u/IBeFearster

If, one night, you happen to be walking down a street called Prince Avenue, and you see me, please, don’t pet me.

I walk the street every night, taking breaks in the alleys or seeing if Samuel’s around. I pace up and down the block, looking for any signs of life. Mostly, all I see is the moths fighting over the light of streetlamps. There’s not a lot of people who walk this part of town; its location has led the rest of the city to deem it ‘unsafe’. They’re technically correct, but they have no idea why. 

Sometimes I come across other dogs. Even dozens of feet away, their gaze immediately shifts to me, and as I approach they start to whimper. Without fail, they will bolt away before I even try to give chase. This is because avoiding danger has been hardwired into their brains. Dogs have much better instincts than humans do. 

The buildings around here are all boarded up and entirely abandoned. People’s perception about this part of the city is that it is ‘riddled with crime’; by some definitions it is, but the true culprits can never be prosecuted. Not that the culprits could ever be caught. Cops generally stay out of this area; the unhoused do as well. Any appeal the buildings may have had went up in smoke after the ninth disappearance. 

For some unlucky few, they end up here, thinking it will be a temporary setback. This street is located next to an exit right off a major highway, the last bastion of decay before driver’s reach destinations bustling with life. There are a few things that may bring them here; it’s the only street near the city that still has functional payphones. The cheapest gas station for miles is here too; Samuel has an agreement with the owner that we won’t bother him, and he’ll look the other way when people disappear.

Samuel has a couple measures to make sure people stick around as long as they have to. He’s littered the roads with debris, sharp enough to flatten tires but inconspicuous enough to go unnoticed. He’s made sure that mobile reception is bad, so that people are sometimes inclined to find someone to ask for directions to get back onto the freeway. But mainly, he uses me. 

If I hear a car coming down the exit ramp, I head to the gas station. 9 times out of 10 that’s where they are going. If I see no sign of the car, I head to the payphone. Most of the rest end up there. Whether at the station or the phone, my job remains the same. I will run up to them. I will jump up on my hind legs and lick their hand. I will make sure they have seen my shiny, golden collar. And then I will dart away, away from any respite of light, and towards the blackness the rest of the sidewalk holds. Most follow right away; if they don’t, I turn around and give them my saddest eyes. That gets almost all of them. I can only remember a few who’ve ignored me. Their callousness was, in this instance, the most important luck they’d ever have.

Everyone that does follow me is not so lucky. I lead them down the street, far away from any potential safety the gas station had to offer, and don’t stop until I duck into an alley. Then, I sit on my hind legs and wait. When the follower sees me, they kneel down and pet my head, once again see the golden placard stating “MAXWELL” that dangles from my neck, and say some variation of “How’d you get out here, buddy?”.

Samuel will have sensed my location by this point. He will start walking the street, calling my name. He walks with a cane. He pried it out of the hands of the 3rd guy we got in this area. Maybe it was the 4th. Samuel finds it disarms people; I think most are disarmed already because of me. 

The follower will turn around and see Samuel, who looks like a mildly feeble middle-aged man, and ask if I’m his dog. He will nod, and start walking down the alley, giving words of thanks. He will have made sure no one else was around when he was still on the sidewalk. He will offer his hand to shake; most will accept. It doesn’t really matter if they take it or not, as their fate had been sealed once they stepped foot in the alley. But Samuel finds the handshake makes things easier. He will keep the handshake going far too long, and then he will squeeze. Hard. So hard the person falls to their knees. And then Samuels face begins to change. His eyes roll back into his head, and start to shrink. His lips curl back, to make his mouth bigger; and his teeth grow and grow, getting sharper and sharper. His nose flattens; his tongue forks; his ears become jagged. The person’s horrified expression will be locked on Samuel the whole time; they will not look behind them to see me transform, too. My eyes also shrink; my teeth grow longer; my lips curl back; my tongue forks; my ears become jagged. Samuel will give me a small nod, and then I will sink my teeth into the person’s calf. It will come off into my mouth in one bite; Samuel has described it as like eating an oyster out of the shell. Samuel, too, begins to eat. 

Samuel has told me that people believe we like to suck blood. I am always far too hungry to stick to just that. Samuel has also told me that people believe that when they get bitten by us, they become one of us. I don’t see how this is possible. When me and Samuel finish eating, there isn’t enough left of the person to become anything. I don’t think that’s so bad, though; I don’t think becoming like us is all that great. It’s uneventful for the most part; but at night, I get so, so hungry. 

