Saturated quickly from the mixed precip, and chilled to the bone from the ceaseless wind whipping across the frozen tundra of America’s breadbasket, Anton found himself wandering through the whipping frigid Hell along the Iowa/Nebraska border.
He really only had himself to blame. Several people back at the library he’d spent the day at made mention of a storm rolling in later that night, but his youthful exuberance and eagerness to get on with his trek easily won out. Spending the better part of the afternoon at the Omaha library answering his email, stealing a nap up in the stacks and taking a bath essentially in one of the bathroom sinks, Anton set out a little after 7 that evening. By 11 or so, he was shivering under an interstate overpass, his clothing drenched from the icy castoff of passerby’s.
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“Twenty minutes from now you’re gonna be dead,” Regina told herself, her right foot pressed on the brake as she guided her Prius into the breakdown lane beneath the overpass.
“You can press it back over on the accelerator and get the hell out of here,” her inner voice railed but her body suddenly became as still as her car.
“Your phone’s still sitting there..you haven’t made that call like you promised,” her conscience chided.
“What am I supposed to say to my Husband..’Oh..I’m down here stuck in a ice storm and I think I’m going to pick up this nice guy hitchhiking up the highway?’ Regina shook her head and huffed, knowing the concern it would raise with Ken even if the two weren’t on the best of terms at the moment.
“You could call your Sister and just tell her you’re gonna get a room for the night and wait out the storm,” the lucent voice of common sense chimed in, perhaps for the last time of the evening.
A whisper of serene calm trickled briefly through Regina’s body, sensing that getting a room was likely her best option. It was a feeling that evaporated in a snap when she saw the dark figure seated outside stand up on the concrete incline of the bridge support and start heading towards her car.
The following thirty seconds seemed to unfurl faster than any half minute Regina could ever remember. The man who had just been sitting on his perch under the bridge had appeared on the passenger side of her car in the blink of an eye.
“Thank God for automatic door locks,” she thought in a panic as she jerked her head to the right.
All she could see through the slightly fogged window was the man’s soaking wet black sweatshirt, and the grim outline of his white hand reaching for the door handle. Regina’s heart trampolined into her throat she she heard his failed initial attempt to open the locked door.
“Now he’s starting to bend down,” Regina quivered, everything spinning so fast now in her head that she clutched both her mitten clad hands around the steering wheel to keep from coming apart.
In her heart of hearts, she fully expected the face of Satan to peer at her through the passenger side window. And if not Lucifer himself, at least the gnarled and snaggle-toothed face of an old and grizzled man who’d been rode hard and put up wet more times than he could count. The first strains of a scream had even began formulating in her throat before she’d even seen his face in anticipation of the evil surely present.