The New Record

As Eli switched off the car’s barely cool air conditioning, he rolled the window down in hopes that the night air would gain him some relief from the stench.

Window.

Singular.

Believe it or not, this piece of junk car still had manual windows on a crank. Eli was at least lucky enough to have a functioning radio. That doesn’t always happen.

As he searched through some radio stations to find one he liked, he found that nearly every station was broadcasting the same emergency report. It was all anybody could talk about. Not surprising for a small town, but it still annoyed Eli that he couldn’t find a decent song to keep him company. The radio stations went on and on about a curfew and how nobody should go outside alone. They said that until the three missing people had been found, everybody should stay alert and vigilant.

This town was such a run-down mess. He wondered how they could even tell if people were missing in the first place. Every street corner he passed was decrepit. No more than a minute after this thought crossed his mind, he came to a stop light.

A small group of young men were gathered on the sidewalk nearest to Eli and they stared at him as he waited for the light to turn green. To Eli’s dismay, one of the young men walked to his driver’s side open window. In a deep and taunting voice, the young man made a comment about how he shouldn’t be driving around alone right now. And didn’t he know that there was a killer on the loose? Eli tried to sound confident and tell the man off, but it came out as meaningless and weak.

The man laughed and said something inaudible towards his friends that made them all snicker. The sly smiles that appeared on their faces made Eli aware that a green light wasn’t going to mean his freedom from this situation.

As Eli watched the group, he scarcely noticed the noise coming from the passenger side of the car. Almost as soon as he realized the door was opening, he felt something hard smash into the side of his head. With no time to react, it hit him again and again. Eli was certain that part of his skull must be showing as he felt liquid running rather intensely down the side of his neck. He felt his seatbelt unbuckle as he vomited all over himself. He was pulled out of the car by his shirt and then tossed to the asphalt.

Two of the men grabbed his legs and dragged him towards the back of his car. Eli felt his face scrape along the pavement as they pulled him. His wallet and phone were removed from his pockets, and they turned him onto his back. He watched as they popped the trunk open, assuming they were planning to put him in it.

Rather than hoist Eli up and toss him in, however, the man who had first approached Eli called the others to come over and inspect the contents of the trunk. Even with the amount of pain Eli was in, he couldn’t help but smile knowing what they must have found.

It would be quite shocking for anybody, Eli imagined, to find such a variety of human body parts.

Belonging to three different people to be exact.

The men were so confused by what they were seeing that they didn’t even notice Eli get up off the ground. They didn’t even notice that Eli had found the hammer that caved the side of his head in. But they did finally notice when Eli used the hammer to shatter one of the men’s cheek bones and then the top of his skull.

The men scattered off in various directions and Eli did not have enough strength to chase them. He reserved what little strength he had left for the man that lay screaming on the ground in front of him. Eli wasn’t sure if he would survive the night, but he was sure that four people from one town was his new record.