#if you meet the devil on the road (beware she doesn't kill you)

[aenramsden]

So my friend made me watch Jennifer’s Body on Friday. I immediately went looking for a particular type of fic I wanted to see; post-canon Needy seen from the outside by someone not in the know (because I am a slut for external PoVs). I failed to find any such fics on AO3.

It is now Sunday afternoon. This happened somewhere in the intervening time in two or three mad bursts of inspiration.

Enjoy, y’all.

If you meet the devil on the road (beware she doesn’t kill you)

(A truck driver on a Nebraskan highway meets a hitchhiker going his way.)

Joey had picked her up from the side of the I-80 at ten to seven; a lone girl walking alongside the double-barrelled stretch of asphalt and concrete as it cut through featureless fields and curved around low hills crowned with trees. It was almost eight now, and he was regretting his decision to pull over. He’d stopped because she’d looked hot - yeah, fine, he admitted it; he’d been thinking with his dick. But any thought of scoring had been left behind forty miles ago. Something about her made his skin crawl.

It wasn’t anything concrete. Nothing he could point to. Outwardly, she was just a girl; pretty and alone and probably barely legal. Blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders, a hairclip held her bangs back from one side of her face. The other half - the half on his side - fell down past her eye, hiding her expression from him when he glanced over. Her clothes were creased and worn; grubby jeans and a tank top that didn’t quite cover her belly, a dirty grey hoodie tied around her waist and battered sneakers spotted with mud and stains put up on the dash. A pendant hid in her cleavage, the chain tarnished, the pendant on the end impossible to see without craning his neck to look down her shirt in a way she couldn’t miss.

Joey might have let his eyes wander anyway, when he’d let her into the cab. Now, the back of his neck prickled at the thought of trying.

“So, uh, where you headed?” he asked. “West, you said?”

“Mmm.” Not a talkative one, this chick. He’d gone through half a dozen pick-up lines before the creep factor had started to settle in, and twice as many icebreakers since. None of them had managed to get her to glance away from the window, where trees whipped past under the last anaemic rays of twilight. His headlights lit the road in front of them in stark white, but shadows shifted in the gathering dark beyond their reach. Joey kept his attention on the road. He’d had more than one deer jump out and get splattered across the highway by his truck on this route, and roadkill always made his stomach turn.

“You, uh, you lose your last ride or somethin’?” he tried. She’d been forty miles out of Omaha City when he’d seen her, just walking along the side of the drainage ditch beside the freeway with her hands in her pockets as night started to fall. Fucking creepy, looking back. In hindsight, that should have been a warning sign. “You were pretty far outta town when I picked you up.”

Hazel eyes flicked over to him behind lank blonde hair. Her mouth twitched in what was either a smile or a sneer.

“Last guy got gropey,” she said shortly. “I ditched him.”

The suffocating silence descended again, and Joey fumbled with the radio to get away from it. It crackled to life, and the dying chords of some unrecognisable generic pop song faded away to an announcer.

“And now we’ve got a tribute to a band of legends taken from us before their time,” the guy said, his voice crackling with static. “A group of young heroes whose gruesome murder is still unsolved one month on, with the suspect still at large. Low Shoulder, this one’s for you; god rest your souls. Here’s Through The Trees.”

Before it even finished the opening bar, the girl snarled and smashed a fist into the radio, killing the music and leaving a jagged crack through the plastic display. A drop of blood swelled on her knuckle, and she sucked it off absently, tongue flicking out.

“Hey!” Joey barked, forgetting his discomfort in the heat of the damage to his truck. “What the fuck, bitch?”

She turned to glare at him, and her eyes caught the headlights of an approaching car coming the other way. For a second, they looked [i]yellow[/i] of all the fuckin’ things, and the shadows stretched over her cheeks to paint a yawning maw. He swore and jerked away from her, yanking on the steering wheel as he flinched. The truck swerved, for a moment scraping along the guardrail with an ear-splitting shriek-

He yanked the wheel back the other way, terror screaming at him, and braked down to twenty. Heart hammering in his ears, he gripped the wheel with white knuckles and waited for his breathing to settle, throwing wary glances at the passenger sitting placidly beside him.

She hadn’t even raised an eyebrow at the near-crash. Just settled back down into a slouch with her feet up on the dash and her attention turned outward to the woods beyond the window.

“I fucking hate that song,” she said, her tone level and venomous. “And they were creeps. Good riddance.”

“Whoa, hey, they got murdered, y’know! What’ve you got against Low Shoulder, anyway?” The words came out before he could catch himself and earned him a contemptuous sneer. Then her eyes went distant. The corner of her mouth twitched upward. A smile like a lizard’s. Or a rattlesnake’s.

“Let’s just say I’ve got a chip on my shoulder when it comes to those assholes,” she said. Her lopsided smirk was twisted and stretched a little too far for comfort, a clingfilm wrap of humour over something dark and fucked-up and ugly that echoed in her tone.

Joey swallowed, at a loss for what to do. He’d been seeing things; had to have been. Just headlights and shadows. It hadn’t been real. But still, all the anger was gone, and any desire to get in her face had gone with it. He just wanted her out of his cab now. He wanted her gone - hell, he wanted to be gone himself, because he could already tell she was going to linger here like a bad smell. It felt like there was a stench to her that would cling.

It hadn’t been there when he’d stopped to pick her up. He’d been tired and missing his girlfriend and she’d looked hot and smelled like perfume and sex when she swung herself into the passenger seat beside him. But at some point she’d stopped paying attention to him and the glamour had worn off. The unease had started building. And with it had come the stench, wafting into his hindbrain without bothering to go through his nostrils on the way.

