The woman is far from home without a map.

She remembers pulling off the main highway an hour ago to follow this two-lane road through the trees. That much is crystal clear, like the dark branches arcing over her head or the rumble of the engine or the two yellow lines in the middle of the road chasing each other on and on and on. She sees it all in perfect resolution. She breathes it in like oxygen, breathes it back out like smoke.

She doesn’t remember leaving home. There’s no moment she can point to where she chose to leave her apartment without her phone or her wallet or her own keys, because she’s certain that this is not her car. This is a truck far older than she is that she knows she’s never set foot in.

She’s not sure why the grooves in the steering wheel mold so easily to her touch.

The woman remembers the funeral—that much she’s sure of. She can see them lowering her brother’s casket into the earth, can see her mother’s gaunt face. Her accusing eyes even though the death was not the woman’s fault. It wasn’t.

When was the funeral? It may have been this morning. There must have been something between the funeral and the woman’s flight because she’s no longer in that horrible dress she wore. It was the same one she’d worn to her grandfather’s funeral two years ago. She hopes she’ll never have to put it on again.

A speed limit sign. She eases off the gas. The speedometer ticks down past the eighty mark, then the sixty, then past the forty. She didn’t realize how fast she was going. But now there are buildings peeking out from behind the trees. Weathered. Shuttered. How long have these houses withstood the wind and rain? How much longer will their boards hold together? Up ahead is a gas station with two lonely pumps. She pulls off the road, not sure when she’ll get another chance to fill up. Her tank is nearly empty, anyway.

She doesn’t have her wallet.

The woman knew it wasn’t there. She still searches her pockets, hoping it will manifest. She finds a five-dollar bill in the glovebox right next to an ID badge for a man whose picture she doesn’t recognize. A ten is wedged between the passenger seat and the door. When she shoves open the heavy truck door to get out, there are three ones lined up neatly on the ground below her hovering foot. Like they were placed just for her.

She goes inside the store to put fifteen dollars of gas on pump two. The other three she uses to buy a water bottle, the label yellowing with age. Her throat is dry. Worth the gamble. 

The kid behind the counter never looks at her as she hands over her money. As the cold change clinks into her palm, the bell above the door rings. The woman turns to see a stooped old man enter the store. 

She notices three things about him. First, that the edges of his eyes are crinkled like he must do a lot of smiling on other, kinder days. Second, that his wispy beard curls up and out like incense. Third, that he’s wearing a shirt with a big yellow smiley face and the phrase Have a nice day!

He doesn’t smile when he looks at her, but there is something like recognition in his eyes. The woman has never seen the old man before. Maybe she reminds him of someone. Maybe lots of lost, lonely people shuffle through this town. 

Eager to be on her way, the woman clutches her water bottle and heads for the door. She stops with her fingers on the handle. It’s dark out. Not the haze of twilight but the finality of night. She doesn’t remember it being so late. Was it like this when she pulled into the gas station? She remembers afternoon. It’s only been a few minutes.

The woman looks back over her shoulder. The old man is still watching her from the snack aisle. The cashier still hasn’t glanced up. 

If it’s nighttime, the woman needs to find a place to stay. She can’t drive through the night. She doesn’t trust her surroundings enough to park somewhere and sleep in the truck. But the only money she has left is the dollar twenty-eight in her pocket. Reflexively, she touches the spot where she deposited the coins, then pauses. There’s a larger lump than there should be. She slips her hand into her pocket and pulls out a wad of twenties.

After everything else, she’s not going to question it. Not when the old man’s eyes have been following every motion she makes. She turns again and escapes into the night. 

This town—if it can be called that—unsettles her. And she’s not tired. She’d prefer to leave this place behind her and find a place to stay in the next town. But five minutes, thirty minutes, an hour out from the gas station and she’s still passing through a steady stream of buildings tucked back in the trees. She hasn’t seen a single cross street. Maybe there’s no getting out.

The woman jumps as the ancient stereo crackles to life. She’d been lulled by the consistent rhythm of the engine. Now she’s wide awake and wondering if she’s been asleep. 

The voice on the radio is low and broken by static. “… years since… the area. We now… behind the killings… still ongoing.” One sentence rings out clearly before the radio cuts out. “Are any of us truly safe?”

In the static’s absence, the night is dead silent. The woman can’t hear the engine or the tires anymore. There’s a buzzing in her ears that builds by increments. Outside the truck, there’s a whistle of wind through the trees that she feels like a breath on the back of her neck.

The truck is stopped. 

That’s why she can’t hear it. The keys are out of the ignition, sitting on the seat beside her. She grabs them, fumbling to reinsert them. The engine sputters as she turns the key but refuses to start. She tries again and again, but it won’t catch. This is bad. She can’t stay here. What does she know about machines? Would it do her any good to check under the hood?

