Survive the Night by Riley Sager
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Josh shifts the car into a lower gear as they reach an incline. The beginning of a hilly area that will take them over a ridge and then down through the Delaware Water Gap and into Pennsylvania. With the change in elevation comes fog, wisps of which begin to envelope the Grand Am the higher it climbs. Soon the car is surrounded. Charlie looks out the windshield and sees only thick, gray swirls ahead of them. A glance in the side mirror shows the same thing behind them. Any cars that might be in the vicinity are lost in the mist. A sense of isolation settles over Charlie, drifting around her like the fog.
It’s just her and Josh.
All alone.
The song ends and another begins, startling Charlie, who’d stopped noticing the music. She had been too busy thinking. Wondering about Josh. Who he is. What he wants. Lost in her own mental fog, during which her right hand had once again found its way to the door handle at her side. This time, Charlie lets it stay there.
The new song has a slinky bass riff that slightly reminds Charlie of the surf guitar rock her parents listened to constantly. She knows the title of the song, though she’s not sure how.
“Come as You Are.”
Josh shuts off the stereo, and the car is plunged into silence.
“Let’s play,” Josh says.
“Play what?” Charlie replies, trying hard to keep from sounding as nervous as she feels.
“Twenty Questions. If we’re going to play the game, we should do it right.”
Charlie continues to study the side mirror, hoping a car will speed into view behind them. She’d feel better with another set of headlights in sight and not just a muted glow in the distance. It would mean there’s someone else nearby if things go bad. She’s seen enough movies to know how situations can change for the worse in a split second. And she’s had enough life experience to back that up.
Not that she’s certain Josh wants to do her harm. When it comes to the man sitting a mere foot away, nothing is certain. But it’s a possibility. Enough of one that she slides a little closer to the passenger door, trying to put an additional inch between them. Enough to keep her checking the side mirror, looking in vain for those headlights. Enough for the same six words to keep repeating through her head like a good-luck chant.
Be smart. Be brave. Be careful.
“I wasn’t really playing a game,” she says.
“Seemed like it to me.” Josh gives a little shrug, the lift of his shoulder cut short by his grip on the steering wheel. “Seeing how you were messing with me just now. I mean, I assume that’s why you did it. Because we’re playing a game.”
Charlie makes another minuscule edge toward the door. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Oh, I know,” Josh says. “I’m not mad. I get it. We’re stuck in this car together. Running out of things to say. Why not ask some questions and kid around a bit. So now it’s my turn. Twenty Questions. You ready?”
“I’m really not in the mood right now.”
“Humor me,” Josh says, cajoling. “Pretty please?”
Charlie relents. It’s the right thing to do. Play along, keep him occupied, hope the fog clears and more cars start to surround them.
“Fine,” she says, forcing a polite smile. “Let’s play.”
“Great. I’m thinking of an object. You’ve got twenty questions to figure out what it is. Go.”
Charlie knows the game. She played it on road trips with her parents, back when she was a little girl and they used to drive everywhere. Kings Island and Cedar Point, which were every-summer destinations. But also places outside of Ohio. Niagara Falls. Mount Rushmore. Disney World. Charlie spent every drive slumped in the back seat, sweltering because her father claimed that using the air conditioner wasted gas. When she inevitably got too bored and whiny, her mother would say, “Twenty questions, Charlie. Go.”
There was a standard question she’d always ask first. One designed to narrow things down immediately. Only now, at the start of a very different game, she can’t remember it to save her life. That lump of worry she still feels in her gut tells her Josh isn’t playing this just to amuse himself.
There are stakes involved.
Ones much higher than when she was a kid.
“You going to ask a question?” Josh says.
“Yeah. Just give me another second.”
Charlie closes her eyes and pictures those road trips like grainy home movies. Her father behind the wheel in ridiculous oversize sunglasses that clipped over his regular glasses. Her mother in the front seat with the window down, her hair trailing behind her. Her in the back seat, her sweaty legs sticking to Naugahyde, opening her mouth to speak.
