Loop by Frizzy J

Loop

Clay let the storm door slam on the drunken laughter and the smack of kissing lips as he stepped out into a frosted November. It had just turned to Sunday, meaning he had little time to secure more beer before the law said, “Go to bed, citizen.” He popped his last cigarette from the crumpled red hardpack between his lips and lit it before sliding onto his frigid driver’s seat. His car, an old beater, started on the fourth crank of the ignition. Rock music from blown speakers joined the broken muffler’s roar, creating a cacophony as drunken and wild as the party he had just left.

The frost that covered the blades of grass next to the gravel driveway had not yet moved to the windshield, so Clay backed up and out onto the road without delay. As he passed the door he had just left, he glanced in to see his friend, Jared, making out with the half-dressed blonde that lived in the house. Her boyfriend, a lawyer, was out of town. Jared was supposed to follow Clay to their place, where they would get utterly trashed and play video games, per their usual weekend routine. Or rather, returning to their usual weekend routine. The party, and the outing to the bar that led to it, had broken routine. Clay smirked as he saw his housemate’s hand squeezing the blonde’s lace covered butt, decided he might not show up at home. With a shrug, he dragged on his cigarette and drove to a brightly lit gas station across town.

Ten minutes later he emerged with a thirty pack of cheap domestic beer and a sack containing a pack of full-flavor cigarettes, a pint of spiced rum, a 20-oz dark soda, and a peanut butter and chocolate candy bar. The last lines of the song on the convenience store’s radio had stuck with him, and he hummed it as he placed his purchases in the passenger seat. He fished out the pack of smokes, packed it, then discarded the foil and cellophane before slamming the passenger side door shut. He lit one as he came around the car and got in, then started it back up. This time it only took two cranks of the key. He drove past the house he had just left as he headed out of the small town to his own, a smaller one. Jared’s rusting pickup was still there, but the stout inside door was now shut. Wrap it up, buddy. Clay thought with another smirk. One way or another, wrap it up.

After leaving the glow of the town’s last streetlight behind, he pried the cardboard flap of the case of beer up and pulled out a brew. He cracked it and took a drink, guzzling the light beer before setting it between his legs. Finishing his cigarette and flicking it out the window, he squinted at his gauges. A quarter tank of gas remained to him, and he shrugged. It would take less than that. A dented ‘Pass With Care’ sign moved past him on the right as he drove into an insidious archway of leafless trees, the branches like skeletal hands reaching for the light of the full moon. He shivered as he left the open expanse of harvested fields behind.

Belching, then tossing the beer can out into the road, Clay lit another cigarette, then groped for another beer. Goin’ down awfully easy tonight, he thought as he cracked this one. He did not think he had ever finished a beer between these two towns before. Ten minutes later he tossed the next one out, then grabbed another as he crested a hill. The moon found a break in the woods and illuminated the smoke film on his windshield for just a second. He squinted and shivered, then held his hand over the heat vent. A steady spray of hot air struck his hand, and he smiled. Only thing that works in this piece of shit.

It was when he threw out his third beer can and crested another hill that he realized something was wrong. The moonlight was his clue. His windshield lit up with it, again, in exactly the same way as before. Slowing, he peered out at the trees, then the road. On the opposite shoulder, he saw a familiar beer can. He lit a cigarette and coasted down the hill, then thought he recognized the song on the radio, despite the damage he had done to his speakers. He turned it up and cracked another beer. Quite drunk by the time he finished it, he was opening another when he crested the hill and the moonlight filled his windshield. Again. Drunk but not stupid, he killed the radio and pulled over, then got out of the car.

He took his beer with him and stepped into the middle of the road. His engine revved hard, from many drunken nights and few repairs. Clay walked back up the hill to stand in the moonray and looked around. The timber rose around the road, and beer cans littered the shoulder. He belched, then unzipped his fly to piss on the road. As the pressure in his bladder was released, his eye was drawn to the beer cans. They were all his brand. He frowned, then looked up to the sky. The moon hung above him, shining light down through the grasping trees. Coyotes yipped in the distance. He shivered again, thinking with a chuckle that he had earned it that time. The night was cold. He zipped his member back into his pants and guzzled the rest of the beer, then threw it at the ones in the shoulder. It clinked against them, and the coyotes stopped their conversation.