So, if you’re ever walking on Prince Avenue, or you’re at the Prince Avenue Gas Station, and a stray dog in a golden collar comes up to you, please, don’t pet me. I will jump on your leg. I will lick your hand. I will scurry away, then give you the saddest eyes I can if you don’t follow. But please, for your own sake, do not follow me into the darkness. It will feel heartless not to; but I promise, if you do follow, you soon won’t feel anything at all.

The snow beat down ceaselessly on the RAV-4 as it careened through the pitch black night. As Preston looked through the windshield, squinting to see the road as snowflakes pelted the glass with a violent aggression, he couldn’t help but feel that this was humanity’s ultimate triumph over nature. The outside was cold, bleak, and potentially lethal; and yet he and Trey sat comfortably in jeans and T-Shirts, blasting the car heater up to 70 and singing along to a Ween album. When they hit track 9, “Cold Blows the Wind”, Trey couldn’t help but give Preston a cheeky smile and say “Dude, how appropriate is this!”. By the time they hit “Ocean Man”, though, there was no appropriateness in the music related to their current setting. Preston was seriously considering stopping at the next building they saw; the road was getting far too difficult to navigate. “Pull up GPS and see what the nearest place we can stop is,” Preston said to Trey, eyes still glued to the road as a continous stream of white pellets clouded his view, “Hotel is preferred, but even a gas station or restaurant works”. For the past dozen miles, all there had been on either side of the road were empty fields, with occasional patches of forest. Preston wagered they hadn’t seen any sign of humanity in over an hour. Maybe serves us right he thought, For trying to do all our driving at night to avoid traffic. Still, he tried not to let how miserable driving in the snow was affect his attitude too much; even if the weather set them back a day, they would still reach the west coast, and thus the end of their road trip, much earlier than they would have if they’d traveled by daylight. “I’m not getting any signal”, said Trey, snapping Preston out of his thoughts, “Should I try to open to window a smidge and see that works?”. “I guess,” said Preston with a shrug, “but be careful. I dont want anything to-SHIT!”. Almost as soon as he had said it, and as soon as Trey had started to open to window, Trey’s phone was sucked out of his hands and went rocketing off into the darkness. Preston slammed on the brake, and then pulled the car over as far as he could to the side of the road. “Dude, I am so fucking sorry,” said Trey, hand dejectedly covering his eyes, “I swear I was prepared for it to be windy, but that literally felt like someone was yanking it out of my hands”. Preston half-nodded, already focusing on getting winter clothes out of the backseat. “It’s alright,” he said, forcing on a pair of gloves “Lets just try and get it back quick. I dont want to have to clear snow out from under the tires, and I would really like to not be sopping wet from snow when we get back on the road”. “Sounds good,” said Trey, forcing a beanie onto his head, “It can’t have gotten that far”.

They stepped out of the car, and were immediately rattled as a harsh wind chilled them to the bone. Trey pointed to the field right of the car and yelled “SHOULD BE OVER THERE” to Preston, who followed after him with heavy, labored steps. The field was blanketed entirely in snow, and Preston could see a small patch of forest to his left about 200 feet out. Straight ahead, however, he saw nothing but a flat plain of white powder. Trey was at least 20 feet ahead of him now, scanning the area as thoroughly as he could and being as frantic as the current weather conditions allowed. Preston looked aimlessly around. If Trey’s phone screen was still on, then that light should be obvious; and if it was off, then the black reflecting surface should have stood out in the snow. But Preston didn’t see sign of either; he wondered if maybe the phone had already been covered completely by snow, and the thought of having to dig for it made him sick to his stomach. He looked back to Trey, who now seemed impossibly far ahead; but it was still clear he had not found what they were looking for. Preston did the closest to running he could manage in Trey’s direction, trying to make up some ground. As he did so, he felt an odd coldness in his right glove. At first, he thought his glove was a little loose, and that it was just the wind blowing against his skin. But he looked at his hand and saw that his glove was borderline airtight. Moreover, this coldness didn’t feel like wind; it felt much more deliberate and calculated. Preston stopped his running, trying to pinpoint what exactly was happening. As he did so, he finally got words to describe the sensenation, and it instantly destroyed any sense of comfort he had remaining; it felt as if though someone else was forcing their hand into his glove. Almost as soon as the thought came into his head, the invisible hand seemed to violently grip Preston’s. Preston shrieked and he fumbled with the glove, deseparate to pull it away from his hand. He remembered that once, when he was very young, his grandfather had made the mistake of showing him an old B-movie that took place in a haunted castle. At one point, a man exploring the basement was grabbed by a skeleton, and the scene had kept him up for weeks. Now, the scene came back into his mind, as what felt like a long, boney hand held a vice grip on his own, its needle sharp fingertips digging into the webbing of his hand. He finally pried the glove from his hand and flung it into the darkness, just in time to hear Trey say “Dude, what the fuck are you doing?” Preston turned back, startled by Trey’s presence and still shaken from the feeling of the ghost hand. “I..the glove was feeling really weird, man. Like, I can’t really even describe it, but-” “Okay, whatever”, Trey interrupted, deciding his revelation was more important that whatever Preston was trying  to spit out, “It stopped snowing, and do you see that in the distance? I don’t know about you, but to me it looks like artificial light. I’m shocked that my phone got carried out that far, but I don’t know what else could be making that light out here.” Preston nodded, and they both took off towards the dim glow in the snow.

