I not supposed to know?” Bob might as well have been given Novocain at this point.
“No,” she said, “You’re not dead at all.”
“But Todd...”
“He’s the one who’s dead.”
“But how?” Bob said, suddenly sober, “I saw all those ghosts.” It was strange now, the way he talked about those people he saw. It was the first time he used that word, “ghosts,” for them. He knew it was right, but it didn’t feel right though. As if those people were still among the living.
“When souls,” another strange word, “travel along this road,” she explained, “they tend to think themselves the only ones on the road. Death is a very lonely experience, you see. You don’t feel like anyone is with you. You’re all by yourself, unless you are one of those rare occasions that have your closest friends die with you. Tragic, but true... So, the souls along this road only know themselves to be here. They see no one else on this road.”
“But how can Todd be dead?” Bob asked, “I didn’t feel him hitting the car. I didn’t kill him, did I?”
The woman shook her head the whole time she spoke, “You did hit him, Bob, but that’s what he wanted. Todd was trying to kill himself.”
“Oh,” Bob said.
“You didn’t see his body then, did you?” she said.
Bob shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “He died nearly instantly. Hardly felt a thing.”
“How come I didn’t see him? And why am I here if I’m not dead? Why was I even allowed to come with him in the first place?”
“When you hit the tree, you were knocked out. You could say you’re having an out-of-body experience right now. Here’s your car.”
Sure enough, they were now standing in front of his car in all its blue crushed pride.
Bob looked around. Then, he looked down and under his good old hunk of metal, and then he said, “Where’s Todd?”
“You need to get in now, sir.”
Bob realized that she would not answer his question. Ever. He yanked open the door to the smoldering piece of wadded up metal. He was a little surprised to find that his body was not in there, but he knew better than to expect an answer from the woman standing behind him.
Yet he couldn’t help but asking, “Are you an angel?”
“No,” she said, and then she was gone. Bob didn’t have to look behind him to know that.
He got in, buckled his seatbelt, and closed the door.
Suddenly, he opened his eyes and his head jerked forward a little bit. He felt like he had just woken up. He wondered what had happened, and why his airbag was inflated....
Just like that, he remembered the tree, driving off into the ditch, and that someone had jumped in front of his car.
He tore out of the car like the seat was being electrified. He didn’t really feel the rain anymore. He just felt his cold skin and his chilling disgust.
He had looked around for the man when he had first gotten out, but he couldn’t find him, standing and alive, or lying down with his blood drowning him. Now, however, that he was looking at his car, he could tell where the man that had jumped out in front of him was, and it made him nearly vomit.
It was too dark to see the blood pooling all around the head for anything other that leaked motor oil, and all the bruises would have been hidden by his clothes. What really got Bob were the legs, one of which was clearly bent at the thigh, and the fact that they were wearing steel-toed boots.
Todd continued driving down the road at an insane speed. He was trying to outrun the dead man, trying to outrun Death.
Trying to outrun the trees.
The damn trees kept coming and coming and coming, like a legion of paralyzed zombies. They were all he could see by now, just rows upon rows upon rows of their dead, wizened trunks and the inescapable cage of all their clawed, intertwining branches. The farther along he went on this road, the closer the trees seemed to be to the edges of it. Pretty soon they were right up on it, their wormy roots creating small to medium bumps on it.
Todd was beginning to feel claustrophobic. That’s the word he used with himself, claustrophobic. Because he was too proud and scared to use the other, more accurate alternative, paranoid. That would force him to accept what he was suspecting.
They were closing in on him.
Immediately, as if they had a wire in his brain or simply realized that he was on to them, Todd heard the loud, furious outcry of snapping bark. He slammed onto the brake at just about the same time he saw the tips of the falling tree’s branches come over the road. Even with his foot jamming the brake to the floor board, he knew that he wouldn’t get stopped in time.
As his car skidded/barreled into the sizeable tree trunk, he threw his arms up over his face, both in an effort to protect his face and so that he didn’t have to see what happened next.
