The Man In The Passenger Seat by Bentley Little

Of the thousands of writers who've submitted material to this series over the years, only one has managed to place a story in every volume thus far—Bentley Little. A winner of the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 1991, he is quickly establishing himself as a major voice in HDF for the Nineties. For me, his short stories, even the ones I reject (and there have been many), have a compelling quality about them. They make you want to keep reading, even if you don't really "like" them. He has the ability to create images that are so singular, so bizarre, that you can't get them out of your head. When a writer does that on a consistent basis, he is nothing less than wonderfully original, and that's why Bentley has been along for the ride three times running. And speaking of rides, check out the modern fable that follows.

Brian was already late for work, but he knew that if he didn't deposit his paycheck this morning he'd be overdrawn. His credit rating was already hovering just above the lip of the toilet, and he couldn't afford another bounced check.

With only a quick glance at the clock on the dashboard, he pulled into the First Interstate parking lot. He grabbed a pen, deposit slip and his paycheck from the seat next to him and sprinted across the asphalt to the bank's instant teller machine. Behind him he heard the sound of a car door slamming, and he glanced back at his Blazer as he pulled out his ATM card.

Someone was sitting in the passenger seat of his car.

His heart lurched in his chest. For a split second he considered going through with the deposit transaction and then going back to his car to deal with the intruder—Kendricks was going to be climbing all over his ass for being late as it was—but he realized that whoever had climbed into his vehicle might be attempting to steal it, and he pocketed his card and hurried back to the Blazer.

Why the hell hadn't he locked the car?

He pulled open the driver's door. Across from him, in the passenger seat, hands folded in his lap, was a monstrously overweight man wearing stained polyester pants and a too-small woman's blouse. Long black hair cascaded about the man's shoulders in greasy tangles. The car was filled with a foul sickening stale smell.

Brian looked at the man. "This is my car," he said, forcing a toughness he did not feel.

"Eat my dick with Brussels sprouts." The man grinned, revealing rotted stumpy teeth.

A wave of cold washed over Brian. This was not real. This was not happening. This was something from a dream or a bad movie. He stared at the man, not sure of what to say or how to respond. He noticed that the time on the dashboard clock was five after eight. He was already late, and he was getting later by the second.

"Get out of my car now!" he ordered. "Get out or I'll call the police!"

"Get in," the man said. "And drive."

He should run, Brian knew. He should take off and get the hell out of there, let the man steal his car, let the police and the insurance company handle it. There was nothing in the Blazer worth his life.

But the man might have a gun, might shoot him in the back as he tried to escape.

He got in the car.

The stench inside was almost overpowering. The man smelled of breath and broccoli, old dirt and dried sweat. Brian looked him over carefully as he slid into the seat. The man was not holding a gun in his hand, there was no sign of a weapon at all.

"Drive," the man said.

Brian nodded. Hell yes, he'd drive. He'd drive straight to the goddamn police station and let the cops nail this crazy bastard's ass.

He pulled onto Euclid and started to switch over to the left lane, but the man said, "Turn right."

He was not sure whether he should obey the request or not. The police station was only three blocks away, and there was still no indication that the man was carrying any sort of weapon—but there was something in the strange man's voice, a hint of danger, an aura of command, that made him afraid to disobey.

He turned right onto Lincoln.

"The freeway," the man said.

Brian felt his heart shift into overdrive, the pumping in his chest cavity accelerate. It was too late now, he realized. He'd made a huge mistake. He should have run when he had the chance. He should have sped to the police station when he had the chance. He should have—

He pulled onto the freeway.

Several times over the past two years, on the way to work, he had dreamed of doing this, had fantasized about hanging a left onto the freeway instead of continuing straight toward the office, about heading down the highway and just driving, continuing on to Arizona, New Mexico, states beyond. But he had never in his wildest imaginings thought that he would actually be doing so while being kidnapped, hijacked, at the behest of an obviously deranged man.

Still, even now, even under these conditions, he could not help feeling a small instinctive lift as the car sped down the on ramp and merged with the swiftly flowing traffic. It was not freedom he felt—how could it be under the circumstances—but more the guilty pleasure of a truant boy hearing the school bell ring. He had wanted to skip work and shirk his responsibilities so many times, and now he was finally doing it. He looked over at the man in the passenger seat.

