Rand Division Match

* * * Entry One * * *

Empty Glass

Coughing and spluttering, the car stumbled to a stop upon the side of the country road. Punching the steering wheel with her fists as the rain pounded down upon metal and glass, Sally slumped back in her seat. She was expected at a party in less than twenty minutes. Instead she was stuck on some tiny, pathetic road flanked by trees in a torrential downpour. She wasn’t even sure if she had an umbrella somewhere in the car.

Sally paused for a moment and took a breath, watching the rainfall in the still burning light of the headlamps and listening to angry thumping of heavy drops on the windshield; pounding as though they desperately wanted to be let inside. She gave the key a quarter turn in the ignition lighting the dashboard display, wondering what had caused her vehicle to fail her on this destitute road. She checked the gas gauge; more than half a tank. Sally gave the key another turn listening as the engine struggled to turn over once, then again. Again, slower. With a sharp exhale of frustration and a whimper she gave up, throwing the keys into the passenger seat where they clattered against the hollow glass of empty bottles.

She laid her head against the steering wheel, nostrils flaring when she caught the smell. Antifreeze. She raised her head and glanced out into the light before the car to see steam rising from under the hood and rainwater boiling off its surface. She looked again at the dashboard display, the thermostat read well below normal running temperature. Low enough that she should have been suspicious. Low enough that, had she not had a couple of drinks to loosen up before Graham’s party, she would have noticed.

But no, instead she had rushed out of the house, flying on the wings of nervous energy. New Year’s Eve, a party at Graham’s house, and a kiss at midnight. Those were the objectives. That was the mission. Those things were her sole concern. Not a faulty thermostat. She checked her cell phone. No reception. Of course.

With a sigh of resignation, Sally clicked off the headlamps and sat in silence; collecting her thoughts. Childhood memories of campfire stories about rural axe murders and haggard, old men with hooks instead of hands bubbled up in her consciousness to take shape and loom at the edges of vision in the dark outside her rain streaked windows. She twisted the knob that brought the headlights back on and pushed the lurkers deeper into the blackened depths, clicking the radio into action warding off the silence which seemed equally menacing.

Static.

She sought another station and watched hypnotically as the digital characters cycled through once, twice, three times in a green blur; finding nothing but static.

Where the hell was she that she got no cell phone reception and couldn’t even rouse a radio signal? She cycled through the stations manually, slower, checking to see if maybe the signal was just too weak for the auto-tuner to lock on to it. Something, anything, even a heavily distorted oldies station would beat sitting alone in the dark and quiet waiting for another car to drive by so she could catch a ride. Not a chance she was going to get out and walk in this downpour.

“Nee—“

Her finger clicked past so quickly she almost wasn’t sure she’d heard a voice on the radio. It was quiet, and twisted in the way voices can be when a signal isn’t strong. Probably just some public radio, talk station. Sally tuned backward more slowly this time, reluctantly.

“Sally!” It was quiet still but she was sure she’d heard it right. Whoever was on the radio had said her name. She glanced suspiciously at the bottles on and about the passenger seat. How many had she had?

“Yeah, probably wasn’t the best decision there, Sal.” The voice again, coming across stronger than before. Closer. It had a rough edge to it, like a cliché 20’s era gangster, with just a hint of mirth tugging at the ends. It was the kind of voice that would call her things like “dame” or “toots” without irony.

“Who is this?” She said aloud. She felt silly as soon as the words escaped her mouth. It wasn’t a two-way radio, she didn’t have a microphone. There was no way whoever had spoken had spoken to her. Had to be just some strange radio show; a rare coincidence. Sally was a common enough name.

“That’s not important, Sal.” Sally spun in her seat; the voice seemed to come from right behind her. She expected to see a man in a pin-striped suit wearing a fedora sitting in her back seat smoking a cigar. And she was going to hit him with a beer bottle.

When did she pick up a beer bottle?

She was shaking now. A brown glass bottle was clutched by the neck in her left hand, ready to strike.

“Check your watch,” it came from the radio again. “Notice anything . . . abnormal?”

