Free Highway 24 by Jeff Chapman Page A

with its own volition, swaying back and forth.
    The car slowed, reluctantly it seemed to Paul. The girl’s form grew larger. The moment before the grille struck her legs, her face came into view, lit from the headlights below, and she was pretty. Paul pitched forward with the impact, but managed to keep sight of the girl. She bounced off the hood and flew toward the windshield. Out of the headlights, her face appeared gray, but her eyes sought his. Paul turned his head aside, snapping his eyes closed after the girl struck the windshield with a squishing thud. An awful series of clunks rattled the roof of the car.
    The car jerked to a stop. Paul’s breath came in raspy bursts. He stared ahead for a moment as the shock washed over him. Please God, let her be moving. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed him what he didn’t want to see. A pink bundle lay sprawled on the pavement in the red glow from the brake lights. He turned off the engine and flicked on the hazards. His hands shook. He hurried toward the bundle with no thought of what to do. Perhaps…no, not with that thud and those clunks. Surely, she was dead. He knew it the moment the car hit her. He was confirming the inevitable, the absence of any hope.
    The toes of his shoes striking the pavement tore at the veil of dark silence shrouding the highway. The girl lay on her back between black skid marks that appeared and then vanished as the yellow hazards flashed on and off, a simple mechanical action with no sense of gravity or wrong or right. Wispy, white netting of a petticoat stuck out from rips in her dress. One of her shoes, a white pump with a low heel, caught under his foot and he stumbled. He picked up the shoe and looked down on her body. A halo of blood enclosed her brown hair. The delicate neck was twisted at a right angle. Her green eyes, drained of emotion, stared at her shoulder. The toe of a shoe and one bare foot poked out beneath the hem of her dress.
    Checking for a pulse seemed pointless and his aversion to touching a dead person sealed his decision. Feel something, his mind screamed. He grew up as the good kid in school, the one who didn’t get in trouble. He shook his head at what he had done. He had killed someone. The realization soaked through him like rain spreading through the earth, seeking the bedrock that would block its descent. Paul’s bedrock shattered. He wanted to wash all the guilt away but his eyes wouldn’t water. Some emotional response would purge the weight from his soul, he thought, but only numbness seeped through his body and heart.
    With one mistake, everything in his life had changed. He found no easy catharsis. Her death melded to him, her copper fusing with his tin to yield a tarnished brass. Numbness morphed to anger at the injustice. She was to blame. She’d jumped into his path. Not enough time and distance for the brakes. Nobody does that kind of shit, unless…
    Unless someone was chasing her. A cold shiver coursed down Paul’s spine. He looked up the road, peering into the black void behind him, listening for a snapping twig or gravel crunching underfoot. Darkness weighed on him from the heavens and earth and every direction. His instincts told him to run, but his conscience refused to let him leave. Abandoning her seemed so final; giving in to fear and giving up without a fight. He had to do something, so he stooped over to pick her up. When his fingertips brushed the silky, pink fabric, reality struck him with the weight of a steel door. He stopped himself.
    His stunned mind roused, forming predictions for the future, most of them terrifying. What would he tell the police and who would believe it? They would give him a blood-alcohol test. The two stouts he drank with his late supper wouldn’t help. Maybe his reactions would have been faster. Manslaughter. Vehicular homicide. Prison. Think. Think, he told himself.
    He knelt on one knee next to the body. Blood oozed from the corner of the girl’s mouth and