The man smiled, twirling a lock of hair between his fingers. "One, two, eat my poo. Three, four, eat some more."

Brian gripped the steering wheel, stared straight ahead, drove.

There was no traffic, or very little. They travelled east, in the opposite direction of most of the commuters, and the city gradually faded into suburbs, the suburbs into open land. After an hour or so, Brian grew brave enough to talk, and several times he made an effort to communicate with the man and ask where they were going, why this was happening, but the man either did not answer or answered in gibberish, obscene non sequiturs.

Another hour passed.

And another.

They were travelling through high desert now, flatland with scrub brush, and Brian looked at the clock on the dashboard. Ordinarily, he would be taking his break at this time, meeting Joe and David for coffee in the break room. He thought of them now. Neither, he knew, would really miss him. They would file into the break room as they always did, get their coffee from the machine, sit down at the same table at which they always sat, and when they saw that he wasn't there, they'd shrug and begin their usual conversation.

Now that he thought about it, no one at the company would miss him. Not really. They'd be temporarily inconvenienced by his absence and would curse him for not being there to perform his regular duties, but they would not miss him.

They would not care enough to call and see if he was all right.

That's what really worried him. The fact that no one would even know he'd been abducted. Someone from Personnel might call his apartment—the machinery of bureaucracy would be automatically set in motion and a perfunctory effort would be made to determine why he was not at work—but there would be no reason to assume that anything bad had happened to him. No one would suspect foul play. And he was not close enough to any of his co-workers that one of them would make a legitimate effort to find out what had happened to him.

He would just disappear and be forgotten.

He glanced over at the man in the passenger seat. The man grinned, grabbed his crotch. "Here's your lunch. I call it Ralph."

Shapes sprang up from the desert. Signs. And beyond the signs, buildings. A billboard advertised McDonalds, two miles ahead, State Street exit. Another, with the name of a hotel on it, showed a picture of a well-endowed woman in a bikini lounging by a pool.

A green sign announced that they were entering Hayes, population 15,000, elevation 3,000.

Brian looked over at his passenger. A growling whirr spiraled upward from the depths of the man's stomach, and he pointed toward the tall familiar sign of a fast food restaurant just off the highway. "Eat," he said.

Brian pulled off the highway and drove into the narrow parking lot of the hamburger stand. He started to park in one of the marked spaces, but the man shook his head violently, and Brian pulled up to the microphoned menu in the drive-thru. "What are we getting?" he asked.

The man did not answer.

A voice of scratchy static sounded from the speaker. "May I take your order?"

Brian cleared his throat. "A double cheeseburger, large fries, an apple turnover and an extra-large Coke."

He looked over at the man in the passenger seat, quizzically, but the man said nothing.

"That'll be four-fifteen at the window."

Brian pulled forward, stopping when his window was even with that of the restaurant.

"Four—" the teenaged clerk started to say.

"Gonads!" the man yelled. "Gonads large and small!" He reached over Brian and grabbed the sack of food from the windowed shelf. Before the clerk could respond, the man had dropped to the floor and pushed down the gas pedal with his free hand. The car lurched forward, Brian trying desperately to steer as they sped out of the parking lot and into the street.

The man sat up, dumping the contents of the bag in Brian's lap. The car slowed down, and there was a squeal of brakes as the pickup truck behind them tried to avoid a collision.

"Asshole!" the pickup driver yelled as he pulled past them. He stuck out his middle finger.

The man grabbed a handful of french fries from Brian's lap.

"Drive," he said.

"Look—" Brian began.

"Drive."

They pulled back onto the highway.

A half-hour later they caught up with the pickup. Brian probably would not have noticed and would have passed the vehicle without incident, but, without warning, the man in the passenger seat rolled down his window, grabbed the half-empty cup of Coke from Brian's hand and threw it outside. His aim was perfect. The cup sailed across the lane, through the open window of the pickup truck and hit the driver square in the face. The man screamed in pain and surprise, swerving out-of-control. The pickup sped off the shoulder and down an embankment, colliding with a small palo verde tree.

"Asshole," the man said.

He chuckled, his laugh high and feminine.

Brian looked over at his passenger. Despite his throwing capabilities, the man was grossly overweight and in terrible physical condition, no match for himself. He turned his attention back to the road. They would have to stop for gas soon—at the next town if they weren't pulled over first—and he knew that he would be able to escape at that time. He would be able to either run away or kick the shit out of the obese bastard.

