[Ambrose]

One | The Cowboy and the Coyote

Karen put the cigarette out in the ash tray on the counter and paid for her coffee. It cost her a whopping seventy-five cents and would probably taste like shit. In any case, she needed something to keep her awake for the drive ahead. The cashier, a dark faced man who looked Mexican, eyed her casually. “Long drive ahead?” He said. Karen nodded, slipping her change into the Save A Life jar. As she left, she hazarded one last look at the man behind the register, who was still watching her, and pushed her way outside.

It was well into the evening, and the cool Arizona breeze nipped at her skin. It wasn’t wholly unpleasant–it was only November after all–but it still managed to send a shiver up her body. She got into her blue Nissan Akira and said “Brrrr!” She turned on the radio and headed back out onto the road. The rearview mirror confirmed for her that she could still turn a couple heads at thirty-two and she smiled back at her own reflection. She had pale blue eyes, now slightly bagged, and fluffy hazel hair that accented her soft, pretty features. She wasn’t what people would call hot, she supposed; she was a little too thick in the thighs and around the waist. But she had a cute face. And as often had been the case, that was enough. Shakira was saying “I never really knew that she could dance like this” and Karen began to move her head in rhythm, miming the words. The sign post she passed as she left the gas station read: Tucson 55, Nogales 89, Phoenix 243.

The evening drive was so far uneventful, not that it should have been anything but. A couple more hip songs, booty songs as her silver-tongued sister Rachel would have called them, were played on the radio. Then it went over to commercials. She changed the station and found a new one. A lady was singing rapidly in Spanish. She only knew a couple of the words.

She wondered what Paul was up to back home. She decided that he was probably down at the bar with Ely and Ted watching the game, seeing as the kids were out. They were staying at Grandma’s for the week since Paul didn’t know the first thing about cooking and she didn’t want him feeding them pizza every night. And after all, it was a Sunday night and Sunday night was football, right? She never could remember these things. Not that it really mattered. He and his buddies were probably laughing it up and having a good time, making lewd comments about the waitress. Meanwhile, she had to drive four hundred miles to attend a funeral. And by the time she got there, she’d probably be needing a casket of her own.

The drive had always been a killer, and Arizona wasn’t the most scenic of states. Sand and cactuses must have been on sale when God created it. There was the occasional plateau, which framed the evening sky nicely. But that was about it. Oh, and you had to watch for coyotes crossing the road, especially at night. During the day, you could count the dead ones like you were counting mile markers. She hated hitting them, not only because of that awful thump it made when they hit the front end but also because of the blood and fur smear that would be left in the morning, right where she would have to get down on her hands and knees to clean it off. Or sweet-talk Paul into doing it. She supposed there were worse things to hit. A couple years back, her friend’s boyfriend had hit a deer and wrecked his truck, along with his face. He’d had to have surgery where an antler pierced the windshield and glanced his head. She’d gone to the hospital with Sage to give moral support and remembered thinking Tom had looked rather ill-humorously like a mummy.

In spite of everything though, she knew that it was a trip she had to make. When someone dies, you go to see them off. It’s just what you do. It doesn’t matter whether it was your cousin’s fiancé’s roommate from college, or whether it happened to be an asshole, you simply said mum and bit the bullet. The it in this case was a formerly cranky old aunt who’d had a penchant for smoking marboros like it was a contest. Seeing as she had miraculously made it to eighty-eight, there was a good chance she’d won too. The woman lived about as far north in the state as you could get, in a little town on the Utah-Arizona border called Colorado City. The other times she had driven the route had been for family reunions in Flagstaff, which was about two hundred miles and two rest stops closer. She’d pleaded with Paul each time to make the trip with her but he would say he felt uncomfortable going to see a bunch of people he didn’t know. Inwardly she thought it was exactly people like Joanna, a woman who used to throw around racial slurs like they were made of confetti, that validated his fears. But jokes aside, the woman had been her aunt and nobody else’s and that meant something to Karen.

