Bridge and Tunnel

Twilight rose above the mouth of the Holland Tunnel and then disappeared behind it as Shari drove. The tile swallowed up her mother’s silver Camry and made the Boyz II Men mixtape so loud that the car sounded like a bachelorette’s party bus, so she turned the stereo all the way down. From the passenger seat, Cristal reached a freshly manicured hand out to turn it back up.

“Calm down, woman!” Shari swatted her sister’s hand away. “We’re not at the club yet!” 

Cristal huffed, flamingo-like in her elegant long-ness and bad attitude.

“Haven’t you ever heard of ‘pre-gaming?’” Beltless, she turned in her seat, so that nearly half her skinny body was in the back and facing their little cousin Lindsay. “Linz, you heard of pre-gaming?”

Traffic slowed to a crawl. Just our luck, thought Shari. Then again, what was she expecting on a Friday night? Clear skies and open seas? As if.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s what that means,” said Lindsay, neatly tucked away behind the driver, secure with her seat belt on.

She was pretty subdued, for being the birthday girl, quiet and modest in her knee-length dress and leather jacket. Shari had tried to get her to borrow her white spaghetti strap mini because she thought it would contrast beautifully against her dark skin. Cristal had scoffed; white would make her disappear completely in pictures! Then she tried to squeeze Lindsay into a dusty purple little number that was obviously too small. To Lindsay’s utter mortification, Cristal had given her ass an accusatory smack, and then decided to try on the dress herself, like See? This is how it’s supposed to look. 

After that, it took twenty minutes to get Lindsay out from behind a locked bathroom door.

So, not a great twenty-first thus far. But as her elder cousins and the primary witnesses to the previous decade or so of awkwardness, Cristal and Shari were determined to show Lindsay how to have a good time. Lindsay’s willingness to participate was irrelevant.

Cristal was on her knees in the seat now, draped over the head rest. She reached out and smacked Shari’s shoulder. 

“Shar, pass me the Kodak!” 

“I’m driving, Cris,” said Shari, all motherly terseness.

“Driving where?” Cristal demanded. “It’s bumper to bumper. Pass me the damn camera!”

Shari kept her hands firmly on ten and two, so Cristal slithered back into her seat.

With a huff, she leaned down to swipe blindly around in the footwell for the discarded camera. Out of the corner of her eye, Shari saw that a small squadron of frat boys packed into the Audi idling next to them was watching the whole production with hungry eyes.

“Ah hah!” Camera retrieved, Cristal sat up and fixed herself in a way that made it apparent she also knew about the Audi full of guys. She turned and shimmied all the way into the backseat, next to Lindsay. The other driver was leaning out of his open window, close enough that he could reach his hand into theirs, if he had the gall. He whistled appreciatively at Cristal’s wiggling.

Lindsay, who had been busy hiding her face as much as her hair would allow, was relieved when Cristal put her body in between her and the onlookers.

“C’mon, girl. Let’s get a picture!” Cristal crowded Lindsay into the corner and against the window, so that both their faces were cast in yellow tunnel light. But she didn’t raise the camera yet.

“Linz.” Cristal slung an arm around the younger woman. She leaned in real close so that they were in a two-person football huddle. “You know we’re gonna take care of you, right?”

She held Lindsay’s gaze and wouldn’t drop it. 

Lindsay hadn’t wanted to come out tonight. It was just the pressure to act her age, to do the kind of thing that everyone does when they turn twenty-one: go to a club, act affronted when they ask for ID, and then knock back tequila with reckless abandon. Shari and Cristal didn’t even have to have to bully her for long before she agreed; Lindsay just folded like a house of cards.

 She felt out of control and a little resentful, but if she said so, her cousin would get all pouty and disappointed, so she gave Cristal a tight nod.

“Good. Take some deep breaths and let go a little. We got your back.” Now Cristal held out the camera in front of them, put on her best pageant smile. Then, loud enough for everyone from McGinley Square to the East Village to hear, she added, “So stop being so uptight!”

