Currently viewing the tag: "Old Kiln Road"

A serial fiction story for your enjoyment about the odd effects of grief.

written by James Rada, Jr.

Betty Douglas’s plan to kill Old Kiln Road was working. The tree she cut down to block the road kept cars from killing animals that the road tempted onto it. The road turned gray, and things seemed peaceful. Then a Frederick County road crew removed the tree. No accusations were made against Betty, but she was sure they thought she was responsible for blocking the road.

She had to do it because no one believed Old Kiln Road had killed her son, and Betty refused to have her revenge taken from her.

She replaced the “Slow” signs with “Detour” signs to steer people around the bad stretch of Old Kiln Road. Detour signs wouldn’t annoy drivers like the tree had, and the county road crew wouldn’t respond as quickly as it had for the tree. Still the cars came, but no animals were killed since Betty kept scaring them away from the road. She couldn’t keep her constant patrols up forever, though. She had to stop the cars.

Betty smashed dozens of her empty mason jars at either end of the road. The first few cars that ignored the detour signs were rewarded with flat tires. Traffic stopped and followed the detour.

The next morning, the road was once again a pale gray, starving for food. Betty set more food out in the fields to feed the animals. She checked on her glass traps, but they were gone, as if they had never been. Had the road swallowed them, hoping to lure traffic back onto it?

Betty went into the house and took Jack’s hunting rifle down from above the mantle. She knew how to use it because Jack had taken her deer hunting with him a few times during hunting season when he couldn’t find any friends to go with him. Betty loaded the Remington and went out to the road for her patrols.

About twenty-five yards from the road, she saw a pickup truck ignore the detour sign and head up Old Kiln Road. She raised the rifle to her shoulder, took aim, and fired just the way Jack had taught her. She shot the truck tires out, then ran off before the driver got out of the car. She walked to the other end of the road and waited. Soon enough, someone else ignored the detour sign. Betty put two holes in his radiator, stopping him from going any further.

The road went hungry another day.

The next day another pickup truck tried to ignore the detour sign and lost two tires. Old Kiln Road went hungry for a fourth day.

On the morning of the fifth day, Betty went out to the porch and wasn’t surprised to see the asphalt had dried out. It looked rough, like a patch of dried skin. Cracks ran through, making it look like a sun-baked river bed.

She patrolled the road with the rifle and was satisfied to see all the cars obeying the detour sign. However, police had barricaded the road, and officers patrolled the roads and surrounding woods. One officer questioned her, and Betty played innocent about what was going on.

How long would it be before the police opened the road? Would it be long enough for the road to be destroyed?

As the sun set that night, Betty watched the asphalt finally crumble into dust, exposing the gravel road bed. But there was something else among the gravel. Bones. Lots of them. Probably the bones of every animal that had ever been killed on that stretch of road. The small skeletons gleamed brightly in the fading light. Betty had starved the road to death and won.

How many animals had died to feed the road? How many people like her Peter had been killed?

She walked to the edge of the road and kicked at the gravel to loosen it like a hunter kicks at his fallen prey to make sure it’s dead.

“I don’t know what made you so bloodthirsty, but I hope whatever it was rots with you in hell,” Betty said.

She moved to kick it again, but as she did, Old Kiln Road decayed just a bit more. The edge of the roadway collapsed under her foot. Betty yelled as she lost her balance and fell onto the gravel. She put out her hands to break her fall, but the rifle got caught in between her and the road. It went off, and Betty shot herself in the stomach.

She fell onto the road, not dead but dying. She screamed for help, but no one was nearby to come to her aid. All the drivers were too afraid to travel this stretch of Old Kiln Road, and Jack was in Los Angeles. She was alone.

Her blood pumped through the hole in her stomach, down her side, and onto the road. As it touched the roadway, it immediately turned black restoring the asphalt. The changes spread like a ripple on water, restoring the road even as Betty lay on top of it dying.

Would the police find her body and think she was a victim of the sniper they were searching for?

Betty wasn’t going to let the road take her body. She would not be like the collie that she had seen commit suicide.

Holding one hand against the bloody hole in her stomach, Betty tried to rise up on her knees so she could crawl away. She moved one leg forward, but it was a struggle. Her leg had sunk into the asphalt, and it only pulled free with a loud sucking sound.

She grabbed with her free hand for the fence she had built alongside the road to keep the animals away. Her hand closed around one of the wooden posts, but the wooden post snapped off in her hand. She fell forward on her face and the road sucked her back a few inches.

