seem too eager to pick him up. After a short jog to meet the car, the boy opened the passenger door, squinting at the dome light.

“Hey, can I catch a lift with ya?”

“How far you headed?” Jack asked. He motioned for the kid to sit down and close the door, which he did, tucking a dirty backpack between his feet on the floorboard. His shaggy bangs obscured most of his face and he twitched in a way that might’ve been nerves, though Jack suspected the tick was from some sort of chemical dependency. He’d seen his fair share of junkies in prison.

“Anywhere is good. Anywhere you can drop me.” He rubbed his hands in front of the vent to warm them, though Jack thought it a ploy to hide how bad they shook. “Damn, its cold out there!”

Jack pulled onto the highway before he took the pack of smokes from his front pocket and lit one with a creased matchbook. The young man accepted one gratefully when it was offered and he settled a little more comfortably in his seat, opening the window a crack to ash.

In the back of his mind, Jack calculated when would be the best time to grab the chloroform from under his seat.

“Only going about seventy miles up the road,” he said through a cloud of bluish smoke. “There’s a little town close by. Drop you there, if it suits you.”

“Cool, man. Real cool.”

Jack remembered his last victim, a scrawny girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, definitely a prostitute. She had a certain hardness in her eyes that was uncommon in one so young. He recalled how nervous she immediately became upon entering the car and he wondered if maybe she smelled the slight chemical odor that always seemed to linger in the vehicle. Regardless of what initiated her unease, it didn’t take very long for her worry to blossom into a full blown panic.

She mentioned that she might have made a mistake asking for a ride, but he ignored her. Eventually she got the courage to tell him to pull over and let her out. When he still didn’t respond, she began to plead. She got so fidgety, he worried she might just open the door and jump out, regardless of the pavement racing by at sixty miles per hour, so he locked the doors.

And while he was debating what to do with her, that’s when he glanced in his mirror to see the flashing lights of a state trooper.

Jack slowly pulled to the gravel shoulder of the road.

Aw shit! The cop would search the vehicle and find the chloroform, find the rope. Finally coming to an end now. He saw himself again in the joint, maybe in a padded cell this time. This was it.

The odd part was how much the thought of prison seemed to calm him. Maybe going back wouldn’t be so bad. He was tired of this game. Probably time that he should get caught… but then what would happen to Jill?

The girl sat beside him with wide, apprehensive eyes. If she seemed nervous before, she was positively petrified now. Taking the opportunity to speak before the officer made it from the patrol car to Jack’s window, he leaned slightly toward the girl and spoke in a flat whisper near her ear. “It’s illegal to hitchhike in this state.”

The girl said nothing, just continued to stare at him with her wild blue eyes. He was gambling on the fact that the girl might be more afraid of the cops than of him.

As it turned out, the gamble paid off. She might have had an outstanding warrant for her arrest. She definitely carried some drugs. He found a little baggie of pot in her rear pocket when he disposed of her clothes later that evening. Whatever made her keep her mouth shut, he was thankful.