But though he wanted desperately to kick the shit out of the crazy fucker, he wasn't sure he really wanted to escape. Not yet, anyway. He didn't seem to be in any physical danger, and if he were to be perfectly honest with himself, he was almost, kind of, sort of having fun. In some perverse, almost voyeuristic way, he was enjoying this, and he knew that if he allowed the situation to remain as is, he would not have to go back to work until they were caught—and he wouldn't even be penalized, he could blame it all on his abduction.

But that was insane. He wasn't thinking right. He'd been brainwashed or something, riding with the man. Like Patty Hearst.

After only a few hours?

"Holy shit," the man said. He laughed to himself in that high-pitched voice. "Holy shit."

Brian ignored him.

The man withdrew from his pants pocket a small, lumpy, strangely irregular brown rock. "I bought it from a man in Seattle. It's the petrified feces of Christ. Holy shit." He giggled. "They found it Lebanon."

Brian ignored him, concentrating on the road. On second thought, he wasn't having fun. This was too damn loony to be fun. But the man was finally talking to him, speaking in coherent sentences.

"We need gas," the man said. "Let's stop at the next town."

Brian did not escape at the gas station, though he had ample opportunity. He could have leaped out of the car and ran. He could have said something to the station attendant. He could have gone to the bathroom and not come back.

But he stayed in the car, paid for the gas with his credit card.

They took off.

For the next hour or so, both of them were silent, although Brian did a lot of thinking, trying to guess what was going to happen to him, trying to project a future end to this situation. Every so often, he would glance over at his passenger. He noticed that, out here, on the highway, the man did not seem so strange. Here, with the window open, he did not even smell as bad. What had seemed so bizarre, so frightening, in the parking lot of the bank, in the business-suited world of the city, seemed only slightly odd out here on the highway. They drove past burly bikers, disheveled pickup drivers, Hawaiian-shirted tourists, and Brian realized that here there was no standard garb, no norm by which deviation could be measured. Manners and mores did not apply. There were only the rules of the road, broad guidelines covering driving etiquette.

Inside the sealed worlds of individual cars, it was anything goes. Brian did not feel comfortable with the man. Not yet. But he was getting used to him, and it was probably only a matter of time before he came to accept him.

That was truly terrifying.

Brian squinted his eyes. Ahead of them, on the side of the road, was a stalled car, a Mercedes with its hood up. Standing next to the vehicle, partially leaning against the trunk, was an attractive young lady, obviously a professional woman, a career woman, with short blond hair and a blue jacket/skirt ensemble that spoke of business.

"Pull over," the man said.

Brian slowed, stopping next to the Mercedes.

"That's okay," the woman began. "A friend of mine has already gone to find a phone to call Triple A—"

"Get in the car!" The man's voice was no longer high and feminine but was low and rough, filled with an authority backed by a veiled threat of violence.

Brian saw the woman's eyes dart quickly around, assessing her options. There was no place to run on the flat desert, but she was obviously trying to decide if she could make it into the Mercedes and close her windows and lock her doors in time. Or if that would even help.

He wanted to tell her to run, to get the hell away from the road, that they wouldn't leave the road to find her, that the man never got out of the car. He wanted to shift into gear and take off, leaving her there safe and unharmed.

But he remained in place, did nothing.

"Get in the car, bitch!" The violence implied in the man's voice was no longer so covert.

The woman's eyes met Brian's, as if searching there for help, but he looked embarrassedly away.

"Get—" the man started to say.

She opened the door and got into the back seat of the Blazer.

"Drive," the man said.

Brian drove.

None of them spoke for a long time. The landscape changed, became less sandy, more rocky, hilly canyons substituting for rolling dunes. Brian looked at the clock on the dashboard. He would be just getting off his afternoon break now, walking through the hallway from the break room to his desk.

"Panties," the man in the passenger seat said.

Brian turned his head.

Frightened, the woman looked from him to the now grinning man. "What?"

"Panties."

The woman licked her lips. "Okay," she said, her voice trembling. "Okay, I'll take them off. Just don't hurt me."

She reached under her skirt, arched her back and pulled off her underwear. In the rearview mirror, Brian caught a glimpse of tanned thigh and black pubic hair. And then the panties were being handed forward, clean and white and silk.

"Stop," the man said.

