When the Black Wind Blows

CW: Domestic violence, child abuse (implied), alcohol

Shiloh loved nothing more than the thrill of the open road, but the sirens giving chase from behind and the black blizzard looming ahead were a bit more than she’d bargained for.

“Ricky?” Her voice shook. “Are we ever gonna get out of this?”

Ricky gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, his bloodshot baby blue eyes wide and unblinking, focused on the highway. “We’ll keep going north,” he said, “all the way to the border. The Mustang’s faster than any cop car on the road, and once we make it to Canada, they won’t have jurisdiction.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works,” Shiloh said, leaning around the passenger seat to stare anxiously out the back window. The red-and-blue flashes of a half dozen police cars swarmed like fireflies, their lights smeared into fuzzy halos by the chill gray mist.

Ricky floored the accelerator and the red 1967 Mustang growled like a tiger spoiling for a fight. The car was his baby, and Shiloh loved it almost as much as he did. Her life had been so much worse before he came and whisked her away in it, the roar of its engine drowning out the screams from her childhood hell.

Shiloh turned to face front. The blizzard ahead was a wall. A yellow road sign whipped by—Caution: frequent blowing snow—and the radio had been squawking about severe weather for miles. Shiloh usually found it endearing how Ricky only ever kept the radio tuned to the news—he’d long ago gotten it into his head that that’s what smart people listen to—but right now, it grated.

“Babe,” Shiloh said. “Going north means going through the storm.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

That tone.

Fat snowflakes splatted against the windshield as the fog grew close and thick. Shiloh’s heart hammered in her chest. She drew a deep breath and mentally recited her mantra, something she’d read in a magazine once and taken to heart: I am alive. I can survive.

Breathe in: I am alive. Breathe out: I can survive.

“Okay,” she said, as steadily as she could manage. “But if we get through this, we’ve gotta change some shit.”

Ricky ran his skeletal, tattooed hand through his thick brown hair. “Like what?”

“We gotta get out. I don’t want to do this shit any more. I’m sick of knocking over stores and scaring innocent people and running from the goddamn cops all the time. Ricky, this isn’t a life.”

“How else you expect to survive?” His voice had an edge now, and Shiloh was grateful his hands were occupied by the wheel. “You ain’t got the body for tricks, and we both know you’re too dumb to get a real job.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

The storm’s artificial night enveloped them like a shroud. The radio burped the last, dying gasps of its weather warning, then flat-lined into pure static. They drove without speaking, while snowflakes burst against the windshield, while the car rumbled and the wind roared.

“Hey,” Ricky said at last, glancing at the rear-view mirror. “I think we lost ‘em.”

Shiloh looked over her shoulder and saw nothing but the black of the storm. She breathed a sigh of relief and sunk back against her seat, relaxing muscles she hadn’t even realized had been tensed.

A long moment passed. Then: “Hey,” Ricky said again, his tone warmer.

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“What?”

“It’s just the stress, it’s… this.” He waved a hand at the blizzard. “I didn’t mean it. You know you’re hot as fuck.”

Shiloh smiled. Ricky wasn’t the best guy, but he was nice to her when he wanted to be, and rough with her when she wanted him to be, and the two only got confused some of the time.

Ricky eased off the accelerator as the road got icy, and the engine’s growl relaxed into a low hum. “We should, you know,” he said. “Get out.”

Shiloh’s heart fluttered. “You mean it?”

“Yeah, soon as we save up a little more cash. Just a few more hits, we’ll build up a nest egg, and we’ll get the hell out. Go to California, live on the beach. Change our names. Forget all this.”

“God, we could be normal,” Shiloh said, and then she giggled despite herself. “Do we even know how to—”

The oncoming car materialized out of the snow like a crimson ghost, all blinding headlights and blasting horn. Ricky jerked the wheel to the right, narrowly avoiding the head-on collision and instead taking the brunt of it toward the rear of the car. The left rear door crumpled and the window exploded into a thousand tempered glass fragments, admitting a shrieking, freezing whirlwind. They spun counterclockwise in two full circles, the snowflakes in the headlights smearing into long, horizontal streaks, before skidding to a stop on the shoulder of the road.

Ricky slammed the wheel with both hands, over and over, his face red with fury. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuuuck!”