Betty rolled onto her back and fired the rifle into the road. Again and again she fired until the rifle clicked empty. The bullets didn’t even leave a mark on the road. They simply disappeared into the soft asphalt. She beat on the road with the rifle until she was too weak to pull the rifle free from the road.

The road pulled her a few inches closer. She was now sitting in the roadway.

How do you kill something that is not alive?

Betty realized she couldn’t win, but it made her feel good to resist the evil of the road. With her remaining strength, she lunged out of the roadway so that her upper body fell onto the grass.

Let her blood nourish the ground, not the road. She wouldn’t help the road live.

Once Old Kiln Road restored itself to its original condition, Betty knew she had lost. After all her efforts, the road had finally found its meal. She felt herself pulled onto the road and sinking into the surface as if she wasn’t laying on hard asphalt but thick, black tar. She sunk a few inches into the asphalt, thinking she would stop when she touched the hard ground. But she kept sinking deeper and deeper. As the soft asphalt filled her ears, Betty tried to raise her head to keep it above the surface. She had to stop soon. This is what happened to the road kills that laid on the road for days at a time. Almost like the La Brea Tar Pits.

The road covered Betty’s face.

Jack turned onto Old Kiln Road. It had been a quiet ride home. Not unusual, but the newspaper he picked up at the airport had said there had been a sniper shooting at cars along the road. From the description given, it sounded like it had been close to his house.

As he came over the last rise before his driveway, a chipmunk ran out into the road so fast that Jack couldn’t swerve to avoid it. He hit it with his right front tire and killed it.

Stupid animal. Didn’t they know better to stay away from the road?

The End

A new serial fiction story for your enjoyment about the odd effects of grief.

written by James Rada, Jr.

2: the killing road

“Peter, you make sure you stay away from the road,” Betty Douglas told her son as they ate breakfast in their kitchen.

He spooned his Corn Pops into his mouth and talked with his mouth full. “I always stay away from the road. You told me this before when I was little,” six-year-old Peter said, slightly indignant that his mother still considered him a child.

Betty knew she had told Peter to stay away from the road many times before. It was popular Mom talk. But after seeing what she had seen the day before, Betty felt a need to repeat herself once again. She didn’t trust Old Kiln Road. Not the drivers, not the road. Something about it was wrong. She didn’t even like the name. Old Kiln. She always made sure to pronounce the N in Kiln, but too many people let it fade, so it sounded like “kill.”

Old Kill Road. It lived up to its name.

Betty spent the morning working outside. She painted large yellow signs with black lettering that read: “Slow.” When they dried, she nailed the signs on trees at each end of the dangerous stretch of road. She also put up chicken wire along the road to act as a fence to discourage animals from going onto the road. If the animals went around the fence, they would be far enough away from the dangerous portion of the road to make it to the other side.

For two days, Betty sat on the porch and watched how her precautions affected the road. She saw no road kills, and the cars drove slower as they came around the curve. The road seemed to pale from lack of food. At least Betty hoped the road paled. She imagined it becoming a light gray during the second day of its fast.

Betty sensed victory close at hand. No longer would the road lure animals to their deaths.

Then, she saw Peter’s soccer ball bounce over the backyard fence. It rolled to a stop about three feet from the road. As Betty watched, the ball started bouncing again, this time on its own. It bounced up the slight rise to the edge of the road and then across the road. Peter came running from behind the garage, following the ball. He didn’t even hesitate as he ran across the road to get the ball.

“Peter!” Betty yelled as she jumped out of the rocking chair.

Her son stopped in the middle of the road at the sound of his mother’s voice. As he turned to look at her, a sports car charged around the curve. Betty could tell by the engine noise that it was coming too fast, ignoring her signs.

Peter didn’t even have time to scream. The car hit him, and he rolled over the hood, smashing into the windshield headfirst. The car skidded to a stop. Peter’s body slid forward off the car and fell onto the road, limp as month-old celery.

Betty ran down to the road. Peter lay on the asphalt, a portion of his brain showing through his broken skull. Blood flowed from his body onto the road. The road absorbed the blood like a dry sponge absorbing water…or a thirsty beast greedily drinking greedily. Betty grabbed her son by the shoulders to lift him up, and his head rolled lifelessly backward. She knew he was dead, but just couldn’t believe it.

