THE LAST TURN

"The Last Turn"
By Hal Hefner

Derek Small was tired. The kind of tiredness that makes your eyes sting and your brain fuzzy. Finals were over at Paul Smith’s College and he was finally heading home. His old Civic was stuffed with dirty laundry and stale Cheese Puffs as Yes blared from his speakers. He sang along, off key, “I've seen all good people turn their heads each day. So satisfied I'm on my way.”

Winding through the dark backroads of upstate New York, his home just ten minutes away, the trees pressed in like a narrowing tunnel. He couldn’t wait to sleep in his bed and eat food that was actually cooked on a stove instead of a microwave.

He came down a large hill and turned a sharp corner onto Creek road right as the song went to the bridge, “Diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit didda.”  Headlights blinded him as a truck came barreling around the bend, crossing the double yellow and headed straight for him.  The truck swiped the side of Derek’s car.

He violently swerved left, then right and his car caught the gravel on the side of the road. The truck veered past, the driver laughing, laughing, with a brown bottle clutched in one hand and the other flipping Derek off as he tore away down the road.

Derek skidded forward turning the wheel left, nearly avoiding a tree, then right as the Civic scraped a stone wall and came to a stop just before the embankment into the creek.

“Son of a fucking bitch!,” he yelled. As he got out of his car and assessed the damage. His Civic was all scraped up and the door was caved in and covered with the shit brown paint of that truck that just hit him.. 

Rage filled his face with a ruddy warmth, as he replayed the incident in his mind. Blinding, swerving, and that fucker was drinking a beer, and flipped him off. Derek’s hands were shaking. He could hear his pulse like war drums in his ears. He got back in his car, whipped the Civic around, gravel kicking up behind him. “No,” he muttered. “No goddamn way that piece of fucking rat shit is going to get away with this..”

He floored it. The red taillights danced ahead of him like devil’s eyes, just barely staying in sight. The truck swerved in and out of lanes, ran a red light and disregarded every stop sign. This arrogant fuck had no regard for others. Derek reached for his phone, thumb over 9-1-1, but his eyes kept darting back up. There was no plate. The bumper was crunched up and loaded with Trump bumper stickers.

“Just get close enough,” he told himself. “Call the cops. Be smart. Don’t be a dumbass.” He opened up his glove box and made sure his hunting knife was there just in case. This town had fucked with him one too many times and no MAGA drunk was going to run him off the road, flip him off and destroy his car without consequences. “Law and order, that’s what you voted for asshole, and you’re gonna fuckin’ get it,” he muttered. 

The truck turned off the main road onto a dirt path, disappearing between the trees. Derek followed at a crawl, headlights off, his Civic creeping like a predator. The woods opened up to a clearing where a sagging farmhouse squatted at the edge of a field. Its windows were black holes. The porch light flickered with a jaundiced glow.

The truck stopped. The driver got out, staggering toward the back of the house. Derek parked, ducked low, and got out. He had no idea who this guy was, but he was definitely meth faced, scrawny and smaller than him. Derek felt confident he could kick his ass if it came to it. This dude was a loser, alcoholic and meth head, he thought to himself. 

The man—unkempt, toothless and drunk, lit a cigarette and coughed with a raspy emphysema ridden aqualung. The man walked around the side of the house, coughing. Derek followed and watched him bend over, then he heaved open a rotting cellar door. Yellow light spilled from below. And then—screams. The man walked down into the light chuckling.

“Shut the fuck up, you little piggies, he said with a maniacal chuckle. 

Derek crept closer, and closer until he was finally upon the entrance. 

What he saw terrified him to his core. Two girls, chained to a metal pole. They were huddled in squalor in the damp, filthy basement of this sick fuck. Both were crying. One barely older than ten, the other was a teenager.

Derek’s breath caught and he stumbled back, tripping over a can of WD-40 on the ground. It rolled onto the crumbled stone path and clanked against the ground.

The man turned toward him, looking up at Derek and froze.

His eyes widened like he’d seen a ghost. “No,” he croaked. “You’re not… real. You can’t be here. No!”