Shiloh tensed. Like her, Ricky loved the Mustang more than anything in the world. If he got his hands on the other driver—or if he couldn’t, and she was the next closest person—

“You okay, baby?” she asked, her voice tentative.

“I’m not fuckin’ okay!” Ricky shouted. He reached in the back seat and dragged out a heavy black flashlight. “I wanna kill that stupid asshole!” He shoved open the door—a real effort against the battering wind—and got out to survey the damage. The flashlight beam blazed, and then: “Oh, my fuckin’ car!”

Shiloh turned, looking back the way they’d come. The other car hadn’t gone far; it had careened off the other side of the road, crossed the shoulder, dropped one wheel into a ditch, and flipped. The taillights were still on, levered high into the air at an absurd angle. One of the rear tires still spun, but otherwise, there were no signs of movement.

Thankfully, the Mustang was still running, the engine idling like a purring lion, static still hissing from the radio. Shiloh thought about walking over to the other car to see if anyone was hurt—they’d flipped, of course they were hurt—but as pissed off as Ricky was, she didn’t want to do anything he hadn’t explicitly told her to do.

Then the radio static wavered, and she could almost make out… no, just more static. But then it resolved, all at once, into a bouncy commercial jingle accompanied by a sing-song voice: “Don’t let stormy seas get you down! When the black wind blows, look out for the Lighthouse. Gas, food, and gifts, just north of mile marker seventeen. The Lighthouse: your safe port in the storm!”

Shiloh stared. There in front of them, illuminated in their own headlights as if for a portrait, stood a little green mile marker: 17. And there in the distance, barely visible through the gloom, floated an oscillating light like a lighthouse beacon.

The radio played a little ditty, the end of the Lighthouse’s jingle, and then flat-lined again into static.

There were coincidences, and then there was this. Shiloh wrapped her arms tightly around herself, shivering against the frigid wind through the shattered rear window and shaking her head as if to rouse herself from a stupor. The cops, the blizzard, the crash, and that slogan: Your safe port in the storm…

As a little girl, she’d had a recurring nightmare about getting lost in the mall. It was the middle of the night; everywhere was closed and everyone had gone home, but she couldn’t find an exit. She’d wander the endless halls, passing a thousand stores or more, always finding new turns, new plazas, new wings—but never a way out—getting more and more terrified until she finally woke up screaming… which invariably woke her parents, at which point the real nightmare would start.

She felt now like she had in that nightmare—a nightmare she hadn’t thought about in years, not since Ricky took her away from that life—and she felt, too, like she was just about to wake up.

And waking up would make it all so much worse.

Ricky jumped back into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, startling her back into the moment. He tossed the flashlight into her lap and jerked an angry thumb over his shoulder. “Cops are still on us,” he said, glowering. “And I was about to go over there and end that motherfucker.”

Shiloh looked back and saw distant red-and-blue flashes piercing the storm. Her pulse quickened. “We can’t go on like this. We need to find somewhere safe.”

“I know.” Ricky threw the shifter into drive and floored it. The Mustang peeled out and threatened to fishtail on the ice, but Ricky gritted his teeth and manhandled it into submission. Then they were off, hurtling through the blizzard again, the rear door rattling on damaged hinges, the freezing wind shrieking through the shattered window like a banshee, and Shiloh’s eyes locked on that distant, oscillating light that felt like escape.

“Ricky?” she said at last.

“What?”

“I think we’ve done this before.”

“We’ve run from the cops plenty of times.”

“No, I mean, we’ve done this before. That ad on the radio—”

“What ad?”

“While you were outside. It got a signal, and—”

“Don’t be stupid. There’s no reception out here.”

“I heard what I heard!”

“Not now, Shiloh.”

That tone again.

Shiloh shut her mouth, stared at the distant light, and shivered against the invading cold.

Shortly, they passed a blue services sign. “There’s a gas station coming up,” Ricky said, calm, matter-of-fact. “We can’t keep going with that window out. I’m gonna get off the road.”

The oscillating light grew closer. Soon, Shiloh could see it for what it was: an actual lighthouse standing tall at the edge of landlocked North Dakota, its beacon signaling safe port to all who traveled there.

The off-ramp emerged from the darkness like a monster from the depths of a lake. Ricky eased the Mustang off the highway, down the ramp, and onto the frontage road, following the little blue service signs for gas that led them straight to the Lighthouse.

