Originally published 2021, in the Last Stop: Horror on Route 13 anthology released by Eerie River Publishing. Edited by David Green & S.O. Green.
There’s always a rational explanation.
Franklin Toombs lived by that mantra. And right now, he was clinging to it like a drowning man to a deflating life preserver.
Toombs breathed heavily, sending a rush of clouds into the cold December air. He was slick with sweat, blood, and dirt. Digging five graves in the winter earth, dragging five bodies to those graves, wasn’t easy work—especially with only one good hand. He shook with exhaustion. And he’d ruined a perfectly good suit! Good news was, he wasn’t cold anymore; the night’s grisly work had seen to that. But his mind felt frayed at the edges, and he needed a drink. Bad.
The sick feeling in his stomach, the one that had been growing worse since he’d first turned down Route 13, threatened to overwhelm him. Somehow, this place—with its pockmarked two-lane dirt road, its dump of a bar, greasy gas station, and moldy motel surrounded by a thick forest of pine—was testing his resolve, the steadfastness of his personal philosophies, just for the hell of it...
Toombs shook his head. No. Don’t think like that. Just get a drink, calm your nerves, get yourself out of here. Yeah, that was the plan.
He took another deep breath to steady himself and glanced up at the night sky. Bad idea. The stars were still winking out one by one as the impossibly vast, multi-angled behemoths he’d seen earlier continued surging across them. His stomach clenched again; he couldn’t explain why, but the stars darkening in the wake of those...things made him feel utterly alone. Like the stars were a million eyes closing shut, not wanting to witness...
No. What he was seeing, hearing—it wasn’t there. It couldn’t be. He’d lost so much blood, taxed himself killing the cultists up on the mountain, burying them in their freshly dug graves, stumbling through dark woods all the way back here. He was simply in shock, hallucinating.
There’s always a rational explanation.
Toombs crossed the empty road, a specter in the fog, drawn to the gaudy neon lights of Whiskey Pete’s bar like a skeeter to a bug zapper.
He kicked open the door to Whiskey Pete’s, leaving a muddy boot-print on the worn wood. The hinges squealed like a slaughtered pig.
“‘And lo, I beheld a pale horse...’”
The lilting voice froze Toombs’ blood in his veins. A wave of lightheadedness surged through him as his eyes settled on the five people standing at the bar, wiping dirt off their clothes.
But… but that’s impossible.
The old man in the red mechanic coveralls bearing the name tag Dale spat a clump of dirt out of his mouth as he examined another gob on the end of one of his gnarled, grime-black fingernails. “‘... and Hell followed with him.’”
Toombs had a sudden desire to lie down, to sleep the sleep of the dead. None of this could be happening.
There’s always a rational explanation.
He’d gone insane; that’s what this was. His mind had shattered; his brains were leaking out of his ears. That was it.
The five Whiskey Pete’s regulars stared back at him as they continued wiping themselves clean of the muck from their graves. Their clothes—and skin and bones—were intact. No severed limbs, no gaping, bloody wounds, no hamburger mash of flesh and splintered bones. Like nothing he’d done, only hours before, had actually happened. Except for the dirt, the mechanic, the big man with mismatched eyes, the red-headed Stacey, the raven-haired Joel, and the decrepit old-timer all looked much as they had when he’d first met them several hours earlier: very much alive.
But he’d killed them. Torn through each and every one of them with a knife and shovel. Toombs looked down at his clothes: his Armani suit was still stained with their blood.
Somewhere out of sight, a door creaked open.
“Well, shit,” Toombs said.
***
Route 13, the worm ouroboros. Never-ending.
Toombs had turned off of Route 30 and onto 13 early that morning a little while after he’d gotten out of Portland, but that had been several hours before; around noonish, he’d already passed Payette National Forest. The day was cloudy, and from inside his pristine, matte black 1967 Pontiac GTO, Toombs could tell it was a cold one: it had that blue winter-look to it. No matter—inside the GTO, the heat was on, and Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral was pulsing from the speakers.
If someone had asked him why he’d left the state-maintained smoothness of Route 30 for the long-neglected, seemingly forgotten—and, if the GPS on his smartphone was to be believed, apparently nonexistent—puckered dirt path of Route 13, Toombs probably wouldn’t have been able to answer.
He was following a hunch.
And in all his years of work, finding people that didn’t want to be found, cleaning up messes and tying up loose-ends for anyone that could foot the bill, Toombs had learned to trust his hunches. After all, his hunches had kept him alive and kept him paid.
