She’d only bought the old pile that spring. The doors were rusty, the air conditioning had never worked, and it was creeping up on two hundred thousand miles, but it had only cost her seven hundred bucks. She knew someone who could get hold of a retired West Virginia license plate for her, which cost five times what it would have cost to register the title, but Marie Adams was already supplying her with her medication, and Marianne Anderson had an eviction and three arrests on her record, so Maureen Allen had to keep her profile as low as possible, and therefore skipped the registration. The only reason she stopped in Sycamore Hills was the fact that the temperature gauge had indicated it was overheating, and she didn’t want it to break down on the side of the highway. Within a day, she’d found a help wanted sign in a bar window and a for rent sign in an old building. She wasn’t sure how long it would take to save cash and fix the car, so she had settled in.
But now that the nightmares had found her again, she prepared to pack up her life and run. The problem of her car remained, though. The grubby garage owner she had left it with was charging her an arm and a leg for the part he insisted was needed to fix it. Based on his quote, it would cost almost her entire cash reserve. Not that it mattered anyway. Though he swore the part was ordered over two weeks ago, it had yet to arrive. She wasn’t going anywhere by car.
On her first day in town, she found out where the nearest coach station was in case she needed to make a quick exit. Unfortunately for her, the station was nearly twenty miles away with only the highway to take her there. None of the local buses went there. She’d have to walk, and a person walking on the highway, weighed down with two bags like she would be, would rouse quite a bit of suspicion or, at the very least, unwanted attention from handsy truck drivers. No, that wouldn’t do either. Maureen knew she’d have to find a way out, and she would spend the next few days looking for it, but for now, circumstance had trapped her in this town with the nightmares.
As she calculated all of this in her mind, she grabbed a pair of running shorts, a T-shirt, and a sports bra and shoved the bags back into their place. She changed into her running attire and ran into the bathroom, grabbing her hair tie and pulling her honey-blonde tresses back into a ponytail. She spent only a moment in front of the mirror to mark the bags under her eyes and decided that she needed to buy a little tube of concealer before work tonight. She grabbed a five-dollar bill and her apartment key from the dresser, slipped on her socks and running shoes, tucking the cash into her left sock, and jogged out of the door, locking it and stashing the key behind the fire extinguisher in the stairwell. Then she raced down the stairs and out into the sunlight.
The air was damp and stifling. It was supposed to have rained the previous night but, since the humidity hung thick in the air, it seemed not a drop had fallen. Maureen picked up her speed until she found the pace she liked and settled into her rhythm. The old buildings of the town’s former commerce area rushed past in her peripheral. At the height of post-war America, it would have provided the majority of the jobs to the local residents. But those were the grandparents of the current generation. The factories had closed, and those jobs had moved on and left the buildings standing. Small businesses on Main Street still provided a good living for some of the locals, but most commuted to the surrounding cities to ply their careers in cold office buildings. Still, it was more pleasant than a lot of towns in middle America that Maureen had lived in.
She hit Main Street and veered left at the courthouse to make her way over to the subdivision about a mile down the road. She had decided to run her usual route through town, and though she never measured it, she knew it should take her about half an hour. Half an hour to get lost in thought. Half an hour to run from the nightmares.
Her breath steadied into its rhythm, and the sound of her shoes on the concrete beat in time, hypnotizing her into that familiar state where she couldn’t help but let her mind drift back through the years. Thoughts of the previous night awakened images of other nightmares, buried deep in her mind but never erased from her memory. She recalled the monster that would come in the night to her companions at the hospital when she was a girl: a lecherous ghoul overcome by desire, lifting the bed sheets and nightgowns to slither his hand up the warm young legs. She had watched through the eyes of a brute whose hands had held down the wrists of her schoolmate. She had seen every ounce of the fear reflected in the tears pouring from her eyes and had felt the violent thrusts as if it were her own hips doing the wretched deed. When the girl had wrenched a hand free and tore off the white collar from around her assailant’s neck, it was Maureen’s own hand that felt the sting of its strike on the young woman’s cheek.
She kept running. The memory of a young black man tied to a chair flashed in her mind. His head was slumped, and the wall behind him was covered in blood and brain matter. It wasn’t her
