The night was still. So still, that when Alyssa gazed up, she felt like she was looking at the moon reflected on a dark surface of water, rather than at the sky itself. The illusion was only broken when she passed a billboard on the flat dark highway. The billboards were lit up so she could read “Fireworks: Year Round” and “HELL IS REAL” and “Injured? Call The Hammer” while doing eighty.
She didn’t signal when she turned off the highway because she was the only car. The winding side road led her into the woods. After turning left onto County Line, the road straightened out so Alyssa put down all the windows. The air rushed around and made her feel insulated, like she was in the eye of a tornado. Flipping on the car’s brights, she could see the bugs streaming out of the dark. It reminded her of Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon jumped to lightspeed and all of the passing stars stretched into long white streaks.
Alyssa had seen all of the original Star Wars movies. They were her dad’s favorites, so she hadn’t had a choice. Her dad sat on the edge of the couch every time they watched. If Alyssa glanced at her phone or went to the bathroom, he paused the movie and waited. He wouldn’t press play until she was done. As a younger man, he’d seen The Empire Strikes Back in theaters three times. He’d worn a costume to the premiere of Return of the Jedi. That was before the franchise sold out, he said, and got all woke and political.
Alyssa thrust her shoulders back into the seat to press down on the gas. Even behind the wheel, she felt like an observer—more passenger than driver. Her phone vibrated in the cup holder, its glow tugging at the edge of her vision. She glanced in the rearview first, then picked up the phone while keeping her left hand on the wheel.
The text was from Jared. She typed back, her eyes flicking between screen and headlights. Cold light to warm light to cold. She swerved a little while stretching her thumb across the screen to reach the emoji button. The wind blew loud in her ears.
Alyssa was putting the phone down when Jared texted back. It was a meme. She looked closer and then there was a snap and everything went black.
#
Colton and Trent were out driving because it was something to do. They played hip-hop music with the windows up so they could feel the bass in their chests. They sipped milkshakes from styrofoam cups from the all-night Steak ‘n Shake drive-thru. Trent was holding his cup against his forehead.
“Your AC doesn’t even work bro,” he said. “Nothing in this car fucking works.”
Colton held his hand up to the vent.
“It blows air, but it ain’t cold,” Trent said.
“Let’s take your car next time,” Colton muttered.
Colton hauled granite for a whole summer in order to buy this car, only for Trent to keep telling him how it was a piece of shit. Sometimes he thought about charging Trent gas money, but then he remembered Trent’s parents didn’t even have a car, so he always let it go. Plus, it really was a shitty ride. An old Dodge Neon that moaned more than a porno, shrieked louder than a haunted house. At least the speakers worked.
Colton turned the music up and Trent started rapping along.
“We could walk around Dollar General,” Colton said.
Trent finished the bar before saying Dollar General closed at ten.
Colton sipped his milkshake and Trent scrolled on his phone. Up ahead, a pair of tail lights glowed just off the right side of the road. Colton steered into the left lane as they passed, turning his head.
“Fuck did you see that?”
Trent didn’t look up from his screen until Colton pressed the brakes.
“What? Why are you stopping? What?”
Colton turned down the music. “There was an accident. The car back there’s all smashed up.”
Trent squinted at his mirror. “Probably a drunk,” he said. “Not our problem. The headlights are on, they’ll call somebody.”
“There’s a guy behind the wheel, I saw him when we passed.” Colton adjusted the rearview mirror. “What if he’s hurt?”
Trent sighed. He rolled down his window and stuck his head outside. “I guarantee you it’s just some wasted guy trying to figure out how to not get a DUI,” he said when he returned to the seat. “I’m not getting involved in that shit.”
Colton turned on his emergency lights and put the Neon in reverse.
“Bro,” Trent said. “We’ve got weed in here. Do you really want cops around? Let’s go.”
“Some resin in a bowl isn’t weed.”
“It’s enough to get us locked up,” Trent said. “Plus what if the cops think we did it?”
Colton didn’t understand.
“You know, what if they think we’re involved?”