Another question Toombs wouldn’t have been able to answer: why in the hell the car’s stereo had burst into static and his stomach had begun cramping as soon as he’d turned onto Route 13...
He told himself it was probably a mixture of the uneven road messing with the stereo wiring and bad fast food; had to be. There were no other explanations, and if Toombs was anything, he was pragmatic; a man of reason.
He forced his mind back to the job.
The kids he was tracking—one Nia Lewis, 16-years-old, and Jamie Walsh, 20—hadn’t been staying in hotels, based on the information he’d received from her father. Jerome Lewis’ impressively wide web of both legal and extralegal connections had been keeping tabs on Nia—at least until she and her boyfriend disappeared off Route 30 somewhere after being spotted leaving Portland.
According to some of Jerome’s police connections, Nia and Jamie had been foregoing hotels in favor of parking their getaway vehicle—Jaime’s crappy 1977 Dodge Aspen—in Wal-Mart parking lots or wooded areas just off the main road. Probably to save what little money they had and to keep a low profile. Poor love-struck Nia didn’t realize just how far her daddy’s reach really was. The stark reality was, Jerome’s reach was both wide and powerful enough that he could have his police connections keep a watch on Nia and have someone like Toombs come along to sweep this little family embarrassment under the rug as quickly and quietly as possible.
“What do you want done with Jamie?” Toombs asked Jerome in the alley behind the man’s house in Astoria a couple nights before.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Jerome said, “that man is a rapist. Do whatever the hell you want to him; I don’t want to know about it. I don’t want to hear about it on the news, or see it in the papers. Just bring my baby girl home, with as little fuss and muss as possible. I’ll make it worth your while.”
And Jerome Lewis had made it worth Toombs’ while: he’d paid triple the normal front-end fee Toombs charged, with a promise to triple the remainder upon completion of the job. With the amount he’d make from this one job, Toombs could buy enough Armani suits to wear one every day of the year.
And if Toombs loved anything more than his job, it was Armani suits; they were the only thing he felt a man should wear.
The sun was beginning to set when Toombs saw the road sign. He pulled the GTO to a stop next to it. The thing was old: made of splintering, mildewed planks of wood, the words looking like they’d been carved into it by some unsteady hand:
DeVIL’S LAdDEr
wHiSKEy PEtE’s
Toombs snickered. The sign—and the place names, even the handwriting—looked like a leftover prop from some old horror flick. Devil’s Ladder? Whiskey Pete’s? Really? Names like that didn’t belong to real places; they belonged to places where cults practiced human sacrifice, or where inbred cannibals preyed upon bumbling out-of-towners. In movies.
And yet, even as he snickered, his stomach was doing kick-flips. A band of static buzzed through the stereo, stuttering the chorus of “March of the Pigs.”
Must’ve been the In’N’Out. And he’d probably knocked something loose on this damn cratered road...
There’s always a rational explanation.
He sat staring at the sign, readjusting his seatbelt as the car idled in the gathering gloom. If he were two love-dumb kids making a run for it, where would he pull off for the night?
Toombs stepped on the gas.
It was a 50-50 shot they’d stopped at either place.
***
Eight miles later, Toombs found the car.
Well, what was left of the car.
It was maybe a mile and half past the parking area for the Devil’s Ladder hiking trail, pulled into a copse of pines that would’ve given the young lovers plenty of privacy. Toombs would’ve probably driven right past the car if the immediate area hadn’t been burned to a black crisp. The trees were nothing more than mangled, black skeleton fingers grasping at the sky.
The GTO’s headlights had caught the burned-out husk of the car as he gently fish-tailed up the dirt path that he assumed was the hiking trail. He pulled up to the scorched pocket of trees, his headlights illuminating the charred vehicle at its center, and put the GTO in park. Toombs turned down the music and stepped out into the night.
The area reeked of gasoline. Except for the idling of the GTO’s engine, the night was quiet; the kind of quiet that made Toombs uneasy. Even in winter, this kind of wooded area should’ve pulsated with the noise of nocturnal wildlife. Hell, he didn’t even hear crickets. There should at least be crickets.
Toombs stepped up to what was left of the vehicle and examined it. The husk looked like the right shape for a 1977 Dodge Aspen, but he needed to be sure. He stepped around to the driver’s side and pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket. He tapped open his file on Jamie, scrolling with his thumb until he came to the Aspen’s Vehicle Identification Number.
