I have taken certain liberties with the geography of Washington State. There are several towns on the way from Spokane to Seattle, for instance. But for purposes of this story, the highway over the mountains is deserted. Also, so far as I know, cell phones work perfectly well up there.
R. W. H.
"God damn son of a bitch!" Jake Foster muttered. He slammed his fist on the steering wheel, causing the horn to beep. This made him even angrier.
Of all the times to die, his car had picked tonight. Jesus Christ.
Foster sat back in his seat and stared gloomily at his watch. It was quarter to eight in the evening. He had to be across the pass and into Seattle by eleven. Jessica was expecting him.
He cursed again, and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. "Fuckin hell!" he said, and slammed the steering wheel again. No signal. Three hundred dollars for an Iphone and it didn't work. Which meant he was stranded up here, with no way to call AAA, or anyone else, for that matter.
Foster sighed bitterly and stared out the windshield. It looked like he was in for a walk. In the teeth of November high in the Cascade Mountains, even. What a god damn fix I'm in now, he thought.
The night was perfectly clear, with not much of a wind, and as a result the temperature had dropped from the mid sixties in Spokane all the way down to the upper thirties in the mountains. Snow capped peaks loomed in the distance, and alpine forests thrust their denuded branches into the sky nearby. It was beautiful scenery, but Foster would have much preferred to be enjoying it from behind the windows of his car, with his jazz CD's playing on the stereo and a warm heater blowing air gently around his legs.
He wasn't even dressed for the weather. He was wearing a t-shirt that said I gave up sex and drinking and it was the hardest 20 minutes of my life, and jeans. No jacket. He wasn't expecting to have to walk, for chrissake.
"Well, if I'm gonna, I better get," he said to himself, and got out of the car. Instantly the wind bit at his face. It felt like the temp had dropped even further since he'd heard it mentioned on the radio.
He went around to the back and fished out his road flares, setting them on the road. Not that it was very likely anybody would come; this road was sparsely traveled this late at night. He hadn't seen a car for the past hour.
Having set up the flares, he started walking. His car receded into the distance, surrounded by its corona of lights. The wind blew, rattling the branches of the trees and biting through his thin t-shirt mercilessly. The nearest town was ten miles away, which would take him almost two and a half hours to walk. What a god damn night.
Foster had set out on this journey for one simple reason, a girl. He was an accountant at a chain of local grocery stores. He was a stereotypical accountant too-short, rather skinny and plain looking, with thick horn-rimmed glasses that gave him an owlish appearance. As a result finding female company that wasn't bought and paid for was nearly impossible for him. He was bright, personable, apt at his job. But his damn face got in the way of all his romantic aspirations. The girls would take one look at him and then look away.
So, it was off to the world wide web. There, you could be anybody you wanted to be. You could get to know somebody without a bunch of preconceptions getting in the way. He'd started with the big personals sites-eHarmony, match.com, dating.com-but no luck. People saw accountant in the occupational field and moved on. Just like real life, in other words.
So he'd moved on to smaller message boards and forums and didn't tell anyone what he did for a living. And whadaya know, he started getting messages. It was a watershed moment for Foster. How could he have lived so long without exploring the reaches of the internet? He started to get to know people, and nobody cared what he did or didn't do for a living, they just knew that old Foster311 was a blast to chat with, that he was fun and witty, that he always had a good piece of advice or a kind word if you needed it.
It was on one of these message boards that he met Jessica French. They started chatting privately six months ago, talking of life and dreams and hopes. He told her what he did for a living, even sent her a photo, and she wasn't put off in the slightest.
Finally, last week, they'd set up a meet. Foster would drive to Seattle, they would go out to dinner, and (Foster hoped) maybe get a motel room somewhere to further explore their compatibility. She had sent him a photo a couple of weeks ago, and Foster had spent many happy nights thinking of her. She was a tall girl with beautiful long blond hair, big liquid blue eyes and full red lips. In the photo, she was wearing a long silk chemise that floated around what looked to be a very curvaceous body indeed and Foster couldn't wait to see if the shape it revealed held true to form.
