It Was Supposed To Be Just A Hot Night At The Parking Lot

The car shook underneath them.

By

It was late at night. A lone black car pulled into a vacant parking lot. It glided like a shadow under the acid-yellow glare of the streetlights, before swerving into the farthest corner and parking abruptly. As the engine died down, the car shook with an uncertainty as the driver moved from his seat. A woman’s moan ripped from her throat.

“Now?” the woman whimpered.

“Please, now,” the driver whispered. The woman could see his desperation as he hovered over her in the passenger’s seat. She smiled, teasingly, and slowly unbuttoned her blouse. His breath caught at the sight of her milky skin washed in the shadow and yellow lights. His body lowered towards her, and she could feel the hunger trembling in his body.

Her breath snared and he suddenly lunged, and his lips devoured hers in a ravenous kiss. Her body writhed in pleasure as his tongue dug down her throat.

The car shook underneath them.

His hands clawed open her blouse, his mouth tasted the pulse in her throat, the delicacy of her skin, and the bulge of her breast. She panted and pulled his head in invitingly.

She could hear the metal of the car creaking, see the glass glinting with the streetlights and the starless night.

She gasped as he bit gently and held her in his teeth.

The lights outside flickered violently as his mouth lowered to her navel, and his hands grappled at her skirt.

Suddenly, the yellow exploded into black, and she screamed as her world was thrown into the void of night. She heard the man’s reassuring words, his gentle touch, but she couldn’t stop her heart from pounding in her chest.

“What happened?” she panted. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. “What the hell is going on?”

“It’s nothing, just a black-out.” She could feel the man’s apathy to the dark, his only care in pulling her skirt away. Part of her wanted nothing but to give herself to him, to give herself to pleasure in the encompassing dark, but she could feel a chill biting at her neck.

“Something’s wrong. I don’t want to—”

The man sighed, and she felt him move away from her. “Fine, let me turn on the car’s light.”

She heard him rise, and a faint click in the dark. He cursed under his breath, and the clicking increased with futile results. The light won’t turn on. She realized. Without his warmth on her, she felt exposed and vulnerable. Isolated from the rest of the world in the passenger’s seat.

“This isn’t going to work,” the man sighed. “Let me find the keys and I’ll turn on the head—”

A noise came from the void outside the car. Like metal against concrete. The woman’s breath snared in her throat, and she heard the man patting his denim jeans.

“Where are my keys?” the man muttered. But the woman’s senses were elsewhere, her eyes wide but seeing nothing. The rest of her body worthless in the dark, she listened for the noise that had disappeared in the void, and heard nothing until it came again. Metal scraping on concrete. Louder. Closer.

A raw, hissing chuckle, like someone trying to hold in a secret laughter.

Mid-way through her scream, the man’s hand planted on her mouth. He barked at her to not worry, but she could hear the fear in his voice as he begged, “Help me find my keys!”

Suddenly, the lights were beginning to flash, blinding the couple with the violent shock between the acid-yellow and black. Together, the couple groped desperately between the dark and light, grabbing leather seats, skin soaked in cold sweat, the carpeting of the floor. Each time the woman glanced out the window, she could almost see something before it disappeared. Each flash, it was closer. Larger. Unnaturally red in the yellow light.

“I found—!”

The man’s voice was cut off as the world flashed back to black. There was a wet hacking noise, and the woman shrieked as something plopped onto her naked lap. She kicked it away, and heard it thump helplessly on the floor.

When the lights flashed on again, she saw the man’s white eyes staring up at her, his head lying on the floor.

Horror flushed through the woman’s body, but before she could scream, she heard a dull crunching at the right side of her head. At the windshield. Her body froze in fear, so that she could only stare at the empty driver’s seat where her lover’s body should be. She wished the world was dark again, so that she wouldn’t have the choice to look to the right of her. To see the inevitable.

She turned her head.

Sitting on the hood was a twisted mockery of a human body, almost glowing red under the acidic lights. Every part of the body was contorted, the bones poking out at awkward angles, the limbs unnaturally long. The hands holding the decapitated flesh of the man had too many fingers, all of which were bent like they had been hammered violently.

What was most disturbing was the head, unnaturally shaped like a human’s, but nothing but a bloody burlap sack. No eyes, nose, or mouth. Only smiling jaws of needle teeth, stretching to both sides of the face.

It smiled, just for her. The woman’s hand went for the car door.

“Where you goin’, sweetheart?” the red thing, in a voice garbled between the man’s voice and something far more sinister. “I’m hungry.”

There was the chorus of glass shattering, as the streetlights and the windshield exploded into black. The void swallowed the woman’s fading scream.