He turned on the phone’s flashlight feature and hovered the light over the blackened car, just under where the windshield had been, and wiped away the ash gathered there with his other hand.
The VIN was faded, but still readable: this was Jamie’s car.
Toombs slowly walked the phone’s light around the car, searching for any sign, any indication that Nia and Jamie had been in the Aspen when it had been torched.
Nada.
He’d need to come back in the daytime to be sure, make a more thorough examination, but he didn’t think the kids had been in the car when it was set aflame.
But something nagged at him. Had Nia and Jamie set the fire themselves? Or had someone else? Did the kids ditch the car here, then steal another hiker’s car? Or maybe they’d hitchhiked or backpacked somewhere nearby?
There’s always a rational explanation.
Toombs vaguely remembered seeing another sign for a town called Chevron a little while back, but his gut had told him to keep on driving. Had his hunches finally failed him? Or had the bad food he’d eaten messed up his gut to the point he couldn’t tell a hunch from a bad case of gas?
No, that couldn’t be it. His stomach might be dancing in his belly, but he could still read his hunches.
And right now, his hunch was saying—
Hoot-Hoot-Hoot-HOOOOOOOOONK!
Toombs froze. What the hell was that? He’d never heard anything like that in his life before… it didn’t even sound like an animal. It sounded more like—
Something massive eclipsed the GTO’s headlights, plunging Toombs into darkness.
Hoot-Hoot-Hoot-HOOOOOOOOONK!
Toombs whipped around, exchanging his smartphone for the SIG Sauer P320 he kept in his shoulder holster beneath his jacket.
Backlit by the headlights, the thing was a blocky shadow, but Toombs thought he caught flashes of something reflective on the large, bobbling head that could have been eyes.
“Yeah, no,” Toombs mumbled.
Long, knife-like claws slashed at him. Hoot-Hoot-Hoot—
Toombs got three shots off. Muzzle flashes lit up the night like lightning, the suppressor Toombs used religiously making the gun sound less like thunder and more like hydraulic pistons.
Even as Toombs heard the thud-thud-thud of the bullets hitting their target, the thing’s claws met the hand holding the gun and severed through flesh, tendon, and bone like they were toilet paper.
“Shit!”
His hand, his gun, and his monstrous attacker crumpled to the ground. Toombs was only vaguely aware of the all-too-human voice screaming from the blocky shape at his feet, his eyes fixed on the jagged stump where his left hand used to be.
“Holy shit!”
Blood sputtered forth like a faulty spigot. Before he could think about what he was doing, Toombs pulled his tie loose with his right hand and used a combination of his teeth and his good hand to tie a makeshift tourniquet around the forearm above his severed wrist.
Toombs staggered over to the GTO, blood pumping in his ears in time with his heart. He released the brake with his right hand while the bleeding stump of his left flopped around like a dying fish on the steering wheel, painting it slick with blood. He got control of himself, put the stump in his lap. With his good hand, he threw the car into reverse and grabbed the steering wheel as he slammed the gas pedal down, and then he was speeding backwards along the trail and back toward the parking area.
The GTO reverse-fishtailed onto Route 13, and just as Toombs thought he’d made it, he hit a pothole and the back passenger-side tire blew. The car careened over into a ditch on the left-hand shoulder, slamming to a metal-crunching stop against a strand of whispering pines.
***
Toombs came-to on sticky carpet. Four human-shaped blurs stood over him, talking. Only one eye seemed to be working, and even that was hazy, like he was looking through a dirty glass; the other eye refused to open, felt puffed up and glued shut. His head felt like it had been scooped out and stuffed full of broken glass. His body ached, and his left stump throbbed and buzzed painfully, like someone was sawing at it with a blazing-hot blade.
“ … find Joel?” the blur standing near his feet asked.
The vision in his good eye cleared some, and he could make out more of the people talking above him. The man who had spoken was dressed in denim, heavily muscled but leaning toward fat; his craggy face was too big, his nose too bulbous. Toombs thought each of the man’s eyes was a different color—one green, the other blue—but figured that was just a trick of the light.
Toombs moved his eye slightly, trying to get his bearings. Behind the big man with the mismatched eyes he could make out a bar to his right, the shelves on the wall behind it dotted here and there with dusty liquor bottles. On his left, near his shoulder, just behind the pretty red-headed, green-eyed woman standing over him, a jukebox that had seen much better days—Toombs doubted it even worked—leaned long-neglected against a dirty wall. The place smelled musty, old, and sour, like it was rotting. He had the urge to leap to his feet—this was one of those dives you’d never want to take a piss in—but his body was too battered to respond.
