The Follower

Something follows a car on a lonely dirt road.

 

It was a cloudless night the last I saw him. Had he cared to look up, he would have seen the empty void above him, bleached of stars from the light of the city. Though the waning moon shone a brilliant silver in the sky, I looked down to watch him drive past through the trees. In his wake, branches swayed in the wind and loose dirt was kicked up into dust. In a moment he looked down to his lap, swerving at a turn in the road. A black mass shifted in the seat behind him. 

Over the years I’d followed him down this path, never had he been so reckless. I set to pursue him as the taillights of his car began to fade away into the trees. There was no one else on that lonely dirt road, just him, and me looming close behind. Darting into the brush, I kept pace with him. I could see him on his phone through the branches rushing past, and through the window I could read his lips. 

    “Yeah I’ll be home by nine. Yeah I know it’s late. You can stop trying to get a hold of me now. No, I'm not driving while on the phone. Yeah u-huh. Bye.” 

I’ve followed him silently from the trees for a long time, me and others like me. I’ve seen him lie countless times. As I’ve observed, I’ve pitied the tangled messes he’d spin himself into, however tonight something had changed. There was a distant but manic look in his eyes, and the unfamiliar silhouette in the back seat of his car. He picked up his phone again.

“Hey, just the man I wanted to hear from. Yeah it’s done. What do you think, genius? Of course I cleaned up the mess. Yeah of course I’d bring him with. Relax, I’m not getting pulled over, no one’s on the road. I’m only twenty minutes out. Yeah I’ll see you then.”

The dark form shifted in the back seat. He picked up speed through a bend in the road, sliding the mass over into the window. He easily began to overtake my pace, trees and brush flew by me as the distance between us grew. Watching my footing and pacing myself, I could tell there was no keeping up with him. I saw the taillights of his car get smaller as I made a sharp left into the thick night forest. The tightly packed shrubbery scraped into my body, the cold night air pelted my face. I knew the forest well from years of growing up among them. The roads had been here just as long, and I could track each twist and turn just as well. 

I came upon a part of the road he would no doubt be fast approaching. I waited. I looked up at the moon, held still in the sky, glowing its brilliant stare. My ears twitched when I could hear his car humming in the distance, but it was still out of sight. I stepped out onto the road, feet clacking on the now paved asphalt. I began to see light in front of me, a familiar brilliant beam. I stared. I could only stare. The golden sheen of those headlights transfixed me, and chained me to the ground. Suddenly and violently that light was taken away, the car was cast aside by my presence into a ditch in the road. 

A tree branch was protruding through the windshield of his car, and his front bumper was crumpled like paper. I need not look to know he had been killed. I galloped to the back door and pulled the handle with my teeth. The rope holding the burlap sack only needed a firm tug to let loose its contents, a small child, shaken but unharmed. The boy looked at me with glowing blue eyes, more beautiful than that of the moon, or those golden headlights. The child fell to the ground before scrambling to his feet and rushing off down the road as fast as his little legs could run. As I watched the child run into the distance, I could only help but do what was natural to me. Like I had done with so many others. I kept my distance, and I followed.