My hand stayed pressed to my side, feeling the slow seep of warmth through my shirt, the sticky drag of it against my skin. The pain had dulled a little, settling into a deep, throbbing ache that pulsed in time with my heartbeat.

I swallowed hard and leaned back in the seat, tipping my head back against the cracked vinyl.

Outside, the night kept moving. It didn’t give a shit about my personal crisis or the past I was running from. Laughter drifted across the lot in loose, careless bursts, loud and bright. Like nobody out here ever had to think twice about anything in their life. A bottle shattered somewhere in the distance, glass skittering across pavement, followed by a cheer that rose up sharp and ugly and then disappeared just as fast.

I needed to get the hell out of here.

“Fuck you,” I murmured to no one in particular, “Fuck everything.” 

If that prick, David, and his hyenas thought I was going to end up on his little hit list or whatever the fuck kind of obsession he’d decided he had with me, he had another thing coming to him. 

I moved to jam the key into the ignition, but before I even got it in, the radio clicked, and my dashboard lights surged to life, Rock You Like a Hurricane blasting out. “Oh, hell yeah,” I said, pointing at myself in the rearview mirror. Fucking bodacious. 

I flipped myself double horns in the mirror and gave a half-assed headbang in time to the music until my ribs pulled, making me hiss. “Okay, ow…ow, still rad. Just like… moderately rad.”

Then the volume spiked, way harder, until the speakers crackled, sound blowing out into static before snapping back even louder. The music warped, vocals stretching into something gnarly and wrong, 

“Holy fuck—!”

The whole car gave a sudden, violent shudder, metal groaning around me. Then the dashboard lights began to flicker on and off, and all at once, they blinked in no pattern I could follow. The music dipped, warbled, then dragged into a low, distorted hum that didn’t even sound like music anymore, but a vicious roar. Dragged into a vibrating static screech that crawled under my skin, sank into my ribs, and rattled me from the inside. It sounded like something alive, something massive and furious, breathing through the blown-out speakers of the Pontiac.

I screamed and grabbed the door handle, the car’s frame rattling like it wanted to come apart, bolts screeching. The seatbelt cut into my shoulder as the force slammed me back, then forward again.

And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, a slick black shape pushed up from beneath the dashboard with a wet squelch. Not wires or hoses, but something thicker and glossier that caught the pulsing light from the ferris wheel outside and gleamed smoothly. 

“Oh, God—oh God—what the shit is that…”

I pressed my head back into the seat, eyes bugging as the thing curled slowly, hovering inches from my face like it was tasting the air.

This had to be a nightmare.

Had to be.

Maybe someone slipped something into my Coke. Maybe David had poisoned the knife he’d used to mark me. Maybe I was already passed out somewhere, and this was my brain short-circuiting on the way out—

A low, wet groan rose from beneath the dash.

I made the mistake of looking down, saw a shit-ton of them.

Tentacles...no, not even trying to pretend otherwise now, forcing their way out from beneath the dashboard in slow, steady pulses, slick bodies dragging against the plastic as they pushed forward. The casing bowed outward with every movement, creaking, warping, as if it were seconds from splitting open completely.

They moved like blood-sucking leeches, purely fueled by hunger.

I choked on a scream as one of them slid higher, brushing my thigh, leaving a smear of something dark and shining behind on my ripped Levi's.

And I swear to God, that was it. I checked out of life, of death. Absolutely fucking exited the universe.

I fumbled with the seatbelt, nearly strangling myself in the process, before it finally snapped free with a sharp click. My hand slapped at the door handle once, twice—

Then it gave.

I bailed.

Cold air slammed into me as I stumbled out, boots hitting gravel hard, knees nearly buckling as I lurched away from the car. Adrenaline hit like a freight train, breath ripping out of me in sharp, uneven bursts as I scrambled away, putting distance between me and my car as metal screamed from behind me. 

I twisted just in time to see the entire crappy, rusted frame give a violent shake. The hood buckled upward with a violent snap—

And then the whole damn Pontiac lifted off the ground and got thrown.

I threw myself the rest of the way as the car launched sideways, spinning through the air in a slow, horrifying arc, one door ripping clean off as it went. The radio was still blasting, the music stretching into something almost unrecognizable as the whole thing flipped and slammed into the ground twenty feet away with a deafening CRASH. 

The impact shook the gravel under my boots. Glass exploded outward in a glittering spray.

The hood crumpled. The frame twisted. And for a second, I lay there, sunglasses halfway down my face, staring at what used to be my car.

After about five minutes, I exhaled through my nose, slowly, then reached into my jacket, totally done with this night. My fingers found my box of Camels, shook one loose, and I slid it between my lips. Fortunately, I had a spare lighter in my other pocket, flicked it once, a cheap spark, and leaned in just enough to catch.

I sat there in the gravel, cigarette glowing faint between my fingers, watching as a fire started to chew through what used to be my car. “Yeah,” I said finally, exhaling smoke into the cold air. “This town and I are gonna have problems.”