Light washes over her. She looks to her left and sees a house off the road behind the trees, the porch light on. The front door opens and a lady steps out wrapped in a dark blue robe. She has curlers in her hair and a frown on her face. The lady in blue watches expectantly.

The woman tries in vain once more to start the truck. Resigned, she pushes open the door. The lady in blue follows the motion with her eyes as she drops onto the pavement, gravel crunching beneath her shoes.

“Do you have jumper cables?” the woman calls.

The lady in blue shakes her head. “Wouldn’t do you no good,” she calls back, “Don’t got an engine to hook up to. My boy’s got the car and won’t be back ‘til Thursday.”

The woman doesn’t know what day it is. The funeral was Sunday. Is it still Sunday? Regardless, she’s stranded with an unfamiliar truck in the middle of an unfamiliar road. She stares at the lady in blue, willing a solution to present itself. After a long, cold silence the lady in blue sighs.

“I’ll help you push it off the road,” she says.

Together, they wheel the vehicle into the lady in blue’s driveway. The pavement is cracked, dead grass withering in the gaps. The front tire of the truck crushes a dandelion as it comes to a stop in front of an ancient garage. In the dark, the truck looks like a giant animal. Hunched and waiting. 

The two women regard each other. The lady in blue’s face is set in a frown, eyes guarded. 

“Do you know a place where I could stay the night?” the woman asks. 

The lady in blue shrugs. “There’s a motel back in the center of town,” she says, “Only I don’t know how you’d get there.”

That’s the heart of the matter. The woman is stranded. And she doesn’t remember ever passing a town center, or any turn-off that could lead to one. There’s been nothing but the gas station and the tumbledown houses on this two-lane road for hours. But it doesn’t matter. If there was a motel she missed, she has no way to get there. So the woman has no option but to ask the lady in blue for help. She’s her only lifeline, her only point of access to this place. 

“Would you be willing to let me crash here for the night?” the woman asks, “I can pay you.” She reaches into her pocket for her cash, but all she can come up with is the dollar twenty-eight. No twenties. Maybe they were never there.

The lady in blue sighs like it’s as much as she expected. “Don’t bother,” she says, “You can sleep in the garage.” She nods to the structure, free-standing from the house. The woman takes in its rusted-out door and sagging roof. The lady in blue must notice her expression, because her face grows harder. “It ain’t personal,” she says, a new bite in her voice. “Can’t be too cautious these days. Not with everything that’s been going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“The killings.”

The woman feels a trickle down her spine. She’d hoped she’d misheard that on the radio. “Killings?”

The lady in blue nods. “Maybe you haven’t heard, wherever you’re from,” she says, “But it ain’t safe here these days. I’d be a fool to let a stranger into my house.”

“I understand,” the woman says. She wants to add, What about me out in the garage? She remembers the question from the radio. Are any of us truly safe? Is she?

But what other option does she have?

The lady in blue doesn’t do anything more than heave the garage door up a few feet so the woman can duck under. The hinges squeal in protest. When the door slams back down, the noise careens around the small space. 

Panic climbs into the woman’s throat. There could already be someone in here with her. She stumbles in the blackness, running into a shelf that she blindly gropes through, looking for anything to defend herself with. Her hand closes around something cold and metal. A flashlight. Blessedly, it clicks on and she swings the beam of light around the garage. There’s no one else here. And no place to hide. That’s either good or bad.

The circle of light falls on a collection of gardening tools hanging on the far wall. She crosses to them, plucking a heavy shovel off its hook. She feels better clutching it in her arms. Back at the shelf, she grabs a drop cloth that she wraps around herself like a blanket. She slides down the wall to sit on the ground below the gardening tools. Better to have them at her back. If someone tries to come through the loud garage door, she’ll have plenty of warning. Plenty of time to bash their brains in before they can attack her. 

Could she even do that, though, if that’s what it came to? Even in self-defense, could she really hurt someone like that? 

She thinks of her brother’s final moments, of blood pooling out from wounds she couldn’t see. The other details are hazy—something about broken glass and wet pavement and a car horn that never stops. The blood, though. That part is absolute. She can see it now, crimson spreading out and out until it eats up her entire field of vision. The scent of it invades her nostrils, the taste of it filling her mouth. 

She doesn’t know where she stops and the blood begins.

It’s morning. The woman can tell that by the pale light filtering through the fissures of the roof and the gaps between the garage door and the wall. She doesn’t remember sleeping, but her body feels the toll that a night on a cement floor has taken. Gingerly, she uncurls her fingers from the handle of the shovel. She stretches her arms, rolling her head to try to work out all the knots. Getting to her feet, she puts the shovel back on the wall. 