It took him back in time to when he was fourteen years old, tagging along on a hunting trip with his dad and uncle. To when they’d found a deer carcass that some wild boar or cougar had killed, half eaten by predators and scavengers and even other deer, its ribs standing out from the gory viscera inside it. It’d been the first time he’d seen death like that, and he’d thrown up at the smell.

This girl made him think of that deer. His nose couldn’t smell it, but his brain could. The reek of blood and rotting flesh.

“Where you gettin’ off, anyway?” he ventured, taking one shaky hand off the wheel to fumble around in the door pocket for the ginger sweets. Maybe they’d help with the rising anxious nausea. He wasn’t motion sick, but wanting to hurl was wanting to hurl, right?

The girl didn’t look away from the dark window and the trees flashing past. “You can drop me off at Paxton,” she said, level and bored. As if she hadn’t smashed up his radio in a fit of rage ten seconds ago.

“Paxton?” Joey’s brow wrinkled, incredulous. “Paxton’s a fuckin’ nowhere-town! It’s barely on the map!” Hell, he only knew it because he stopped there for coffee sometimes on his route up and down the I-80. Then again, did he care, if it meant she was getting off?

For some reason, his outburst seemed to amuse the girl. She snorted, rolling her head to look at him through her lashes.

“Yeah,” she drawled. “Not the first shitty little town in the middle of nowhere I’ve been to. Won’t be the last, either. I’ve got... friends there.”

“Friends, huh?” Joey didn’t buy it, but like hell he was gonna call her on it. “Cool, cool.”

Her grin was a bone-white flash in the evening gloom. “From online. They’re into some niche stuff you can only find in a few places. I like to meet people in the community and chat.”

Some ancient, primal instinct, long-buried at the back of Joey’s mind since he’d grown out of childhood nightmares, curled up in his hindbrain and screamed at the way she said that last word.

“Yeah. Yeah, cool. Good to know.” He did the math in his head. Fuck. Another two or three hours in the cab with her. His foot pressed down further on the gas. It was worth the risk of a ticket if it’d get him to Paxton sooner. “Hey, uh, you choose the music then, how ‘bout that?”

“Don’t feel like it,” she drawled, flexing her hand. He couldn’t see any more blood from where she’d punched the radio. Must’ve been a shallow cut. “I prefer the silence.”

“I, uh. I’d prefer to have something on,” he tried desperately.

“Ain’t that a kicker.” No sympathy whatsoever. He might as well have been a drowning rat for all she cared.

The miles rolled past. The hours wore on. She didn’t speak, and Joey kept his mouth shut. The stench of dead things thickened, and her breathing rasped in his ears, but he didn’t take his eyes off the road. Two more hours, he told himself. Ninety minutes. Another sixty miles. Half an hour to go. The time felt like it dragged past and flew at once. Things swam in the corners of his vision, out beyond the light of his headlamps. A long-haired guy with star necklace and a guitar neck embedded in his throat, staring blankly from beside a roadsign, gone when he double-took. A manscaped asshole with a bowie knife hilt-deep in his chest, glimpsed for a second in the wing mirror before the shadows swallowed him. A pale boy in a waterlogged tux, his neck a ruined mess, seen through the trees staring earnestly at Miss Creep.

And a girl. She showed up more than once, the girl. Blazing hot. Black hair, gorgeous face, fantastic body. And blood. So much blood. She was drenched in it; her hair, her shirt, her shorts. And most of all, in the middle of her chest, a great sodden stain so dark it was black under the streetlights. She was sitting on top of a truck that passed him going the other way, she was flagging down a hitchhiker on the other side of the road, she was lying posed on the guardrail like a camgirl, playing with her lip. Never in the light. Never where he could see her. Always just a quick flash in the corner of his eye, appearing as the line between his high beams and the shadows off to his side swept by.

By the time the sign for Paxton glared bright white light back at him from the high-vis paint, Joey was a quivering mass of nerves and his teeth ached from how he’d been grinding them. He wanted nothing more than to get out of the stinking cab, find someplace brightly-lit and loud and preferably full of booze and park himself there until sunrise. Except that would involve staying in the same town as Spooky, and no fucking way was he doing that. No, on second thought he’d put as many miles as he could between them and maybe stop in at a church to pray to Jesus or something. But right after that, first big city he went through, the brightly-lit bar was happening.

“H-here’s your stop,” he forced out through a jaw that had almost locked up stiff from how hard he’d been clenching it. “Good, uh. Good luck with your friends.”

She looked at him with that same lizard-like, stretched-out smile.

“I’m looking forward to seeing them, yeah.” Again, that trick of the light that made hazel eyes look yellow. “Who knows?” she added playfully. “They might get lucky too.”

He watched her walk off with a sigh of relief and felt like a pussy for it as he drove away. By the time he changed onto the I-76, he was second-guessing himself. What had she really done, anyway? Been quiet, not as talkative as he’d been expecting? Glared at him a couple times? Shown a flash of temper and split her knuckle on the radio at a song she didn’t like? He’d psyched himself out, that was all. The hallucinations and shit, just a result of a bad kebab, not enough sleep and some jumping at shadows. She’d just been a girl. Just an ordinary girl.

A week later, he heard the news out of Paxton. Six dead. Members of an occult club at the local high school. Brutalised and torn apart, their remains left strewn all over a riverbank in the woods. Last seen on footage from a camera trap, hustling a teenage girl through the trees down near the South Platte river where they’d been found.

Joey looked at the girl in the photo and recognised her face.

Just an ordinary girl.

He wondered how many dead would be following her next time someone stopped to give her a ride.