Brooding over the hours still-to-go, she lit up another cigarette. Paul hated it when she smoked, so she supposed that was one minor plus about making the trip solo. She cracked the window to let the smoke out. The Spanish lady had disappeared from the radio, and was replaced by a couple of fast-talking Spanish hombres. She’d taken four years of Spanish in high school, but was irked to find she couldn’t understand anything on the radio. It was too fast. It was like listening to an auctioneer rambling off prices. She never knew where to jump in.

At twenty past nine, Karen pulled the car into a rest stop. The seventy-five cent coffee had finally run its course. When she’d planted her bare tush on the metal toilet seat, she was reminded of another thing Arizona had going for it. The metal toilet seats never got cold. During the day, they’d absorb all the heat and they would hold onto it well into the evening. The state had also put a good deal of money into the highways and as such their facilities were quite hospitable, as far as road-side crappers go. She reached for the toilet paper and realized with quiet dismay that she’d chosen the stall without any. Usually she was good about checking first. She waited a moment, listening to make sure she was by herself. Then, quickly, she shuffled out of the stall, her panties still pulled down to her knees, and into the one next door. Here, she smiled down at a half-used roll and promptly went to finishing her business.

Before leaving the rest stop, she purchased a bag of M&Ms and a packet of Twizlers from the vending machine. She munched her snacks absentmindedly as she drove, her mind off in that distant place that girls’ minds tend to drift when they find themselves alone with numero uno and no boys, clothes or gossip to distract them. She thought about how the cactuses kind of looked like people, with their rigid arms reaching up to the sky. She imagined them staggering across the desert towards her, crying out for help. Only their throats had become so parched they made only whispers. Get me out of here! They said. She smiled to herself, amused. Even the cactuses thought the desert was boring.

After she’d devoured the M&Ms and laid waste to the Twizlers, Karen found herself as antsy and hyper as an eleven-year-old girl. She made up a game to pass the time. It was a game she’d played with her friend Sage, the only other person she knew that had the imagination for it. The game went like this: you watch other people (in the case where you’re driving, you watch other drivers) and you make up what happens to them after they leave your view. Does the athletic guy with nice abs go home and make love to his wife while she chants his name and rocks her hips like a hula doll? Does the woman in the smart suit go to the 711 at lunchtime and buy seventeen packets of Extra Long Lasting Doublemint, chew it all up into a sticky ball, and plant it under her boss’s desk? Does the kid go to his little league practice and hit a line-drive into the pitcher’s crotch? Does the old hag go get another manicure? Those were the types of questions that needed to be answered in the game. And the more farfetched the answer, the more tears one could get brimming in the other person’s eyes as she clutched her sides and howled with laughter, the better.

Unfortunately, she’d be playing alone this time, so the tears would most likely have to be traded in for giggles. But giggles were sometimes just as good. She trained her eyes on the approaching pickup. The pickup was of a rusty, beaten sort, and had obviously seen its fair share of hard years. Her mind went to the cattle ranches scattered all over the state. Ranchers often owned spare pickups to haul around trailers and move hay bails. You could tell a ranching pickup from a street pickup like you could tell a rotten apple from a fresh one. And this one in particular looked like it had been sitting under a tree for quite some time. There was mud spattered like heresy syrup across the hood and on the cab, challenging the viewer to discern its true coat. It was getting dark, but she could just make out the dented crown of a cowboy hat and the outline of a shady, mustached face as it passed. And on the back, like one of those witty stickers that people too dumb to think up their own expression stick on their car in obtrusive places, it said: Got Mud? After it had gone buy, Karen could not help but burst out laughing. All she could think about was the occupant of the truck, the cowboy, el ranchero, cruising down the highway in a truck bathed in mud, and being damn proud of it. Now there was a man who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty!