Surprisingly, the impact wasn’t near as dramatic as he was anticipating it to be. The jolt of being hurled against his straining seatbelt and hitting the inflating airbag was very unpleasant, too be sure. His heart was thundering incessantly behind its cage, and he thought, oddly enough without any embarrassment, that he felt the warmth of a small puddle of urine in his crotch region. Other than that, however, he was perfectly fine. More than fine. In fact, as he got out of the Jeep to look at the hood which was now slightly caved in to the curvature of the trunk, he was tempted to say that he was in the calmest state he had been in during this entire ordeal.
Of course, that tranquility only lasted for about three or five seconds. Then the tree and Jeep disappeared.
It was just like a circa 1969 episode of Bewitched. One second both the tree and Jeep were less than a foot from Todd, then the next they were completely gone. It looked to him as if they jumped out of existence. His eyes swiveled about in his skull, searching for them, but he didn’t physically move, not even his head. He just stood there, tensing up as if to brace for the next impact, the next falling tree, the next one of this goddamn road’s dirty tricks.
Sure enough, her heard a voice, a woman’s, call from behind him, “My God! Are you alright!”
He didn’t really trust this place enough to turn around, but then again, it would’ve been hard for him to defend himself if he couldn’t see what he was supposed to be defending himself from, wouldn’t it?
Slowly, and with much reluctance, he turned around. She was standing practically right him. That she could have gotten so close without him noticing startled him more than the tree and his Jeep disappearing. Velvet brown curls dangled from and around her head. She had eyes a shade darker than her hair, and with tiny sparkles in them, like glitter on a doll. He thought she was very pretty, and then he realized...
She was glowing.
Warm, yellow light, a little brighter than a candle, shown from her skin, her hair, the dress she was wearing. Coming from any other source, it would have been soothing. From her, it was horrifying.
He backed up about two feet, and then he stopped, unable to go any further. Everything told him to run, but to his horror, he couldn’t. Worse, he felt drawn to her. He never wondered, but he now knew what a bug zapper looked like to a fly.
“Are you okay?” she said, genuinely concerned.
“What happened to my Jeep?”
“It’s right where you left it.”
Todd couldn’t answer, but the look on his face felt as if it said plenty.
“That wasn’t your actual car. That was an illusion.”
“What? But how?”
She didn’t say anything. She stared blankly at him, as if he’d asked her the one question she didn’t know.
“You need to come with me,” she said at last.
Todd’s heart was set to fluttering in his chest. A great, heavy sense of dread began to spread out within him.
“Don’t tell me I was wrong.”
“Excuse me?” she had already started walking and when she turned her head her face had an odd mix of perplexity and annoyance that accompani
ed women who’d been coquettishly whistled at.
“Am I dead?”
“Oh,” she said, “No.”
The weight of the dread suddenly evaporated, and he was able to follow this strange, benevolent woman.
“So that other man? He’s the one that’s dead? That’s why he was able to see all those other people.”
“Yes,” he hair seemed to glimmer as she nodded, “Only the dead can know their own secrets, including whether there are others like them present.”
His walking slowed a little as he thought and said, “Wait, if he’s dead, then how could I see him? He missed me. How was I able to give him a ride?”
“He didn’t miss you.”
“What?”
“He swerved to miss you, but not in time to completely miss you. You’re badly injured, but you’ll be fine. The reason you were able to see him and he you was because you were knocked unconscious when it happened. You could say that you’re having an out of body experience. He saw you, whether he knew it or not, as dead. How you were able to drive your car might be a little harder to understand. The best I can say is that you were under the illusion of having a car. You were, essentially, just going through the motions.”
Just as she finished explaining, they had suddenly reached the wrecked car. Todd was amazed at how fast they were able to get there, but he was even more amazed at the sheer carnage he saw in front of him. He now saw that the car was practically hugging the tree. Shattered bits of glass lay strewn every which way. He wasn’t surprised that the man didn’t survive the crash. He was even more surprised that he