Before Lindsay even had time to frown, the camera clicked. The flash went off. 

And then the lights went out. 

Cristal cried out and dropped the camera. Lindsay freed herself from Cristal’s now desperate hold.

“What just happened?” Lindsay sat up to look through the windshield, and then turned to the rear window. A bend in the tunnel and two sets of taillights in front of them, and behind them, a sea of pinprick headlights and faces washed in the pale glow of digital dashboards. Otherwise, the tunnel was black.

There were a few seconds of shocked silence before the honking started, a cacophony of displeasure and panic. But no matter how hard people laid into their horns, traffic didn’t move an inch. 

Shari shifted behind the wheel.

“It’ll be fine,” she mumbled, a sorry excuse for assurance. “Longest it ever took me to get through the tunnel was fifteen minutes. We’ll be moving soon.”

“This is crazy, though!” Cristal exclaimed. “Did the power go out or something? No one said anything about a storm tonight, right?”

“No, there’s no storm,” Shari reassured her. “City’s probably just being cheap.”

“Which one?” Cristal snorted, arms crossed tight over her chest. “Jersey or New York?”

“Both, duh.” Shari joked. The humor only barely lightened the mood.

Lindsay fiddled with the hem of her dress as they all prepared themselves for a challenging round of the waiting game. She just couldn’t calm herself, though. She was covered head to toe in goosebumps, even under her jacket. Something felt wrong.

“Hey, ladies!” Someone called out. It was one of the Audi boys, a clean-shaven, Abercrombie type in the back seat. They had their overhead light on. “You scared of the dark?”

Cristal perked up. She shuffled over to the right-hand side of the car to lean out the window like an overgrown puppy. If she had a tail, it would be swinging like a tree branch in a tornado. Lindsay rolled her eyes. Nothing could get between Cristal and  meet cute, apparently.

“No,” she giggled. “‘Course not!”

Against her better judgment, Lindsay peaked around Cristal to see the guy she was fawning over. 

His eyes latched onto her, blue and quick. He gave Lindsay a lascivious smile, cold gaze raking over her chest.

“Meeee neither,” he said, slow and deliberate. The guy was white. The collar of his polo was popped and his Raybans were in his hair. He looked like he had a bad case of jungle fever. 

Lindsay tucked herself back into her seat. 

People were getting out of their cars now. Some had cell phones flipped open and held out in front of them for light. Others were more prepared with real flashlights. A few dim, red emergency lights had flickered on, but they weren’t doing much.

“Hey, I think I got a light in the glove,” said the Audi driver to the guy riding shotgun. 

“You heard that?” asked Cristal’s new paramour. “We’re prepared.”

“We got a couple of boy scouts, then,” Cristal crooned. “Ain’t we lucky, girls?”

“Let’s make a trade.” It was the driver now, shooting his shot. “You can have the flashlight in exchange for a little company.” 

Popped Collar opened his door in invitation.

“Seriously?” Shari mumbled from the front. 

“Oh, come on. We’re keeping you company from right here!” Cristal argued with the tepid ferocity of a girl playing hard to get.

Lindsay wondered for a moment if her cousin was really crazy enough to hop in with these strangers. She also wondered how they expected her to fit. Slight as Cristal was, the Audi was already at full clown car capacity, with two other dudes in the back seat next to Popped Collar.

Shari reached up to turn on their overhead light.

“Don’t need it,” she smiled, tight and deliberate, with the aggressive placidness of a girl who was really not interested. 

“Aw, what’s the big deal? Hey, how about your shy friend?”

Lindsay froze. 

Someone in the Audi scoffed.

“Really? You want the ‘uptight’ one?”

“Okay,” Shari interjected. She started rolling up the windows from the front seat controls. “You’re done!” 

“Hey!” Cristal protested. “I’m talking to them!” 

“Yeah, you were. Now you’re done!”

Cristal jammed her finger against the window button, lowering it again. She got it a quarter of the way down before her finger slipped and Shari got the upper hand. Cristal made a frantic attempt to fight the window’s ascent with her own button, making a noise high in her throat like a little kid gearing up for a tantrum.

