You're Next

YOU’RE NEXT

Amy glanced down at the clock radio beside the steering wheel. 8:00, that party had started at seven and she was no more close to being there then she was an hour ago. It was her brother’s fault, taking the gps back to college with him. It had been hers but like everything else, including their parent’s affection he had taken it for his own.

Amy looked back at the empty, winding road. She could have driven with her eye shut, there wasn’t another car in sight, and there hadn’t been for a good forty-minutes. Row after row of corn stalks lined the road on both sides, bending and swaying in the wind. It was starting to get a little creepy. Pushing the thought out of her mind she pushed the stereo knob and a blood chilling scream of static filled the tiny, beat up car. Quickly turning the volume down she took a shaky breath to calm herself and began fiddling with the other knob to find a station.  Static, static, static, not static? She stopped turning the knob and listened, her face contorted into one of pained boredom as a voice droned on and on about stock prices, government issues about which she had no concern, the weather, and then finally the news.

“Residence in Dutton county area are urged not to leave their homes tonight,” a woman’s voice crackled through the ancient speakers.

Amy frowned and turned the volume up.

“Psychopath and murderer Calvin Blake, escaped from his maximum security cell earlier this afternoon, killing two other maximum security inmates as well as three prison guards. He is believed to be very dangerous and residence are urged not to try and approach or apprehend him in anyway, if you have any information please call 586-953…..”

Amy snapped the radio off, not wanting to listen to another second. It had been several years since Calvin had been placed in prison but she still remembered it like it was yesterday. In her own neighborhood, just three houses to the left Calvin lived with his mother, step father, his step father’s three children, and the little girl that his mother and step father had had together. They had been a friendly family, excluding Calvin who was always locked away in his bedroom in the basement. Amy had babysat the kids several times, she had sleepover’s with the little girl and had thought of her like the little sister she had never had. Then one night five years ago Calvin killed them, all of them, moving from room to room armed with nothing but the old, rusty ax which had used to rest against the side of the house.

Thinking about it still made Amy sick. She hated her brother sometimes, wanted to punch him in the face, but never in a million years could she imagine hurting him like that, killing him, you had to be on sick masochistic whack job, and that’s exactly what Calvin was.

Everyone had known he was not quite right as he grew up, he had killed a dog, regularly bought pet rats just to drown them, and fish just to leave them gasping on the sidewalk, but no one had thought he would ever do anything that horrendous, and then he had.

Suddenly the car dinged, alarmed Amy looked down at the gas light and groaned, she was almost of no scratch that, she was out. The thin needle hovered below empty. Almost as if on cue the car hissed to a stop. She tried restarting but it was no use, she was out of gas. Looking out the window she grimaced at her surroundings. Corn as far as the eye could see, a dilapidated farm house in the distance, and several feel away, a slumped over scarecrow hanging suspended from a cross.