After she’d recovered from her fit of laughter, she realized that she hadn’t even made up a story for him. Then again, she hadn’t needed to; the sight alone had been a riot. Still, she disciplined herself to be on the lookout for the next winner. A Chevy suburban passed with a frazzled-looking middle-aged woman at the wheel and a backseat full of screaming children. She was on her way to drop the gang off at soccer practice and return home for a nice long bubble bath. This wasn’t really funny, but Karen felt sympathetic for the woman and the thought of a hot bath sounded good to her stiff joints. Next up was a Volkswagen van that had, since leaving Oregon, become indefinitely lost while inside its occupants negotiated the map between clouds of white smoke. Then there was a cherry-red convertible driven by a young blonde girl who had yet to lose her own cherry, but who was driving fast enough to lose the former in a crash that would rival the end of even the best Hollywood chase scenes. An old couple on their way to overpopulate Florida. An angsty-looking guy who would have made a fine Hitler youth rocking out to Nine Inch Nails and well on his way to becoming deaf. A business type in a white Audi who was undoubtedly and inextricably bad in bed. And finally, the game was over and she was spent.

Another couple hours passed and the road began to blend into the darkening horizon. She felt herself losing the battle against sleep, despite or perhaps because of the caffeinated reinforcements she’d evacuated several hours earlier. Her head would nod, as though it suddenly weighed one pound too many, and she felt her eyelids sag like heavy curtains. It was time to toss in the towel, she thought wearily, and when she spotted a Zipper’s Motel along the side of the road, she tossed it all the way to Room 17, the one overlooking the pool and the spa, the latter of which she planned to occupy shortly.

Zipper’s chain of motels was about as cheap as they come. She imagined Zipper as being a sharp-eyed and rotund fellow whose rosy cheeks and congenial smile masked the shameless penny pincher he was. The room was outfitted in drab seventies style brown carpet, a single bedside lamp with missing lampshade, a measly twin bed, and a fan that only pretended to serve a purpose. In the place where a hotel goer’s best friend usually sat–the one that came with a remote and free cable–there was a cartoon drawing of a man clad in a red and green striped poncho and wearing a ridiculously large sombrero sprinting away from a bull. But even Zipper knew where to draw the line, knew that when the evening wore on, happy vacationers would look for the next best thing to do after they’d had their fill of watching the sombrero-wearing bull runner and had had the sense to install a pool and Jacuzzi on the side of the building.

When she’d changed into her bathing suit and headed down to the pool she was greeted by a few noisy kids, who, and thank God, were escorted shortly thereafter back to their room by a woman who looked to be half toad. Karen felt her self-esteem go up several notches just looking at this woman. She held each kid by his and her wrist and was busying saying “Hey, I said stop your crying this moment” to the girl as she waddled her way out of sight. With the place to herself, Karen removed her towel which had been covering up her legs and slid into the Jacuzzi, not bothering to turn on the jets. A long and unbridled ah escaped her lips. The tub was just perfect, not too hot. Her muscles instantly relaxed and she let her body slide deeper into the water. If she could have traveled back in time and reintroduced herself into her mother’s womb, she imagined it would have felt something like this.

* * *

Karen woke up the next morning to the sound of Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire” on her cell phone. She cursed herself for not remembering to turn off the alarm when she realized that it was actually her mother calling to see where she was.

“South of Phoenix. About seventy miles. Whatdaya want?” She groaned.

“Is that how you greet your mother?” A soft and somewhat prissy voice said on the other end of the line.

Karen rubbed her eyes. “At 7:00 AM it is. What do you want mom?”

“Well, I wanted you to be here yesterday to console your father. But since that is now an impossibility, when can you arrive the soonest?”

“What’s the rush? I thought the funeral wasn’t till Thursday?”

Of course she knew the funeral wasn’t till Thursday. It had been written down in her Day-Timer (in front of three exclamation marks, one might add) for a week now. The plan as she knew it was to get to Flagstaff by today (Tuesday) or tomorrow, meet up with her folks, and ride the rest of the way to Colorado City in her dad’s Impala. Her dad drove slower than the Second Coming, but at least she could sleep in the back. And, with any luck, her mom would be so wrapped up in grief she would be unable to interrogate her about Paul and the kids.