“You are such a child!” Cristal whined.

“I’m the child? How am I the child here?”

“You—”

Cristal never got to finish that thought.

A sound bounced off the tile walls, above the idling engines and low radio static. 

From the New York end of the tunnel, a mile off, there came a disjointed chorus of screams.

No one spoke. No one even breathed. Then the frat boy slammed his door shut and made the girls all jump. 

Cristal let Shari roll the window all the way up. 

“What the hell?” 

“This is just getting crazy now.” Shari craned her neck to try and see something, but they were still at the bend.

“What the HELL?” Cristal exclaimed again. 

There was more shouting now, closer and less unintelligible, but no less panicked. Someone just around the bend was saying, “Turn back! Turn back,” but the tunnel was packed like a tin of sardines and the Jersey entrance was half a mile away.

Lindsay wrung her hands in her lap. The chill under her skin was worse now—she was almost shivering. 

“Hey,” she started. Her voice cracked. “Hey, Shari. Turn the radio on.”

“The RADIO?” Cristal screeched. “What for?” 

“Maybe they’re saying something on there, duh!” said Shari, catching on. She fumbled with the dials. “This is an emergency.”

“Damn right, it’s an emergency,” Cristal muttered into the back of the passenger seat where she’d pressed herself up, as if it could shield her. “Wish they’d turn the damn lights on.”

The music came on again. Cristal squealed at the sound of “End of the Road,” which was pretty typical, except this time it was because Shari turned the dial too far. 

“Sorry, sorry!” She scrambled to get the volume to an acceptable level and then flipped over to AM. 

Nothing. No late-night radio, even. Just static.

FM, now. The city had just put that in this year. Brand new transmitters.

They waited, flipped through a few more stations. Kept waiting. Still, empty air.

Shari flopped back into her seat and groaned. The groan morphed into a cry.

“What the HELL is going on?”

People were deserting their cars, jogging past the Camry in the half-dark.

“...Should we get out?” Lindsay asked.

“HELL NO!” Both sisters shouted her down, agreeing for the first time that night.

Lindsay sniffed a little, fighting back tears. 

She hadn’t wanted to come out tonight. Why didn’t she just say no? 

The screams pressed closer.

In the car, the sounds of their breathing were amplified. 

“Everyone shut up!” Shari yelled as she shot up in her seat, even though no one was talking. She waved her hands at the radio. There was a soft noise coming through. It sounded a little like clicking. Lindsay thought it might be a machine. Like, maybe this was the government trying to communicate through morse code.

Shari turned up the volume. The sound became throatier and more chirpy, like a cricket with a frog in its throat. The noise was irregular, cutting in and out of the static. Listening more closely, it seemed organic.

Lindsay could see the boys in the Audi, still as stone, glued to their own radio.

Then, the screams from the end of the tunnel were in the car with them. The throaty sound was overshadowed by it, but even louder than the screaming was the sickening crunch crunch crunch, like bones snapping.

It was hard to hear over the speakers, but the noise outside of the car was getting louder too. A sound like metal scraping against metal, a train pulling into a stop too fast, grew with it. 

Before anyone could say anything, everything else went dark: the overhead, the dash, all the flashlights, phones and every single hazard light in the tunnel went out. 

The fall of darkness hushed the wave of sonic horror for a moment. Cristal filled the silence with a wail. 

“Oh my god, oh my god!”

The thing was, Cristal was afraid of the dark. Shari had always made fun of her for it. Lindsay was glad she never joined in, because now her pupils were straining painfully against the empty, lightless space. It felt both like the car was pressing in on them, and also like they were completely exposed. Trapped, sitting ducks. It was enough to develop a new phobia.

“Those guys,” Cristal stammered. “They have a flashlight, right?”

Lindsay could almost hear the gears shifting in her head, shifting lanes from "stay put" to "RUN LIKE HELL." There was the scrabbling of her nails, and then the kathunk and the car door opening. 

“Cristal, what the fuck?” cried Shari.