It was a round, whitewashed stone building with squat, almost dollhouse proportions, broad at the base and tapering subtly upward to a rusty cupola thirty feet above. A long, curving window ran around the ground floor; a row of old-timey gas pumps, the gallons and price tracked by mechanical spinners, squatted in front of it. A severely faded wooden billboard stood on an A-frame near the main entrance, its hand-painted script proclaiming this “The biggest lighthouse in North Dakota!” Shiloh didn’t think there were any other lighthouses in North Dakota, but of course that was never the point: this was quintessential Midwestern kitsch, the sort of charming absurdity she’d been steeped in since before she could even remember.

The scene was less charming tonight, under the circumstances. There were no other cars, and there were no lights on anywhere; there was only the glow from the spinning beacon overhead, silently sweeping its false moonlight over the snow-covered plain.

“This place looks abandoned,” Ricky said. “Cops’ll ignore it. We can hide the car out back.”

Shiloh pointed at the beacon flashing over them. “If it’s abandoned, then why’s that still on?”

“Fuck if I know. Batteries or some shit.”

“So what if there’s someone in there?”

“There’s nobody in there.”

“But what if—”

“God, Shiloh, do you think I’m an idiot?”

“No!”

“I listen to the news. I know what I’m talking about. Nobody’s gonna bother us here.”

“Okay, baby.”

Ricky steered the car around to the back of the building and nosed it right up in between two battered Dumpsters, putting it safely out of view of the highway and, to Shiloh’s relief, out of the worst of the wind. He killed the engine and they waited a few minutes in stillness, listening to the drumming of heavy snow on the roof and shivering as the temperature in the car plummeted.

“Ricky?”

“Shh.”

“Are we actually gonna make it this time?”

“Shh! I can hear them.”

Shiloh closed her eyes and listened, and then she heard them too: a half dozen cars approaching, the airy static of tires crunching over snow, the occasional quick chirp of a police siren.

She opened her eyes and saw the fog around them pulsing red and blue, and hissed under her breath: “Shit, Ricky!”

Ricky slapped his rough hand over her mouth and gave her a wild-eyed look that was equal parts fear and anger. She froze. In the alternating red and blue glow, he looked demonic. Her heart pounded. She focused on her breath, trying to calm herself.

Breathe in. I am alive. Breathe out. I can survive.

After a long minute, the cars passed, their chirping sirens receding back into the night. The fog returned to a still monochrome.

Ricky slowly removed his hand from her mouth. He grinned. “They’re gone. We made it.”

Shiloh exhaled, then started laughing uncontrollably, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked at Ricky’s beautiful smile, his beautiful baby blue eyes, his beautiful arms that had steered his beautiful car through all this beautiful mess, and a choked sob of relief escaped her.

Ricky shivered. “We can’t stay in the car; we’ll freeze to death out here. Gimme that light.”

Shiloh handed him back the flashlight, and it blazed to life in his hand.

“Come on,” Ricky said. “Let’s find a way inside and wait out the storm. And who knows? Maybe we’ll even get lucky and make a start on that nest egg we were talking about.”

They got out of the car and trudged around the side of the building through what was by now four or five inches of accumulated snow. Ricky’s flashlight waved back and forth over the sparkling fresh powder as he stumbled along. Shiloh was glad for the deserted highway; it meant nobody to observe his careless gesturing. She didn’t see any headlights, at least; the cops were long gone, and she heard nothing except the crunch of the snow under their feet and the haunting howl of the wind.

Ricky found a side door marked “employees only” and tried it, but it was locked. Before Shiloh could suggest trying the front, Ricky raised the heavy flashlight like a club and brought it down on the lever-style door handle with a whang that rang out like a gunshot. Shiloh flinched and let out a startled yelp.

Ricky grinned and swung the door open. “What?” he said, seeing Shiloh’s stricken expression. “Nobody’s gonna hear us. There’s nobody out here.” And then he disappeared into the building.

