Survive the Night by Riley Sager

INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT

Charlie watches the diner recede in the Grand Am’s side mirror—a blur of chrome and neon that’s soon replaced by night sky, moonlight, and the ghost-gray trees crowding the edge of the road. They’ve reentered the middle of nowhere. Just the two of them.

They ride in silence, both of them facing forward, their eyes fixed on the sweep of headlights brightening the road ahead. Charlie has no idea if they’re heading toward the interstate or away from it. Not that it matters. She already assumes that wherever they’re going, it’s definitely not Ohio. And that there’ll be no coming back from this.

“How much do you know?” Josh says after they’ve traveled a mile without another car or building in sight.

“Everything,” Charlie says.

Josh nods, unsurprised. “I figured as much. Why’d you get back in the car?”

“Because I had to.”

It really is that simple. Charlie couldn’t risk letting Josh do something to Marge or Officer Tom. And she certainly couldn’t let him leave on his own, where he could do the same things he did to Maddy to someone else. So now she’s here, sitting next to a killer.

Call it fate.

Call it karma.

Whatever it is, she understands she needs to be the one to stop Josh. It’s her duty and hers alone.

That doesn’t make her any less frightened. She’s more scared now than she’s been the entire car ride. Because now she knows the stakes.

Stop Josh from getting away, or die trying.

The problem is that Charlie doesn’t know how, exactly, she should try to stop him. She sits with her hand thrust deep in her coat pocket, her fingers curling and uncurling around the handle of the steak knife. Part of her is tempted to attack Josh now and just get it over with. She doesn’t because the idea of stabbing someone—literally thrusting a knife into another human body—frightens her as much as thinking about what Josh might try to do to her.

“Most people wouldn’t have done that,” he says.

“I guess that makes me plucky.”

Josh chuckles at that. When he looks Charlie’s way, it’s with what she can only discern as admiration.

“Yes, you are certainly that.” He pauses, as if debating whether he should say what’s on his mind, ultimately deciding to just go for it. “I like you, Charlie. That’s what’s so fucked-up about all this. I like talking to you.”

“You like lying to me,” Charlie says. “There’s a big difference.”

“You got me there. I told you a lot of things that weren’t true. I won’t deny that.”

“Like your name being Josh.”

“That’s one of them, yes. My real name is Jake Collins. But you already knew that.”

Charlie nods. She did. Even at the height of Josh’s mind games, a small part of her knew she was right about that.

“Your real name. Your real driver’s license. That game of Twenty Questions. Why did you let me think I’d imagined all of that?”

“Because I needed to keep you in the car,” Josh says. “You looked like you were about to bolt, so I came up with something on the fly. I guess it worked.”

That it did. And Charlie feels stupid and angry with herself for believing it, even though she shouldn’t. It’s not stupid to want to believe the best in people. You shouldn’t get mad at yourself for thinking someone is good and not inherently evil.

“Is there anything you told me tonight that is true?” she says.

“That story about my mom. That’s all true. She left on Halloween just like I said. I haven’t told too many people about that.”

“Why did you tell me?”

“Because I like talking to you,” Josh says. “That wasn’t a lie, either.”

Inside her coat pocket, Charlie’s fingers continue to clench and unclench around the knife handle. Earlier, they did the same thing around the handle of the passenger-side door. Once eager for escape, now eager for a fight.

But Josh shows no sign of giving it to her. He simply drives, unhurried, ready to say something else he’s unsure about.

“My dad always blamed me for my mom leaving,” he says. “He said it was my fault. Right up until the day he died.”

“Another thing you lied about.”

“Not really,” Josh says. “He did have a stroke. It’s what killed him. And I would have dropped everything to take care of him, if I’d needed to. Even though he hated me and, well, I guess I hated him.”

“Because he blamed you for what your mom did?” Charlie says.

Josh shakes his head. “No. Because he convinced me to blame myself. It didn’t matter that my mother chose to leave all on her own. I thought it was because of me. I still do.”

Charlie knows that feeling all too well. So heavy and cumbersome and exhausting that she would do anything to rid herself of it.

Even die.

She knows because she almost did. Not tonight. Before that. Four days before.

“I almost killed myself,” she says.