As they trounced through the snowy expanse, Preston kicked himself for not making the glove seem like a bigger deal to Trey. He probably doesn’t even remember me starting to tell him why I took it off, he thought, Goddammnit, the one time it fucking matters, you still don’t advocate for yourself. It's like what Michelle’s been telling you ever since the Halloween party, you never stand up to Trey. I should have never even let him open the window. I- His thoughts were cut off as they approached the light. While they were still about 10 feet away from its source, Preston could already tell that there was no way this was a phone light. For one, it was way too bright, but even more importantly, whatever was making the light was clearly circular. Preston’s jog slowed to a walk before eventually stopping in place. Trey, once he noticed, turn around and asked “What’s up?” “There’s no way thats your phone making the light, right?” Preston said, his gaze shifting to and from the illuminance and Trey’s face. Trey paused, looked at the light, then back towards Preston. “I don’t know, maybe the snow’s making it look weird? My phone or not, its artificial light, so I still want to see what it is”. He turned back around and started to head in the direction of the light, but Preston grabbed his shoulder. “Wait,” said Preston, turning Trey to face him “I don’t know, man. The shit that went on with my glove earlier geniunely creeped me the fuck out, and I don’t like that the snow went from violent to nonexistant in the span of a couple minutes. I say we head back to your car and look for your phone in the morning.” “Look, you think I think looking for my phone outside, at night, in the middle of nowhere, when its snowing on and off? But the sooner we find it, the sooner we can get the fuck out of here and find someplace to chill out at.” As Trey said this, he removed himself from Preston’s grip and started back towards the light source. After a few seconds of consideration, Preston begrudgingly followed. They approached the light, and as soon as its source became visible Preston felt pit in the stomach dread. It was a lightbulb; not attached to anything, and yet glowing as radiatly as the fluorescent bulbs in hospital rooms. The top of the bulb had a black dot on it (painted? Sharpie? Preston couldn’t tell) that made the entire thing look like a googly eye. Trey, apparently, did not have the same reservations; he reached down and plucked the lightbulb from the ground before Preston could get a word in edgewise. Trey rotated the bulb around in his hand, before holding it up to his ear. “What are you doing?” Preston asked, too unnerved to add any frustrated perjoratives to the question. “Do you hear that?” Trey said, removing the bulb from his ear and moving it towards Preston’s, “It sounds like…like music”. Preston reticently leaned his ear closer to the bulb, and as he did, he heard it. It sounded like the lightbulb was…humming. After a few seconds, he removed his ear from the bulb and looked up towards Trey. “Did you recognize the song?” he said, eyes wide. Trey quickly pressed the bulb back against his ear, and started listening intently. “Holy fuck,” he said, turning his eyes from the bulb towards Preston “Is that…Is that Cold Blows The Wind?” As soon as he said it, the lightbulb got impossibly bright, before exploding in Trey’s hand. An eruption of light forced Preston’s face backwards, and as he fell towards the ground he felt glass shards flying through his hair. 

