ANNELISE’S CAMPFIRE TALE

AS FEATURED ON EP #67

“SPOOKS” BY JORDAN MILLER

On most occasions Annelise cherished a good drive, but she found the task far less enjoyable with a large section of bone protruding from the bloody meat of her forearm. The slightest touch sent jolts of searing pain through her body, so she just held it to her chest like a bird with a shattered wing and tried her best to stay between the yellow lines. 

Tears streamed down her face as she tried her best to focus on her breathing, the road, the radio, anything. Anything but the pain and the fact that the one person she loved most in the world had just broken her arm in two like it was uncooked spaghetti.

When it had happened she hadn’t been thinking anything more than get out of the house. Get out of the house right now now before he kills you. Before it kills you. When she thought about what happened she didn’t think in terms of he, she thought in terms of it, because it wasn’t her Braden who had hurt her, it was the thing on the end of his arm that looked like a hand. The thing they had thought must be too good to be true, but had accepted all the same. The engine sputtered loudly for a moment, Annelise swore at it and it evened out. She and Braden had talked about needing a new car for months but that would involve some diligent and patient saving. They weren’t the sort of people who just went out and bought a car. 

They had started putting money away for one when the accident happened. Suddenly their aging vehicle had become a vague and distant concern.  Cars were expensive but so was a long stay at a hospital and they both knew the car fund was going to be the first to go when the invoice came. That was when the man had found them in the hospital like some kind of guardian angel and offered a reset button. After all, when you lose a hand and some suit offers you a new one free of charge, only the rich have the elbow room to scoff. 

Thinking back, she couldn’t even remember the name of the man who had offered Braden the surgery. Billings? Bellow? She was almost certain it started with an B. She couldn’t remember who he worked for now that she really thought about it, but on that account she can’t be sure if Mr. B had told them at all. Things like this just didn’t happen to her. They happened to people on tv shows maybe, or on the news, but not to her.  Her life was supposed to be normal. Annelise couldn’t believe she had been so stupid. She was smarter than to accept things like that and believe it was truly free. Especially from some fucking stranger in a suit. 

Thinking about it closer, she didn’t know what sort of company had enough money to be giving out free robotic arms anyway, but she knew governments had that kind of dough. They could try whatever they wanted out on someone like them and get away with it too. Who could stop them? From some of the stories she had read she was pretty sure they did it all the time. 

A blaring honk brought her back from her thoughts, realizing she had ignored a red light, driving through a four way intersection. She swerved last minute and pressed her foot down harder on the gas. Annelise maintained control of her car and saw a blue SUV spin to a stop in her rear view mirror and realized she had come probably three feet from being crushed by it. The fear and adrenaline erased any thoughts of mysterious men in suits. She needed to focus on the road before she killed herself on the way to the hospital. 

The woman at the front desk took one look at Annelise and rushed her back into the care of two young doctors.  They didn’t ask for any info when she came in, probably because she was in such agony, not to mention bleeding all over their floor. She recognized the girl from the desk and was a little surprised she hadn’t recognized her back, but then again hospitals only remember you if you’re the one with your hand blown off by a shotgun, not his girlfriend. 

They sat her on a temporary gurney in a large room with several other people and was told to wait a minute while they got into a room with a doctor, then they were gone. There was a TV on in the corner of the room playing the news. Annelise recognized the house on the screen as her own. Her garage door was open and they were wheeling a shape under a white blanket out and into an ambulance. They were in no hurry.  

The volume was too low to hear, but she knew what she was seeing. That was Braden under that sheet. The hand had turned on him. Or maybe it wasn’t the hand. Maybe it was a couple men in dark suits. Men with guns fitted with silencers who drive nondescript black cars and keep watch over certain expensive test subjects, especially in case those tests turn out to be failures.  

She didn’t know for sure and she couldn’t think about it any deeper. Every avenue of thought was stopped short, blocked by a figure laying down under a white sheet. A figure that was once Braden, but now was just a shape under a sheet. A shape that could maybe be sleeping if you really wanted to believe it, and she wished so badly she could.   