For a brief, arresting moment, Shiloh felt that all the rest of humanity had vanished, leaving her in total isolation against an infinite, unyielding cosmos. There was the whitewashed curve of the wall, featureless save for the black portal into which Ricky had just vanished, and then there was the equally featureless expanse of glistening white snow stretching as far as she could see. There was the highway running silent and dead somewhere just beyond sight, though in that moment it may as well have been a hundred miles away. There was the beacon blazing overhead, rendering the scene in a surreal monochrome like starlight. There were the snowflakes twirling and tumbling like motes of dust caught in that starlight. And then there was her, standing alone in the middle of a blizzard in the middle of nowhere, wondering how it had all come to this.

She shook her head, angrily scattering those kinds of thoughts into the night, and followed Ricky inside.

The door opened into a short hallway that led straight through to the front of the store, passing a moldering bathroom and a storage closet along the way. The wind howled through the narrow aperture; with some effort, Shiloh forced the outer door shut against it, but it wouldn’t stay—since Ricky had broken the latch—and it just slammed open again.

“God dammit, Ricky,” she muttered under her breath, looking for something to stop the door with. She dragged open the storage closet and sucked in a sharp breath over the musty stink. Mold colonized stacks of towels, and an old mop sat in a bucket coated with slime. Thick cobwebs overran everything, like no one had been in here in years. A single bare light bulb—dark—hung loose on a wire, dangling from a ragged hole in the ceiling like a fisherman’s lure. She tried the light switch, but nothing happened. Then she spotted several ten-pound pails of rock salt on the floor.

That would work.

With the door shut and stopped, Shiloh was about to make her way to the front of the store—following the dancing shadows thrown by Ricky’s flashlight—when she heard a noise like a muffled sob nearby.

She froze, straining to listen. The sound was so quiet and so brief that there was no way Ricky heard it. The bathroom door yawned open; she saw through to the sink and the very edge of the toilet, coldly illuminated by a sloped skylight above, but from her vantage point, about half the room was still hidden from view. She held her breath for a long minute, but only heard Ricky rummaging noisily through something in the front of the store.

Then she spotted herself in the mirror and saw, not herself at all, but a looming, malevolent shadow, a black void in her own shape but with no discernible features save for a glowing, too-wide smile.

She stared. Her pulse quickened. She tilted her head slightly, and the shadow followed suit as precisely as her own reflection.

The sound of shattering glass rang out from the front of the store, and Ricky yelled, “Fuck!”, and when Shiloh turned reflexively toward the sound, his flailing flashlight beam swept over her, blinding her and then plunging her back into darkness in an instant.

She blinked the stars out of her eyes and glanced back to the mirror, half-expecting to see someone or something running away, but saw only herself—not a shadow at all—softly illuminated by the skylight, more like a mournful ghost than whatever the thing was that she’d seen a moment ago.

“Shiloh!” Ricky yelled from the front. “Where the fuck are you? Get out here!”

Shiloh shook her head and blew out a long breath. She was so sure she’d heard someone, or seen something, or both, but now there was nothing, and in its place was whatever problem Ricky was having, and she knew the consequences if she kept him waiting. She took one last look in the mirror—just herself, a pale, sad girl in way over her head—then turned and headed out front.

The store proper was a broad circular space filled with kitschy nautical décor and oriented around a rusty, chained-off staircase that spiraled up into the dark. A row of refrigerators followed the curve of the back wall, all dark and silent, their contents long since spoiled. The front wall offered the cashier’s counter, behind which a long window looked out over the gas pumps and the empty, snow-covered parking lot, admitting some fraction of the gray light reflecting off the snow outside. A half dozen parallel aisles formed by low, straight shelves cut across the middle, many empty, the rest ransacked.

She found Ricky in the liquor aisle, open bottles of vodka in both hands and a third puddled at his feet, glass shards scattered everywhere. His wide grin, underlit by the flashlight tucked into his arm, was too like the smiling shadow she’d seen in the mirror, and she shuddered despite herself.

“What happened?” she asked.

“They’ve still got booze!” Ricky said triumphantly. He took a long swig from one of the bottles, coughed, then did it again.

Shiloh grabbed the other bottle from him and held it up in the flashlight beam to check the label. “This stuff is shit,” she said.

“It’ll keep us warm.”

“And what if we get drunk and then the cops come back?”

“They’re not gonna come back.” That edge on his voice again. “I told you, they’ll ignore this place.”

“Well we don’t have to be stupid about it!”

His whole body tensed, and Shiloh realized what she’d said, and what was coming, too late to flinch.

