Simon walked next to the car, his flashlight searching the distance beyond the bushes for the source of the noise. The bushes moved in the breeze, but he could not find what created the noise. As he approached the front of the car, something felt strange. In his peripheral vision, he saw something wrong with the angles of the car. He jumped away from the car and shone his flashlight on the car. He heard car doors open and turned the flashlight back to his car, where he watched Charles jumping out of the car, yelling at Simon.

“Are you okay over there?” Charles asked. Simon saw Penelope getting out of the back door as well. She had one foot outside the car.

Simon returned the light to the front of the BMW. His heart was racing and he considered what he saw.

“I’m okay,” Simon said after a few pausing for a few minutes. He waved his hand toward Charles and Penelope in a come-here gesture. “You should see this.”

Simon had not realized, but his hand had gone to his neck and he felt his pulse. It was racing like a hare. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself down. The front of the BMW had been crunched, as if a heavy weight had landed on it. He ran the light along the entire front of the car. He took a step closer to examine the damage.

He heard Charles and Penelope walking up behind him.

“No zombies then?” Charles asked. Simon turned in surprise, as if Charles had been reading his mind the entire time. “What you were not thinking about them as well,” Charles asked, trying to keep the told-you-so from his voice.

“You were thinking that also,” Penelope asked. Charles and Penelope laughed. Simon did not. “Too early for the humor?” Penelope asked.

Simon did not answer. His hand, which was still waving them over, waved harder and faster. He had taken a step away from the front of the car. He turned and shone the flashlight on the closest car to the left, and then the closest car to the right.

He returned the light to the BMW’s front when Penelope and Charles joined him.

“What happened?” Penelope asked.

As they looked closer, Simon realized that it had not been a heavy weight that had made the indentation on the front of the car. If it had, the front hood would have been pushed closer to the ground. Instead, the front looked like it had been pinched together. He could not imagine what would have pinched it together.

“Strange, huh,” Simon said, as Penelope and Charles stared at the crushed front of the car.

“The other cars?” Penelope asked.

“They look the same,” Simon said. “We should take a closer look. Do you see how the front is not pushed to the ground? At first I thought something was dropped on top of the car. The more I look at it, that doesn’t seem likely. It looks more like it was caught between the jaws of life.”

“It does not look like any jaws of life I know,” Charles said. “I’m thinking that perhaps we were too quick in discarding the zombie theory.” Charles had bent down near the front of the car and was running his hands along the squished hood. He made small sounds, some good others bad, as if he was discovering different things. “From writing a lifetime of zombie stories, I can safely say this was not done by a zombie—at least by a zombie that obeys any of the stuff we know about zombies. I have always wondered if that would change once we actually see one. If everything we had made up in the pursuit of entertainment was false.”

“I think we can discount the zombie theory,” Simon said. “Whatever did that to this car was probably not the size of a man. Look at the marks. Tell me they don’t look like oversized bite marks.”

“I was trying to stay away from that,” Charles said. “But they do seem that way. These two holes could be fangs. And these appear like molars. Shine that line over here. I want to get a closer look at the size of this jaw.”

“Wait,” Penelope said, pushing Charles out of the way so she could get a closer look at the car. “You are telling me that some large beast bit the front of these cars? What are you thinking? A lion or an elephant?”

“It would have to be much bigger than either of those beasts,” Charles said. “Whatever bit the front of this car had a mouth that was almost as big as the hood. This car has a very large hood. I imagine if this happened to the some of the other cars, the jaws would have shattered the windshield as well.”

“Did you notice the drag marks?” Simon asked. “I thought it was skid marks before, but with these teeth marks, it is clear that the car was dragged to the side of the ditch. It did not just drive down into it. The real question is what did the dragging.”

“Let us look at a few more of the other cars,” Penelope said. “Maybe we will get a better idea of what is going on here.”

Simon nodded and with Penelope and Charles in tow, he began walking toward the closest car. As he turned, he saw the lights were still on in his car since Penelope left the door open.

“Do you think my car is safe,” Simon said, suddenly coming to a stop. He realized that if whatever had dragged the cars off to the side was still around, they could be stuck in the wilderness, a good twenty miles outside of town, with no way of getting any closer.

“Those marks were old,” Charles said. “You said so yourself.”

“That does not mean that whatever created those marks is not still here,” Penelope said. “Let us get back to the car. Perhaps we made a mistake getting out. Once we get to the town, we can come back. Maybe they will have an explanation for what is going on out here.”

