The drive was long, especially since we didn’t stop for anything but gas and bathroom breaks along the way. But everyone took turns driving, and we napped and talked along the way.

Surprisingly, we didn’t talk about what we were going to do once we got to the New York/Canadian border. I guess we were all just kind of waiting to see what would happen and waiting to put off any more planning until the last possible moment. It was nice just to have a car ride to talk and not think too much.

When we finally made it to the New York State side of the border, there seemed to be a delay in getting across. The traffic was at a standstill and Adam decided to step out of the car to see if he could find out what was going on and what the hold-up was.

“Yeah, this is probably not so good for us,” he said once he got back into the car.

“What’s going on?” Michael asked.

“There’s a delay in getting across—dozens of cars, at least, ahead of us and gridlocked.”

“What is causing the delay?” Rob asked.

I could see the gears in his brain turning. He was thinking about whether or not the delay had anything to do with us. If these crooked cops were as serious of a threat as he seemed to think they were, then it didn’t seem impossible that they would have reached out to the border patrol already to stop us from leaving.

“I don’t know,” Adam answered, shaking his head. “Can’t tell from here. But it’s definitely going to make it difficult to try to slip through unnoticed because they’ve got the patrol guards stretched out along the sides of the road and even into the brush that is usually unmanned.”

“That isn’t going to be good for us,” Michael said. “We won’t be able to get across. And we’re basically sitting ducks if we just wait here in this line of cars.”

“What do we do?” Stacy asked.

The anxiety in her voice was palpable.

“I think we should get the car off the road,” Rob said. “There’s a truck stop I saw a few miles back. We should pull in there for the night. It’ll be safer to lay low there for the night and come back to the border tomorrow after this has all died down.”

“Agreed,” Michael said as he took the wheel.

He finagled his way out of the traffic by making an illegal U-turn, which thankfully no one seemed to notice. Then drove a half-mile down the dirt shoulder of the road until he could get back into a clear lane of traffic and headed into the other direction to find the truck stop. When we pulled in, there were only a few cars and a handful of semi-trucks at the rest stop area. We made a plan to camp out in the car for the night and get out and stretch our legs for a bit and get some snacks before getting cozied up inside the car until morning.

“I’m heading into the bathroom guys,” Stacy said as she stepped out of the car and stretched her arms behind her back.

“I’ll grab us some snacks,” Rob said as he headed toward the vending machines. “This is a pretty crappy truck stop, but at least there’s vending machines and coffee.”

“I’d prefer the woods in the mountains to be honest,” Adam said.

Michael laughed and nodded his head.

“Well at least that’s one thing we can agree on,” Michael said. “I don’t like just waiting here. Feels like we should be moving and not stalling, especially when we’re this close to the border. I just want to get across.”

“But you said we should pull off the road until tomorrow,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, I did. And I still think it’s the best idea given our current situation. I just don’t like it.”

To be honest, neither did I. I wasn’t going to feel at all at ease until we had made it across to Canada. And even then, it would probably take me a few days to shake off the feeling of always having to look over my shoulder. Crossing that border could not come soon enough. Although I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to do it since we couldn’t chance going through border patrol and it now looked as if even the illegal ways of sneaking across were blocked.

Rob came back with a handful of preservative filled snacks and balancing a stack of coffees in disposable cups on his forearm.

“That was fast,” I said as I reached to take one of the coffees from him.

“Really?” he asked. “Felt like I was gone for a while.”

Speaking of which—Stacy actually had been gone for a while.

“I’m going to go to the bathroom and check on Stacy,” I said.

“I’ll come too.”

“It’s okay,” I smiled at Michael who was now so devoutly overprotective that it was becoming endearing. “I think I can handle the ladies’ room on my own.”

There’s a strange feeling that happens when your subconscious knows that something is about to go wrong, but it hasn’t clued-in your more aware self yet. It’s almost like you’re stuck in a movie and you know that something isn’t quite right, but you can’t see anything wrong around you. Most of the time you don’t even realize that you’ve had the intuitive feeling until it is much, much too late. Then, when you look back on it, you realize that you shouldn’t have taken a sip from the cup, or gone down the staircase leading into the basement, or in this case—gone into the ladies’ room.

It’s funny how the universe works. If I had taken time to notice it, I would have realized that the guys must have felt the same unnoticeable feeling too, because they hadn’t stayed by the car. Instead, they chose to come shortly after me and wait outside the restroom doors. There was nothing in particular that prompted their decision. The rest stop was barely populated by a few people sleeping in their cars and trucks, and certainly nothing which would have given them cause to suspect there was any reason to worry about me. But they came and waited outside the door just moments after I had stepped inside anyways. And that was all it took—just one step inside the bathroom.

I screamed and stood in a paralyzed shock, unable to do anything but put my hand over my mouth both to try to silence myself and to keep from being sick. All three guys immediately ran into the bathroom as soon as they heard me scream and abruptly halted next to me once they saw the scene that was sprawled out before us. Never in any of the horror movies that I had ever seen, had I seen anything like this before.

Stacy hadn’t just been murdered, she had been completely dismantled and dismembered. It was exactly as Rob had warned me about. The entire bathroom was covered in her blood and pieces of her body were scattered all across the bathroom floor. I wanted to cry and scream again, but I was so scared and horrified that all I could do was shake involuntarily as the tears ran down my cheeks. I was just about to bury my face in Adam’s shirt next to me, when I felt Michael grab me by the arm and pull me so hard that I felt my elbow pop.

“We need to get out of here now,” he said as he yanked me out of the bathroom and all four of us ran back toward the car.

But when we got to the parking lot, the car was no longer there. I looked around to see if somehow, for some unknown reason, the car had been moved or was getting towed. But it was nowhere in sight. The car was completely gone.

“Did you leave the key in it?” I asked.

Michael reached into his pocket and pulled out the single key to hold up and show me. The car had been purposely lifted. Just like Stacy had been very purposely and viciously murdered. They were after us, and now we had no way to get away.

“All our stuff was in that car,” Adam said. “We don’t have anything to survive off of, no money, no food, no way to stay warm outside in the cold.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Michael said. “The only thing that matters is surviving the night and getting across that border in the morning.”

I looked over at Rob, who had been silent this whole time. He looked like he was simultaneously going to be sick and kill someone with his bare hands. He had known Stacy for years and had been her partner. That was about as close as two people could get without being romantically involved. It was like being family, and he had just seen her completely gutted on the floor of a truck stop bathroom. I knew that cops were tough and that he had probably seen worse than that, but this had to be impossibly hard for him to just push aside and press on.

“Rob?” I asked as I reached my hand out to touch his arm.

He looked back at me with a cold stare that let me know he had turned off his emotions for the time being. I forgot how good cops were at compartmentalizing too.

“Michael is right,” he said without a trace of emotion. “Our only priority is surviving the night and making it onto Canadian soil tomorrow. Whoever killed Stacy is still here and you can bet that they’re coming for us now.”

“There has to be security at these truck stops, doesn’t there?” I asked.

I looked around and spotted a man in a night guard uniform. He was standing near the vending machines now, with his back toward us. It looked like he was moving his hands around a bit and maybe talking to someone in front of him. He started to turn around toward our direction, but just as I got ready to flag him down, I saw who it was that he was talking to—a cop.

Michael reached to pull my arm down as soon as he saw it too.

“What would a local police officer be doing here in the middle of the night talking to rest stop security?” I asked in a whisper.

I was already afraid that I knew that answer to my own question. When the cop looked over in our direction, I could see him hone in on us, even from a distance away.