FEATURE: “The Road to Bitter End” by Justin Carlos Alcalá
We sped along a dark highway chained down by somnolent villages and crooked woods. Mellony sat drunk on borrowed dreams while I steered. We were going west no matter what the gentry said, leaving a world of jagged expectations behind. But resolve swore a single enemy, and its name is nature. After ten hours on the road, we suffered the tax of a gas station diet and searched for sustenance.
Mellony and I funded our expedition with her last paycheck, so our options bore limits. The only affordable place open in Bitter End, Tennessee, was a restaurant chain known for southern breakfast and fistfights. We pulled into its jigsaw-shaped lot, parking between a rusty semi-truck and a cotton-candy-blue 1957 Chevy. Silhouettes along tables told us we weren’t the only famished midnight riders. The diner’s interior globe lights were our only guide along a side street of obscurity, so like moths, we flapped our way inside.
I had a gut feeling, which could’ve been gas, that something was off. A truck driver in a used flannel sat at the lunch counter playing solitaire and drinking syrup from the tap. Along a round cocktail table, a set of teenagers dressed in matching Levi’s stared out the restaurant’s window with wide eyes reserved for death notices. A rail-thin man, still as a marble David, seated in the corner booth with a smoking coffin nail pinched between his fingers. I heard banging pots and a muffled argument beyond the silver bump-door. We helped ourselves to the closest booth, reading sticky menus.
“They have city ham,” said Mellony.
“Which city?”
A man, his face marked by tattoos and an overbite, exited the kitchen, glancing at us before departing before we could order bean-water. I kept looking over Mellony’s shoulder at the customers and discerned that not one of them had been served. Mellony must’ve picked up on my curiosity because she peaked her head around and joined in gawking. Famished, I half-stood in my seat, looking for someone to assuage my desire. The only thing staring back at me from behind the bar was an outdated Halloween calendar sponsored by Hershey’s Chocolate.
A lap steel guitar played a song with no lyrics through an overhead speaker, then when it ended, the same song looped again. Mellony and I sat quietly, our eagerness to beat the odds swapping places with confusion about our new terrarium. My eyes defied directives not to wander, returning to the truck driver at the counter. The scruffy man in a baseball hat sipped out of the glass syrup dispenser as if it were coffee, but the liquid pancake topping never seemed to lose its level. He laid down a jack of diamonds atop another jack of diamonds before removing another card from the deck. I turned to tell Mellony, but she seemed to fight with her own unearthing, gawping at the cocktail table sandwiched between two teens.
I looked over the high schoolers with a detective’s suspicion. The boy, hair greased into a ducktail, kept a pair of smokes wrapped in his white sleeve. From my angle, something dark pink splattered across his shirt. The girl wore a matching V-neck, complete with splatter, and a pair of jeans rolled up to her shins. Under her red nail-polished hand lay a pocketbook copy of Fahrenheit 451. The pair’s window-pinned gazes pierced the veil of what was available to the naked eye, trapped in some vortex of quantum physics.
My scrutiny shifted from the teenagers to the thin man sitting in a corner booth. His narrow face and sharp cheekbones made him appear elfin, and his wool toffee knitted three-piece suit fit him like a glove. Silver and gold confetti intertwined in his tangle of sandy blonde hair. But not to be outdone, the man’s oddities pressed onward, revealing something lurid. His colorless left eye glinted like an empty glass, and his right foot wore a hot pink high heel spattered in mud. His cigarette, now burning for a song’s cycle, remained crayon size though its tip blazed cherry at the end. He continued to glare at the tobacco’s tip as if it owed him vindication.
A banging behind the kitchen door heralded the tattooed man’s return. He gave us the same poisonous stare he’d thrown at us the last time, before u-turning back to his hole, ignoring me as I raised a menu in petition. Mellony and I exchanged wordless qualms. As we did, the music ceased, and a sound so quiet it demanded attention deafened the diner. It was an echo chamber of naught, vacuum sealed inside the restaurant like a deep breath before perdition’s scream. Mold stretched over the walls, and pencil-line cracks webbed across tiles. I saw Mellony’s hand tremble over growing buds of mildew on our tabletop, and reaching for her, I noticed gooseflesh on my arm.
“Bullets don’t go back in their barrel,” said Mellony.
I grabbed my keys, took her hand and led us out the corroded entrance. The outdoor sign twitched on-and-off, constricted in vines that sprouted from asphalt cavities. The diner’s bricks painted themselves in dust with accents of grime. Our feet made their own decisions. As we put distance between us, I noticed the diner yield to its authentic hue, daisy signs, rosy awnings, and vivid bulb lights. It was as if it had never happened, but we didn’t stick around for the rationale to catch up. My high beams reached the pair of divergent on-ramps, and I looked to Mellony. She nodded with her soft honey smile, and I took a left.
We retraced the highway to our birthright. The past is a memorial fused by sentiment. Mellony said that motion isn’t our sanctuary, but a trap with iron teeth. Folks avoid the heat only to end up in the cold. If we put the bottle down now, we’d avoid the hangover. Besides, we were meant to rule these lands, not run away from them.
My name is Justin Carlos Alcalá, a Mexican-American horror and dark fiction writer. Born and raised in Chicago, I now live with Bigfoot in the mountains of North Carolina. In the past fifteen years, I’ve published four novels and thirty-plus stories in American literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. I’ve won several literary awards, including the Speculative Literature Foundation Finalist Award for A Dead End Job and Horror Writers Association Grant Award for The Taming of the Cthulhu.
WEBSITE: https://www.justincalcala.com
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/justin.alcala/
BLOG: https://justinblog.com