While backing up Colton noticed all the glass glinting in the road behind them. He put the Neon in park and got out. Trent’s milkshake was in the car’s only cup holder, so Colton set his on the roof before peering around. It was hard to see anything against the glare of the other vehicle’s headlights, but there wasn’t any movement. Holding his hand up to the brights, Colton waited for his vision to adjust.
“Look how fucked that car is dude.”
“Was it a hit and run?”
“I’m gonna go look. Nothing’s moving.”
Trent shifted in his seat but didn’t get out. He heard glass crunch like gravel under Colton’s sneakers. Trent leaned out the window trying to shield his eyes. His friend had become a shadow to him. Trent followed his silhouette in the flash of the emergency lights.
“Hey you okay?” Trent heard him say. Then Colton jerked back like he’d been shot.
“What?” Trent called. “What is it?”
Colton stood very still but Trent couldn’t see his face.
“Don’t fuck with me. What’s going on?”
Colton was leaning forward and staring into the wrecked car. “Holy shit,” he said. His shoulders swiveled as he looked up and down the road. Then he stepped right up to the door and cried out. “Holyshitholyshitholyshit.”
When Colton’s voice cracked Trent knew he wasn’t fucking with him. “I’m coming,” Trent called. He waited for a reaction. When none came, he opened the door of the Neon.
“What was that?” Colton called.
“The door. Your rusty ass fucking door.” Trent left it open behind him and walked around the front of the Neon to approach the wreck the way Colton had done, but he stopped a few paces short. “Is that…?”
“Yeah dude. I know. I can’t figure it out.”
Trent held his breath and stepped up next to Colton. It was so quiet they could hear the click click click of the Neon’s emergency lights down the road.
Trent slipped his phone out of his pocket and snapped a photo. Only after looking both ways and scanning the surrounding trees, did he take one with flash.
#
When the call came through, Officer Jocelyn McBride was staked out in her cruiser at a gravel pull-off near the old grain silo. Just down the highway was PJ’s Bar & Grill, which didn’t have a grill, and was known to over-serve and under-card. All the passing traffic had kept it between the lines tonight—one of them even waved—so McBride was spending the final hour of her patrol playing Candy Crush on her phone under the dash. Until the call.
Dispatch reported a motor vehicle accident on County Line. Possible injuries. Two boys called it in, the dispatcher said, but they sounded like they were on drugs. Fire and EMS were waiting for an officer first-response.
McBride sighed, flipped on her lights. She was the only officer on duty.
“10-4 dispatch. Show me en route. ETA six minutes.”
She drove fast but without sirens. No need to wake up the whole town for what would probably turn out to be some high schoolers having a bad mushroom trip.
Out on County Line, McBride spotted the blink of emergency lights from a quarter-mile away. They disappeared with every dip in the road, then resurfaced again. Like swimming breaststroke toward a lighthouse, she thought.
McBride liked how everything went quiet and slow underwater. She used to swim at the YMCA when she was training for her triathlon, even though Brandon kept telling her chlorine exposure builds up toxins in the body which cause health problems for the benefit of Big Pharma. She’d told Brandon he was full of shit, but once the triathlon was over she’d decided not to risk it.
Nearing the scene, Officer McBride noted two vehicles on opposite sides of the road. On her left, a pair of teenage boys leaned against a blue Dodge Neon which didn’t appear to have any damage. On her right was a silver Chevy Cobalt with a crumpled front end that was visible even from behind. The windshield was gone and a seatbelt hung loose on the driver’s side. McBride’s chest sank. It was going to be a long night.
She parked her cruiser at an angle to block traffic and stepped out with her flashlight.
“Anybody hurt?” she called to the boys. They looked about high-school age, maybe sixteen. Hard to tell when they were squinting.
“We don’t know,” said the boy with sandy hair. “That’s what we told them on the phone.” He added: “We’re fine though. We weren’t involved or nothing.” The dark-haired boy stared down at his feet.
McBride swept her flashlight over the glass and debris strewn across the asphalt. She fixed the beam on something wet.
“Why’s there a milkshake in the road?”
“Oh yeah,” said the sandy-haired boy. “I set it on top of my car when I got out.” He patted the roof of the Neon to show her. “Must have fallen off when I moved to the shoulder.”
“You boys high?”
The dark-haired boy glared. “Seriously?”
