***
Toby awoke lying on a hard, cold surface. He couldn’t move and was disoriented. He opened his eyes, and as his vision slowly came into focus, he could make out voices he didn’t recognize. He tried not to moan, and moved his head just enough to be able to see where the voices were coming from. He realized he was lying in the bed of a pickup truck.
He could hear a woman’s voice saying something about heating up the oven for dinner. He found the owner of the voice. He gasped. It was that devil-woman from the toll booth. What was he doing here with her? The people heard him gasp, and all turned to look at him now.
“Great, it’s awake,” said the woman. She looked to the man beside her, the one from the road, and said, “Finish it. I will get everything ready to cook.” She then waddled off toward a dilapidated old house.
“What’s going on?” Toby asked. “Why are my hands tied?”
The big man grunted. “You belong to us now, and we are getting ready for dinner.”
Toby was getting a seriously bad feeling. That is besides the splitting headache he woke with. “Why are you doing this? This isn’t because I couldn’t pay the toll. Who are you people?”
“We are the trolls who own this road,” another voice said. Toby turned and saw a grotesque grinning face. It was the man from the last booth, the woman’s son.
“What are you talking about?”
Both men grabbed him and dragged him out of the truck. He thought they were about to drop him on the ground, when they suddenly righted him and set him on his feet. Standing here before the two men, he realized they did have a troll-like appearance. Although, that was ridiculous, there was no such thing as trolls. They were just trying to scare him. Actually, it was working. They were big and nasty-looking, and the older looking one had already proven they were capable of violence. Toby’s mind reeled as he tried to reassess this situation and how he was going to get out of it.
The larger of the two, the one who had attacked him, stepped into Toby’s personal space. Toby tried not to flinch, and realized he could not even back up; he was already against the truck. The monster appraised Toby, slowly moving his eyes over his body, making Toby feel dirty, nauseas. Leaning forward, he took a deep breath through his nose, and then let it out slowly, his nostrils flaring and a smirk forming.
Finally, his attacker spoke. “Dinner smells great. Human is my favorite. Even better, this one is seasoned just right – greed, rage, lust,” The man, the troll, stopped and took a short sniff. “Oh,” he said, his grotesque mouth breaking into a grin. “You have secrets, don’t you?” He leaned forward, “I can smell them,” he whispered. He rubbed his hands together, chuckling.
Toby was repulsed by the thick, yellow grime on his unnaturally sharp teeth, and his breath that smelled like a rotting carcass. Worse, he had just heard himself referred to as dinner. He felt vomit burn the back of his throat. He swallowed, and then turned his head to draw in a clean breath.
As he turned back, the troll stepped away. “Look,” Toby said, “you don’t want me. Just let me go. I’ll go to the ATM and give you all the money I have in my checking account. You can even take me there yourself, so you will know I won’t try to ditch you.”
The younger of the two laughed. “We have no use for your money now. You tried to use our road without payment – you tried to steal from us.”
“No, I-“
“There is one punishment for theft here. This isn’t your cushy little business world where you can take whatever you want, run over whoever gets in your way, cheat whoever doesn’t cheat you first. Besides, we’re hungry. The last man to get stuck on our road was too pure. I couldn’t expose my children to that. Have you ever seen a troll with food poisoning? It’s not a pretty sight, I assure you.”
Now Toby’s head was spinning. He leaned against the truck for support. “No. You can’t do this, you can’t eat another person. Are you serious?” They cannot be serious. He struggled to get a grip on his emotions. These guys would surely prey on his weakness.
“Didn’t you hear the first time? We are not people, we are trolls,” the older one growled.
Toby went down onto his knees. Oh, man. These guys really were trolls. Worse than that, he was on their menu. He struggled to keep from hyperventilating. It all made sense now: the black empty eyes, those ugly bulldog-looking jowls, the pasty skin, the large awkward size. He thought about the windows on all those toll booths having dark tint. He thought at the time it was just for comfort, but that wasn’t it, was it? He thought he remembered something about trolls preferring night time. But all of that was a just myth, wasn’t it? “Oh, man,” he groaned.
A large, hairy hand wrapped around his upper arm, and yanked him to his feet. Oh, man, oh man…
He heard a woman’s voice shouting, “Stop talking to your food, you idiot. Get over here so we can eat.”
“Mama has spoken.” The younger troll started forward. The larger turned and opened the truck door to grab something. Toby snapped back to his senses. Before he had a chance to rethink it, he bolted. He ran harder than he thought he was capable. Go, go, go….
There was a growl behind him and he heard a thump on the earth behind him and wind against his back. Pain shot through his shoulder as if he had been bludgeoned by a hammer, the earth disappeared from beneath his feet. Suddenly he was falling into a dark abyss, the rough walls scraping the skin off his arms. The roar from the monster behind him became distant thunder. What the- The instant he realized he had fallen into a well, his body slammed into the hard, dry bottom. Pain seared his head and the world went black again.