Weeping into her good hand, Annelise found she could appreciate the morbid irony that both her and Braden had been reduced down to one hand. Both birds with shattered wings. That was when the doctors found her and helped move her into another one of the rooms where they could set her arm. Had she been calmer, they may have asked her then for her information then, but she seemed worse than when she came in, so the priority was still the arm. 

They offered to put her under completely, but Annelise opted for the local anesthetic. Demanded was more like it. She hated being in this hospital again and was horrified by the idea of being unconscious in it for any amount of time.  They set the bone which involved a couple screws and a small metal bracket and closed it up. The swelling was bad so they set her up with a temporary splint until it went down enough to allow for a proper cast.

Finally things had settled down enough for the doctors to ask Annelise for her information. She truly had not been withholding it before, she had just not been thinking about it. Things like that happen when you can see your own bone sticking out of your skin. 

“You’re name and insurance information, ma’am?” The young doctor asked. She was about to answer when she saw two men walk through the swinging doors at the far end of the hall. They both wore dark gray suits and identical tight haircuts and they were looking around like they were searching for someone. Maybe they’re brothers and their mom had a stroke, Annelise thought to herself but didn’t believe it.  

“Ma’am, you’re name?” the young doctor asked again impatiently.

“Rebecca Thorn” Annelise lied. She didn’t know where that name had come. “Can I please just use the bathroom first?” The young doctor sighed and offered to take her. “It was my arm that broke not my legs, you can just tell me where it is”. The young doctor sighed again and pointed down a hallway to their left.  “Thanks, be right back”. That was her second lie.

She went down the hall towards the bathroom and turned the corner, then she took another turn and started making her way quickly towards the front lobby. Not too quickly, though, she didn’t want to seem like she was running, which of course was exactly what she was doing.  Only once did she see one of the men in dark gray suits, he was peeking into hospital rooms one by one. She took another hallway taking the long way around. She never saw the second man. 

Annelise walked out into the lobby and out of the front entrance with the kind of calm assuredness that just demands not to be noticed.  She had her arm in a splint but so what? Everyone in there had something going on and some of them were a lot worse than an arm in a splint. Her car was where she left it, and once she got in she gave herself a few seconds to take some deep breaths and collect herself. Her hands were still shaking a little when she put the keys in the ignition. She turned them and the engine sputtered again, its pitch raising then lowering again. She turned the keys back and begged the old car to just give her one last ride. One more, for good time’s sake.

She turned the key again, the engine sputtered, the pitch raised, lowered, then raised again and finally turned over. She smiled as she drove out of the parking lot and away from the hospital, thinking she’d always wanted to visit California and now seemed like as good a time as any. Things like this don’t happen to me, she thought again. However, it was becoming abundantly clear that apparently they do, so she smashed her phone and threw it out the window as she drove. Everyone knew they could track you from those things. 

Annelise drove down the road with thoughts of the Pacific in her head. She didn’t think the car would make it all the way to the West coast, but it could take her part of the way. Maybe even halfway, if she was lucky. As it turns out the old car was about ready to finally go to the big scrapyard in the sky, and only had about thirty miles left to go. 

The car had sputtered to its final resting place on the side on a long rural road right in between where she came from and absolutely nowhere.  She sat there for a long moment staring into the darkening sky and thought neither one seemed too appealing, but out of the two she felt inclined to pick nowhere.  She grabbed her wallet, a small flashlight from the glove box, then took a jacket from the backseat and started walking. One good thing about fleeing your home in a blind rush is that you pack light. 

She figured hitch hiking would be the best option until she could get to a bus or train station, but she had to be careful. She had to make sure she wasn’t picked up in one of those non descript black cars, especially the kind driven by men in tight matching haircuts and dark gray suits. She didn’t like how late it was getting and knew it would be harder and harder to make out cars as it got dark, but that was a bridge to cross later. She walked in the general direction of nowhere and expected to see a car within a few minutes.  When a few minutes became twenty minutes she got concerned. When twenty minutes became an hour she was getting scared.  

