Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,6

can still go around the barricade and drive on the closed-down part. You have to go super slow though because it’s really narrow and twisting. That’s how the cutthroats get you. They just slip out of the woods and—” He hit the brakes. Inertia slammed everyone forward against their seatbelts. Mandy and Jenny yelped.

Laughing, Jeff accelerated. Behind them, Noah blared his horn.

“God, Jeff!” Mandy said. “You’re such a dick!”

“A small dick I’ve heard,” Jenny added, and the two of them broke into more giggles.

Jeff scowled. “A small dick, huh?” he said. “You’ve never had any complaints, have you, babe?”

Mandy rolled her eyes.

“Well?” he demanded.

“No, hon,” she said. “No complaints.”

Mandy turned her attention to the haunting black forest whisking past outside her window. It really did look like the type of woods that would be home to a ruthless band of cutthroats. The shadowed maple and oak and elm had already shed all of their foliage, leaving their spindly branches denuded and shivering in the soughing wind. They stood interwoven with the larger pine, spruce, and cedar, the great needle-covered boughs sprouting from the trunks like dark wings, masking whatever may lay behind.

What if Jeff was telling the truth? Mandy wondered. What if when they eventually got to this closed-off road and had to slow down a deranged man—worse, a pack of deranged men—swarmed the car, dragged her out by the hair, and slit her throat?

What if—

No. Mandy banished the “what ifs” from her mind. There were no cutthroats living in the forest. She was safe. They were all safe. Jeff was full of it. Not only that, he was full of himself too. You’ve never had any complaints, have you, babe? Who said stuff like that? The answer, of course, was Jeff. His ego was so big it couldn’t see its shoes on a cloudy day.

Mandy and Jeff had been at a party a short time back, a “model party,” or at least that’s what everybody called it. It had been hosted by Smirnoff vodka. The models had been hired for the glam factor. There were no Christy Brinkleys or Brook Shields in attendance. The models all hailed from the no-name talent agencies that dotted the backstreets of New York City. They were the D-list hired out for photo shoots in obscure magazines or low-budget cable TV commercials. Not that you’d know this by talking to them. Everyone Mandy had mingled with had a tale about brushing shoulders with Burt Reynolds or Christian Slater—and missing out on their big break by inches because of some unfortunate reason or another.

Anyway, they did have their looks going for them. Mandy knew she was attractive. She’d been told this her entire life. People often said she resembled a red-haired Michelle Pfeiffer, even though Mandy thought her eyes were a little too close together, her nose a bit too pointy. Yet the no-name models made her feel positively average. They were all taller than her, had the flawless, thin bodies of fourteen-year-old boys, although with breasts, and most importantly, they knew how to flaunt their sex appeal.

At the end of the evening, while waiting for a cab, Jeff, tipsy, had said, “Did you see that guy? The one with the long hair?”

“They all had long hair,” Mandy told him.

“White shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest.”

Mandy had seen him. He’d been gorgeous. “What about him?”

“You think he was good looking?”

“Ha! You’re jealous,” she said.

“Hardly. But I’ll tell you this much. He’s probably the first guy I’ve ever seen who’s better looking than me.”

Mandy stared at Jeff, thinking he must be kidding. He wasn’t. Up until that point in his twenty-six years of existence, Jeff had seriously considered himself to be the best looking man on the planet.

Mandy blinked now, and instead of the trees and the blackness beyond the car window, she saw her glass-caught reflection. It was vaguely visible, transparent, ghostlike. It gave her a case of the creeps.

Shivering, she faced forward again. No one had spoken since Jeff had challenged her to find fault with his love-making.

Mandy didn’t like prolonged silences, they made her uneasy, and she said, “Complaints, huh?” She wrapped a lock of her hair around a finger. “Do we have time? This could take a while.”

“Name one,” Jeff said.

She leaned close to Jenny—who she’d been happy to discover shortly after they met shared a similar goofy sense of humor—and whispered: “He has a hairy butt.”

“Grody!” Jenny whispered back.

“And he likes to be spanked—it’s like spanking a monkey!”

They broke up in