After a minute, Preston forced himself off the ground and crawled his way towards Trey, whose pained moans were stifled by the fact that the violent snow had returned. Still, Preston could see that shards of glass dotted the side of Trey’s face, and blood flowed from the top of his ear down to his chin. “Jesus Christ dude, are you okay?” Preston asked, kneeling down next to Trey and attempting to force him up off the ground. “No,” said Trey, whose pained grimace was only matched by the fear in his eyes, “Listen”. Preston turned his gaze up from Trey and towards the open expanse. As he did so, he heard it. What sounded like the galloping footsteps of a pack of animals heading in their general direction. After a couple of seconds, he also felt that he could make out the sound of barking. “Wolves,” Trey sputtered, so afraid he was on the brink of tears, “Its fucking wolves, Preston”. “No,” said Preston, seeing a light piercing through the snow, “Its…dogs”. “What?”, said Trey, shaken from his fear by the absurdity of what Preston had just said. But turning around, he saw that Preston was right. A team of sled dogs was pounding through the dark, and as the light approached, they saw that the team’s captain was as stereotypical as could be. A large man, with a even larger beard in a gigantic winter hat, sat behind the reigns of the sled, holding a large lantern in his right hand. As the sled approached them, the dogs lessened their pace, until the sled came to a stop next to them. “You two look a little worse for wear,” the sled driver said, setting down the lantern and offering a hand “Need a lift back to the road?”. “Yes,” Trey said, before Preston could have time to retort, “Please”. The sled driver nodded and put his hands under Trey’s shoulders, before turning to Preston. “You grab his feet, and we’ll hoist him up here”. Preston nodded and took Trey’s ankles in his hands, before looking up at the sled driver. “Thanks for the help, man. If you don’t mind me asking, what…uh…what brings you out here of all places?” “I run the Idotarod up in Alaska each year,” he said, laying Trey down on the right side of the sled, “But I’m from around here, so when the weather gets like this, I find a flat field like this is a good training space for my boys”. He threw a thumb to point at the dog team, and Preston nodded. He sat next to Trey on the sled, and the musher took the reigns in his hands as the dogs restarted their pace. Preston looked down at Trey, whose eyes were closed and whose face held a pained expression. What a fucking night, Preston thought, I swear, when we get back to the car… He thought of all the ways he would chew Trey out when they got back, how he told him to hold on to his phone, how he knew they shouldn’t have gone to that fucking lightbulb, how he… Preston stopped his own thoughts. Every gut instinct he had up to this point was, to an extent, correct. And his gut instinct had told him that getting on the sled would be a bad idea. He decided to try and curb the thought by making small talk with the musher. “So, uh, how long you been out here?”. “Oh, I’ve been out here a long, long, time…” the musher said, eyes never veering from their fixed position on the dog team. “Like, how long?” said Preston, desperate to pretend that the uneasy feeling building in his stomach was illegitimate. But the sled driver didn’t respond. Preston at first thought that the snow was making his answer unintelligible, but then he realized the musher wasn’t talking. He was humming. And when Preston recognized the song, his blood froze to ice.

It was Cold Blows The Wind.

As soon as he recognized it, the driver slowly started to turn his head in their direction. Preston slid back as far as he could on the sled as the musher’s face became clear. His mouth was parted into what would normally be a friendly smile, but his eyes had rolled into the back of his head. And his head kept turning. It turned a full 360 degrees to face Preston and Trey, and then it kept turning. Like a screw, it rotated ceaseleslly, and Preston heard the sickening crunch of the tendons in the driver’s neck coiling over themselves. And then the musher started singing. “CoLd BlOwS tHe WiNd OvEr My TrUe LoVe,” the ruined vocal chords garbled out, as Preston violently shook Trey. “Dude, we have to jump off of this fucking sled. NOW!” Trey opened his eyes, and went fully rigid as he saw the driver’s rotating head belting the garbled tune. “cOlD bLoWs ThE dRoPs Of RaIn”
“Trey we have to jump”
“I nEvEr HaD bUt OnE tRuE lOvE”
“NOW!”
“aNd In CaMpViLlE hE wAs SlAiN”
Preston grabbed Trey’s shoulder and jumped. As he did, he felt the gloveless hand he had grabbed Trey with slip on the snow gathered on his jacket. Before he could try to reach out and grab Trey again, he hit the snow coated ground with a sickening thud.