He hit her so hard she almost blacked out. She staggered away from him while stars exploded across her vision, sparkling supernovas of shock and pain colliding, combining, expanding, swallowing everything.

She shook her head, her vision slowly clearing, and looked up, tentatively, to meet his glare. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said in a thin, meek voice. “You know you’re smart as fuck.”

Ricky took another swig from the bottle, regarded her darkly for a long moment, and then scoffed, “I gotta piss.” He shouldered his way past her and headed for the bathroom, taking the flashlight with him.

Alone again, Shiloh’s chest heaved with silent, angry sobs. How could she have been so thoughtless? Nothing got Ricky madder than being seen as stupid. The fact that he actually was stupid—stupid enough to believe that merely listening to the news was enough to make him smart—was irrelevant. Once upon a time, Ricky and his Mustang had saved Shiloh from her abusive family and her dead-end life; didn’t she owe it to him to make him feel smart, if that’s how he wanted to feel?

But there was no point beating herself up about it now. Ricky would drink, and time would pass, and it would all become water under the bridge, and things would go back to normal.

They had to. There was nowhere else to go.

Shiloh closed her eyes and exhaled a long, shaky breath, forcing her shame and anger down deep, alongside all the other bad feelings. She focused inward, calming herself.

Breathe in. I am alive. Breathe out. I can survive.

The air stank of cheap vodka thanks to the bottle Ricky had dropped, but that didn’t stop her stomach from rumbling. She wandered a couple aisles over and knelt to grab a candy bar from the lower shelf, but that shelf was empty, and she was surprised it was empty, and then further surprised that she’d instinctively known where a candy bar would even be.

And then the realization arrived, bubbling up slowly through the thick murk of her confusion: she knew this place.

She stood, perplexed, and turned in a slow circle, taking in the scene again with a more critical eye.

The long front window should’ve been lit up by the warm glow of the exterior lights, more inviting than the harsh fluorescents within. The shelves should’ve been fully stocked with all the staples of a middle-of-nowhere convenience store—canned goods, carb-heavy snacks, candy bars, shelf-stable microwave meals, and yes, cheap liquor—and the ones behind the counter should’ve been stuffed to the brim with cigarette cartons and nudie magazines. The lotto board there on the right should’ve been lit up, and the tip jar should’ve sat there on the left, stuffed with a handful of bills from the register. There should’ve been the hum of the refrigerators at the back of the store, and the obnoxious ka-clank, ka-clank from the one with a compressor that was going bad. There should’ve been the cloying scent of stale incense burned half an hour ago, and another half hour before that, and another half hour before that. There should’ve been the tinny, grating voice of the local newscaster issuing from the black-and-white mini TV sitting on the shelf beneath the register—

Wait, that one was real.

Shiloh stared at the counter, from behind which issued that very voice, exactly as it should’ve done—exactly as it had—and she found she already knew the words even as they were spoken: “This morning, authorities found the fugitives’ red 1967 Mustang overturned on the highway shoulder, just south of mile marker seventeen. Both occupants were still in the vehicle, having died from a combination of their injuries and exposure.”

“Ricky?” Shiloh called, but he didn’t answer. Still, she moved toward the counter, around the end, dreading what she knew she would find.

There on the floor behind the register spread a pool of fresh blood, black as night. Tiny crumbs of glass floated there, catching the gray light from the six-inch monochrome television beneath the register, twinkling like distant stars.

The TV squawked: “Authorities believe the fugitives, who were already on the run from Fargo police, were also involved in last night’s fatal armed robbery at the Lighthouse.”

Shiloh looked up to the middle of the window and saw what she knew she would see: three little bullet holes rimmed with spiderweb cracks, through which invaded three shrieking fingers of the storm.

They had killed him right here.

He was yelling in a language Shiloh didn’t know, an immigrant language she’d heard spoken around her all her life but had never cared to learn. He was yelling, and he reached for something under the counter, and Ricky’s gun went off—a series of deafening staccato pops that quickly gave way to impotent clicks—and the damage was done.

Three bullet holes in the window. Three bullet holes in the clerk. Three people staring dumbly at each other, their lives irrevocably changed in a single, shattering instant.

Of course, that was before.

The welcome bell dinged, and Shiloh’s stomach dropped.