“I’m gonna see if they still have light!”

“If they had light then we would SEE it, dumbass!”

Blindly, Lindsay threw herself in Cristal’s direction, hands grasping. All she got were fistfulls of air. With a scrape of sequins against upholstery and a slam of the door, Cristal was gone. 

The two remaining girls sat in shock for a moment. They could faintly hear Cristal’s voice over the din, fist pounding against the other car’s door.

“I should go after her—”

“No!” Lindsay grabbed Shari’s shoulder. “Don’t go out there!”

“She’s my goddamn little sister, I have to!”

“You don’t need to put yourself in danger because she’s doing something stupid,” Lindsay rationalized. She surprised herself with her coldness. Maybe it was survival instincts, or maybe it was cruel revenge for every slight Cristal had made against her, but Lindsay didn’t feel any obligation to take a risk on her cousin.

Shari was more conflicted. She groaned and banged her head against the seat. At least, that's what Lindsay assumed the thump was, since she couldn’t see.

“God, she always does this shit.” 

After another moment of marinating in the din of noise, Shari smacked her hand against the wheel in frustration. The horn wailed, long and loud.

“Damnit, I’m going out there!” 

“No! She’ll be fine. She’s fine!”

“There’s no way they let her in,” Shari shouted back. “There’s nothing for her out there. If she’s fine, why hasn’t she come back yet?”

Lindsay didn’t have an answer for that. Instead, her brain supplied her with the realization that she couldn’t hear Cristal’s wailing anymore. Either she was in the Audi, or…

“You’re just too much of a damn baby,” Shari scoffed meanly. “I’m going. Deal with it.”

Before Shari could even unbuckle her seatbelt, though, something crashed into the driver’s side window.

The vague shape of limb, even darker than the abject darkness of the tunnel around them, shot into the car. Shari screamed, long and loud and pained. The sound of metal wrenching and twisting rose above Shari’s wails and Lindsay’s panic. 

Then Shari’s screams were outside of the car. The sound drifted further away, until it was just part of the cacophony. 

For a moment, Lindsay was perfectly still, blind and nearly deaf from the noise, except for the ringing in her ears and the pounding of her own heart. Then she threw herself into the footwell. She curled into herself, knees tucked to her chest, and willed herself to be invisible. 

Something clacked and skittered above her. She couldn’t tell if it was outside the car or in. 

She lay there for what felt like hours, barely breathing. Her eyes strained to adjust to the dark, but there was simply no light to take in. Then she remembered Cristal’s camera. The light from the flash would be something, at least. 

Lindsay reached out slowly, grazing her finger tips against the carpet. Then she crawled her hand up the seat to search there. 

The chittering got louder. Lindsay went stone still, arm raised awkwardly. Nothing happened, and she let out a breath. She resumed her search and, finally, her fingertips touched plastic. She rolled over onto her back, quiet and gentle as she could, and took a picture. 

The flash went off. Lindsay screamed.

Cristal heard it from four cars down. She’d heard Shari’s screams, too, and they had paralyzed her, turned her legs to jelly and made her drop to the asphalt. She’d barely registered the pain as she scraped her knees bloody. 

The boys in the Audi hadn’t let her in. In a moment of petty pridefulness, she chose not to get right back in the Camry with Shari and Lindsay. The heat of that embarrassment would be too much. So she’d started walking, Jersey-ways, in search of an emergency exit. 

Now she was curled up in the ground between two big tires, the tread of one brushing against her bare arms. The knowledge of what her sister sounded like in the throes of abject pain skewered her. She breathed heavily against the panic, tried not to lose herself to tears, but the idea of letting her mind just wander away from the horror sounded very, very appealing. 

Before she could float away completely, a sharp on her backside and someone crying out above her pulled her back into reality. Someone had tripped over her prone form. From the sound of his loud cursing, she thought it might be one of the Audi. She wanted to grab at his ankles and beg for help, but he was stumbling somewhere ahead of her now and she was too scared to move, or even call out.