He got back into the car and checked the time as he cracked another beer. 2:24 am. He frowned as he put the car into Drive and moved along. It’s like I’ve hit that hill four or five times… but I’ve driven this road a thousand times. There’s no turn off, no loop. It’s a straight four miles through forest and farmland. Some deer, maybe, but I should have been home by a quarter to two. His brows furrowed as he squinted, trying to see the road more clearly. His dirty windshield and beer goggles were not helping.

It was 2:58 when he lost the radio entirely. A song, God knows which one, had ended, and a commercial had begun before it had fizzled out into four seconds of static, then silence. He had driven over that moonlit hill thrice more, and he had finished another beer. With mounting absurdity, he was beginning to have thoughts about the pint of rum that bordered on intentions. Panic was also beginning to develop a foothold within him. He hardly noticed the radio’s absence until he saw his gaslight come on. Moments later, the car died, the tank’s fumes expended, on the moonlit hill, but coasted twenty more feet. His pulse pounding in his ears, he lit another cigarette and tossed out his empty beer. In the silence he could only hear his ragged breath and the yipping of coyotes as they triangulated him. That was, until the radio gave its final interjection, a commanding male voice growling the words “Get Out.” Then the battery of the car seemed to die as well, leaving Clay in silence and darkness.

The young drunk man took a drag of his cigarette, finished his beer, and got out of the car. His phone was dead and had been since the party. He went around to the passenger side of the car and loaded all six of his coat pockets with beer, then began to walk, cigarette, liquor, and soda in hand. The coyotes followed him, sometimes seeming closer and other times seeming farther away, but something else caught his attention: something was near the road, walking slowly in the underbrush. He drank and walked and listened, trying to emulate the idea that he was not frightened.

Clay drank deep into the pint before the hill appeared in his path again. Only, this time, a man stood in the moonlight atop the hill, wearing a fedora and what appeared to be a duster. The man was a silhouette, so he could discern no other features. Clay stopped. The forest went silent. His hackles rose, and he swallowed the burning gulp that rested upon his tongue. Despite the fact that he was still drinking, he felt a hangover beginning, just a dull ache in his head. He approached the man on the hill slowly.

“Strange night, right?” Clay said to the man’s back. There was no answer. Each step seemed to sap his drunkenness away, and his pulse began to pound in his head. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Which wouldn’t usually be noteworthy, but I think I’ve been here three hundred fucking times tonight.” Clay said, mostly to himself. He stepped up beside the man and looked out into the dark as he fumbled his smokes from his pocket and moved one with sleepy determination to his mouth. He dropped the pack and soda and bent to retrieve them. The man beside him moaned. Clay grabbed the pack of cigarettes and looked up at him. He dropped the pack again as he took in the man’s face. His features were contorted in a scream of fear become madness. What’s more was his complexion: pale, blotched over with the blue and purple of settled blood, like a corpse that spent several days facedown. As the moan grew louder, the man began to shake. Clay was reminded of a man he had known once… cerebral palsy and torticollis had robbed the man of his mobility, and when he screamed, his body would rock in strange little shakes. This man rocked in just this manner now, then fell backwards. When he hit the asphalt, he shattered like a sheet of thin ice.

Clay’s hangover hit full force as he began to run into the dark. Coyotes screamed from three directions around the road, each seeming closer… Closer. Suddenly Clay heard the underbrush move and he stopped, then took off again when a deep, feral growl that could not have been a coyote erupted from the dark. He ran and ran, wondering if his car would reappear and wondering why this was happening and why that man had shattered and where did he come from and if he (or some part of him, har har) had an eye on his pack of smokes and is that light on the ground…

This last had an answer, of course. He vomited as the rusty truck slammed into him, crushing his body and pocket-beers against his own car. He felt the truck door open rather than heard it, and was only dimly aware of Jared’s voice yelling “Oh my God, fuck, Clay, you ok?”