The red-head nodded at the big man. She kept her arms folded protectively across her chest. “He’s out back, gettin’ cleaned up.” Her voice was flat, lifeless; Toombs found it incongruent with her shapely lips. She dipped her head slightly toward him. “Shot him coupla times.”
The big man grunted.
The scrawny man standing over Toombs across from the woman laughed. He wore ill-fitting red mechanic’s coveralls with a nametag Toombs couldn’t make out. The man kicked Toombs. “Not much of a shot, eh, asshole?”
Toombs noticed pictures tacked to the wall behind the bar, and the wall directly to his right. The picture was old, black and white, and from his angle on the floor, Toombs couldn’t be sure, but he thought the big man with the mismatched eyes and the redhead were standing on either side of another man in a checkered shirt and dark pants—a man not currently standing over Toombs—but this man’s face was blurred, like he’d turned before the camera had finished taking the picture.
Directly above Toombs, a third man, gaunt and disheveled and dressed like a soldier in a Civil War documentary, bent closer. The man’s breath was rancid, his teeth black and likely rotting in his mouth.
“Yew for the Gray or the Blue, boy?” the man wheezed in a thick, Southern drawl.
“Ah shaddup, you old coot,” the mechanic said, waving the man away. He had a lilt to his voice—Canadian, maybe?—and the dirtiest fingernails Toombs had ever seen.
The old-timer straightened and mumbled to himself; Toombs thought he heard the words war and Northern Aggression, but he wasn’t sure.
“He by himself?” Big Man asked. Toombs thought he heard the hint of a New York accent in the man’s voice.
Red Head shrugged. “Ask Joel.”
“He didn’t say?”
“Other than bitchin’ he got shot by some dandy in a suit pokin’ around that burned car, no, he ain’t said nothin’.”
“I toldya we shoulda done something else with that car,” Mechanic said. “Toldya somebody come looking around for them kids.”
Big Man grunted.
“Well, Con? Whadda we do?”
“Hang ‘im,” Old-Timer mumbled. “For treason.”
Big Man sighed. “Gotta talk to Joel, first.”
“An’ then?” Mechanic asked. “As gooda night as any, ask me...”
“Been a while, too,” Red Head muttered. She glanced at Toombs with something like hunger in her eyes—a look that both aroused him and made him sick.
Big Man grunted. “Lock him in the motel. Then we talk to Joel.”
Toombs passed out again as soon as they jerked him up from the carpet with grimy hands.
***
He awoke to the sound of a door locking shut.
It took a few moments for Toombs’ good eye to adjust to the darkness. The other side of his face pounded terribly, as if his heart had switched places with his right eye.
When he was finally able to see his surroundings in the murky twilight, he found himself tied to a bed in an old, run-down motel room. Stained wallpaper curled from the walls, and the musty, rotten, mildewed smell that he’d first sniffed in the bar was worse, here. The bed itself had no padding, and the springs poked up through the mattress and into his back.
Something moved at the foot of the bed.
“Who’s there?”
“Stacey,” came a soft, monotone voice. Toombs remembered it from the bar. The red-headed woman.
He was having trouble seeing her. There was a deeper shadow near the end of the bed, gliding closer now, but between the darkness of the room and the limited use of his one eye, Toombs still wasn’t clear on her location.
He heard a zipper slowly pulled down, then the sounds of various bits of soft things dropping to the floor.
Toombs swallowed. Sure, Red Head—Stacey—had been somewhat attractive, but this was not the time nor the place. He wasn’t into the kinky stuff, and anyways, none of this was consensual. He felt like hot rocks were sizzling in the pit of his stomach.
Stacey appeared at his left side, a sliver of light streaming through the curtains across the room, draping her naked body in lambent moonlight.
“You look good enough to eat,” Stacey said as she leaned over Toombs.
His heart was beating fast, and the pain behind his right eye and where his left hand had been intensified. His vision grew hazy.
“Listen, lady—”
Toombs’ mouth went dry as Stacey brought her hand up suggestively between her breasts.
He looked at her eyes—and his blood went cold: they swirled like black holes, impossibly deep and dark, getting darker, deeper, wider as he gazed into them. Then the darkness in them threatened to spill over, to eat up the room—maybe even the world.
