No One Told Them Why the Road Was Closed

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

The car came to rest upside down and backward at the bottom of the ravine. The noise of its long tumbling crash, like thunder bowling apart solid rock, receded only slowly for everyone inside. But before silence crept in, even before he could remember his own name, Barrett Leigh knew not a single human being outside the car had heard the noise. The town was twenty miles back, the resort cabins were twenty miles ahead, and the road was closed to traffic.

Samantha had protested his decision to take the closed road. But the barricade had been easy to get around, as if to invite him to try, and for sure this road would be a lot faster than driving all the way around the mountain. The road looked fine.

“Kids,” Barrett said. “Everybody okay?”

He was upside-down, strapped in. He turned his head, and a white-hot pain lanced up his neck behind his left ear. Tears sprang to his eyes.

“Kids,” he said, eyes closed, unable to turn.

He looked down—up, actually—to see his thighs tucked against the steering wheel. The discharged airbag lay misshapen. He tried to remember flying off the road. He remembered it curvy, narrow—no problems.

“Mommy has a nosebleed,” Kerry said.

Thank God, oh God, Kerry can speak.

Kerry was seven.

“How about you, Dar?”

Darius was ten.

“Mokay,” Darius said.

Panic tingled through Barrett at how slurry Darius sounded. But Barrett was an engineer—he designed bridges—and he wanted to kiss everyone on the team that had designed the kids’ car seats.

That’s what puts humanity at the apex of the pyramid, he thought. That right there! Tool use, math, ingenuity. Engineering.

“We shuh call frelp,” Darius said.

“Good idea, tiger. But first, let’s play a game. Let’s count to forty, then count backwards. I’ll start. One, two, three.” He got to nine and said, “Okay, Dar, you’re up! Take us to thirty-nine.”

Darius counted. He did not sound less slurry as he progressed. Barrett worked his phone out of his left coat pocket and held it in front of his face. No service. His hand could barely form the grip, and the phone slipped out and clunked on the ceiling. There was blood all over his hand. He wondered where he was cut.

“Thirry-fie, therr… therr non,” Dar said. “Kerz turn.”

“Good job, buddy. Okay, quick, who’s your favorite athlete and what’s his number?”

Darius answered, though not right away. Maybe getting him right-side up would help. Maybe it was crucial. He wondered how unhealthy it was to hang upside down. His own head felt heavy and enormous.

“Okay, how are your seatbelts? Can you unhook them?”

“I tried.”

“Daddy, you didn’t ask me my favorite anything.”

“Okay pumpkin. What’s your favorite color?”

“I don’t know,” Kerry said. “Sometimes it’s yellow. Not red.”

“Yellow’s fine. Okay—”

“Mommy has a nosebleed,” Kerry said.

His wife had been silent in the front passenger seat.

Barrett tried to turn his head to look at her. A searing jolt of pain stopped him.

“Samantha?” he said. “Sam?”

“Sssmom okay?” Darius asked.

“Samantha, honey? If you can’t talk, reach over and squeeze my hand.”

She did not.

He reached to adjust the rearview. The reach lit a web of pain across his shoulder. But it was not as crushing as the neck pain and he managed to angle the mirror to see Sam.

He wished he had not.

Her arms hung straight down. Her hands sat limp on the ceiling in a lake of blood. Which dripped steadily through her hair from the wide split in the side of her head.

A rock or tree limb. Must have been. Got her on the way down. Through her open window.

He cranked the mirror sharply away from her. He felt his chest seize. Heart attack, he thought in a wild panic. He didn’t know. He felt sure he was about to die. He felt sure he had killed his whole family.

“Kids,” he said, between the hard knots in his breathing. “If I fall asleep. Both. Go. Leave me. And Mom. Climb up. To road. Walk back. To that—little town.”

He passed out.