Sally glanced quickly at the timepiece on her wrist. Delicate gold, inlaid with a pattern of tiny diamonds, a birthday gift from Graham last year. The kind of gift a man gives to his wife on their anniversary; not to his mistress on her birthday. It read 1:06. She’d missed it. How had she missed midnight? She’d left home at a little after noon. She should have had more than enough time to make the drive. How had she lost twelve hours?

“That’s p.m., babe.” The voice came to her almost as a reflection of her own thoughts.

“Why is it so dark outside?” Something didn’t add up, something more than just this disembodied voice that seemed to read her mind. The clatter of empty glass came again from the backseat. Sally glanced up from her watch in time to watch a flood of empty beer bottles spill out of the rear seat into the front of the car.

Reflexively, Sally snatched the door handle and jerked it open, jumping from car in time to avoid the wave of containers spilling out onto the pavement.

Pavement? She could have sworn this was a dirt road. And why wasn’t it raining? Sally looked into the sky. She couldn’t see any stars; probably because of the clouds. Rain must have just stopped. That’s what she told herself, despite to hood of her car being dry as a bone. It was easier to ignore it.

Sally danced around a few beer bottles lying in the street, careful not to step on one in her heels as she made her way out front to examine her car. Her jaw dropped incredulously. The front tires were flat, driven to that state by shards of the fenders driven into the rubber at jagged angles. Steam still leaked skyward from beneath the hood, and a puddle of green and yellow fluids leaked out beneath the vehicle. The license plate lay twisted among metallic wreckage and the broken shards of windshield while the whole front of the vehicle was smashed inward as though she had collided with a light post, or maybe hit a large animal.

Yes! That must be it. The road was remote enough that there weren’t any light posts around, but there was surely plenty of wildlife in the area. She must have hit a deer or something and run off the road.

She’d been in an accident; that much was certain. She was in shock. Maybe a little drunk. Seeing things, hearing things; she just needed to calm down. Sally gingerly stepped back to the door opening it slowly expecting to be buried in empties. No bottles poured forth. Of the deluge she’d witnessed moments before, only the three or four on the pavement remained. Sally sat, heavily, in the driver’s seat with her feet outside of the car, her elbows on her knees and face in her hands; sobbing.

A whirlwind of emotions; anger, fear, self-loathing, laughter all blending together into a ridiculous clown mask of smeared make-up and snot and tears. Sally wiped her face with hands she could clearly see now were cut in several places, her arms were scraped up, and she felt pain on her face and in her chest; pains she feared to inspect too closely. It was becoming apparent that her accident had been something more than trivial.

She sat like that for a long time, not checking her watch, not caring, losing track. Until the sound of engine noises brought her out of herself. Sally raised her head to see a tow truck pulling up and parking before her car. Yellow flashing lights blinking in the darkness. The rig’s engine rumbled and belched diesel scented clouds, turning her already panicked stomach. Sally covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve and watched as a stocky little man, dressed all in greasy denim, hopped out from the cab and made his way in her direction.

“You need a tow, lady?” he called out over the sound of the engine. He had already begun to attaching the various fixtures and implements to her vehicle without waiting for a response. Which was good, because Sally could only stare, dumbfounded. She knew that voice. That was the laughing mobster; that was the pin-striped suit and cigar.

She stood, suddenly in a panic all over again, backing away almost frantically.

The little man raised his head a smiled. “Hold on there, toots. Lemme finish up here and we’ll get on the road.”

“I. . .” Her words caught, “I’m not going anywhere with you. Who are you?” Sally moved behind the trunk of the car, never taking her eyes off the man while putting the bulk of the vehicle between the two of them. She didn’t like running in heels, but it hadn’t stopped her before.

He linked a couple more chains in place and yanked a lever on the back the truck as he got to his feet. The heavy machinery lifted the front end of her vehicle off the ground and pulled it closer to the rig at its head.

“Alright, now,” he said, wiping his hands on his grubby denim jumpsuit, “Calm down, Sal. This will be easier if you just relax. What’s done is done. There’s no taking it back now.”

“Who are you?” She cried again more emphatically, “What are you talking about? What’s been done?” Tears flowed freely now.

The little man raised his hands before her in a calming display. “Just take it easy, and turn around.” He made a turning motion with his finger, “Look back the way you came.”

