I should have known that something was wrong when I was able to start my car without the key fob.
I’d been looking for my keys for thirty minutes without luck and was running late. The fob is on a ring with my house key and a four-inch replica of a talon from a prehistoric carnivorous bird. Finally I thought maybe the keys were somewhere in the car and went to the garage to check.
They weren’t in the console or on the seat. But I thought maybe they’d fallen out of my pocket and into a crack or onto the floor. I started rooting around. Still no luck.
My car has a keyless ignition. It starts with a push-button as long as the fob is within a certain range. I pushed the button and the car started.
OK. So the keys had to be somewhere in the car. I figured I could continue rooting around in the cracks and under the seat while the car drove itself and by the time I got where I was going I would have found them. Like I said, I was late. And my car has a fully autonomous driving feature, allowing it to drive itself.
I didn’t use the feature too often. Made me nervous, what with all the stories you read about self-driving cars running over pedestrians or wedging themselves under semi trucks. But tonight was as good a time to use it as there would ever be.
My destination was already programmed into my phone, so I synced my phone with the onboard GPS and hit the drive command on the dashboard display.
The car backed itself out of the driveway and proceeded out of my darkened neighborhood and all was well, though I still couldn’t find my keys, not even after I adjusted the seat as far back as it could go and groped around on the floor for several minutes. I figured I’d have to find them when I got where I was going.
Focused on my search for the keys, I hadn’t been paying attention to where the car was taking me. But when I put the seat back in its driving position I looked out the windshield to discover I wasn’t where I should have been. That is, the car had taken a wrong turn and was driving away from town. Stupid car.
I grasped the wheel to take control. Normally as soon as you manually turn the wheel or hit the pedals the self-driving feature discontinues. Except now I did both – turned the wheel, hit the pedals one after another – without result. Not only did the car continue to drive itself but it didn’t respond to my commands. It was like the wheel and pedals weren’t connected to anything.
This was concerning.
I fought off panic as the car turned onto the highway. At least it was performing well, seamlessly merging and navigating traffic.
I kept tapping the dashboard display but nothing happened. I grabbed my phone to call the automaker or the police or someone but the screen was locked on the syncing screen with the spinning wheel that it briefly displays every time it syncs with the car. I powered down the phone but when it powered back up it was on the same screen.
For some reason I tried to unlock the door. It’s not like I was about to hurl myself out of a speeding car onto the highway but I guess I felt the need to do something, anything. It wouldn’t unlock. Nor would the windows go down. I was trapped.
The car drove and drove. Off the main highway onto a state road. Every now and then I’d try the locks and windows, just in case. Off the state road and onto back roads. On and on as the headlights coming the other direction gradually decreased in number, until it seemed like mine was the only car on the road, the only car in the world.
The silence of the road and the darkness of the night were hypnotic. I was near the water. The road threaded its way past marshes of thick brush and tall dead grass.
Finally along a desolate stretch the car slowed to a stop. It reversed, pulling perpendicular across the narrow two-lane road so that its headlights shone into the marsh’s thick, tangly scrub.
The doors unlocked.
For a moment I sat as if stunned, too surprised to move. Then I was throwing open the door and running. I don’t know where I thought I was going. I was in the middle of nowhere on an unfamiliar road and didn’t know which direction was more likely to lead me to civilization.
After about thirty yards I stopped, taking heavy breaths of fetid, brackish air. I turned around. The car was in the same position.
How long had it been since I’d seen a house in the direction from which I’d come? Fifteen minutes? Maybe ten miles? I could walk that. It would take me a while and I’d be alone in the dark in the marsh but I could do it. So I started back in that direction, which meant walking past the car.
I took a few steps and the car blinked its headlights. Once, twice. I paused. It beeped its horn – a flat, forlorn sound in the moonless dark. I took another step and the headlights blinked again.
Again I paused. Now the car reversed a few feet, advanced a few feet, reversed a few feet, advanced a few feet, back and forth, as if to emphasize the direction of its headlights.
Was it possible? Was the car trying to tell me something?
I approached it warily. Stood beside it, staring in the direction of its lights. The night which I would have expected to resound with bug chatter was silent as stone. The headlights blinked again.
This time when they flicked back on I thought I saw something. What might’ve been the beginning of a path through the thick, forbidding scrub. I walked in front of the car for a closer look and indeed it appeared that there was a narrow passage.
Of course the idea was preposterous that the car had wanted me to find this path. Or so I told myself as I began to walk it. The going was slow, the footing uncertain. The headlights through the scrub cast jagged shadows and grew fainter as I went until it seemed they weren’t helping at all.
“This is stupid,” I said aloud, and stopped. I turned around to go back.
When I did, however, the car’s headlights cut out. Only in the pitch darkness did I appreciate how much they’d been helping me navigate after all.
“OK, fine,” I said, turning around once more to go further into the brush. The headlights came back on.
It wasn’t much longer before I found it. Found her.
A tree had fallen to create a small clearing and as I emerged from the trail I saw her there smiling at me. Except no, not smiling. It was just that most of her face was gone, revealing her teeth and jaw.
I don’t know how long I stood there looking at her. It was like my mind and body shut down, a wheel and pedals no longer connected to anything.
