The Backpack

My two friends and I were going on a hiking trip in the Swiss Alps. It was something that we all were very excited about and had planned for months. We were all avid hikers and were all looking for new experiences, so when we heard that hiking in the Alps would be an adventure of a lifetime, we just had to cross it off our bucket lists.

It was about mid-morning when my two friends—we’ll call them Paul and Mary—packed into a rental car that we had rented for the week. We were going through Susten Pass, which gave us breathtaking views even before the trails we were looking to hit. To say the least, we were all in very high spirits and up for just about anything. That’s when Paul, who was driving started slowing down. I, in the back, wondered what was happening and asked him and Mary why we were slowing down.

“Well,” Paul replied. “Look at that person up ahead.”

I crept forward from my seat in the back, sticking my head in the front seats.

“Oh, yea,” I replied. “A hitchhiker. What about it,” I asked, not thinking much about it at the time.

“We should pick him up.”

I looked up ahead to a tall, lanky man who appeared to be in his mid 30’s, sticking his thumb out. There was also something else that I noticed and, as I was about to point it out, Mary chimed in.

“His backpack looks just like yours, eh?”

I looked down at mine, which sat to my left. It was yellow with black zippers and loops. There was nothing really special about it.

“Okay,” I replied. “Funny,” I placated.

“Well, maybe he’ll think it’s funny, too,” Paul added.

“I don’t know,” I nervously responded. “Isn’t it dangerous to pick up hitchhikers?”

My friends scoffed and made whimpering noises as they teased me.

“Oh come on, Kate,” they replied.

For the sake of this story, my name is Kate.

“Look,” Paul added. “This isn’t L.A. or some dark, wooded backroad that you’re used to in America.”

I should also point out that my friends are from a very trusting, safe part of Canada.

How we still hang out while I’m in L.A. is for another story.

I rolled my eyes, took their jabs, and reluctantly nodded.

“Alright,” the two in front of me cheered. Paul stopped the car and within seconds the hitchhiker opened the door that Paul gestured to and slid on in next to me. I scooched over to give him some room and he greeted me with a big, toothy grin and some broken English. It sounded like ‘Thank you for the ride’, but I only understood a ‘Thank’ and ‘ride’. He set his backpack down next to mine and pointed, exclaiming something in Swiss that I didn’t understand. Mary had been studying a bit of Swiss, so she kind of understood him. So, I looked at her to get a translation and she just shrugged. I guess she had skipped a day or two of study.

“Sounds like slang,” she mouthed to me, excusing her poor comprehension of our passenger’s dialect.

For a while the car ride was uncomfortably silent. Our passenger had no way to speak to us and vise versa. We not only had to think of the topic to talk about but also the words to express it alongside hand gestures. But what was really uncomfortable was that the hitchhiker was just looking at me, breaking eye contact every so often to look down at our backpacks and briefly spout off in some incoherent babble.

As a bend in the road came, something unexpected arrived with it. At a speed of around 60 the hitchhiker just opened the door and stuck his foot out. The noise of the door opening made everyone look at him and freak the fuck out. Was he going to jump? Paul pressed down hard on the break and everything went every which way for the moment. As the car came to a stop, the hitchhiker just hauled ass out of the car, backpack and all, and made for the tree line just beyond the road.

At this point we were all pretty freaked out. We had never seen anyone do anything like this before and, with all of us just shocked about this suicidal hitchhiker, we all sat in silence for what seemed like an hour. Paul snapped out of it first and pulled back into the highway and onwards towards our destination. Mary and I eventually joined him and began to soak in the breathtaking scenery like we had before. However, I still couldn’t get that hitchhiker out of my head; the way he looked at me and smiled, what he might have been saying when he did speak, and why he fuck he just decided to jump out of a moving vehicle.

About 30 minutes after that incident we were at the trail heads and anxious to take on nature. The sun was coming out and it was warming up pretty decently. That, paired with the climb really gave us the challenge we’d been looking for. The trail had been pretty quiet, with only a couple of other hikers passing us by. Paul was up ahead of me and I was in the middle with Mary trailing behind. About an hour into the hike I was really starting to perspire. I sweat easily, just so you know. It was well into this soak that Mary called out to me.

“Kate, what’s that?”

I stopped in my tracks and looked back at her. She was pointing to something on my leg.

“You hurt or something?”

I looked down, still unsure of what she was talking about. But that’s when I saw it. A couple of droplets of blood had landed on the back of my calf and had started to slightly run down as I had been walking. I just hadn’t noticed them.

“I don’t think so,” I replied, looking for a cut or something. We had gone through some bushes, so I was thinking that maybe a branch had taken a swipe at me and I just hadn’t noticed.

That’s when something dripped from me onto a rock just in the line of my peripherals. It was blood again.

“What’s that,” I called out? Mary saw it too.

Paul had now stopped and started walking towards us to investigate the commotion.

“Kate, your shorts,” he noticed.

I looked to where he was pointing and saw a small patch of red start to stain the top of my tan shorts. That’s when we all saw another drop of blood coming from the bottom of the backpack. We all freaked the fuck out and the two rushed up to grab it off of me. As this happened, Paul’s arm brushed my sweat-soaked shirt and I saw that his elbow now had a reddish hue to it. I took off my shirt and stood there, in only my sports bra, examining my shirt, which was red in color. That’s why we hadn’t noticed the blood before. But more concerning than that was where it all came from. The backpack. We now all stood before it, looking at each other before one of us—Paul—reached for the zipper and pulled them apart. He opened the backpack a bit. But when we couldn’t quite see what was in there, he opened it further. I was expecting to see the clothes I had packed for the trip, but instead I was met with something else. Plastic.

Nothing in my backpack was wrapped in plastic. That could only mean one thing. But before I could get to that, Paul was already separating the plastic, his curiosity driving him. As he pulled back the layers of plastic we all screamed and stumbled back. My heart had never raced so much and I had never before felt such a need to vomit.

Looking up at us from inside the backpack was a human head. But what was the most frightening part was that it looked almost exactly like me. Blonde hair, cream complexion, and deep blue eyes. And then it hit me, why that hitchhiker couldn’t take his eyes off of me. It was some kind of morbid déjà vu to him. And in the process of him getting out, the most unsettling part of it all was that he now had my backpack. My clothes, my address book. Just about everything he needed to track me down.

There on the trail, the three of us just looked at each other, wondering what to do. We were in a foreign country. We had a fucking head in a backpack. And we needed to get back home. There, we all made the hardest decision of our lives. To let a murderer go free so we couldn’t. And with that decided, we took the backpack, covered up the head in plastic again, then put rocks in it, then hid it as best we could and ran the fuck back to the car.

The rest of the trip and even now as I recollect this I’m always going to wonder if that killer would make good use of the address book and other such information I had in the backpack he mistakenly took instead of his own. I also wonder if he’s still out there looking for me and for a way to replace what he misplaced. But we all know for certain. None of us will ever pick up a hitchhiker for as long as we live. Not even on the pretense of a funny coincidence.