He had set out this evening, thoughts of Jessica dancing in his head. They were going to have dinner at the Space Needle restaurant, and hopefully things would progress from there.
But his damn car had to go and die on him a quarter of the way there.
Foster sighed and kept walking. The wind had died, but now the air hung, still and colder by the minute. A full moon shone down, dappling the surface of the highway with silver shadows. And from behind him came the sound of footsteps.
Clip clop. Clip clop. Clip clop.
The night was otherwise silent.
Foster stopped and listened, holding his breath. The footsteps stopped too. There wasn't a sound to be heard.
"Who's there?" he called.
No answer. Just more silence.
Foster had images of some hulking mountain throwback hiding behind him, watching, ready to pounce. Among his other interests was a devotion to hammer films. In his mind's eye, he saw a filthy psychotic killer with a hook for a right hand, a chain saw in his other, and a maniacal grin on his face, hiding behind a tree.
"Who's there? I warn you, I'm armed!"
No answer. The silenced pressed in on him. The moon had sailed behind a cloud, and the night was pitch black.
Foster started walking again, faster. The footsteps matched him stride for stride, not hurrying, not falling back. Keeping pace about fifty yards back, just out of sight.
He was getting seriously scared now. The sound of footsteps wasn't at all alarming; how many times had he heard them-women in high heels clopping down a hall; men in dress shoes and cowboy boots clunking down the sidewalk-but out here, in this vast wilderness, they took on a whole new dimension of sensation. The only sound out here were the two sets of footsteps.
Suddenly something came crashing out of the woods, crunching branches and twigs. Foster screamed like a girl and started running. The footsteps ran too. He was flying in a headlong panic, darting glances over his shoulder, before he realized it was only a deer. It came charging out of the woods and bolted across the road behind him, its hooves striking up sparks on the pavement, and disappeared into the trees on the other side of the road.
Foster stopped and caught his breath. He noted that the footsteps behind him had stopped too. God, he was falling to pieces out here. Getting all freaked out over a damn deer. He considered going back to his car, but that would mean passing the owner of those footsteps, something he didn't want to do, not way out here in the middle of nowhere.
He reached into his pocket and brought out his phone. Still no signal, and even better, low battery. Great, just great.
He glanced around for the person following him and continued to see a whole lot of nothing. "Who the fuck are you!" he hollered. No answer but the echoes of his own voice, which freaked him out even more. He broke out into a cold sweat and kept walking. And listened to the footsteps, still fifty yards back.
Clip Clop. Clip Clop. Clip clop.
He'd already come what he figured to be about a mile and a half, still a long way to go. And if he had to listen to those footsteps all the way, he would go insane.
Foster walked along, almost jogging. Were the footsteps getting closer? He could've sworn they were, but who could tell?
As he hammered along, trying not to think too deeply about what might be behind him, he found himself remembering a time when he was about six years old. He had gone with his brother Robert to visit his aunt and uncle down in Grants Pass. They had driven down for the weekend, their father grumbling all the way about his no count brother and his mother trying to calm him down. He couldn't remember what the occasion was, probably a wedding of one cousin or another. And on Saturday, he, Robert and their cousins had played hide and seek in the old barn out back. It was a big old corrugated tin structure and their footsteps had echoed weirdly in it. He had gone up to the old hayloft, redolent with the ghosts of bales past, and waited to be found.
Now, hearing the footsteps draw closer, he was reminded of that breathless time in the hayloft, only it wasn't a child's giggling delight he felt, but a deep, atavistic terror. His body was wreathed in a slime of cold sweat. His heart thundered in his chest; his bladder felt loose and hot. And yes, the footsteps were definitely drawing closer.