Her fingers went ballistic, digging, ripping into the skin of her chest, and she was pulling herself open, blood spilling upon the floor and spraying across his face, and still she was digging, pulling, stretching the skin to impossible lengths like it was a linen sheet she was ripping apart.
A towering swarm of cockroaches exploded from her.
He screamed, writhing in terror and disgust, unable to wrench free from his bounds as the roaches descended upon him and millions of little, sickly, sticky legs scuttled over him. He tried to tell himself this was only a hallucination brought on by blood loss—there’s always a rational explanation, dammit!—but then he was choking on roaches as they forced their way down his throat and into his ears and his eyes and his—
Toombs woke screaming in a dark, musty room. He tried to move and found he was tied spread-eagled to an uncomfortably springy bed by his right hand and both his feet, his clothes wet with sweat. His handless left stump flopped uselessly at his side, burning, always burning. He gasped for breath, his head swimming in a hazy mist of pain and terror.
And then, mercifully, he passed into a dreamless void.
***
On the edge of consciousness...
“... shouldn’t we bind him or somethin’?” Red Head, again.
“Man’s got one good hand, one eye stopped shut, and he’s lost enough blood to fill a bucket. He’s half dead, Stacey.” The Mechanic.
“Joel’ll feel more like a man gutting him if he’s not bound.” Big Man.
“Fuck you, Con.” Something familiar about that voice… like he’d heard it in pain, somewhere… making strange bird-calls, maybe?
Chanting, rhythmic and baroque, filled the air, a choir of voices melting together into a haunting, brooding hymn.
A breeze caressed Toombs’ face as he slowly regained consciousness. His eye opened. He was on his back—again—but this time, outside, laid out on some kind of stone surrounded by grass. Orange light flickered at the edge of his vision, seemed to curve around him like he was the center of something. He was staring up at the starry sky, except—except something was terribly wrong. There were massive… things moving across the sky, darker than the void between stars, consisting of angles that made his head feel on fire, roaring in languages that made his ears bleed; the stars winked out one by one in their wake.
There’s always a rational explanation, he reminded himself as tears tumbled from the eye that was not gummed shut by blood and pus.
“‘Madness rides the star-winds,’” the Mechanic said nearby. “‘Claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses...’”
Four hooded figures approached Toombs from every side. Their cloaks were black as pitch, the hoods so wide and deep their faces were permanently lost in shadow; but he could feel their eyes piercing him as his eye flicked from one figure to another. The chanting continued from all around him, from others outside the range of his limited vision.
A fifth hooded figure approached, kicking Toombs’ feet apart and walking right up to his crotch. This figure withdrew the most evil-looking knife Toombs had ever seen in his life—wickedly curved with an obsidian cross-guard that looked like it had been made of molten darkness—and his balls retreated into his stomach. The light of what little stars remained in the sky flickered across the silver blade, morphing with the reflected lights of torches and creating infernal fractals that burned themselves upon Toombs’ retina.
“Shoot me, leave me to bleed out in the woods,” that familiar voice said again from within the cloak looming over him. The figure pulled back the hood, revealing a raven-haired man with a crooked, yellow smile. His eyes blazed with menace. “I’m gonna enjoy this.”
The raven-haired man brought down the wicked knife in a flash, but Toombs brought his right hand up to block it.
“No,” Toombs said, barely a whisper.
The knife speared Toombs’ palm, jutting out the back of it and spraying his face with his own blood.
“Shee-it!” someone cried.
The shock of pain, the coppery smell of blood, woke something in Toombs that had been groggy since he’d lost his hand and crashed his car earlier that night.
It came roaring back to life.
Toombs roared.
Suddenly he was lurching forward, sinking his teeth into the raven-haired man’s nose and ripping violently backward. The man screamed as hot blood exploded from where his nose had been, and he let go of the knife stuck in Toombs’ hand.
Then Toombs was on his feet, kicking the raven-haired man onto his back and yanking the knife out of his own hand with his teeth, growling around the hilt as the pain lanced through his nervous system. He grabbed the knife’s handle with his wounded right hand and spun.
Hooded figures lunged at him, throwing wild punches and screaming to throw him off balance. Toombs stayed calm, focused on each punch, each kick that came his way, expertly deflecting them.
He sliced through flesh, opened veins, drenched the grass at his feet in blood. With his stump he jabbed at eyes, slapped at faces, elbowed groins.