The memory works. The mandatory first question pops into her head, fully formed.
“Is it bigger than a bread box?” she says.
Josh shakes his head. “Negative. One question down. Nineteen to go.”
Charlie’s memory hums like a film projector, quickly giving her the second question she’d always ask.
“Is it alive?”
“Interesting,” Josh says. “I’m going to say no, but someone smarter than me might say yes.”
Charlie considers his response, thinking hard, knowing that if she does, it might push aside all the other thoughts slithering through her brain. Scary thoughts. Ones she doesn’t want to think about. So she focuses on the game, pretending it really is just a game even though she knows it’s not.
Not for her.
“Is it associated with something alive?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s part of something.”
“Yes,” Josh says. “And I consider that a question even though it wasn’t phrased as one. That wouldn’t pass muster on Jeopardy!”
“Animal or vegetable?”
It’s another one of the standard questions she’d ask her parents on those long-ago road trips. Even though it was technically two questions, her mother always let it slide. Josh, on the other hand, calls her out on it.
“You know I can only give you yes or no answers. Care to rephrase?”
Charlie no longer tries to think about the games she played with her parents in that hot, sticky car with its perpetual McDonald’s smell. She worries the current game will ruin those memories. She doubts she’ll ever willingly play Twenty Questions again. Even if Josh turns out to be harmless. A very big if.
“Is it vegetable?” Charlie says, ridding her brain of images of her father’s clip-on sunglasses and her mother’s wind-blown hair. Instead, she pictures plants and all the things attached to them. Leaves and branches. Thorns and berries.
“No.”
“It’s animal, then.”
“Yes,” Josh says, the answer narrowing things down but not a whole lot.
“Is this animal common?”
“Very.”
“Is it wild or tame?”
“That’s two questions again, Charlie.”
“Sorry.”
Charlie’s voice goes small, and she winces upon hearing it. How weak she sounds. How scared. And she can’t sound weak or scared. She can’t, under any circumstance, let Josh know she suspects he’s up to no good. If she remains calm—if she continues to be smart, brave, careful—there’s a chance nothing bad will happen.
“I’ll rephrase,” she says, forcing some steel into her voice. “Is this animal wild?”
“It can be. The wildest.”
Josh smirks as he says it. A knowing, winking, bordering-on-smarmy upturn of his lips that tells Charlie more than any spoken answer could.
“You’re talking about humans, right?” she says.
“I am.”
“And is this object you’re thinking of part of the body?”
“You’re good at this game, you know that? You’ve only asked—” Josh pauses to count the fingers on his right hand, the digits flexing. “Ten questions and you’re so close already.”
Charlie’s not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. It’s hard to tell without knowing the stakes. But since Josh seems to be in no hurry to do anything but continue to play the game, Charlie decides it’s best to do just that.
Keep him occupied.
Keep him happy and calm and driving until they reach a place where they can stop and Charlie can get out of the car and never get back in again.
That’s another thing she’s decided. To do what she’s starting to fear she should have done back at the 7-Eleven just before the highway—tell Josh she’s changed her mind, leave the car, get her things from the trunk, and let him drive away without her. She doesn’t care if she’s overreacting and Josh is just some harmless weirdo who only wants to drive her to Youngstown. It’s better to be safe than sorry. And right now, safe is a place outside of this car.
“Is this body part useful?”
“Oh, it’s very useful,” Josh says, again with the knowing smirk. This time, though, its accompanied by a lift of the eyebrows that suggests something both sexual and sinister. Seeing it makes Charlie shift in her seat.
It occurs to her—just now, when it’s far too late, and not back when she was still safely at Olyphant—that Josh could be a sexual predator. Someone who lures college girls into his car, rapes them, dumps them on the side of the road. Then he drives off to a different university and the process begins anew. Josh is certainly physically capable of it. His size was one of the first things Charlie noticed about him.