Maybe nobody uses this road anymore, She thought. Maybe I took a wrong turn somewhere onto an old road that nobody uses and now I’m stuck out here. She walked on because it was the only option but every step started to feel like another shovel full of dirt as she dug her own grave.  She could imagine herself freezing out here on the side of the road, it got cold enough at night for it to happen. She could turn around now and walk back to her car, she considered, she could at least sleep there through the night. Even as she thought this she kept walking and never turned around.  

The thought of the car terrified her. It had her license plate on it and she was sure those men in gray suits had that on file. She would be helpless. Even if you couldn’t track an old clunker like hers the same way you could a smartphone, it didn’t mean they couldn’t find her. She finally decided it was best to keep walking. 

Another half hour had passed and it was starting to get dark. Annelise was starting to panic when two shining white eyes appeared over the horizon behind her. She saw them and froze. What if it's those government men? They found my car and knew I started walking and now they found me.

As the headlights drew closer she could see they were the aged yellow color of a much older car, not the sleek sterile white lights of the nondescript cars she feared. She could hear the loud bassy rumble of the engine and knew for sure, so she started waving the flashlight and stepped to the edge of the road.

The headlights slowed to a stop and she could see the car was a white pickup truck that looked like it was produced in the 1960’s. She approached the window and she could see the driver looked more scared than she did. That was good.

“You alright?” the man in the driver’s seat asked. He was a short, thin man with a curly mess of dark hair and big round eyes that were alert with fearful suspicion.  

“I’m sorry, I need a ride. I just need to get to the closest town or something” Annelise said. The man eyed her again with suspicion but seemed to relax a little. 

“Say. That wasn’t your car off on the side way back a ways, was it?” He asked.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“You have been walking a while then.” He still seemed torn, but the fact about the car seemed to do the trick. “Alright, hop in”.

Annelise got in the truck and buckled herself in. She smiled at the small, messy haired man in the driver’s seat and he smiled back, which seemed to melt away the top layer of his nerves, even though he was still quite jittery. Probably scared of girls, she thought to herself, stifling a laugh. The first thing Annelise noticed about the truck was there was no radio. Where the radio unit belonged there was an empty rectangular gap. That didn’t strike her as terribly strange, the truck was ancient. She had an old clunker herself, not this old but still pretty old, and she knew how it was. Things broke and you fix them and they would break again. Eventually sometimes you just said fuck it and decide to stop trying. That’s just life, really. Sometimes it gets to the point where you just say fuck it, let’s ride.

“I’m Denny” the wide eyed man in the driver’s seat said. “What’s your name?”

“Rebecca” Annelise said almost on instinct, surprising herself that Mrs. Thorn was still around. “Thanks for picking me up, my car just died and I didn’t have my phone, so I just started walking and I was starting to think I was going to have to spend the night out here.” 

“Be glad you didn’t. It gets freezing out here at night” Denny said as he leaned over his steering wheel slightly, staring up with his nervous eyes into the darkening sky, darting in one direction then another, as if he expected to see something up there. He leaned back in his seat again and tried to smile. “How’d you hurt your hand?”

“It’s my wrist actually, hurt it… um, well it’s kind of a long story. So, do you live around here?” Annelise asked. 

“I have a small mobile home nearby and I travel a lot. Been in this spot for a little while. Off-the-grid.” Denny said.

“Oh, cool! I love watching videos on tiny home living online, do you run off solar?”

“Um..” Denny looked at her for a minute and seemed outright terrified “how did you know that?”

“It’s what pretty much everyone does online” Annelise responded, slightly taken aback.

“Oh, right. Well yeah, solar really is the best way”. He seemed to calm down, at least to what passed for calm in Denny’s world.  “Couldn’t live in the city anymore. Too much noise. Too much radiation. Who-knows-what in the water, fucking acid rain, breathing clouds of smog. It was a little better outside the city but you really have to travel to get a real lung full of clean air”. Denny was strange and fidgety, sure, but Annelise understood all the same, even if the word radiation had thrown her for a loop.

“I know what you mean. Nothing like the taste of clean air, especially when it’s a little cold out” Annelise said.

