Read Midnight Grinding for Free Online

the girl, as had his funeral— baby blue casket and all. But the most devastating thing was the place they had buried him. Deanna had screamed and cried when she found out, but the grownups had ignored her and buried Timothy there anyway. On the half-acre hill of stones…beneath that blossoming magnolia tree.
    After that, Deanna found it hard to sleep at night. Her parents worried that the strain of her brother’s death caused her bouts of insomnia. But it was not. It was something much more sinister.
    What drove the comfort of slumber from young Deanna’s mind were the nightly visits.
    Visits by a single tiny shadow outside her bedroom window and the low cooing sounds that drifted from beyond the sash. She would lie with her back to the window, her thin body shivering and her eyes screwed tightly shut, until the first rays of dawn chased that awful presence from her midst. For she knew that if she listened to her little voice and turned to look, she would see his pale and bloodless face pressed against the panes. She would see those dark, liquid eyes, glazed and unseeing, burning in at her with some strange light…some unholy motivation torn between the restlessness of the living and the moldering of the dead.
    And, the following morning, there would be another toy missing from the cool sheets of Timothy’s abandoned crib.

 
 
 
    YEA, THOUGH
    I DRIVE
     
     
 
 
 
Surprisingly, the practice of hitchhiking is still prevalent, even after years of well-deserved paranoia and tragic news reports about the perils of trusting strangers who travel the roads with their thumbs stuck in the air. Whenever I see a driver slam on the brakes to pick up someone holding a cardboard destination sign, I want to honk my horn and yell, “Hey, maybe you ought to give it a little thought first. Doesn’t this guy look familiar? Jeffery Dahmer’s second cousin, maybe?”
This tale of hitchhikers on a stormy Tennessee night takes place on the fictitious stretch of Interstate 53, where a grisly fellow by the name of the Roadside Butcher has been pretty danged busy lately…
     
     
    There was a massacre in progress on I-53.
    The interstate system stretched from Atlanta, Georgia, across Tennessee and Kentucky, clear to Cincinnati, Ohio. Until the autumn of that year, it was known mainly for its scenic beauty and the Southern hospitality exhibited at the restaurants and motels that served as overnight havens between the long miles of rural solitude.
    Then the killings began.
    In three short months, the “Roadside Butcher” had murdered seventeen travelers along Interstate 53, each one varying in degree of brutality and mutilation. Some drivers were found sitting in their cars or eighteen wheelers with their throats neatly slashed from ear to ear. Others were found lying at the side of the road, sliced open from gullet to groin, gutted like a deer at hunting season. And then there were the more grisly of the Butcher’s victims…those who had been hacked to death, dismembered, or decapitated. The strange thing about the whole ordeal was that there was no definite pattern. The victims had been hitchhikers and drifters, as well as vacationing travelers and burly truckers who regularly frequented the five hundred mile stretch of southern interstate.
    The Highway Patrol was out in full force, as were the FBI, but the increase in law enforcement did not seem to deter the Butcher from performing his fiendish whims. It got so that veteran travelers of the road began to carry pistols and sawed-off shotguns, secretly stashed in glove compartments and sleeper cabs. Most of the truckstops began to sell a rather popular bumper sticker which read “YEA, THOUGH I DRIVE ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH, I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, FOR I AM THE MEANEST S.O.B. ON I-53!” However, at least a couple of those fearless motorists were found lying across their front seats with their throats cut down to the neckbone or their entrails dangling from the