The morning sun is sharp against her eyes as she lifts the garage door and slips out. She cringes at the scrape of the hinges, then jumps at the thud when the door closes behind her. She blinks against the light, adjusting. It’s not so bright now, the sun hidden behind the low ceiling of clouds and the tall trees. She gets behind the wheel of the truck immediately, turning the key in the ignition. The engine sputters and croaks but won’t start.

The woman slumps against the steering wheel, forehead on the cool leather. She can’t stay here. She has to get out.

Once again finding herself with only one option, the woman turns toward the house. From here, the angle of the shadows makes it look like the front door is hanging open. As she gets closer, she realizes that it isn’t just the shadows—the door is ajar. The handle looks broken. A sick feeling of dread settles in her stomach.

Some part of her tells her to turn back, to get as far away from this place as possible. To not look at whatever waits for her inside. But there’s nowhere else for her to go. So she nudges the door more open with her elbow and steps carefully over the threshold. 

It’s the smell that hits her first. 

The woman wasn’t aware until now that she knows the scent of death. Maybe it was something from her brother’s death that her brain stored away, though she can only recall the smell of blood and rain from that night. Maybe it’s an instinctive knowledge. Part of being human. Either way, she knows that the lady in blue is dead long before she sees her.

But it doesn’t prepare her.

Mechanically, the woman moves through the house, propelled along as if she knows the place. Her feet lead her through a doorway into a dark room. Her hand finds the light switch automatically, illuminating what she already knows she’ll see. She takes it in for one heartbeat, two. The lady in blue no longer wearing her blue robe, instead wearing a green nightgown, halfway under her bed covers. One arm hanging over the edge of the mattress drip, drip, dripping blood onto the carpet. What used to be her face a bashed-in mess of skin and bone.

With the third heartbeat, the woman is on the front step again. She’s in the driveway. She’s in the truck, turning the key and hearing the engine start up without a hitch. She’s driving away.

What is she doing? She can’t just leave. She has to go back, call the police, do something. Anything. But she doesn’t. She keeps driving, as far away as she can get from that thing that used to be a person.

The radio is alive—no words this time—just static that keeps getting louder and louder. The woman thinks that maybe it’s been doing that ever since she turned the truck on. She can’t remember. Nothing makes sense. She can’t tell which way she’s driving, whether she’s heading away from the town or toward it. She doesn’t know if there’s a difference. The static is starting to sound more like screaming.

For the first time, the woman sees a turn-off to the left. She veers the truck sharply, skidding on the pavement in her desperation to get off the main road. The static gets quieter as she drives like it’s guiding her down this gravel path. Leading her somewhere. Beneath the buzzing, she can almost hear a song, something she thinks she’s heard before that she can’t place.

The gravel road ends at a house. It’s more of a box, really. The moss-covered roof sags, the windows broken. The woman turns off the truck and gets out. The house is important, somehow. She can feel it. She knows the house, though she doesn’t know how. She’s never been there. At least, not that she can remember. But she doesn’t know how much she can trust her memory anymore. 

As she approaches, the front door opens and a person steps out. The house is too dark to see into, the dilapidated porch roof hanging too low to make out the person’s face. But he steps out into the gray morning light, and the woman knows him.

It’s her brother.

No, it’s not him. He’s all wrong—his features are in the wrong place, his arms hang too low, his hair is too short. The thing lifts a too-long arm and points at her. It opens its mouth and blood trickles over its chin. Its eyes bore straight into hers, eyes that are almost her brother’s but that she’s never seen this angry. This accusing.

The radio switches back on behind her. She doesn’t bother dwelling on the impossibility of that, just listens to the words it spits out, broken with static.

“Stop!” the woman screams, covering her ears and squeezing her eyes closed. This is a dream. A horrible, unbelievable nightmare. When she opens her eyes, she won’t be in this hellish place and her brother won’t be dead. 

When she opens her eyes, the thing that looks like her brother is gone. The radio is silent. There’s just the tumbledown house in front of her. She doesn’t want to know what’s inside, except she thinks she’s always known. She thinks she’s been driving here this whole time for whatever waits for her within those walls. Smoothly, shoulders back and head held high, she mounts the porch steps and passes over the uneven threshold. She’s met with the familiar smell of decay. The bodies have been laid out for her. The newest looking is the man from the ID badge in the truck’s glovebox. The longest dead must be the man with the incense beard and the Have a nice day! T-shirt, who looks like he’s been here for weeks. That can’t be right, because she remembers seeing him alive yesterday. Can she trust her own mind, her own eyes?

When she looks down at her hands, she finds them covered in blood.