After a couple of minutes in pained silence, Preston forced himself off the ground, dusted himself off, and look around. The snow had once again stopped, and there was no sign of the sled. “TREY!” Preston shouted, desperately looking all around him in the open expanse. There was no sign of life; the air was deathly quiet. “TREY!” he shouted again, but no response came. Its your fucking fault, Preston thought, still frantically pacing and turning with no real direction Your’e the one who put him on that sled. You KNEW there was something wrong with the sled, and you still carried him on it, you fucking idiot. Preston held the back of his head in his hands and screamed in frustration. You’ve got to find him, Preston thought, *You’ve got to find him and then you get to the car, and then you get the FUCK out of here, fuck the phone, fuck finding a place to stop, just get anywhere but here-*Preston suddenly saw a glint of light out of the corner of his eye. It was coming from the patch of forest. It had to be the light from the sled’s lantern. Preston forced himself to believe that was the only option as he took off towards the forest. He remembered that, when he and Trey had first stepped onto this field, the forest had seemed hundreds of feet away; yet now if felt far closer, and within no time Preston had covered the entire distance from where he fell from the sled and the edge of the wood. He darted between the trees, desparate to trace the source of the light. But something caught his eye that made him go from a full sprint to a dead stop. Nestled at the bottom of a tree was a human skull. Preston wracked his brain trying to decide if he should keep going forward, or go to the skull. That can’t be Trey’s he assured himself, *You were apart for what? A couple of minutes? That skull looks picked clean. No, you should leave it alone and go find Trey. You need to find Trey, you need to leave, you need-*he took a step towards the skull. Despite all of his thoughts, all his rational explanations for continuing forward, his body disobeyed the commands, and he continued towards the skull. When he got close enough, he could see it was not just a skull; it was wearing a hat. A gigantic winter hat. The same one the sled driver was wearing, thought Preston, and something instinctively told him to reach for it. As he did so, the skull and hat sunk into the snow. Preston plunged his hands into the snow after it and felt…nothing. It was as if the skull and the hat had disintegrated into the snow itself. “What is happening, what is happening, what the FUCK is happening…” Preston muttered to himself, before letting out an angered wail and pounding his fists into the snow, over, and over, and over. He stopped, closed his eyes, and took a long, deep breath. Chill out, he thought, fighting to urge to continue screaming, Just chill out. You’re not going to find Trey and the car acting like this. Just keep walking, find Trey, and get to the car. He let out his breath, opened his eyes, and stood up. As he went to dust off his pant legs, he saw the snow he had punched had coalessed into the shape of a face. The sled driver’s face. The mouth contorted into a smile and said “You look a little worse for wear! Need a lift back to the road?”. Preston fell back, while scrambling to get away from the snow face. The wind suddenly surged back to life with a violent howl, and immediately after buckets of snow started falling from the sky. Preston got up to his feet, and continued backing away where where the snow face had been. Before he could turn around, he heard something from behind him. At first he thought it was the wind, but then it clearly came through as a voice. A raspy, pained voice saying “Prrrressssstonn”. Preston whirled around and immediately fell to his knees. In front of him was Trey; or, what remained of him. Trees branches had wrapped around his limbs and pulled, extending each to over ten feet long, A large vine coiled around his head, and Preston could see blood pooling through the space the vine left. And something had punctured him through the stomach; it looked almost like a magic 8 ball without any ‘8’, just a huge, gleaming black orb porturding through Trey’s chest. And then it started to glow. It got brighter and brighter until Preston realised it was an inhuman eye. It looked exactly like the lightbulb they had found. The bulb glowed brighter and brighter, except for the center; that remained black. And then it looked down at Preston. As soon as its gaze shifted, the wind erupted into a disharmonic chorus, like the sounds of both angels and demons in twisted harmony, and Preston could tell immediately what it was they were signing. “COLD BLOWS THE WIND OVER MY TRUE LOVE, COLD BLOWS THE DROPS OF RAIN, I NEVER HAD BUT ONE TRUE LOVE, AND IN CAMPVILLE HE WAS SLAIN”. Then, still looking at Preston, the eye said in Trey’s voice “Dude, how appropriate is this!”. Preston bolted out of the forest, away from the bastardized monstrosity that was once his best friend, and back into the open field. As he did so, the horrific choir of the wind got louder and louder. Something in the snow caught his foot and he tumbled to the ground. He turned himself over and covered his ears. “COLD BLOWS THE WIND OVER MY TRUE LOVE” 
“Shut up”
“COLD BLOWS THE DROPS OF RAIN”
“Shut up”
“I NEVER HAD BUT ONE TRUE LOVE”
“SHUT UP”
“AND IN CAMPVILLE HE WAS SLAIN”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