The words surprise Josh. They surprise Charlie even more. She’s never admitted it before. Not even to herself.

“Why?” Josh says, shock still potent in his voice. Charlie notices something else there, too—a note of concern.

“Because I wanted the guilt to go away.”

“So that’s why you accepted a ride from a stranger.”

“Yes,” Charlie says. “That’s exactly why.”

Josh stays silent a moment, thinking. “How did it happen?”

“Accidental overdose,” Charlie says. “Sleeping pills.”

They were the little white pills, prescribed to offset the restlessness brought on by the little orange ones. Charlie hadn’t taken many, preferring to spend her nights indulging in revenge fantasies that bore zero resemblance to the real-life one she’s now experiencing.

But then came the night in which the human-shaped blank she normally fought was replaced by a mirror image of herself. It startled her so much that she put a movie into the VCR, crawled into bed, and downed a handful of little white pills.

She told herself that she just needed to sleep.

That it was just a coincidence the VHS tape she picked was Singin’ in the Rain, which she once told Maddy was the last movie she wanted to see before she died because it was as close to heaven as any film could get.

Charlie continued to lie to herself even after her body rebelled and she threw up the pills and then flushed the meager few that remained down the toilet. She let herself think every excuse in the book. She was too tired to know what she was doing. She wasn’t thinking straight. It was all an unfortunate accident.

That’s the real reason she needed to leave Olyphant immediately. Why she couldn’t wait until Thanksgiving or when Robbie was free. Why she went to the ride board and put up that flyer and jumped at the chance to share a ride with Josh.

Charlie was afraid that if nothing changed, she’d experience another unfortunate accident, this time with a different result.

But as the shame and sadness of that morning come back to her, she knows the truth.

None of it was accidental.

For a brief, soul-shaking moment, she would have preferred to die than spend one more minute weighed down by her guilt.

Now, though, she wants to live. More than anything.

“I’m glad that didn’t happen,” Josh says. “And I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet under different circumstances. I think I would have liked that.”

Charlie stays silent. It’s better to do that than admit she feels the same way. There were points in this drive when she actually liked Josh, before suspicion and fear kicked in. She felt a kinship with him, probably because he’s as much of an outcast as she is. Lonely, too. She can tell that even now. Like recognizes like. In a weird, twisted way, Josh seems to understand her better than even Maddy sometimes did.

Or maybe it’s simply Maddy who makes her feel tied to Josh. There’s a reason Josh chose her to be one of his victims. Perhaps he was drawn to Maddy for the same reasons Charlie was. And it’s possible that’s another reason she got back into the car with him at the diner, even though it defied logic and reason.

She wants to know why.

Why Josh picked Maddy.

Why he approached her outside the bar.

Why he decided to kill her.

But instead of trying to articulate all that, Charlie lets the silence grow. It fills the car, uneasy, the two of them never taking their eyes off the road, which seems to have narrowed. On both sides, the forest presses in close. Bare branches arc overhead, connecting like elderly couples holding hands. Bits of snow still sit in the evergreens. Occasional clumps of it drop from the branches and hit the roof of the car with a muffled thump.

“So what now?” Charlie eventually says.

“We drive.”

“But not to Ohio.”

“No, Charlie. I’m afraid not.”

“What’s going to happen when the driving stops?”

“I think you already know the answer.”

Charlie’s fingers again curl around the knife in her pocket. This time, they stay that way. Gripping it tight. As ready as she’ll ever be.

“Maybe you should stop driving now,” she says.

Josh gives her a look. “You sure you want that?”

“No,” Charlie says. “But I’ve gone through a lot of things I didn’t want.”

“Like what happened to your parents.”

“Yes. And Maddy.”

Charlie finally senses it—the hardening of her heart she’s been waiting for. All it took was saying Maddy’s name out loud to the man who killed her. Yet it feels nothing like what she experienced in the movies in her mind. She’s angry, yes, but also sad. So exhaustingly sad.

“Yes,” Josh says. “And your—”

A deer suddenly leaps into the road, right in front of the car, the headlights making its eyes glow.