“I agree,” Charles said. “It does not hurt to come back later. I am thinking we should not return until tomorrow during the day. This night time is freaking me out.”

Simon wanted to go back into the car. He wanted to drive to town and not stop until he was warm and safe in his sister’s house. But he realized he did not even know what his sister’s house looked like. He had the directions printed in the front seat of the car, but it might take them a while to get there, to find the house once they drove into town. While the town was not large, he did not remember the outskirts where his sister lived. He thought he would arrive during the day and have time to ask around. In the downtown area, there were always people milling around during the summer. He thought he would just stop and ask one of them for directions. The direction she printed from the computer were not accurate. He knew that by looking at the turn by turn directions. They could not be correct. His sister said that little had changed since he left, especially the downtown. The townspeople had worked hard to keep the town as it had been fifty years before. They had fought against chain restaurants and oversized malls. Even the grocery stores were mom and pop shops. It was probably still run by the same family as it had been when his family had left twenty years before.

“You two go back to the car,” Simon heard himself say. “I am going to look at a few more cars before I go back. Charles, you drive. Just in case.”

“Just in case we get chased by an oversized car eating monster?” Charles asked. “That’s a good idea. Just make sure if that monster does come this way, you get back to the car so we can drive off into the sunset. I do not reckon either of us wants to be monster or zombie food.”

“I thought you said it was unlikely the teeth marks were caused by zombies,” Simon said.

“In the dark anything is possible,” Charles said. He took Penelope by the hand and started running back to the car.

Anything is possible in the dark, Simon thought. He watched Penelope and Charles run to the car, and kept his flashlight on them until they were back in the car with the doors closed. He turned around and continued walking to the closest car.

He heard his car start up and watched as it rolled forward slowly. Charles would turn the wheels to the side of the road to provide more illumination every few feet. Simon watched as the car swerved back and forth across the road to provide him with the briefly blinding lights. He saw Penelope in the back. She was holding the second flashlight from the back and illuminating the road behind and to the other side. She was looking out for monsters, Simon knew. Simon turned back to the path as the car’s headlights kept blinding him as they turned toward him.

He approached the nearest car and began picking up speed. He tried to listen in the distance for evidence of the sound he had heard earlier, but he could only hear his own car driving slowly over the asphalt, and his own breathing, which was much faster than before. Even with the time since he had last seen the car, he felt more nervous as he approached the next car.

He looked up and saw that the clouds had cleared and the moon had risen in the east. The moon illuminated the field beyond the bushes, and for the first time, Simon was able to see the long rows of farmland. The farmland was still gray on black in the near darkness, and he stood staring at it for a few minutes, before the Charles’s honk brought him back. He waved toward the car, and continued to approach the next car on foot.

As he drew closer, he saw that it was a station wagon. He was almost close enough for the flashlight’s light to reach the car itself. When it did, he saw it was of a maroon color. He did not waste much time searching the back of the car, but headed to the front. He walked a bit into the ditch to approach the car at an angle, so his flashlight could reach it.

What he saw did not surprise him. The indentation on the roof of the station wagon was as large as it had been on the BMW. Unlike the last car, the bite mark—because it was now clear that it was bite mark—had attached itself to the edge of the car. The front left light had shattered, and the entire left side of the hood had been squished together. His flashlight’s light fell on the front left wheel, and it looked misshapen as well, sitting an angle with its top part away from the car, and its bottom part pulled in. There was no air left in the tire.

When he arrived at the car, he looked in and found that like the BMW, the station wagon was empty. He walked around the car to the tire marks, and saw what he expected: the marks were at an angle, as if the car had been dragged to the right side, to compensate for the bite on the left side. The car was perpendicular to the road, as the BMW had been. Whatever had dragged the BMW had also dragged the station wagon. And it had even compensated for the missed bite by dragging it more to the right.

Simon thought it was safe to assume that he would find similar marks on the rest of the cars. He ran back to his car. It was time they made it to the town to see what was going on. As he reached the car, he heard the noise again coming from the bushes. He turned and did not even need to point his flashlight into the distance to see what was approaching. With the light coming from the moon, he was able to see a large shape in the distance, beyond the bushes in the farmland. It was huge but moving slowly toward him. It made a strange sound, as if something was dragging and pounding at the same time.

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