The ghostly choir went silent, but the wind persisted. Preston felt the snow pelt his ragged body, but he was glad the singing had stopped. The cold had started to feel okay now, and for the first time since he had stopped the car, he started feeling warmth. He slipped himself onto his stomach and started crawling forward, trying to see if he could get a better sense of where he was. But he saw only open expanse. He looked behind him, and the forest was now invisible. Or it had simply vanished, but the snow made it hard to tell. Something caught Preston eye. Directly ahead of him was a source of light. He army crawled towards it and grabbed it with his ungloved hand. It was Trey’s phone. As soon as he grabbed it, a new notification popped up. It was a text from him to Trey. It was a 30 second voice memo. Preston unlocked Trey’s phone, turned to volume all the way up, and pressed play. He heard the sound of his voice saying “Lets just try and get it back quick. I dont want to have to clear snow out from under the tires, and I would really like to not be sopping wet from snow when we get back on the road”. Then the sound of Trey’s voice saying “Sounds good. It can’t have gotten that far”. And then Cold Blows The Wind came blaring through the phone speaker at four times the volume the rest of the memo had been. Preston immediately flung the phone as far as he could into the dark expanse. He couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the snow pelting him and the ground. Humanity triumphs over nature he thought, and then he started laughing. He howled with laughter. He laughed until he was keeled over completely on the ground. He laughed until tears came streaming out of his eyes. He kept laughing as the tears froze to his cheeks, and laughed as his eyes froze over. Finally, when he had no laughs left to give, he gave in to the all encompassing blackness of the cold.

“Hell of a day you picked for a ridealong, Caden”, Sheriff Frank Peck said. His brother-in-law had been pestering him about doing one for months, and just so happened to pick a day where IT happened again. He looked over at Caden, the smarmy little creep his sister had somehow fallen in love with, and felt like socking him in the face when he saw he was wringing his hands together. “Can’t believe it happened again last night” Caden said, shiteating grin spread across his face “Gonna be the first in town to know about it”. “That’s right,” said Frank, attempting to placate him “You are. But you know as well as I do that its a hefty responsible to be the disseminator of such information. So stick to the facts, edit what I tell you, and most importantly,” Frank parked his car on the side of the road, across from the 3 other police cars which had been called to the scene initially, “Stay in the goddamn car until I say, Caden”. Caden gave him a half-salute, and Frank rolled his eyes as he walked over to the other officers. “Morning sheriff”, Lietenent Walker said, “Been briefed on this one yet?”. He pointed at the corpse laying on the ground, someone who had clearly died in the curled up position they lay in now. “A little,” said Frank, briefly taking off his hat to repart his hair with his hands, “They in the same shape as that dog sled trainer from a few weeks back?” “And the couple from November”, said Walker, as two officers carefully lifted the body and hauled it towards an open trunk, “Obviously haven’t been able to do a fully autopsy yet, but its a similar situation where the body looks to have undergone months of decomposition in a single night. And exposed to similar weather”. Frank nodded, and looked towards the patch of forest a couple dozen yards out “You said the other one was found it that patch of woods there?” “Yeah, and he was even worse for wear. I’ll tell you Frank, those remains had more in common with a fossilzed Neo-Assyrian than that of the recently deceased”. “Alright,” said Frank, “I guess keep standard procedure going. Assuming you guys haven’t gotten anything as to the cause of this?” “No dice,” said Walker, “So unfortunately business as usual”. “Okay,” said Frank, “I’m off. Don’t like having Caden in this area on my account. If you get anything, you know where to reach me”. “Sure thing,” said Walker, “Seems like he’s making the most of the ridealong”. Frank turned around and saw Caden already taking pictures of the scene. He gave a sharp whistle, and Caden sheepishly walked back towards the car. “Sorry,” he said, getting back into the passenger seat, “But people gotta see this”. Frank sighed and put the key in the ignition. Caden put his phone back into his pocket and said “So its the exact same as the dog racing guy”
“Yup”
“And that hippie couple?”
“Uh-Huh”
“And you guys still dont understand what’s going on?”
“There’s a lot I don’t understand. I don’t understand why people keep showing up dead in that field, on that section of road. I don’t understand why their corpses are decomposing way faster than they should be. I dont understand why some of them are keeling over and dying a couple feet away from their vehicles. But what I really don’t get,” Frank said, glancing in his rearview mirror at the barren field of grass behind him “Is why these bodies have experience blizzard conditions in a town that hasn’t seen an inch of snow in 8 years”.