“Peter! Peter!”

The teenager who had driven the car was standing next to his car with his head buried in his hands as he cried. He slid down the side of the car and sobbed violently, not looking at Betty. Betty held her son in her arms, rocking back and forth, until a Thurmont ambulance finally came half an hour later when a passerby saw the accident and phoned it in.

The road turned a darker gray.

Betty sat on the front porch, rocking in her chair and watching the road. In the week since Peter had been killed, the road had fallen back into its rhythm of killing and eating.

Old Kiln Road was a deep ebony now. It was the road that had killed Peter, not the teenage driver of the car. The road had lured Peter onto it, so he could be killed. Old Kiln Road was trying to get even with Betty for depriving it of food for two days.

She heard the screen door open on her left, but she didn’t look up. She knew who it would be since only two people lived in the house anymore.

Jack set his suitcases down on the porch. “I can send someone else out to Los Angeles. It doesn’t have to be me, Bet.”

Jack worked as an auditor for a manufacturing company in Frederick. He usually had a half-hour drive to work, but occasionally, he went on long trips to the firm’s corporate offices in Los Angeles.

“I’ll be fine. Go,” she told him.

“You’re not acting fine. I’m worried about you. All you do is sit out here and look at the road where he was killed.”

Jack just didn’t understand. It wasn’t just the spot where Peter had been killed. It was where Peter had been eaten. It was the spot where many animals were eaten day after day. And no one ever noticed. No one but her.

“Please, go, Jack. I’ll be fine.”

He kissed her on the cheek. “I left all the phone numbers and places where I’ll be staying on the bulletin board. If you need me, give me a call, and I’ll come right home.”

He left, and Betty sat on the porch, only seeing him go when he crossed over her field of vision as he drove down Old Kiln Road.

Sometime later, the phone rang. The caller wouldn’t be anyone important, so she let it ring until the answering machine picked it up. What was happening out here was more important than anything anyone could say to her.

A small, gray rabbit hopped out into the middle of the road. It sniffed at the asphalt as if he were following a scent across the road. When it reached a certain point in the road, it stopped and lay on its side. A few minutes later, a car came creeping slowly over the hill. Slow enough that the rabbit could have moved in time to get out of the way, but it didn’t. It let itself be run over. It committed suicide.

That’s what she should do, Betty thought. Life wasn’t worth living anymore. Jack still had his work to keep him busy, but her work had been raising Peter, and the road had taken that from her. There was nothing left for her now. Except to destroy the road. To watch it wither away slowly and agonizingly. To let the road know the pain she felt at the loss of her son. That’s what she wanted to do.

Once she made up her mind, Betty knew exactly how she would kill the road. She took Jack’s chainsaw out of the garage and walked over the hill. Finding a medium-sized tree near the road, she sawed into it, so it toppled across the road, blocking any cars from coming over the hill. Then she walked down the hill and did the same thing to another tree, blockading the road. The next thing she did was to take one of the dessert pies from the oven and set it in the field to draw the animals away from the road.

Old Kiln Road didn’t eat that night, and in the morning, it was grayer.

A new serial fiction story for your enjoyment about the odd effects of grief.

Written by James Rada, Jr.

1: ANIMAL KILLER

Her own screams woke her from her nap. That’s how it always was for Betty Douglas. Sleep was a fleeting thing, if it came at all, and it was never a peaceful affair, just something she did to pull herself through to the next day.

Yet the next day was never any better than the one before it. More of the same emptiness. More of the same fears. More of the same pain.

Betty never left her property anymore because she would have to go past the end of the driveway and that was an evil place. A place where death was stronger than life, and it hurt her to see it. It reminded her of what Old Kiln Road had done to her son…her Peter.

Can an inanimate thing kill?

She had asked herself that question 10,000 times if she had asked it once. Around the 4,000th time, Betty began to think the answer was “yes.”

Old Kiln Road was evil. It was a murderer. In particular, the stretch of road that ran in front of her home. The road ran from Roddy Road, north, with a couple of hard turns to Motters Station Road. In all, it was about 2.5 miles long, with a few dozen homes along it and a lot of open space.

For as long as Betty could remember, there had always been a lot of roadkills on Old Kiln Road. Back when Betty used to like to sit on her front porch, she saw a dead animal almost every time she walked out her front door because most of them seemed to be along the stretch of road that ran in front of her property.