That might have been the smartest thing she’d done so far, because there was the sound of that metal screeching, and then the man screaming, and then the crunching bone sound from before. Except now it was so, so close. She could hear now, that the noise was also wet.

 Cristal whimpered, and then shimmied to her left to hide under a car. It wasn't a very effective cover. Something furry tickled her leg and she wailed, kicking at it. When it felt like she got one good jab in with her heel, she scrambled out from under the car and began to crawl away. She scraped her arm on the concrete of the emergency walkway, realized what it was, and got up and hopped the fence real quick. Once on the walkway, she stayed low. 

Footsteps are coming up behind her, too fast. They would trip, too. She just kepts crawling and tried not to think about the boy. Tried not to picture what might have happened to him. Or what might happen to this next person if they also make a scene. Staying down and shutting up for once had gotten her this far, Cristal wouldn’t be announcing her presence. 

They tripped. They cried out. Cristal recognized the voice.

“Lindsay!” Cristal whisper-yelled. Something in her that had been iced out by the terror thawed suddenly. Thank God Lindsay made it out of the car. 

This whole stupid night was her idea. She thought it would be fun, good for Lindsay to come out of her shell. If the fucking tunnel monster didn’t kill her, the guilt surely would have. 

Cristal took Lindsay’s hand in a vice grip and kept her low to the ground with her, other hand feeling for a door. Lindsay said nothing as they crept forward, just whimpering very softly.

She didn’t get to feel the door, or even see it, because she heard it before anything else. The nearest exit door was open, and someone was shouting commands through a crackling megaphone somewhere above them. 

“This is the New York City Fire Department. Evacuate the tunnel. Come towards the sound of my voice!”

They crawled hurriedly towards the sound. Cristal found the door frame. It swung inwards and Cristal almost caught her fingers in the hinges while feeling around. 

Suddenly, a light came from above, bringing the stairwell in the emergency alcove ahead of them into stark illumination. 

Cristal turned to smile at Lindsay. Immediately, her eyes were pulled to the junction of the wall and ceiling above Lindsay’s head. She saw the thing. It was one of many, crawling around the tunnel in her periphery. The thing was like a giant spider, mostly legs, but the legs moved almost like seaweed underwater. Floaty. One was reaching towards Lindsay. 

Cristal screamed and yanked Lindsay towards her by her arm, but the leg-tendril-thing was suddenly faster. It shot out and wrapped around Lindsay’s shoulder. Then another came for her knee and pulled her off her feet. Cristal held on as tight as she could to Lindsay, who was in the air now and being dragged away from her. 

Her hand, slick with sweat, slipped down Lindsay’s arm. Lindsay caught Cristal’s hand with her own just in time.

Cristal saw another creature out of the corner of her eye, scaling a truck, prowling towards them and making that throaty clicking sound. A tendril danced towards Cristal’s leg. She screamed, tears in her eyes.

Suddenly, Lindsay’s hand went slack in hers. It happened so fast, Cristal barely had time to comprehend that Lindsay was being pulled into the dark. 

“RUUUUUUN!” Lindsay called, her voice fading fast into the chaos. Cristal blinked through her tears, into the abyss. In the half a millisecond that her eyes were closed, she realized that Lindsay just let go. Cristal was going to keep holding on, predator thing be damned. She wasn’t going to let go of Lindsay.

But Lindsay let go of her. And she gave her an order, in no uncertain terms. Cristal chose to listen to her cousin for the first time that night. 

She vaulted herself into the emergency alcove and kicked the door behind her. 

A dark leg slipped through before the door shut. Cristal threw herself bodily into the door, again and again. The metal-on-metal screeching rang out just on the other side until the tendril finally retreated. 

Cristal slumped onto the ground. There were people coming down the stairs now, fighting against the small but mighty tide of people fleeing upward. Cristal stayed laying, and let herself sob like a child. With the promise of rescue so close, she let all the noise around her fade away, retreating into a place in her mind. In that place, a radio crooned softly:

Come to the end of the road 

Still I can't let go

It's unnatural

You belong to me 

I belong to you