Then, like a switch flipped, he charged.

Derek bolted back to the Civic and peeled out, tires digging ruts into the wet soil. In the rearview, he watched the man jump into his truck. The chase was on.

Derek’s heart pounded. Trees blurred past as the red Civic he bought from his friend’s Dad, Dave, gave him everything it had left. He glanced down—80. 90. The truck was gaining. A sharp bend up ahead. He braked, drifted, and the Civic fishtailed before straightening. The truck tried the same move—too fast. It careened, skidded, and plunged down a ravine.

Glass exploded, metal shrieked and the yell of a kidnapping, drunken, meth abusing molester echoed into the night’s misty breath.

Derek parked and climbed down, boots crunching branches and leaves. The truck was upside-down, crushed like a beer can. The driver lay ten feet away, mangled and twitching. His face, a ruin of blood, muscle and mangled teeth.

Derek stood over him silently. He could smell the booze and iron as the man’s neck spurted where his Adam’s apple once was. He watched the blood puddling around him as he gurgled for air like a fish out of water.

The man looked up, choking on his own breath. He mumbled “You… You’re one of them…”

Derek leaned down, spat on him. “You’re one of them, asshole.”

Then he turned, dialing 9-1-1 with trembling fingers.

The call connected as he climbed back into his car. He drove off into the night. The voice on the other end of the line said, “911, what’s your emergency?”

But he couldn’t answer. 

Two hours later, red and blue lights bathed the trees in bleeding neon. Rain began to fall as paramedics pulled a body from the mangled remains of a Civic near mile marker 22. An EMT bent over the body, while a state trooper looked on, flashlight in hand.

“Name’s Derek Small,” he said to the officer, reading from the ID. “Twenty-one. Student at Paul Smith’s.”

Another EMT, a younger guy, squinted at his radio, static hissing.

“Yo, Jim,” he said. “You’re not gonna believe this. I just talked to Scottie, who took that other call. Holy sheep shit!”

“Jesus, don’t tell me, another wreck?”

“Yep. Truck flipped into a ravine a mile from here. Driver’s dead. Marty Kovak.”

Jim looked up sharply. “Wait. The Marty Kovak?”

“Yeah. The same shit bird we revived last year after he OD’d. The one whose breath made you puke. The one with the record a mile long. Sex offender registry lit up like a Christmas tree.  And you’ll never guess what they found in his truck?”

“What?”

“A backpack. Tanya Johnson’s. The girl who went missing three months ago.”

“No shit.”

“And they went to his house. Found Tanya. And another girl. Still alive. Chained in the cellar.”

Jim blinked, suddenly pale. “Jesus fucking Christ on a crack binge with Gary Busey…”

“Yeah.”

“But here’s the thing,” the EMT added. “That crash? The one with Kovak? There were no skid marks. No sign of another vehicle. Cops say it looks like the guy just drove himself straight into the ditch. Probly fucked up out of his mind.”

Jim glanced at the mangled Civic again, noticing the brown paint on the side of the door. "Doesn’t Kovak drive a brown truck? You think..."

"Who knows, man.”

Jim shook his head, stepping away. “Maybe.”

He didn't say the other thought lingering behind his lips. He looked down at Derek again. Rain splattered across the strange grin on his face. 

The EMT’s covered Derek and stuffed him into the Ambulance. As the EMT’s shut the doors and walked around to the front they noticed the muffled acoustics of Jon Anderson’s high pitched voice. They looked at each other and without saying a word, made a baffled look as they realized the radio was on in the Civic still.

“Jim, wanna shut off the car?” 

Jim nodded.

Derek Small was dead but his car lived on, still playing Yes. He had never dodged the truck that night and everything that came after was the last act of a soul that refused to rest. 

Until someone paid and the girls were free.

One last turn is all he needed. The final drive of unfinished business…was finally finished.

“I've seen all good people turn their heads each day. So satisfied I'm on my way”

Art and story by Hal Hefner 
Produced by Catmonkey Studio