He had a dream, blackly vignetted, like a peek through a keyhole, of a stone slammed into his wife’s temple, wedge-shaped, driven as far as her nose. Splattering gore. He saw their wedding day and, in the dream, the splatter happened that day. He put his hand on hers atop the knife handle to cut the tiered cake and her blood splashed across the white icing. In the dream he saw their lives together, their decision to join their lives, ending in flying red meat, in the jelly of brain.

When he woke up, the kids were still in their car seats.

“Wake up wake up,” they were singing. Everyone was still upside down.

“I told you to leave,” he said.

“We shuh stick together,” Darius said. “An Mom geh a vote.”

Barrett tried to think. It was a miracle they could not see her their mother’s face from the angle they had. He had to make sure it stayed that way.

“You two have to unhook your seatbelts,” he said. “But first let’s go over the plan. I want you to unhook, and sit on the ceiling of the car. Okay. And look out the back window, and tell me what you see.”

It took them a while to unhook. They had been trying. He tried his own. He could barely get his left hand to apply pressure to the button. Finally Kerry got free, she fell, and said the blood was gross, then she helped Darius, and he fell and said the blood was gross, and then told him them they couldn’t see anything out the windows except dirt and trees.

Finally he got his release to click. The belt digging into his shoulder lost all tension. But the steering wheel pinned his thighs where they were. So he flopped forward, ass off the seat. Arms too slow to respond. His head hit the ceiling. Pain exploded in his neck. He screamed.

When the fireworks in his head cleared, the kids were silent.

They’ve never heard their dad scream before, he thought. They know me as the calm authority who enforces the chore schedule. Who says “Because I said so.”

Keep it together.

“Okay,” he said.

His head was pressed to the ceiling, neck bent. His neck throbbed. He could not push himself out of this position. He thought about stresses, systems failure.

“I’m going to stay here to keep your mom company. You two are going to keep each other company and go for help. You’re going to get out of the car and when you do, I bet you will see that our car cut a path through the trees. Climb up that. To the road.”

“How far up is it?”

“It might be far. So be careful. Do you have snacks you can bring?”

They did. Juiceboxes too.

Barrett wondered if there were wild animals. No, he knew there were. He wondered if any animals would take an interest in children.

“You stick together. Promise? And don’t come back to the car. Get to the road. Walk downhill to the town. Walk all day and night if you have to.”

They would have to. It would be a five-hour walk for me.

He intended to follow them when he could. Spend the hour it might take to work himself free of the car. See if he could walk at all. He had come to notice that he could not feel the steering wheel pinching his thighs. He hoped to pull himself out of the wreck using his hands and then lie flat outside. Do stretches, leg lifts, get things in working order. Climb up, catch up to the kids.

We can all walk into town together.

“When you get to the road, stay on it,” he said, thinking of the animals. He said it with conviction, as if that thin black ribbon of civilization was verboten to uncivilized creatures. As if wolves, mountain lions, bears could not enter that strip of territory. As if nothing could that lived by tearing with teeth rather than by designing and building.

“You both know I love you so much.”

But they couldn’t open their doors to get out.

He told them to lower the backseat and climb out through the trunk. They struggled to move the suitcases packed for the week in the cabin—finally Kerry wiggled through only to find the pull-cord did nothing. The trunk lid would not fall open. Darius could not kick it open, either.

“Summon blocken it,” he said.

Sure. The rear of the car had landed over a rock or a log, pushed up against a tree. It would never open.

“Okay,” Barrett said. “Darius, lie on your back and kick out your window.”

That didn’t work either.

“Find something that comes to a point and hammer the glass. Cover your eyes.”

It didn’t work.

“Mommy’s window is open,” Kerry said. “We can squeeze out.”

Barrett felt ill. The pain in his crooked neck was shooting nonstop to the top of his skull and down to his lower back. He could barely twitch the fingers of his left hand.

But he could move his right arm reasonably well.

“Okay. I’m going to pull Mom away from the window. You shimmy past and get out. Real quick. Quick like a bunny,” he said. A saying they’d used since the kids were tiny.

“Can I hug Mommy before I get out?”

