“Don’t look so shocked,” Booda and I said simultaneously.
The man tried to move, but pain folded him immediately. A scream tore out of him so raw it echoed across the empty highway. I crouched beside the broken window and stared at him.
“You should’ve pretended you didn’t see me. Could’ve ambushed me when you got where you were going. You're not too bright, are you?” I asked with a giggle.
“Help me…” he rasped, his voice was wet with blood.
I looked over at the dead girl again. Her hair swayed slightly in the breeze coming through the busted windshield.
“She didn’t deserve this,” I muttered.
“Nah,” Booda replied. “But she got in the car with him.”
A strange calm settled over me after that. I wasn’t angry anymore, and I wasn’t panicking either. I just looked at the girl hanging dead in that car, then back at him, and accepted what the night had turned into.
Booda reached in first and grabbed the man beneath his good arm. I grabbed the other side, and together we dragged him from the wreckage while he screamed and clawed weakly against us. Blood smeared across my hands and sleeves.
By the time we got him to my backseat, he was crying. Actual tears. Begging. Promising money. Offering information.
That triggered something. I’d been in a situation similar to this before. And one thing I’d learned then was that people always pleaded when they knew death was inevitable. Funny how morality suddenly kicked in when your bones were outside your body, and death was standing close enough to breathe on you.
He was heavy as fuck, and I could barely hold him up. Thank goodness Booda bore most of his weight, or I would’ve been out of there.
The man cried the entire time we dragged him toward my car. His feet scraped against the pavement while blood poured downthe side of his face and soaked into his shirt. One of his arms hung wrong, limp and twisted near the shoulder.
“Please,” he choked out again. “Please don’t kill me.”
I ignored him and yanked the back door open.
Booda shoved him inside first. The man screamed the moment his broken arm hit the seat, and the sound bounced around the empty highway.
“Shut the fuck up,” I snapped.
He tried. I’d give him that much. His cries dropped into ragged whimpers while he curled awkwardly across my backseat, shaking so hard the entire car moved with him.
I slammed the door and looked back toward the wreck. The woman was still hanging upside down inside the Challenger.
Her hair brushed the crushed roof while smoke drifted into the night around her. One heel had come off during the crash and lay several feet away near shattered glass glittering across the freeway.
For a second, I couldn’t stop staring at her. She probably thought she was going out for a regular night. Now she was dead on the side of the freeway while he begged for his life in the back of my car.
“Let’s go. It’s nothing we can do to help her,” Booda said from beside me.
I looked away from the wreck and climbed back into the driver's seat. Cops and paramedics would be here soon.
The engine turned over, and I pulled away from the scene without looking back again.
The farther we got from the freeway, the quieter the city became. Buildings spread apart, traffic disappeared, and streetlights grew farther from each other until darkness started swallowing whole sections of the road.
The man groaned behind me every few seconds, and his blood kept dripping onto my seat.
“You know where you going?” Booda asked.
I swallowed and tightened my hands around the wheel. “I think so. Something about coming this way feels right.”
I wasn’t guessing. My body knew the route before my mind caught up to it. I made turns without thinking. Left at the light. Right near the railroad tracks. Straight through a row of dead warehouses with busted windows and rusted gates.
Then I saw it.