Brian pulled over, stopping the car. From the pocket of his blouse, the man took out a black Magic Marker. He laid the underwear flat on his knee and began drawing on the cloth, hiding his work with one greasy hand. When he was done, he rolled down his window and reached outside, to the front, grabbing the radio antenna and pulling it back. He quickly and expertly pressed the metal antenna through the white silk and let it bounce back.

The panties flew at the top of the antenna like a flag.

On them he had drawn a crude skull and crossbones.

"Now we are whole," he said. He grinned. "Drive."

The day died slowly, putting up a struggle against the encroaching night, bleeding orange into the sky. Brian's muscles were tired, fatigued from both tension and a day's worth of driving. He stretched, yawned, squirmed in his seat, trying to keep himself awake. "I need some coffee," he said. "I—"

"Stop."

He pulled onto the sandy shoulder.

"Your turn," the man said to the woman.

She nodded, terrified. "Okay. Just don't hurt me."

The two of them traded places, the woman getting behind the wheel as Brian settled into the back seat.

"Drive."

Brian slept. He dreamed of a highway that led through nothing, a black line of asphalt that stretched endlessly through a desolate featureless void. The void was empty, but he was not lonely. He was alone, but he was driving, and he felt good.

When he awoke, the woman was naked.

The driver's window was open, and the woman was shivering, her teeth chattering. None of her garments appeared to be still in the car save her bra, which was stretched between the door handle and the glove compartment, over the man's legs, and held two thermos cups filled with coffee. From this angle, Brian could see that her nipples were erect, and he found that strangely exciting.

It had been a long time since he'd seen a woman naked.

Too long.

He looked at the woman. No doubt she thought that he and the man in the passenger seat were both criminals, were partners, fellow kidnappers. Since she had come aboard, he had not behaved like a prisoner or a captive and had not been treated like one. He had also not made an effort to let the woman know that he was on her side, that they were in the same position, although he was not quite sure why. Perhaps, on some level, he enjoyed the false perception, was proud, in some perverse way, to be associated with the man in the passenger seat.

But that couldn't be possible.

Could it?

His gaze lingered on the woman's nipples. It could. In a strange way, he was glad he'd been kidnapped. Not simply because he'd had a chance to see a nude woman, but because an experience this extreme gave perspective to everything else. He knew now that, prior to that moment in the bank parking lot, he had not been living. He'd been simply existing. Going to work, eating, going to sleep, going to work. The motions had been comfortable, but they had not been real, not life but an imitation of life.

This was life.

It was horrible, it was frightening, it was dangerous, it was crazy, and he did not know what was going to happen from one moment to the next, but for the first time in memory he felt truly alive. He was not comfortable, he was not merely existing. Travelling through the darkness toward an unknown destination with a man insane, he feared for his safety, he feared for his sanity.

But he was alive.

"We killed father first," the man in the passenger seat said. His voice was low, serious, almost inaudible, and it sounded as though he was talking to himself, as though he did not want anyone else to hear. "We amputated his limbs with the hacksaw made from mother's bones and sold his parts for change. We killed sister second, gutting her like a flopping fish on the chopping block..."

Brian was lulled by the words, by their rhythm.

Again he fell asleep.

When he awoke, both the woman and the man were standing in front of the car. It was daytime, and they were on the outskirts of a large city. Houston, perhaps, or Albuquerque. The woman was still naked, and there were frequent honks and excited whoops from men who passed by in cars.

Brian stared through the windshield. The man held, in one hand, half of the woman's now torn bra, and he dipped a finger in the attached thermos cup as she fell to her knees. He placed his coffee wet finger on her forehead as though anointing her.

He returned to the car alone.

Brian watched the naked woman run across the highway and down the small embankment on the other side without looking back.

The man got into the passenger seat and closed his door.

"Where are we going?" Brian asked. He realized as he spoke the words that he was asking the question not as a prisoner, not as a captive, but as a fellow traveller... as a companion. He did not fear the answer, he was merely curious.

The man seemed to sense this, for he smiled, and there was humor in the smile. "Does it matter?"

Brian thought for a moment. "No," he said finally.

"Then drive."

Brian looked at the clock on the dashboard and realized that he didn't know what he would ordinarily be doing now.

The man grinned broadly, knowingly. "Drive."

Brian grinned back. "All right," he said. "All right."

He put the Blazer into gear.

They headed east.