“Honey, I don’t—yeah, okay. A real light hug. She won’t hug back because she’s asleep but she’d like that. Okay. Okay good. Real light, in case she has a broken rib. Be real gentle. Barely a hug at all, darling, just get your arms around a little. One arm. A one-armed hug. So soft. Gentle. Okay—all done—no more—scoot out. Quick like a bunny.”

So he kept his right hand clamped over the hole in Samantha’s head as he pulled her away from the window, while his daughter hugged the corpse.

Then Kerry crawled messily through the goop of blood and brainmatter on the ceiling of the car. She stood up outside. Barrett could only see her from the waist down. Her yellow pants with knees soaked red, the toes of her little white sneakers thick with blood. He watched her wipe her hands on her shirt, adding red streaks under the sparkly unicorn.

“Okay buddy.”

“Bye, Dad,” Darius said. He went quick, like a bunny. Bigger than Kerry, he knocked against his mother as he went, knocked her out of Barrett’s grip. Desperate, Barrett grabbed to pull her back, keep the wound hidden. He pawed useless across her slippery face. She swung toward the window, the kids. He caught her at the last second only because his fingers hooked into the hole. Caught on the broken edge of bone. He pulled her back and hugged her.

He was shaking. Darius’s red pants next to Kerry’s in the window frame. He was too bent, everything hurt too much, hurt like a steady rising storm.

“Go,” he said.

They did not go right away. He remembered the road suddenly, how there were no guardrails. There had been guardrails. Then there were only the wooden posts. He thought maybe that was why the road was closed. He’d asked in town why it was closed. “Never you mind why. You just take the long way. Short way depends on local knowledge.” Kind of bullshit that hicks in these little villages leaned on to shore themselves up in their own eyes. “Short way’s dangerous if you don’t know the tricks.” Samantha said “Let’s not go that way, who knows. We don’t ever want to hear the register lady missing a front tooth at the Bluebird’s Nest Luncheonette & Sundry say ‘I told you so.’” But he was driving, so he decided—and the only “trick” was, eighteen or nineteen miles up, suddenly no guardrails. Not the biggest problem, the road itself was fine. But around one bend Samantha, looking ahead, said “Well that’s nuts.” Where the road curved left and then cut back to the right on the other side of a ravine in front of them, they had a clear view of the scree that sloped downward from the pavement—and down in those gray rocks, there lay lengths of what looked like perfectly good steel guardrail. As if removed from the posts and tossed down. It didn’t make sense. Why would anyone do that? At least there was nothing wrong with the road itself—

He remembered now. Losing control. Just after Samantha pointed out what she saw. Something flew in through her open window. An object that hit her. She jerked. Spray of blood across the windshield. It happened right at a hairpin turn. He did not cut it in time.

Now his children’s blood-soaked sneakers stood in the forest framed by the window.

“You both,” he said to the sneakers. “Be real careful.”

“Uhhngkay,” Darius said.

“Promise me. Both say it.”

“I promise, Daddy,” Kerry said.

He watched their sneakers turn and head in the direction that must be uphill. He let his wife go. She swung away. Pieces fell out. He shifted his eyes to the windshield but it only showed dirt, tree roots. He listened to the voices of his children cooperating, fading.

Then he heard Kerry shriek.

The shriek ended abruptly.

His son yelled “Dad! D—”

That ended abruptly too.

Then came footsteps. The whisper-light footsteps of an animal at home in the mountains, coming across the pine needles.

What appeared in the passenger window was something—an animal; it had to be—shaped like a small man. And this creature, with a green face essentially human in its features, crouched to peer in at Barrett. It was so small, it almost did not need to crouch. Similar figures appeared behind the first. All the same height. A pack. And the first, apparently deciding Barrett Leigh was truly helpless, gave a sneer of savage delight, which revealed sharp and wicked teeth. But it was the fact that the creature wore clothing, wore a neat vest and pants of smooth brown cloth, that somehow struck Barrett as most out of place; and it was the hatchet in the small green hand, with a stone blade sharp enough to glisten.

The end