There was a pause, her mother perhaps considering a particular diatribe, disregarding it, and then she continued in her usual, pertinent tone. “I’m not talking about the funeral. I’m talking about your father.”

Karen thought about asking why it was always up to her to get through to her dad and then thought better of it. She listened to her mom say “Him and I both… we’re, just, heartbroken… we should be together, you know… as a family” and then said she’d try her best to make it up there before dinner or before Conan at the latest and then she hit END CALL, rolled over and went back to sleep.

When she finally did get up, it was half past one and the prospect of driving the rest of the way before dinner had gone out the window. Not in any hurry, she took a leisurely shower, got dressed, and made her way down to the restaurant that sat along side the motel for some coffee and an omelet. She noted absently how the motel restaurant combination was a surefire business tactic. When people wake up, they’re hungry and, not to mention, stuck in the middle of nowhere. So where do they go? Why the restaurant of course! Did all motels neighbor restaurants? Zipper’s motels definitely did.

The glass front doors were propped open and she strolled in. The smell of pancakes and coffee greeted her nose like old friends and her stomach rumbled in dutiful response. A brunette with a petite figure that Karen quickly came to envy led her to a table in the smoking section. The girl, whose nametag proclaimed her to be Sindy and who looked to be in her teens, coughed a little as she weaved her way around a table that seated several burly looking men in construction clothes, smoking industriously. Once seated, she lit up despite Sindy’s look of underlying disgust and ordered a coffee. Just you wait, Sweetie, she thought to herself as she watched Sindy with an S strut away, wiggling her cute bottom ostentatiously as she passed the construction workers, once you’ve popped out a couple pint sized bundles of stress, you’ll be dying for one of these.

The food was served quickly and Karen dug into her omelet like she had a vendetta. Ham and cheese was perhaps the finest combination in existence. Or at least within a hundred miles or so. She washed it down with four cups of coffee and plenty of cream and by the time she was headed out the door she felt ready to drive all the way to Albuquerque.

She almost didn’t notice the truck. When she saw it, she stopped abruptly in the middle of the parking lot. An observer, if he or she were to come by at that moment, might have thought she’d dropped a quarter or something. Except for the fact that she wasn’t looking anywhere near the ground.

The driver seat was empty, and somehow that disquieted her a little. In the bright morning glare, the thing looked even filthier than before. She wondered briefly where it had come from–hadn’t she seen it going the other way? Before the subsequent thought could enter her mind, the one that would confirm that she was hopelessly and incontrovertibly paranoid, she continued on to her room. She went upstairs, vaguely aware that she was now hurrying, and quickly came down with her single bag of clothes–mind you, there were plenty more in the trunk–then drove hastily over to the main office to checkout. When she’d received a wave and a “Have a good day, now” from the obese woman who ran the front desk (a distant relative of the toad woman, perhaps?) she headed back out to her car and was slightly struck to discover that the truck–Got Mud?–was gone.

Karen didn’t believe in coincidences. But she also loathed to think a man would follow her forty miles to the motel she would spend the night at and then wait till morning to see her off. Things like that only happened in the movies. Surely there was not a creepy stalker guy following her, waiting for the opportunity to drag her from her car screaming and rape her roadside. Surely there was no one of the sort.

Fortunately, another thing Arizona has going for it is that when you look outside your car window at nothing your mind quickly loses track of any and all things. It is as though it is rendered dumb by the boringness of it all. And within a few minutes of watching the vast plains of sand and sagebrush and the occasional rocky outcroppings go by in her periphery, she forgot entirely about the man in the cowboy hat and the mud-stained truck. She finished the cigarette she’d been smoking upon leaving the restaurant, noting to herself that a half pack a day was probably unhealthy and that she would have to cut back, and turned on the radio. This time she got sports. There was something about football, about how the Cincinnati Bengals were projected to win the Super bowl this year. Then the sports announcer turned it over to the local news. A man was talking about something or other though Karen wasn’t really listening. And then she heard the man say “been missing for two weeks now” and that got her attention. She turned up the volume. After the story was over, she felt a chill like stepping on cold tile. A woman by the name of Molly Walker had gone missing, and the police were looking for her. That wasn’t all. There had been several other disappearances around Phoenix in the recent past, all women, all between the ages of twenty and thirty. And none of them had ever turned up. She found herself suddenly looking off into the desert and a hideous thought rose in her mind. Out there somewhere, discarded and left as a feast for the vultures, could have been the body of Loraine or Jannet or Molly, or all of them. Another chill crept its way up from her midriff and settled around her neck; it was the kind one got after one has just spotted a snake slithering a couple feet away from oneself in the grass. She felt panicky.