The worried lump in her stomach expands, rising upward into her chest, pushing against her lungs. Her rib cage tightens. So much so that she takes a deep breath, just to prove to herself that she still can.
“Do all humans have it?” she asks, silently pleading that Josh says yes and she can stop tallying all the pornographic possibilities he might be thinking of.
“We do,” Josh says, more straightforward this time, as if he’s realized he’s crossed some invisible line he didn’t intend to breach. Not that it makes Charlie feel any better. Now that the idea of Josh being a rapist is in her head, she can’t shake it.
Her fingers have never left the door handle. She flexes them against it. A test. Seeing how long it might take to pull the handle and fling the door open, if it should come to that.
She desperately hopes it doesn’t come to that.
“Is this body part located above the waist?”
“As a matter of fact, it is,” Josh says.
“Is it above the neck?”
“Yes.”
“Is it something we’re born with?”
Josh appears thoughtful, taking a moment to squint at the thinning fog outside the windshield. Charlie does the same, relieved to see not only the lightening of the gray outside but a set of taillights glowing not too far in front of them. She checks the side mirror, and her relief grows. There’s a car behind them now, headlights cutting through the dissipating gloom. Another pair of headlights joins it. Then another.
Charlie’s hit with a faint shimmer of hope. Maybe one of the cars will try to pass them. Maybe she can flag down the driver.
“It’s funny you should ask that,” Josh says, still gazing out the windshield. “Because we’re not.”
In an instant, all of Charlie’s hopefulness disappears. Because she knows the object Josh is thinking of—a realization that makes it feel as if all the blood has drained from her body. Ice water pours in to replace it, leaving Charlie motionless and numb.
“You know the answer, don’t you?” Josh says.
Charlie nods, too unnerved to speak.
“Then say it, smarty-pants.”
Charlie swallows and forces herself to speak, willing the words onto her tongue and into the stifling air of the car.
“Is it a tooth?”
“It is.” Josh smiles, proud of himself. “Very good. You solved it in sixteen questions.”
“What made you pick that object?”
“I don’t know. It just came to me.” A stricken look crosses Josh’s face. “Oh, shit. I’m so sorry, Charlie. I wasn’t thinking. No wonder you look like you’ve just seen a ghost. It’s because of your friend. That guy pulled out one of her teeth after killing her, didn’t he?”
Charlie shakes her head, wanting him to stop talking. Needing him to stop. The urge to shut him up is so great that she’d lunge into the driver’s seat and clamp a hand over his mouth if there was a way to do it without them running off the road. Because the more he talks, the worse the situation becomes.
Still, she has another question. One she must ask. She needs to hear Josh’s answer. She wants to believe what he says, even though every ice-cold nerve in her body tells her she won’t.
“How did you know about the tooth?”
“I read about it in the newspaper.”
“It wasn’t in the papers,” Charlie says.
“I’m positive I read it there,” Josh says.
He’s lying. The police wouldn’t have made her swear not to tell anyone about Maddy’s missing tooth if they planned on giving that information to the press, and Charlie assumes she would have heard about it if they had.
She runs through all the ways Josh could know about the missing tooth, the least scary being that he’s somehow related to Maddy and heard it from her mother. But that makes no sense. If Josh was a family member, it’s likely Charlie would have known about him when Maddy was alive. Even if Maddy hadn’t mentioned him—and she loved to talk about her family—there’s no reason why Josh wouldn’t have brought up the connection immediately.
Next, Charlie considers the idea that Josh could be a cop. Or used to be one. Again, it’s unlikely. Any cop familiar with Maddy’s case would also know Charlie had been her roommate.
That leaves one last possible reason Josh knows about the tooth.
One so scary it makes Charlie simultaneously want to scream, throw up, and leap from the moving car.
Josh knows about Maddy’s missing tooth because he’s the one who took it from her.
Which would make him worse than anything Charlie had previously thought of.
It would make him the Campus Killer.
