The Burning Road

It was a humid Tuesday night in late September when I found myself driving back from a town that didn’t exist on any map. I had been in the Mojave Desert for a research trip, studying the strange petroglyphs etched into the rocks near a dried-up lake bed. My name is Mara, and I was a graduate student in anthropology, but that night I was just a tired woman with a failing phone battery and a desperate need for gas. The last town I’d passed through, a place called Pinyon Flats, had a single pump that was out of order, and the old man at the general store had pointed east, muttering about a place called Redstone. ‘Twenty miles,’ he’d said. ‘You’ll see the lights from the road.’ But I’d driven for what felt like an hour, and the only thing I saw was the endless black of the desert and the occasional silhouette of a Joshua tree.

I wasn’t scared at first. That was the strange thing. I’d grown up in the city, but I’d done fieldwork in the desert before, and the emptiness had always felt peaceful. But around the time my odometer clicked past forty miles, I started to notice something odd. The road, which had been smooth blacktop, began to look like it was made of something darker, something that soaked up my headlights. And there was a smell, faint but unmistakable: burning rubber. I slowed down, thinking I’d blown a tire, but when I pulled over, the tires were fine. The smell seemed to come from the road itself, from the cracked asphalt beneath my feet. I got back in the car and drove on, but the smell grew stronger, and I began to see heat waves rising from the pavement, even though the temperature had dropped to a chilly fifty degrees.

That’s when I saw the figure. It was standing on the shoulder, about a hundred yards ahead, barely visible in the beam of my high beams. At first I thought it was a hitchhiker, but as I got closer, I saw that it wasn’t moving. It wasn’t even facing me. It was just a dark shape, tall and thin, with its head tilted back as if looking at the sky. I slowed down, half-expecting it to wave me down, but it didn’t. I passed it, and for a split second, I saw its face in my rearview mirror. It had no features, just smooth skin like a mannequin, and where its eyes should have been, there were two black holes that seemed to absorb the light. A chill ran down my spine, and I pressed the accelerator, but the car didn’t respond. The speedometer needle began to drop slowly, even as my foot pushed the pedal to the floor.

The car came to a stop about fifty yards from the figure. The engine was still running, but the transmission felt like it was in neutral. I tried to shift gears, but the lever wouldn’t budge. The smell of burning rubber was now so strong that I had to cover my nose, and I could feel a heat radiating from the dashboard, as if a fire was starting under the hood. In the rearview mirror, I saw the figure begin to move. It didn’t walk. It glided, its feet not touching the ground, and as it moved, the road behind it seemed to melt into a black liquid that bubbled and smoked. I knew then that this wasn’t a hitchhiker. This was something that had been waiting for me.

I didn’t think. I just acted. I grabbed my backpack from the passenger seat, kicked the door open, and ran. I didn’t look back. I ran straight into the desert, stumbling over rocks and dry brush, my breath ragged in my chest. Behind me, I heard a sound like a thousand tires screeching, and then a voice, not in my ears but in my head, whispering words I couldn’t understand. It was not a threat. It was a question, repeated over and over: ‘Do you remember?’ I didn’t know what it meant, but the question stirred something deep in my memory, something I had forgotten for years.

I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. I collapsed behind a large boulder, my heart pounding, and peeked around it. The road was gone. In its place was a faint, glowing trail that snaked into the distance, like the afterimage of a shooting star. The figure was gone too. I waited, shivering, until dawn broke over the mountains. When I finally made my way back to the road, it was there again, normal asphalt, with no sign of anything unusual. My car was still there, the engine cold. The gas gauge read full. The only evidence that anything had happened was the faint smell of burnt rubber that clung to my clothes.

I told no one about that night. I finished my research and went home, and the memory faded into the background of my life. But now, months later, sitting in my apartment in Seattle, I can’t shake the feeling that the figure was not a random encounter. I’ve started having dreams where I’m standing on that same stretch of road, and the figure is beside me, and its face begins to shift, to melt, and underneath it is my own face. And I hear the question again: ‘Do you remember?’ What scares me most is not the dream itself, but the fact that in the dream, I always answer ‘Yes’—and then I wake up screaming, with the taste of burning rubber in my mouth.