And what would panic be without an image to go along with it, like the bad tasting gum at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. And the image that came to her now was the one that she’d so carelessly laughed at before. It was of the truck, now so dirty she could hardly see the driver, not that she wanted to see the driver. She told herself that she was being silly. That there were millions of people in the state, and that of course meant there were also a few oddballs. But what, please, were the odds that the particular oddball she had in mind was also the one that had been busy snatching up middle-aged women from around Phoenix?

After a little while, the soothing nothingness of the desert drive began to relax her a little. There were no dark alleys here for someone to jump out of, only a great expanse of sand. There was nothing to worry about. The most eventful thing that could possibly happen would be to hit a coyote, or perhaps, a wayward deer that had trekked its way down from the cascades. She giggled at this. Yeah, I’m just being silly, she thought.

Some time later, there appeared a blue sedan in the breakdown lane. Stopped just pass mile marker two fifty-two, the car glittered like a forgotten treasure, not a rest stop or gas station within miles. Karen confirmed with a sideways glance upon passing that it was, in fact, empty. The car looked fairly new, not the kind of thing you’d want to leave out in the desert like a piece of scrap metal. It must have been a flat tire or engine trouble. But the question prodded at her, like that annoying friend who sits behind you in class: where was the driver? She imagined him hitching a ride into town to find a mechanic and a tow. What a pain in the butt, and she found her eyes wandering unconsciously over the gas gauge. But soon the thought of being stranded was cast from her mind and replaced with thoughts of sagebrush and cacti for miles and miles and miles…

She felt around in the back seat for her iPod. She always made a point to take it whenever she went somewhere in the car and then she would forget about it. She passed it off as middle-age forgetfulness. At least it wasn’t as bad as the tiny lines forming around her eyes, the ones she would scrutinize in the mirror every morning and, when Paul wasn’t around, whisper obscenities at. She turned it on, her eyes momentarily leaving the road, and began to scroll through the long list of songs that contained a lot of girly stuff but also, as she would say to defend herself, some good and wholesome country western. She found a song she liked, queued it up, looked back at the road, saw nothing for miles, and then looked back at her song list. Once she had her play list complete to her satisfaction, she set the music player down on the passenger side seat, and began drumming her hands on the steering wheel to the beat of Shania Twain.

The next half hour was spent car-dancing to her favorite songs. She supposed yet another plus about making the trip alone was that she didn’t have to worry about how she looked while she was grooving out to her music. She could do all the dorky moves (her favorite was the one where you pull your hands across your face, palms facing outwards, one at a time, like Uma Thurman did in Pulp Fiction) and sing along in her less than perfect voice. It was times like these that she realized how self-conscious she was normally around other people; she would never have felt free to express herself like this around her friends, not even around Paul. She relaxed for a minute in between songs. Up ahead, the road rose up to a small hill and the clouds were framed nicely above it. Maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad trip after all. And then, the first sign that she was the most wrong she had ever been came in the form of a Tobin McGraw song. She hated Tobin McGraw, the man who had inherited none of his older brother’s vocal talent, only his instrumental. Unfortunately, she’d discovered this intense dislike only after downloading a few of his songs and not knowing how to get them off her iPod after. How he had slipped onto her play list was nothing short of a mystery which she quickly sought to remedy. In doing so, her eyes left the road again, searching frantically for the Pause button. All of this was happening right as she crested the hill and began to drop down the other side. When she looked up, she saw the largest and weirdest looking coyote she had ever seen.