Sally stared a bit longer at the little man until he halted his approach, at which point she turned slowly and looked back up the road. Sally gasped.

Behind her the road was daylight. Sunlight blazed in a chilled winter afternoon. The road she travelled on was a heavily trafficked two-lane highway. Miniature snowdrifts outlined the lanes as cars buzzed by in both directions at high speeds, separated only by a shrubbery median. She watched as though entranced as dozens of cars passed her by on what was, mere minutes ago, a country back road.

“This looks familiar. I remember driving this way.” She remembered more now. Why she had thought it made sense to be driving down a dirt road in the middle of the night in the rain on her way the Graham’s party uptown escaped her completely.
She watched a car headed her direction. Its wheels strayed into the little banks between lanes, spraying slushy snow out in globs. It swerved to and fro at speeds slightly greater than its peers. Sally recognized that model car; that license plate. It matched hers.

The vehicle veered from one lane to the next, lurching between other cars in a desperate bid for lead in the oblivious race. Then it hit an especially slushy patch and veered out of control. For the briefest instant before it disappeared behind the shrubbery into oncoming traffic, Sally recognized her own reflection behind the wheel.

“No.” Was all she could manage.

There was a screech of tires, the scream of twisted metal as her vehicle plowed headlong into an oncoming sedan. At the point of impact the vehicles stopped in a splash of mechanical carnage. Glass and plastic, fiberglass and chrome sprayed in all directions as a ghostly afterimage of each vehicle drifted outwards from the wreckage. Sally’s own shambled back through the median further down the line to sputter to a stop alongside a dirty country road.

The rain had returned, though Sally could not feel it. She could still see the point of impact, where the corpses of both cars steamed and smoked. On the far side of the accident it was brilliant daylight. The afterimage of the broken sedan cruised blissfully into the distance.

Words escaped her completely.

Sally stared at the other car driving off into the distance. At the twisted hulk of both vehicles made one by pure force, and the emergency crews that had arrived, pulling bodies from the wreckage. A man, a woman, a child, and Sally herself.

“I . . . I died?” Her words were barely a whisper.

“Yep.” The stocky man spoke, his voice matter-of-fact, “Them’s the breaks, kid.”

“How come I’m here? What’s all this?” She gestured at the tow truck.

“It’s how you’re dealing with it. Believe it or not, dying can be stressful. Everyone handles it differently. Especially the damned.”

“What about them?” She pointed into the sunshine, at the other car disappearing into the distance.

“Them?” He shrugged, “Odds are they’ll never know what hit ‘em. Quite literally.”

“How? How does that work? I saw them . . . I see them right there, being zipped up.” Sally’s voice cracked, “They’re as dead as I am!”

“True.” He fumbled with his name tag, she hadn’t noticed it before. ‘Charon’ it said. “But they were innocent. You killed them. You saw how you were driving, and you know why you were driving that way.”

Charon took her by the arm and began leading her to the truck. “Don’t think of it as dying. Think of it as taking another path. Those three will continue on with their lives, never knowing they died. They’ll get where they were going, do what they would normally do, and everything will be just a little better than they expected. The ‘living’ world,” He used air-quotes, “will go on without them but they’ll never know.

“You though,” his voice took on a more dangerous tone, “You get to know what happened. You get to know what you did. You get to see those left behind, and you get to live on as well; only you get to do it with full knowledge of what you did. You get to watch the aftermath. You, Sally, have a front row seat to all the misery and pain, the tears and anger; and you get to know it's all your fault.”

He opened the door to the truck and guided her up the step into the seat, closing the door forcefully behind her. Sally watched the top of his head as he made his way around the front side of the truck. When he opened the driver side door she asked, almost hopefully, “So, does that mean will I still get where I was going?”

“No, no, Sal.” He hopped into the driver’s seat, “You’re headed for a whole different kind of party.”



Coughing and spluttering, the car stumbled to a stop upon the side of the country road. Punching the steering wheel with her fists as the rain pounded down upon metal and glass, Sally slumped back in her seat. She was expected at a party in less than twenty minutes. Instead she was stuck on some tiny, pathetic road flanked by trees in a torrential downpour. She wasn’t even sure if she had an umbrella somewhere in the car.