Rabbits, dogs, cats, possums, raccoons, and some unidentified remains. Still, she hadn’t ever thought it was anything more than the result of a losing battle between Mother Nature and modern technology.

The only thing Betty had thought was odd was how completely the dead animals decayed. She never had to take a shovel out to the road to bury the dead animals because they always seemed to disappear after a few days.

And there was never any smell. Oh, she’d seen the birds picking over the bones, and the flies swarming over the bodies. Then one day, she would come out, and the first corpse would have vanished, a brand new animal laying splattered on the road.

In all her years of porch-sitting, Betty had never seen an animal killed, only the remains. Then one overcast day, she saw it happen. Normally, she wouldn’t have been outside on such a dreary day, but the house was stifling hot because the air-conditioning needed a shot of freon. Her husband, Jack, had called the repairman the day before, trying to get him out to the house.

So, Betty had walked out onto the porch to get away from the heat. She sat down in her favorite chair, a wooden rocker Jack had bought her when she was pregnant with Peter. As she rocked back and forth, Betty watched the sparse traffic go back and forth on Old Kiln Road, a car every 10 minutes or so, if that much.

She wasn’t the only one watching either. On the other side of the two-lane road, a beautiful collie sat in the grass, its head swinging back and forth. The dog had to be someone’s pet. Betty wondered where the dog had come from and why it just sat watching the road. It looked as if it was waiting for something.

From the south, an unseen car engine roared as the driver picked up speed on the straight stretch of road. Betty’s house was close to one end of that stretch and the only one within a quarter mile.

Peter came to the door and said, “Mom, can I have a cookie?”

Betty looked over her shoulder. Peter was standing in the doorway, smiling that innocent way he had of grinning. Betty couldn’t resist him.

 “Only two. And put the jar back when you’re done,” she said.

Peter went back inside the house, and Betty again turned her attention to the dog on the other side of the road. It was standing now and stretching as if it was preparing to cross the street.

 “Don’t come now, puppy,” Betty muttered to herself. “Can’t you hear that car coming?”

The car was maintaining a good clip, probably going about 50 miles an hour. The collie watched it come. Betty was happy that the dog wouldn’t become roadkill. It was such a pretty dog.

Right before the car passed the dog, it suddenly jumped onto the road. The collie was too close to the car for it to slow down and let it pass. It happened so quickly, Betty only had time to open her mouth to yell. The truck hit the dog, knocking it to the ground and then catching the collie under the truck tires. The car slowed, but rather than stop, it sped up to get away from the scene of the accident.

Betty’s scream died in her throat as she just stared at the corpse. The dog had committed suicide. That’s the only way she could describe it, as she gaped at the mangled, bloody corpse.

Of course, Jack hadn’t believed her. She had told him the whole story when he came home from work that night. He had just muttered, “Stupid mutt,” and went off to watch the evening news. Peter, on the other hand, had asked her if he could have a collie for a pet.

Betty knew it was more than the fact that the dog was stupid. The collie had seen the car coming, and it had jumped in front of the car. That night, Betty sat out on the porch, staring at the corpse. The first scavengers, the birds, left near sunset, leaving the disfigured corpse laying on the road. By morning, other small scavengers would have come and picked over the dead collie.

Even as Betty watched, a raccoon crossed the street and stopped to smell the corpse. While it was chewing on the dead collie’s ear, a car along the road drove by and flattened the raccoon. Betty almost screamed.

She had lived in the house for seven years without ever seeing an animal killed on the road, and now she had seen two animals killed within half a day of each other.

She shook her head back and forth. Had the collie moved? No, it was dead. She had seen it killed. But the dog’s corpse was moving. It was sinking into the road as if it was a ship sinking in the ocean. How could that be? The asphalt was a solid surface.

Why hadn’t she ever noticed this before? No one had ever mentioned something this odd to her, but who actually watched the road? Peter was always playing in the backyard, and Jack was usually away at work. But it had happened. She had seen it. When she had slowed down enough to pay attention to things, she had finally noticed what had been happening right in front of her own home.

That night, Betty dreamed of Old Kiln Road as a giant beast. The road was actually a long, black tongue, leading into the dark throat of a sleeping beast. The tunnel of trees that shaded the road at the top of the hill formed the throat. And the beast was always hungry, even in its sleep. It was like an angler fish that dangled its bait to attract food. The road was the bait that lured other animals into the maw of the beast.