They were only about thirty yards back now, picking up speed, a frantic urgency seeming to communicate itself through the clip clops on the pavement. Foster whimpered and picked up his own pace, now positively jogging. "What the hell do you want!" he screamed. "I ain't' got no money, please ... please just leave me alone!"
There of course was no answer, and now the footsteps were picking up even more speed, clipclopclipclopclipclop, racketing behind him like machine gun fire on the road's surface.
Giving up all pretense of calmness, Foster began running outright, tears sliding down his cheeks, his breathing wheezing harshly in and out of his throat like a hot branding iron. A stitch sunk itself deep in his left side, stabbing and twisting and growing deeper with each step. And the footsteps raced closer and closer, and now he could hear a frantic panting behind him, like the sound of some large animal, a German shepherd maybe, pondering a delicious piece of steak.
Foster screamed breathlessly and wrung a last burst of speed out of his tortured body, racing, racing beneath the cold indifferent mountain sky, listening to his pursuer get closer and closer no matter how fast he ran, hearing that frantic panting. Now it wasn't clipclopclipclop, it was thudthudthud, like a hammer of doom, like one of the horsemen of the apocalypse racing after him. Gaining, gaining, gaining...
It was a rock he tripped over. Foster went sprawling, sliding for a good ten feet, erasing all the skin on his hands and breaking his nose on the unyielding blacktop of the highway. Pain exploded in his head like a firebell, blood cascaded down his throat with each breath and he coughed and whimpered frantically, trying to get up and run and look over his shoulder all at once.
There was a triumphant howl from behind him and he saw his pursuer and Jacob Foster screamed so loudly he felt something give in his throat. The footsteps stopped and there was a blur of movement, and he knew no more.
# # #
Officer Frank McCleary of the Spokane Police Department banged on the door of the house at 39 Maple Lane. "Jacob Foster? Open up! This is the Police!" he hollered in his best cop voice.
McCleary hated these calls more than just about anything. The 9-11 operators had received a frantic call last night from some woman in Seattle called Jessica French, babbling about how this Jacob Foster hadn't shown up for their meeting two days ago, and she was worried and could somebody please please check his house and find out if he was ok and oh my god did something happen to him? It had been given a low priority-there was, after all, real crime going on and the police couldn't be everywhere at once checking on a boyfriend who decided to stand up a girl in Seattle, but then this morning Foster's boss had called, saying there was no answer at Foster's house and could somebody please go and look the place over to make sure somebody hadn't broken in and killed him, such terrible times we do live in, yadda yadda yadda.
So here he was, banging on the door and the place sure did look abandoned, but who could tell these days? "Mr. Foster? Are you in there? Last chance!"
There continued to be a whole lot of nothing, so McCleary tried the door. Unlocked. This didn't look good. Not good at all.
Unstrapping the butt of his gun, McCleary cautiously opened the door and stepped inside.
The smell hit him at once. How many scenes had he been called to where that smell was the precursor of bad news? Scenes beyond number. It was the smell of death.
Using his elbow, McCleary turned on the bank of lights by the door. What the hell?
Foster was dead all right. But it didn't look like foul play.
McCleary was a part time computer gamer, and recognized the setup right away. Jacob Foster was slumped over his computer console, a big old virtual reality helmet on his head. It looked to McCleary's eye like he had died of a heart attack while playing an exercise game-there was a scene of a deserted road on the monitor and a small figure standing on it.
"Well, guess that answers that," McCleary muttered, and unhooked his radio to call it in. Time to start the machinery of death. But then he paused.
He had moved around to get a better look at the computer-it was one hell of an impressive set up and he couldn't help admiring it, even at such a grim scene as this. As he had stepped to one side, he caught sight of Foster's face. Fixed on it was a look of utter terror, the eyes wide open, the mouth pinched into a scream. And suddenly McCleary heard somebody. Walking down the stairs. Clip clop. Clip clop. Clip clop.