“No mam. No, officer,” said the sandy-haired boy. “Just dropped a milkshake is all.”
McBride motioned for them to stay put and moved toward the wrecked Cobalt. She looked inside and her breath hitched. Lowering the flashlight, McBride blinked hard, then looked again. Nothing changed.
“What you make of it?” the sandy-haired boy asked. He sounded more excited than scared now. “I mean, you ever seen something like that?”
McBride didn’t answer. She swept her light in front of the car, over the twisted metal and out into the trees beyond.
“Hello?” Her voice came out softer than she’d expected. She felt the boys’ eyes on her.
“Looks like it was driving, right?” one of them said.
McBride ordered the boys to get in their car and not to move. They obeyed. She radioed for EMS and Fire, priority response.
“Hey we’re not in trouble, are we?” called the dark-haired boy from the passenger seat of the Neon.
Officer McBride rubbed her eyes then circled the wreck, scanning the ground. More glass and debris glinted among the weeds. Blood, too. It was streaked across the hood, pooled on the seats.
She hesitated at the edge of the headlights, wary to put herself in the wrecked car’s path. But this was no time for superstition. The boys were watching. Her dash cam, too. McBride stepped forward. When nothing stirred, she knelt for a closer look.
#
Brandon chewed on a stiff piece of beef jerky. His jaw ached. He moved the jerky into his cheek to take a puff off his Juul, then went back to chewing. He’d been on the same piece for seven minutes, but it felt like longer.
Brandon told himself the jerky was irritating him, when really it was Jocelyn. It was unusual for her to be working so late. Sometimes she did, but she always sent him a text about it. Brandon didn’t miss her, exactly. He just liked to know when she’d be home.
When Brandon had the house to himself, he turned off all the lights. He could smoke his Juul inside and drink Mountain Dew straight from the two-liter and watch porn on his phone without headphones. Sometimes he did these things when Jocelyn was home, but she always gave him shit about it. It was always “crack a window” or “use a glass” or “turn down that fucking butt-fucking.”
No, he didn’t wish she was here. He just wanted a time. But why so late? What’d they have her doing? Jocelyn was good, but being good meant being loyal, and her loyalty made her naive. She’d been a cop for more than a decade and still refused to believe her department was corrupt—that it served and protected in order to control. They already collected intel from her dash cam and reports. He knew it wouldn’t be long until they strapped her with a body cam, too.
Brandon spit the clump of tasteless gray meat into his hand and tossed it in the sink. He played Call of Duty for a while and felt better. At three, Jocelyn still wasn’t home, so Brandon watched Infowars clips and ate some caramel corn. It was just after four when her headlights raked over the ceiling. Brandon brushed the flakes off his shirt and climbed into bed to wait.
Jocelyn was undressing using the light on her phone.
“So what happened?” Brandon grunted.
She flinched and turned, apologized for waking him up. “Bad accident,” she murmured. It had taken forever for the investigators and the coroner to arrive. Then, as the officer who secured the scene, Jocelyn had to go back to the station afterward to write up the report. Her voice sounded like an echo of itself as she said all this in the dark.
Before Brandon could probe, Jocelyn padded into the bathroom, closed the door, ran the faucet. When she came back out, she forgot to turn the light off before opening the door and Brandon groaned like a wounded animal.
“Sorry,” she whispered, flipping the switch. “I’m sorry.” She stood still for a long time, then got into bed.
“So who died?” He felt her stiffen next to him.
“Nobody we know,” she said.
“Why you being weird about it then?”
Jocelyn pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her lips made a soft puck as they parted, but for several moments she didn’t answer. Then in a thin voice that wavered between a whisper and a murmur, she described what she’d seen in the car.
Brandon laughed through his nose.
“A girl died, Bran. We found her in the trees a hundred feet away.”
“I know I know,” he said. “But still.”
He rubbed his sore jaw and thought about what she’d said. Suddenly he shifted onto his side to face her in the bed.
“Wait, how does that even happen?”
“Just a freak accident. That’s what they kept calling it. A freak accident.”
“Yeah, right. Did you interrogate those boys? They must’ve done it, fucking sickos. You should lock them up before they hurt somebody.”