"Fuckin' figures..." She muttered to herself, twisting about to check for an umbrella. For the past six months, life itself had conspired to make Sally DeMuerte as miserable as possible. At work, she had been losing her clients and money. Jobs didn't come by as often as it should have. She had lost two boyfriends in that last time period, three friends, and five relatives to a nasty cocktail of disagreements, arguments, diseases, divorces, and lies. More of which were her fault than she cared to admit.

After a good five minutes of cursing herself, her family, her friends, the party, God, and everything else that came to mind, the petite woman extricated herself from her tiny broken down automobile. Only to find her coat soaked through to her blouse within minutes of standing in the rain. Dark curled hair matted to her skull and ears, cut short in what she had thought was a cute pixie cut at the time. Her makeup ran in black and brown rivers down her cheeks, when she stared up at the sky, cursing the heavens for the ocean it had decided to slowly dump on her. Her fingers were already starting to chill deeply while she wasted time before embarking on the short walk from the driver's side door to the hood of her tiny, stupid, piece of shit of a Volkswagen.

Frozen fingers clawed for the release hatch on the hood, fumbling numbly around the latch before the frustrated Sally gave up and kicked the stupid-fucking-wreck of a piece-of-shit-car and gave up in frustration. She moped, sitting on the wet hood of her car to think, doing her best to ignore the rain crashing into her with every minute. She clapped her hands and rubbed them together, then huddled up in a vain attempt to warm her ice-like digits.

The road was deserted, until just a few minutes ago, she was the only one on it, probably for miles. She couldn't even remember passing a gas station or, hell, any sort of structure. So, she could sit here, in her car, and hope someone came by... Or she could venture down the road, one way or the other, and hope she merely missed the signs of civilization as she sped down the wet road.

Only a minute later small petite Sally DeMuerte was walking down the road in the same direction she had been driving before. Hands shoved into her soaked pockets, head bowed, and hood on her coat up, though it was too late to do much for her.

The rain seemed to worsen while the petite woman walked down the road, slogging through massive puddles, and hoping that someone would come along, or that the rain would stop. Even as she thought this, she began to feel uneasy. Like someone was watching her, not like she felt in the bars of the city, on the nights where she dressed in a rather revealing outfit in an attempt to feel sexy. But rather... Unfamiliar was the best word to describe it. She couldn't quite place it.

"Hello?" She called out to the rain, her voice practically small and timid, though that was far from her attitude, or capabilities. "Is anyone there?" She paused in the road, still only hearing the rain pound down through the trees and onto the road. No one answered, no dark shape came into being on the road, no creepy glowing eyes in the darkest areas of the trees. Nothing came to her rescue, or came to rape her.

She supposed she was glad for that last fact.

With a huff, Sally turned around, brushing a drenched bit of hair out of her face, and continuing her grumb- Her thought was interrupted by a growl, low and gutteral, coming from a dark patch just off the road. She stopped dead in her tracks, turning to face the source of the sound. Two pale green eyes stared back at her, narrowed in what had to be suspicion. They seemed to glow in the shadow, reflecting what little light there was back at her. She would have thought they belonged to some kind of mountain cat, had she not had to look up at them.

In stunned silence she watched as a beast extricated itself from the darkness, taking shape before her own vaguely disinterested eyes. It was tall, reaching a good seven feet from head to toe, and it bristled with shaggy unwashed grey fur. A long muzzle shot forward just under the eyes, ending in a dark wet nose. Hackles were already risen, displaying very sharp yellowed teeth. It had broad shoulders, a barrel like chest, and extremely long arms. The claws flexed, showing off the manual strength of the creature. A glance further down revealed that it was a he, rather. Sally quirked a single brow at that fact, the whole experience rather interesting to her desensitized mind.

She shook her head, muttering to herself, "Why me..." and then looked back up at the werewolf. "You picked the wrong day, pal." She bared her own teeth, her canines were sharper than average, and dropped into a traditional martial arts stance, fists held high, legs spread apart to better her balance.

"Well... I don't have all day..."