“No!” She grabbed his arm, her fingers digging in through the sleeve of his shirt. “No, you have to go back!”
“My dear, I don’t have to do anything. Get out, or I’m going to throw you out.” If there was one thing he didn’t have time for tonight, besides being lost, it was being lost with a human who was deranged past the point of making any sense. She continued to babble as he opened his door and grabbed her by the arms, dragging her out over the gearshift. Even when she was out of the car, she kept pleading, as if she didn’t realize she was already on the ground. He pushed her back to get her desperate, clawing hands off him, and got back in the car and slammed the door before she could grab him again.
He rolled the window down just a crack. “Where’s the nearest town?”
“You’re in it,” she snapped at him, wiping her eyes. “I hope you enjoy your stay, asshole.”
Right … so, she wasn’t going to be any help. Sure, he was leaving her on the side of the road, but he had just saved her life. Humans could be so ungrateful.
He pulled away. She’d called him an outsider. What the hell had that been about? As much as he didn’t want to head back toward … whatever it was that had destroyed the gas station, he really didn’t want to drive straight to the heart of some religious commune, either. He blew past a THANKS FOR VISITING PENANCE sign with peeling paint and a faded metal Rotary Club seal on it and pressed the accelerator to the floor. He didn’t want to see the gas station when he passed it—at least, not as anything more than a blur. It had been about three miles since he’d passed the last county road. He’d backtrack to that and take it wherever it ended up leading. If he had to sleep in the trunk to stay out of the sun, well, he would. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it would be a hell of a lot more pleasant than being held hostage by religious freaks.
After a few long, silent moments, he turned on his iPod. Weird stuff happened all the time. It didn’t bear thinking about. He found Lily Allen’s latest album and turned it up, singing along absentmindedly as he struggled with the TomTom once more.
Three songs later, he noticed he hadn’t made it back to the road yet. No, that couldn’t be right. He probably was just too distracted trying to change the settings back to English to notice that he’d passed it. He pulled a U-turn and headed back. He’d only gone about a quarter mile before the ruined gas station loomed to his left, and he passed a WELCOME TO PENANCE sign on his right.
“What the …” Up ahead, a figure walked at the shoulder of the road, her head hanging, arms wrapped around her middle. He slowed beside her, double-checking the odometer. He’d driven fifteen miles. It was right there, in black and white on the little dials that worked just as well as the rest of the car.
The girl shot him an angry look over her shoulder, then faced forward again, tossing her long, brown hair.
He drove past her and waited, watching in the mirror as she tried to look anywhere but at the car she approached. He couldn’t help but notice her long, suntanned legs sticking out of a nice, short pair of denim cutoffs. Country girls. Yum. He rolled down the window as she walked by. “Something strange just happened.”
She didn’t answer, but kept walking. He gave her a little room, then rolled after her. When he pulled up even again, he continued, “I just tried to drive back to county-road-number-whatever-that-number-was, but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Got any idea what that’s about?”
Still no answer.
He let her get ahead again, then drove up beside her once more. “You can either get into this car, or stay out here with whatever that was that just wrecked a building.”
She laughed humorlessly and kept walking. “You didn’t seem to care about leaving me out here when you thought you were going to be able to drive away and never see me again.”
“Well, yeah,” he said, creeping slowly alongside her. “But that’s only because I thought I was going to drive away and never see you again … Why didn’t that work out?”
“You’re a real gentleman.” She shook her head, still walking. “You can’t leave because It keeps us here.”
“It?” She’d said the word like it was a name, like it should be obvious what she was talking about, but Graf had no clue. “What do you mean, ‘It'?”
There was something hard about the way she wrinkled her nose, as though she had been defeated a long time ago and didn’t like talking about the fight. Whatever bad memories were associated with the subject, they made her voice a little less strident. “I don’t know. No one does.”
“Well, what do you mean I’m—” His foot slipped on the accelerator, and the car lurched forward. He hit the clutch and downshifted into Neutral. “Damn it, get in! This is ridiculous.”
To his surprise, she walked around the front of the car and opened the passenger door. “Are you going to drive me home, or just abandon me on the side of the road a little farther down?”
He ignored her. “You told me to enjoy my stay. So, I take it other people have had this same trouble?”
“No. You’re the first.” She wasn’t being sarcastic. She dropped into the seat and pulled in her long legs as she closed the door. “The rest of us have been trapped here, but outsiders never stop.”
Trapped. Well, that sounded great. “‘Never’ meaning … how long exactly?”
“Five years.” She pointed to a dirt road ahead. “Turn there.”
He complied, too confused to do much other than ask questions and take orders. That wasn’t like him at all, and it made him uncomfortable. “Five years, no one has been able to …”
“To leave Penance, or get in. No visits to or from. No one with car trouble on the side of the road.” She closed her eyes. “No ambulances.”
“So, I’m the first person to come to Penance for the past five years?” There was a fallow field to one side of the road, a swamp to the other. “What is this?”
“A town.” She looked at him like he was crazy. “A small one, but a town. And everything within the city limits has been trapped for the past five years. No one gets in, no one gets out.”
That explained the lack of cars on the road, the closed-down gas station. “So, what’s this ‘It’ that you’re so worried about? The ‘It’ that tried to bring a building down on us. What’s with that?”
“I don’t know.” She got a faraway look, as if she didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ve seen It before. A lot of people have. It kills. Not every night, not on a schedule. Some people have had It come right up to them and not do anything at all. Other people get slaughtered.”
“Okay.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “But what is it?”
She looked dead-on at him like he was stupid. “It’s a monster.”
Two
Realistically, Graf couldn’t doubt the existence of monsters. It just wouldn’t make sense. Obviously, vampires existed. And werewolves. He’d met one of those. Zombies, he’d never heard of those existing, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Witches? Wouldn’t want to tangle with one. But unclassifiable bogeyman-type creatures that could bring down a gas station roof right over his head? It wasn’t that they couldn’t exist, they probably did, but such information was hard to believe when it was coming from a human.
“A monster?”
The woman nodded, still eyeing him like he might be a little bit “special.” “Yes. You don’t really think a tornado did that? And left