She had just enough time to yank the wheel hard to the left, sending her recently washed Nissan Akira sharply over the center strip and off into the dirt. Upon leaving the road, she was reminded harshly of why there are roads. The car bounced and shook over the uneven ground, making her head feel as though it were attached to her body by spring. Before her brain could tell her foot to let off the gas pedal, she slammed head-on into a cactus. Her body jerk painfully against the seat belt. And then, all of sudden, she felt terribly light headed, like she was on the verge of passing out. There was a splotch of red on her window, which appeared strange and alien to her at first and then she brushed her head with her finger tips and saw that there was red on them too. She was bleeding. Oh God, I’m bleeding.

Remembering the funny looking coyote, she threw open her door and staggered out into the sweltering heat. She swerved, nearly losing her balance, and then recovered. Her head was a ball of fire and her neck ached from whiplash. She felt terribly shaky and weak, like the life had been sucked clean out of her. Her legs in particular felt about as sturdy as toothpicks, ready to snap and send her face first into the ground. But somehow she managed to get back to the road where she was met with another odd sight, and also the second sign that she had been dead wrong: this would be a bad trip, a very very bad trip.

What she saw was a large man in a cowboy hat standing over something wrapped in furs. The something wrapped in furs, she realized after a few moments, was a woman, just lying in the middle of the road, like she’d been taking a nap. The sight made her do a double take. Where was the coyote she had almost hit? What in the hell was going on? To complete this insane scenario, the man in the cowboy hat tipped his hat to her.

“Gotta watch out for them coyotes,” he said in a voice that sounded both grating and at the same time like it had come out of a dog’s squeak toy. The only other comparison that came close was a Mickey Mouse with emphysema. Aside from that, the man seemed for the most part normal, sporting faded brown overalls and a rancher’s t-shirt that was fittingly in tatters. But what wasn’t at all normal aside from the present circumstances, was the look on his face. His mustached face was twitching like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to smile or scowl and his eyes held a disturbing gleam. She suddenly and perhaps quite smartly felt the urge to run. And then her eyes fell hopelessly on the vehicle parked a ways off the road behind him. From a distance, it looked like a large, shimmering brown smudge.

Before she could will her legs to move, the girl lying on the ground and covered in furs stirred awake. She issued several groans before opening her eyes and looking around, first at Karen and then at the man in the cowboy hat standing above her. Her eyes grew to the size of quarters and her cracked throat made the ugly and terrifying gurgle that so desperately wanted to be a scream. The man in the cowboy hat stood by impassively. After a few moments he gazed down at the girl, eyes gleaming like a man who has lost all semblance of sanity, and said in that terrible squeaky voice of his, “Well, I’ll be a rusty pecker. It’s still alive.” And then, still feeling an intoxicating mix of disbelief and shock, Karen watched as the man in the cowboy hat laid a hard kick into the back of the poor woman on the ground. And this time, she did scream.

“Stop!” Karen cried, rushing up to the man to… what? Take a swing at him, maybe, give him back a little of his own medicine. But before she could take a swing, he’d seized her with surprising quickness by the waist and pressed his body against her. She had a close up view of his wild face–jaw thick with razor stubble, spittle hanging from his bottom lip–before he thrust her to the ground along side the poor coyote woman. She felt stupid and helpless lying on the road, looking up into those savage eyes. Karen had never been a very good Christian, but she believed in the Devil, and as sure as her heart was beating furiously in her chest, she was looking into the eyes of The Red Demon himself.

“Now, now,” he said in a voice that was screwdrivers twisting their way into her ears. “Let’s not forget our manners, Stacey Baby. Let’s not do that.” After he said this, he pulled a hypodermic needle from the pocket of his overalls and came towards her. Fueled by an intense desire to keep her life, she was on her feet even before her brain could fully register the situation and was sprinting down the road like she was back at Hempford High running the 400. Adrenaline pounded bump da bump da bump in her head as though a tiny orchestra comprised entirely of drums had taken up residence there. Her throat burned. Her eyes stung from sweat. And not once did she even think about looking back.