I say her but that was a guess. The body must have been there for some time, exposed to the elements and the wetland scavengers, because all that was left that suggested it was a woman were a few scraps of clothing. That and the fact that as my mind began to work again I immediately connected the body to the missing women. Not in my town but in a town about an hour north of mine, a town I’d lived in for a while when I was younger, shortly out of school.
The disappearances had been in the news and people were talking. I hadn’t been paying close attention but it was the kind of thing if you lived in the area you couldn’t help but hear.
Poor woman. It was so lonely out here. A lonely place to end up.
This time when I turned around and began heading back along the path the headlights stayed on. It really was as though the car had wanted me to make this discovery. Emerging onto the road I looked for some way to distinguish this spot but it looked the same in both directions as far as I could see. I got back into the car to grab my phone to call the police but my phone was still locked. And now that I was in the driver’s seat the car righted itself on the road and began to drive.
“Wait,” I said as if the car could understand. “How am I supposed to know where to tell people to find her?” There were no signs or markers or anything. But the car was not to be reasoned with.
It drove the lonely road. I was no more than mildly surprised when it stopped again, pulling across the road as it had before, shining its headlights into the marsh.
Another narrow passage. Another place the car wanted me to go. So I did.
I knew the body was close because I could smell it. There’s an undertone of rot in the typical smell of a marsh but this was something else.
The woman hadn’t been dead as long as the first and was still decomposing. I didn’t have to be a forensics expert to know that. There was enough of her left to get a sense of what she must have looked like in life.
Long dark hair. Now I remembered from the news stories. All the missing women had long dark hair. It seemed the killer had a type.
How cruel and illogical that these women were marked for a horrible fate due to something so arbitrary.
Back to the car. Before climbing in I tried to fix the place in my mind so that I could lead people there. It wouldn’t be easy. But it would probably be enough to identify the general vicinity, to narrow down the search.
Only as the car set off again did the reality of the situation hit me. Because cars are not sentient. They can, however, be programmed. Programmed perhaps by someone who knew where the women could be found.
A tingling sensation on the back of my neck. I turned around, checked the backseat as if the killer might be hiding on the floor, biding his time. The backseat was empty.
The car stopped again. Pulled across the road.
A sudden thought: What if the killer was out there in the marsh? Waiting for me?
Logic told me not to go. But the car flashed its lights, arguing otherwise. As crazy as it sounds, it really seemed as though the car was trying to communicate. As though someone was trying to communicate to me through the car.
I’d purchased the car in the town where the girls had gone missing, drawn there by the local dealer’s incentives. A coincidence? Or could one of the victims have programmed the car? But then how could she have known what would happen?
Maybe I didn’t understand how the programming worked. Maybe there was a way. It didn’t matter. What mattered is that I was here now and had to do what I had to do.
Into the brush once more.
For one brief moment when the woman came into view I thought I recognized her but thank god I was wrong. I hadn’t seen my ex since we’d broken up shortly after school but no, this wasn’t her. This woman was younger than my ex would be by now. And she hadn’t been here long. The wound that must have killed her was still distinguishable, still fresh – a deep jagged gash across her throat.
Her hand lay across her chest, caked with blood that ran down from one encrusted fingernail. She’d put up a fight, it seemed, gouging her assailant. Good for her.
I got back in the car willing to go wherever it would take me. Prepared to bear witness to whatever horrors it would show me. For whatever reason I had been given this purpose. But the car didn’t stop again in the marsh. It made its way back to the highway.
Still I didn’t take the wheel or man the pedals. Somehow I suspected the night wasn’t over. The car had places yet to take me, things yet to show me.
The first thing it showed me was my keys. I looked over and they were sitting on the passenger seat. House key, fob, replica talon. As if materialized from nowhere. It wasn’t that I’d overlooked them. No, they were right in the middle of the seat.
I was puzzling over this discovery when I realized the car wasn’t taking me home. It had exited off one highway onto another – the one that led to the town where the women had gone missing. Which made sense. That’s where I would need to report my discoveries.
But how would I explain them? The truth wouldn’t sound believable. Maybe an anonymous tip? But it would be more difficult to direct the authorities where to look if I weren’t along for the ride. I spent most of the trip thinking through the possibilities, formulating a plan.
Finally, after about forty-five minutes, the car exited the highway and pulled into town. It remained familiar to me even though it seemed long ago that I’d lived here with my ex. Each block seemed to bring back another bad memory. I tried to push them away and concentrate on where the car was going.
It stopped at the end of a cross street in front of a little house. It too seemed familiar though I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t the one that I’d lived in with my ex. Similar yes but not the same.
It didn’t make sense. The car should’ve taken me to the police station. I didn’t understand why I was here.
I also didn’t understand how it was that I knew who lived here. A woman I was sure I’d never met. She lived alone. She had long dark hair. Where was it my car had taken me? Where did it mean to take me?
Suddenly I felt like I had to get out. But when I tried the door it was locked. The car had one more thing to show me. The sun visor dropped down in front of me and the light beside the vanity mirror clicked on.
Down the side of my face ran a long crimson scab.
The doors unlocked. Ah yes my programming. Here I was at my destination and just in time. I grabbed my keys, held them in my fist so that the talon jutted out between my fingers, and stepped into the night.