Someone came at him with a shovel. Toombs ducked under the swing, lunging forward with the knife, sliding it through black robes and into soft flesh, yanking it up and then side to side. He pulled back with the knife, dropping it and catching the shovel—a much better weapon, allowing more space between himself and his assailants—as his attacker screamed and clutched at the steaming coil of intestines unspooling into a slop upon the earth.
Stacey was on him, then—he recognized her voice as she threw herself on his back, wrapping her thin arms around his neck. She thrashed and screamed, bit at his neck and face and his stump as he swatted at her again and again.
He wrapped his left forearm around the back of her neck and pulled as he leaned forward, allowing her momentum to launch her off of him and onto the ground.
He cut off her raging scream with the shovel, severing her head at the neck.
And then, it was done.
The only sound, besides Toombs’ ragged breaths, and the ear-piercing shrieks from the star-things that loped across the heavens, was the sound of dying cultists, gurgling in growing pools of their own blood.
“Goddamn cannibal hillbillies,” Toombs mumbled.
He limped among the bodies, staving-in skulls and severing heads with the shovel until the only one still crying and choking was the raven-haired man. He was on his back near the stone they’d placed Toombs on, clutching at the mangled mess of his nose.
Toombs slammed a foot down on the man’s testicles, applying pressure until he heard a wet pop and the man screamed the most blood-curdling scream Toombs had ever heard. He brought the shovel point down to sever the rest of the man’s genitals, then stepped around to the man’s head, kicking away his hands from his nose and placing the shovel at the man’s bobbing Adam’s apple.
The man gagged on tears and blood. He spat at Toombs. “You’re dead, man! You are so fucking dead!”
“Nia Lewis,” Toombs said. “Where is she?”
The raven-haired man looked confused. “Who?”
“Nia Lewis. She came here with her boyfriend, Jamie Walsh.”
“Don’t know who you’re—”
Toombs whacked the man’s destroyed crotch with the shovel, then brought it back to his throat.
“Black girl, white boyfriend.”
The raven-haired man laughed. “That bitch? She dead, man. They both dead. Their baby, too.”
Toombs hesitated. Baby? That was unexpected. But there was nothing he could do with that information, not now. Nia Lewis was dead, and so was Jamie. Jerome wouldn’t be happy, but what could he do? The dead don’t come back.
The raven-haired man’s laughter grated on Toombs’ nerves, and he raised the shovel over the man’s head.
“Oh, Pete is gonna love you,” the raven-haired man said.
Toombs brought the shovel down, splitting the man’s head in half.
***
Somewhere out of sight, a door creaked open.
“Well, shit,” Toombs said.
“Look at him,” the raven-haired man said, smiling his crooked, yellow smile at Toombs. “He still don’t get it. I told you he wouldn’t figure—”
“—Joel,” the big man said in an exasperated sigh, “shut your—”
“‘—goddam hole’,” Joel finished, rolling his eyes. “Get a new fucking catchphrase already, Con. It’s getting old.”
Con glared at him and grunted.
“It’s all gettin’ old,” Stacey said, eyes vacant.
“Don’t talk to me ‘bout old,” the old-timer said, his words trailing off into incoherent mumbling.
This… this wasn’t right. There was always a rational explanation for everything. He had to believe that. This… it couldn’t… it didn’t...
Toombs took a step backwards. He had to do it all again. Kill them all, and make sure it stuck this time, that they stayed dead and buried. The very thought of expending the amount of effort he’d already expended on these five assholes again was too much for him, and something in his head finally just broke. The stump of his left wrist throbbed. Had any of it been real? Or had he gone mad somewhere on Route 13, crashed his car, and now spent his existence looping in this god-awful red-neck hell?
A roiling darkness burned on the periphery of his vision and suddenly, Toombs realized there was a sixth person standing at the bar with the others. He wore a checkered shirt and dark jeans. Where the hell had he come from? Had he been there the entire time, and Toombs had just passed over him?
Toombs couldn’t be sure, but as he looked at the man, something about him seemed… familiar. Everything, except for his face. Like Toombs had only seen the man from the neck down somewhere before. But where—
His eyes flicked to an old, creased photograph tacked to the wall behind the bar, then back to the man. He tensed.
There’s always a rational explanation...
“There it is,” Joel said.
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’” the mechanic said, a wicked smile distorting his face.
Before Toombs could say or do anything, the sixth man melted into surging tentacles of pure shadow, and then Toombs was being dragged across the floor, down into a gaping, black maw of nothingness.