But unfortunately she’d lost the 400 to Katrina Tempton and she was about to lose it again. Pure adrenaline can only take a tired body so far. She felt a rough hand close around her arm, jerking her back like a rag doll. She fell against her pursuer and immediately slumped to his feet, defeated, fear becoming exhaustion, exhaustion becoming hate. She was put into a headlock and there was a sharp pain in her chest where he stuck her with the syringe. After he released her, she could do no more than lay there on the hot asphalt, half in and out of a trauma induced daze. She felt violated, and worse, she was too weak to do a damn thing about it. Too weak to even stand up. Her skin was assaulted by the sun. She’d been transformed into road kill. Then her head began to swim like the heat haze in the distance, her eyes began to fog, and she tumbled down the rabbit hole into sweet, blissful unconsciousness.

[Jimbalaya]

Wow. What an incredible piece of writing, Ambrose. I was immediately pulled in curious. I think most of it kept my attention because I identified with the MC very well. I instantly liked her, she's goofy, and quirky, and the things she does just cracked me up. I've always liked the way you write, but I must say, I think you are getting better. This was near flawless and incredibly well done.

I'm very curious about the Cowboy, but maybe more so about the "Coyote". Exactly what is she? Time will tell and I think it will be a fine trip around the clock.

The metaphors you use throughout this piece were unusual but perfectly excecuted and gave a lot of life to the story, made it fun to read. One that will not get out of my head is when you compared the old truck to a bad apple. Perfect, and it really helped me understand the state of the vehicle.

Love the characters so far, they are I feel like I know the MC already and I'm rooting for her. Hopefully she'll find something out about herself that will allow her to combat this being.

Excellent work here, man. Can't wait for part two.

[Venomous Vixen]

Sand and cactuses must have been on sale when God created it.

I absolutely loved this line, cynical yet humorous. One thing, plural of a cactus is cacti I believe.

It was like listening to an auctioneer rambling off prices. She never knew where to jump in.

Another very nicely put set of words

I noted a few other places you used 'cactuses' and one where you used 'cacti'

Besides that minor stuff I have to agree with Jim, not only was this incredible but I do see improvement as well. Your voice comes through in all of your work but it does not get stale and your stories always keep me on the edge of my seat. There is a mellowness to them, like a dazed ride through them, twists and turns and then bam, everything you never expected and it takes a moment to come to.

I look forward to more of this, and like Jim, I too have some things I am looking forward to being answered in the upcoming chapters.

I think what made this one for me was how into your character you got, beyond the surface and her personality really shined through, realistic thoughts, fears, goofiness etc. Very well done.

[Ambrose]

Glad you guys enjoyed it. I know I can always count on you two to read my long stories and I'm flattered by the feedback

Part 2 going up.

[Gurdit]

Anyway, the first thing I thought when I read this was...Oh, another horror tale about a psycho killer on the highway. But to be fair, there are still more parts to read, and you might make the tale much more interesting than all the other highway-based horror movies yet.

Your character development is really good. The protagonist is portrayed realistically, and she appears to be a tough lady...no more to add to that, no complaints really.

Your writing style is really good as well. It makes a dull drive through the desert quite interesting to read actually. Your descriptions are fresh, and your story-telling is also fresh and moves along at a brisk pace.

I felt like there was something wrong with this sentence:

]She felt violated, worse, and she was too weak to do a damn thing about it.

As if the "and" has been misplaced or something...
She felt violated, and worse, she was too weak to do a damn thing about it.?

[Ambrose]

Originally Posted by Gurdit

As if the "and" has been misplaced or something...
She felt violated, and worse, she was too weak to do a damn thing about it.?

Yeah, I'd originally written it thinking she felt worse than violated, but that does kind of funny. Thanks for the careful read.