“It’s not just pollution either” Denny stated, “it’s full of frequencies. They’re everywhere. You can feel them. If you listen close enough you can even hear them... buzzing. Gamma waves, radio waves, microwaves… all that fucking radiation, man.  You really gotta get far from the cities to get away from them and that’s what I do.” Annelise listened and without thinking her eyes fell again to the rectangular gap where the truck’s radio should be. “Those things don’t just pick up signals, you know.” Denny said. Annelise’s eyes moved back up to him. “The radio, I mean, they do a lot more than just pick up the top 40. They do that, sure, but they can be used to transmit and relay signals too. If someone had the right technology they could track you using just the radio in your car, and believe me, someone does. That’s why I got rid of mine”. 

“I didn’t know that,” Annelise responded. She tried to keep her voice steady but she felt it waiver anyway.  

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Denny asked, and Annelise’s mind immediately went to men in dark gray suits and tight matching haircuts.

“Actually, you’d be surprised,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Denny responded. Clearly he was not the kind of person who appreciated too many surprises.

“Just that I don’t think you’re crazy,” Annelise said trying to sound reassuring. “I know about the government people…” Annelise could see Denny was getting uncomfortable and starting to fidget. “And about the radiation. I know about that too,” she said finally.

“Y-You do?” Denny said, and Annelise could see actual hope in those big haunted eyes. “I mean, it’s so obvious when you see it but most people can’t even tell it’s there, but it is. That’s why you drive an old car isn’t it? Avoiding the cars with computers in ‘em?” Annelise thought she would be a fool not to go along with him.

“Yeah, but if I did have one of those new cars I promise you I wouldn’t have gotten stranded out here like I did.”

“And then you would’ve missed the pleasure of my company!” Denny chuckled. Was that a sense of humor she was detecting under all those nerves? She thought it was, and it wasn’t without its charms.

“Exactly. Pretty convenient if you ask me,” she said, and then Annelise noticed a change in Denny’s demeanor. His smile faded and he brought both his hands up on the wheel into proper textbook position. Ten and two, please and thank you. He mumbled something under his breath but she couldn’t quite make it out. “I’m sorry? Did you say something?” she asked.

“I said, convenient. Because you’re right, you know? It’s convenient I should come down a road that almost nobody uses and find a pretty girl who needs a ride. Very fucking convenient if you ask me, like something out of a movie even.” 

“E-excuse me?” Annelise was watching him unravel before her eyes. He was starting to shake and to mumble to himself and it had all happened in a matter of seconds. 

“Real fucking convenient. Why don’t you just tell me who you work for?” Denny demanded. 

“I work in catering!” Annelise cried out, not knowing what else to say but the simple truth.

“That’s a new one! You don’t think I know what the fuck you’re trying to do? You think I’m scared of you just because of who you work for?!” Denny screamed and reached down between his seat and the middle console, pulling out a small black handgun. He pointed the gun into Annelise’s face “I’ve got a nice private place where I put spooks like you. A place so far out there even you fuckers would have a hell of a time finding it. My own little personal graveyard. So don’t even try me. I’ve heard every lie under the sun, but I’ll give it to you, catering is a new one.”  

“I swear it’s the truth, I--”

“Shut up! This is what I fucking get for trusting somebody. Jesus, you people really are sons of bitches, you can’t just leave me alone?”

“I’m not who you think I am, please just let me out and I’ll leave you alone” Annelise pleaded.

“Can’t do that now, no, no, no we’re past that unfortunately. You people always make me do things I don’t want to do. That kinda thing fucks with a person you know? Even if it is just putting a few spooks down in the dirt!” Denny was speaking as much to Annelise as he was to himself and in that moment Annelise’s brain did an incredible thing. Through all the frantically sparking synapses and blind idiotic fear, her imagination somehow produced an idea. An idea that just might work, or at least she hoped. It was hard to think watching how Denny’s hand shook holding that gun, but she had no other choice.