Josh pounds the brakes, and Charlie’s jerked forward a sliver of a second before the seat belt locks and yanks her back. Her head snaps against the back of the seat. Beside her, Josh cuts the wheel to the right, trying to avoid the deer. The animal springs across the road and into the woods, but the car keeps moving. Fishtailing at first, then rotating, the back of the Grand Am whipping in an arc across the road.

When the car stops, it’s still on the road but facing the wrong direction.

They sit there a moment, the car idling, the engine pinging, the headlights pointing in the direction from which they’d just come.

“Are you okay?” Josh says.

“I think so,” Charlie says before having two thoughts, right on top of each other.

The first is: If Josh plans on killing her, why does he care if she’s okay?

The second is: The driving has stopped.

Josh unhooks his seat belt. “We might have clipped that deer. I’m going to check the front of the car.”

He pauses, waiting for Charlie to say something. But she can’t say anything because that second thought she had repeats through her head like a siren.

We’ve stopped driving. We’ve stopped driving. We’ve stopped driving.

A third thought joins it.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

But Charlie does.

She’s known the moment they left the diner.

Josh is going to try to kill her and she’s going to try to kill him and only one of them is going to succeed.

With her hand in her coat pocket, her fingers in a death grip around the knife, Charlie watches as Josh gives up waiting for a response and gets out of the car. He crosses in front of it, his sweatshirt bright in the glow of the headlights. When he bends down to examine the front bumper, Charlie notices wisps of steam rising from the Grand Am’s hood. It takes her a second to realize the cause of it.

The engine.

It’s still running.

Ready to drive.

To end this, right now, all she needs to do is slip behind the wheel, shift into first gear, and stomp on the gas pedal.

Charlie moves quickly.

Snapping off the seat belt.

Sliding over the center console.

Grabbing the steering wheel for leverage.

She’s halfway behind the wheel when Josh catches sight of her. In a flash, he’s beside the car, flinging open the driver’s-side door before Charlie can hit the lock. As Josh pushes his way into the car, Charlie scrambles back into the passenger seat.

Josh gazes at her with regret in his eyes.

“Listen, Charlie,” he says, “I don’t want to hurt you, okay? But I can. Hurt you, that is. I’m quite capable of it. So we can do this two ways. You can be calm about it, which is my recommendation. Or you can try to fight it and I’ll be forced to get rough, which—I reiterate—I really, really don’t want to do.”

Shrinking against the passenger-side door, Charlie tries to put her hand back in her pocket.

“Keep those hands where I can see them,” Josh says. “Don’t make this hard on yourself.”

He plunges a hand into the front pocket of his jeans. He pulls something out and tosses it to Charlie. Unwilling to catch it, Charlie recoils and lets it drop to the floor with a rattle.

She looks down and sees it’s a pair of handcuffs.

“Pick them up and put them on,” Josh says.

Charlie shakes her head, and a tear flings from her eyes. A surprise. She didn’t know she’d started crying.

“You need to be smart now,” Josh says, his tone a warning. “Pick them up.”

“I—” Charlie’s voice cracks, cut short by fear and anger and sadness. “I don’t want to.”

“Please don’t make me get rough,” Josh says. “You don’t want that. I don’t want that. So I’m going to count to three. And when I’m done, those cuffs need to be around your wrists.”

He pauses.

Then he starts to count.

“One.”

Still shaking her head and still crying, Charlie reaches for the handcuffs at her feet.

“Two.”

She scrunches down, one hand scooping up the handcuffs, the other burrowing back into her coat pocket.

“Three.”

Charlie sits up, the cuffs cold in her left hand, the knife handle hot in her right.

She doesn’t move.

“Damn it, Charlie. Just use the fucking cuffs.”

Josh lunges over the center console, moving in an instant from driver’s side to passenger side.

Charlie pulls the knife from her coat.

She closes her eyes.

Then, with a scream so loud it shakes the car windows, she thrusts the knife forward and plunges it into Josh’s stomach.

She thought it would go in easier than it does. In the movies, knives slide in smoothly, like a blade through butter. The truth is that it takes force. Teeth-gritting, grunting force to push it through Josh’s sweatshirt, then his flesh, then deeper still, into places Charlie doesn’t want to think about. She stops only when she feels blood on her hands and hears Josh moan her name.

“Charlie.”