Road to Nowhere

"I need the map." I shook her shoulder as gently as I could. Susie opened one eye and stuck out her tongue, turning toward the passenger door. "Can you get it? It's in my bag."

"Do I smell chicken?" Both eyes were open now and she sat up, blinking at the brightness.

"Yeah." I nodded at the bucket on the floor. "I need to know which exit."

"Did I really sleep through you stopping for chicken?" She yawned, leaning carefully over the seat and fishing through her bag.

"You slept through half of New Mexico, doll." I admired the swell of her behind as she stretched over the seat, pulling the map out of my bag and putting it down between us.

Susie settled herself in the front seat again, digging through the red and white bag on the floor and pulling out a tub of coleslaw. "Oh, evil temptation!"

I steered around something in the road. "What exit does it say to take off this?"

Susie looked at the hand-drawn map and carefully printed directions. "Sixty-three."

She put her bare feet up on the dashboard, pulling a white spoon/fork combination out of its plastic and studying the eating utensil. "I bet the guy who invented the spork is going to be a millionaire." I noticed her toes, painted a deep, blood red. "Hey, are you still hungry?"

"Nah. I had a couple wings." I nodded to the greasy red and white bucket on the floor, leaning over and squeezing her slim leg through her sun dress. "Although...I could go for a thigh."

"Bad!" She poked my knuckles with her spork.

"Watch it!" I put my hand back on the steering wheel, smiling.

"Oh right, like I could take you with a spork?"

"You just like saying spork."

"Where are we, Mark?" Susie tapped the spoon against the dash to some invisible beat. "There's nothing to see out here but sand and more sand."

"Not true—look, there's a cactus!" I pointed, using the diversion to grab the utensil out of her hand. Susie rolled her eyes but rewarded me with a small smile. I held out the modified spoon. "Wanna spork?"

"Bad!" She groaned, but took it back. "I'm so tired of being lost. How did we end up heading to a town we couldn't even find on the map?" I glanced over to see her pulling the lid off the bucket of chicken and peering inside.

I shrugged. "Maps don't know everything."

"If it isn't on the map, it doesn't exist." She gave me a Susie-look, the one that said, 'I know everything, even if you think I don't.'

"Well, let's hope you're wrong." I watched her use the rubber band around her wrist to pull her long, dark hair back into a ponytail and sighed.

"Never happens." She flipped on the radio with a delicate flick of her small wrist.

I smiled, slipping a hand behind her neck, massaging. "You're so smug."

She slid all the way across the Malibu's bench seat—even with the air on, her long legs stuck to the vinyl—and snuggled up beside me. "Mmm. I think I found something better than chicken."

"Susie..." Her fingers did the walking up my leg, dancing across my crotch. "I'm driving."

"So drive."

There was no stopping a determined Susie, and she was determined now, unzipping my fly, her small hand finding my already-hardening cock through the gap in my boxers.

"Oh Christ." Her mouth was warm and wet, licking me into a swelling state of hardness as I leaned back in the seat, giving her more room to work. The soft, hungry noises she made from my lap were maddening, and the road seemed to melt, a fading mirage in the orange glow of the setting sun, as my eyes half-closed in pleasure.

"Mmmmm," she murmured around the length, her lips coming up red on the tip. "Now this is what I call a tasty meal."

I tried to control myself—my breathing, the pressure of my foot on the gas pedal, the play of the steering wheel in my hand—but my hips moved all by themselves, thrusting my cock into her willing mouth. She made a fist around the shaft and stroked me fast as her tongue circled the head. I knew she could taste my precum, just mere pennies compared to the payoff her hard work was going to give her in, I gauged, probably less than a minute.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," I whispered, grabbing onto her ponytail—the perfect handle—using it to pump myself into her mouth, feeling it building, a deep well, a fountain ready to burst. The speedometer read a steady fifty-five, and that was good. Don McLean was crooning a goodbye to Miss American Pie, and that was good, too. The road was straight and even, the yellow lines stretching upward as we began to crest the top of a hill, and I was riding high toward my own summit, Susie's mouth working its magic between my legs.

"Oh yeah, oh yeah, it's coming!" I moaned, the shove of my hips forcing my cock deep into her mouth as she swallowed—I heard her throat working, trying to take the full load of my cum—and it was in that moment of unimaginable heaven I saw the flash of lowbeams converging with the blacktop as we came to the very top of the hill.

I had time to think that it was early for lights—mine were still off—as the sun was just setting somewhere deep in the desert. I had time to feel Susie's blissfully unaware sigh as she licked the last bit of my cum from the tip of my cock. I think I even had time to hear the last bit of the song on the radio:

Bye-bye, Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to the levy

But the levy was dry

And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye

Singing this'll be the day that I die...*

At least, I think I heard it, maybe I just remembered it that way, the DJ saying, "Number three on the charts this week, that was..."

I realized the car was in our lane, no mirage coming over the hill in the fading heat-haze of a blood-red sun, but a hulking, flying mass of metal that would knock us fully into darkness.

So I closed my eyes. There was nothing else to do but close my eyes and wait for it, and when my breath turned to glass in my throat, when the impact didn't come, when the Malibu continued on its way under my power down the ever-darkening ribbon of highway, I opened them again in a panic.

Seeing the truth made me want to retch. Seeing only half of Susie's head resting in my lap, the blood soaked end of her pony-tail slick in my hand. Seeing the front end of the Malibu—brand spanking new and cherry red in 1972—crumpled like an accordion in front of me, its body rusted, the paint faded almost to pink.

There were no lights, there was no road, no smell of chicken, no radio playing. Some time during its lingering stay on the side of the road in the middle of the desert for the past thirty-some years, the Malibu had become a convertible, it's roof completely gone, leaving us completely exposed to the elements.

Not that it mattered. We were the elements now.

"Susie." I blinked, whispered her name, and she sat up, still licking her lips. There was no more blood, no more nightmare gore. She was just Susie again, her eyes bright in the orange glow of sunset. There was no car coming toward us, and the Malibu seemed to know its own way down the desert highway.

"Susie, did you...?" I wanted to ask her if she had seen, if she knew what I had, in that awful, liminal moment between worlds, realized. When she pressed her fingers to my lips, and then kissed me—god, I could taste my cum on her mouth, how could that be?—I understood that she knew, too, had known all along.

She snuggled up next to me and turned up the radio. It was that song again, that same song, singing this will be the day that I die...

"Just keep driving," she murmured, and I did, steering us ever toward our destiny, on a darkening road to nowhere.

*American Pie by Don MacLean