“Calm down, Denny, I need you to listen to me because we don’t have much time. You know they know where we are but they can’t hear us thanks to your work on the radio and as far as they know right now everything is going exactly as planned, so I’m going to need you to listen closely right now.” Annelise barely knew where it came from, but immediately saw it was working. Denny was listening, quite intently actually. Given the fact he spent every waking moment thinking about authority, she was not the least bit shocked to see that he responded well to it, even if it was false authority. 

She was all in now, so she proceeded, having no idea where she was going but proceeding all the same. “I knew you would recognize me. I was counting on it actually. I needed to pass on a message and this was the only way I could get in close contact with you and not be monitored.” Denny could barely keep his eyes on the road, but somehow managed to keep driving and keep the gun pointed on Annelise at the same time.

“What do you want with me?” Denny demanded. That was good because it meant he believed her, at least for now.

“You know about the radiation, Denny. Not many people even know it’s there. That’s part of it, but the other part is that I want out. You have no idea what it’s like working for those bastards. If your family doesn’t go four generations back through elite society then you’re looked at forever as a guest at the family table. A freshman. Worse than that, a freshman girl. So, I want out and I want to say fuck you on my way out.”  Annelise was amazing herself. If she makes it out of this, she could have a future writing fiction maybe, but she thought it best not to get too ahead of herself and focus on the situation at hand.

“There’s no real way out once you’re in, you see. That’s why I’m here. I’m making my own way out.” She saw his grip loosen on the gun a bit and thought she had done it right. She felt like continuing but worried she would sour the deal with too much information. 

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” Denny asked.

“You don’t really. You have to trust me, but at the very least I can show you how they tracked you.” It was a long shot but she saw Denny’s eyes grow wide. He was downright greedy to know and that’s when she realized what Denny was. He was a junkie. He didn’t fiend for heroin or pills, but for information. He was a junkie for secret knowledge, and at this point in his addiction he didn’t care if the knowledge was truth or complete bullshit. He just needed a fix. The really terrifying part is that some of his fantasies just happen to be true. Just not this particular fantasy. Annelise’s brain kept right on going in fifth gear and she formulated what she thought might be the rest of a plan. 

“Like this,” she said, and leaned over to push the old truck’s cylindrical cigarette lighter into its port with a metallic click. “Metal on metal contact. That’s all we need”. Denny stared in amazement at the cigarette lighter, only glancing back up to the road for a brief second here and there to make sure he didn’t drive off the edge of a cliff or into a mountainside. 

“I’ll be goddamned,” he said in an exhausted sigh. He had surveillance proofed his entire life and was betrayed by a fucking plastic cigarette lighter. Annelise almost felt sorry for him, especially because she was making the entire thing up. She just hoped he didn’t take the cigarette lighter back out and toss it out the window. That was not part of her plan. He relaxed the gun but didn’t bring it all the way down. “So what’s your message? What’s your way out that you so desperately need me for?”

Her mind went wild searching for the answer. What was her message? She hadn’t thought this far ahead. She knew the cigarette lighter didn’t need much time to heat up that she had pushed it in, but she still had to fill that time without setting Denny off or fucking it all up somehow. That is, assuming the cigarette lighter in this old truck even worked. She hoped with everything she had that it did.

“How would you like to use their own weapon against them?” Annelise said, pulling some stupid line from some movie she had seen. Denny narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

“The fuck you talking about?” he asked, grip tightening on the gun once more.

“We blow a… containment grid”. Oh god, she thought, that sounded bad. That sounded really bad. I hesitated to think of that stupid sounding bullshit and I think he noticed. She looked up at him hoping she didn’t appear half as terrified as she was and could immediately tell the sure enough, Denny had noticed. He looked angry and the gun was back up again.

“For a second there I almost thought you were a real person. But you’re not, you’re another fucking spook, and you almost made me forget that. You people always make me do it” Denny said, a tear streaming from one of his eyes as his grip tightened around the gun. Just then there was a small metallic click as the cigarette lighter popped out, having reached full heat. The sound of that click caught Denny’s attention, only for a moment he cast his eyes down to the dashboard. Annelise, who had kept her eyes fixed on Denny, was not going to let what would probably be her only chance go to waste. While Denny was distracted she reached out and swatted at the gun. Denny saw her coming and moved to respond, he clenched down hard and pulled the trigger. 