Jocelyn told him to stop, the boys had nothing to do with it. “It was a freak accident,” she repeated. “Totally random.”
Brandon sighed and turned onto his back muttering how nothing was random. Jocelyn was a Sleepwalker—that’s what Brandon called people who were content living in their own little dreamworlds, the ones who would never wake up.
They lay quietly for a while. The air conditioner purred in the window. Jocelyn’s body had started to relax into the mattress when Brandon sat up.
“It’s an omen,” he said. “Divine intervention is the only explanation. God’s sending a message and we’ve got to be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“For whatever’s required.”
Jocelyn groaned. “You’ve got to stop thinking like this all the time.”
“Like what?”
“You know.”
“No, say it.”
She drew a breath. “Like a fucking conspiracy theorist. Turning everything into—”
“That’s a slur! That’s a goddamn slur used to discredit people like me who see the world for what it is—for anyone asking real questions.” He was shouting now. “You know your department is going to cover all this up, right? They probably already have. You probably helped them.”
Jocelyn rolled over, turning her back to him with a sigh.
Brandon couldn’t get her to say anything more, so he reached for his Juul and smoked in the dark.
#
At first glance, Kian thought the photo was fake. Most things were, nowadays. He’d been scrolling through Facebook on his desktop when he saw it: a deer driving a car.
The deer looked real—the camera flash bounced white off the animal’s eye, glassy in the dark. Someone had probably used a second phone light to brighten the scene, he thought. Kian noticed details like that. The deer wasn’t really driving, of course. The deer was dead. But the way it was slumped upright behind the steering wheel of the battered car, the deer looked like it was out on a joyride, its hooves at ten and two. Like it was swerving around hitting humans, instead of the other way around, Kian thought. The Facebook post had racked up thousands of shares, and the longer Kian stared at it, the more certain he became that the photo was real.
To meme, or not to meme, that is the question…
Kian scrolled through the comments. Users were speculating about what had happened during the accident, picking sides. The leading theory was that the driver hit a deer and was ejected from the car, spooking a second deer which dove through the window in a panic and wedged itself behind the steering wheel as it died. But supporters of the “one deer theory” argued against this, saying the force of the collision had simply sent the driver and deer careening past each other in midair. Still others claimed the whole thing was staged because it defied physics.
One user named Jared was picking fights with everyone in the comments, especially people making jokes. “Show some damn respect for a family that’s grieving,” he wrote. “This isn’t how she deserves to be remembered.”
People were ganging up on Jared.
“Maybe she shouldn’t have been texting and driving…” one user wrote back.
“No seatbelt, no sympathy,” wrote another.
“Still funny af tho,” commented a third.
Kian returned to the driving deer image. He clipped it, dragged it into Photoshop and then paused, staring for a moment to visualize its potential. After cueing up some classical music in his headphones, Kian opened a sticky note on screen and typed out caption after caption, his fingers flying across the keyboard like a concert pianist.
Back in Photoshop Kian pieced everything together, adjusting the images and arranging the text until he had a series of epic, unholy memes. But were they dank? That’d be up to the internet.
He shared his work in all the usual places: r/memes, 9GAG, Instagram, the “Dank Memes Melt Steel Beams” Facebook group. Over the following days, Kian watched the upvotes, likes, and shares tick up on his phone. His top-performing captions were “The Fast & The Furriest,” “Meanwhile, in Rural America…,” “No Officer, Just a Little Salt Lick,” and “Pull Up, Doe.” The only hater was Jared—the same troll from the original Facebook post. He’d found Kian’s memes and seemed hellbent on spamming his comment sections into oblivion. So far Kian had ignored him, but sitting at his desktop checking his metrics, Kian realized Jared now claimed the top comment on his Instagram post. 10.2K likes.
He must be destroyed.
Blocking Jared would have amounted to censorship, so Kian kept burner accounts for situations like this. He switched over to one now on his phone. When he replied to Jared’s comment, he did it anonymously.
“You should be thanking us,” he wrote. “Now she’ll live on forever.”
Kian added a clown face emoji and pressed send. For a moment his eyes flicked between his monitor and phone. It was his account, he told himself. He was in control.