The gunshot rang out in a deafening explosion which, amplified by the enclosed truck, burned like a white heat in their ears. She didn’t know if she was hit or not, too distracted by the ringing sound currently had her head feeling like a church bell after being struck with a sledgehammer. She didn’t think she was hit, but she also knew that the time for thinking would come later. And so, without wasting an instant, she reached out with her other hand and grasped the cigarette lighter. With one movement she pulled the lighter from it’s cradle and plunged it into Denny’s eye. 

The all powerful ringing in her ears gave away to the sound of Denny’s maddening screams. The cigarette lighter stuck out from Denny’s bloody mess of an eye like one of the bolts she remembered coming out of Frankenstein’s monster’s neck. She could hear it sizzling inside his head and she imagined it cooking the whites of his eyes like fried eggs. He flailed in his seat, screaming deranged sounds that were almost words. He dropped the gun and let go of the steering wheel and Annelise knew there could possibly be only seconds before they crashed into a ditch or a telephone pole, so she decided to finish it while she had the time. 

With one more movement, just as swift as the first, she threw out her hand palm first and hammered the protruding cigarette lighter the rest of the way into Denny’s head. When she brought back her hand she could see the white emblem of a smoking cigarette on the end of the lighter flush to his skull and she thought of dolls she had as a girl with buttons for eyes. She could still hear it sizzling and this time she imagined it burning the outermost edge of his brain matter. She thought she could smell it cooking, but that was probably just her imagination. Denny had stopped screaming and was wearing the dumb vacant look of a dead man. Annelise was taking no chances and used the extra time before they crashed to do one more thing. She reached that skillful hand out one more time and produced one final click as she pressed the red button and unbuckled Denny’s seatbelt. Nothing to do now, she thought, but sit back and wait for the impact. So she braced herself for the world ending crash that never came.

She had images in her head of them plowing into a massive rock and Denny’s body being hurled through the window and landing in a bloody pile maybe fifty feet away, but it didn’t happen. Instead of careening straight into a telephone post or off a rocky cliff as the truck would have surely done in any action film, it just drove off the road and slowed to a bumpy stop in the middle of a field. Dramatic impact or not, Annelise looked over to see that Denny was dead all the same.  A trickle of smoke floated up from the corner of his bloody eye socket. 

Annelise unbuckled her seatbelt, leaned over Denny’s body and opened the driver’s side door. With some effort she pushed his body out of the car and listened with some satisfaction as it tumbled onto the ground outside. She shifted over into the driver’s side and adjusted the seat. In the movies this would also be the time she found the truck to be dead or out of gas, but it was still running and the fuel meter read three quarters full.  She backed the old truck out onto the road again, not surprised that it handled in a similar way to her old clunker. This truck however, drove like it still had plenty more life left in her.

Annelise thought about the men in matching suits who she had narrowly evaded back at the hospital and the man she was about to leave in a ditch by the side of the road. Two different sides of one very strange coin, and for the first time since her arm had been broken she didn’t feel scared. She was surprised when she realized what she felt in that moment was powerful and she smiled in spite of everything she had experienced.

That night she fueled up at the nearest gas station, which turned out to be forty-six miles away, and filled her tank with the cash she found stashed in the middle console. Good ol’ paranoid Denny had quite a little getaway cache ready to go and now it was hers. She paid the attendant and on top of the gas bought herself a blue Gatorade, a large coffee and a king sized candy bar, feeling like she had earned it. Shifting the old truck into a higher gear, she drove in the direction she hoped was West. She didn’t know if the old thing would get her all the way to California or not, but knew that it was at least a start and a good headstart is all we can really hope for in life. She had once thought things like this didn’t happen to people like her but she was leaning fast that things like this could happen to anyone. Fuck it, she thought to herself with a smile, let’s ride. 

As she pulled out onto the highway, behind her a set of nondescript red tail lights illuminated and pulled out onto the road.  Behind the wheel was a man in a dark gray suit who’s tight, no-nonsense haircut matched perfectly the man sitting next to him in the passenger seat.