The front door creaked open, granting violent entry to the full fury of the storm. From the torrential swirl of blowing snow stepped two human shadows, and the only features Shiloh could make out were their malevolent smiles, glowing.

“Ricky!” she screamed, backing into the window as the shadows approached the counter, blocking her escape. “Ricky, where the fuck are you?!”

The shadows closed in, the smiles bearing down on her. They were close enough to reach out and touch, even as she shrank back, and now she could see something else: a thousand little points of starlight floating in the black, as if she were seeing through them directly into the cosmos.

The smaller shadow screamed something at her in a shrill, lunatic voice. It was some language she didn’t know—a language she wasn’t even sure was real—and she quailed at the plume of putrid breath and the spray of bilious spittle that accompanied it. The shadow kept screaming, its frustration growing, but she couldn’t understand, and then the other, larger shadow joined in, its voice deeper, angrier, and that one waved its arm at her and she realized with a shock that she was staring down the barrel of a gun.

Shiloh froze. Through blurry tears, she fixated on those glowing smiles floating in their human-shaped voids, and she realized this was exactly what she had seen in the bathroom mirror.

She had seen herself.

The clerk too, had been unable to understand. He didn’t know the language, and Ricky hadn’t cared, and Shiloh had never learned. He had reached for something under the counter, something that was now within her reach. She glanced down and saw it on the shelf next to the TV: a framed photo of the clerk and a little girl, probably no more than twelve, making silly faces together in a novelty photo booth, looking happier than Shiloh had ever felt in her entire life.

He hadn’t been reaching for gun. He’d been trying to show them he had a daughter.

If only he’d understood.

If only they’d known.

From somewhere, Ricky yelled “Shiloh!” and then a gunshot exploded, and then another, and another—six in all—amplified in the little store so that she felt the pressure waves break inside her skull.

A cruel silence followed.

Bitter cold spread from her chest, so cold it burned. She looked down in wonder at the black stain spreading over her shirt, at the points of starlight twinkling inside it. She looked back up at the not-faces, still horribly smiling, and then Ricky crashed into the big one from behind and went right through it and into the counter—“Ow, fuck!”—and then the two shadows beat a shrieking retreat out the front door and dissipated like plumes of smoke into the night.

Shiloh swayed and steadied herself against the counter. Her vision swam. She wondered, absurdly, if she’d done a huge dose of shrooms earlier and just forgotten, because nothing she’d just seen seemed like it could possibly be real, but the freezing pain in her chest most certainly was, and besides, some part of her knew that this was how it had gone, only she and Ricky had been the ones running out the door in a panic.

“Who the hell were those guys?” Ricky was saying, squinting out the open front door as if he could still see the shadows, as if they hadn't already been reclaimed by the night. “Where did they come from? What happened?”

Then he turned to her and saw, finally, and he stared at the void in her chest with his mouth dumbly agape, and Shiloh could only manage to whisper, “Help?” and then her legs gave out.

The rest was a blur. Ricky’s arms around her shoulders, dragging her to the back of the store, icicles of agony slicing through her. Ricky swearing, dropping her against the wall in front of the bathroom—“Why the fuck did you block the door?!”—him throwing the pails of rock salt over her head to explode against the ground, spilling their contents with a hiss. Her shadow in the mirror, staring down at her with that cruel grin. Ricky throwing open the door and the howling storm surging in like an angry wave. Then she was over his shoulder, and they were outside, and the world was spinning, and the pain was beyond comprehension, and she kept telling herself she’d make it through because this wasn’t the first time this had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last.

She told herself it meant something that he still tried to save her, every single time.

Then they were in the car, and it wasn’t any better, because the car was freezing and the backseat was full of snow and there were things shrieking all around them now, their voices like police sirens, their dire screams whipped into a confused frenzy by the raging wind, and she couldn’t tell if the sounds were coming from outside or from the void-wound her body seemed to be collapsing into.

Ricky’s red 1967 Mustang roared to life like an enraged demon, as if the car itself meant to shout down the storm. The tires spun for a sickening moment, seeking traction, and then the car lurched away from the building in reverse, and Ricky was saying, “I can’t believe you got yourself shot,” and he slammed the shifter into drive, and he drove, and the Lighthouse and the grinning shadows and all the shrieking things sank like corpses into the black lake of the night.

Then there was only the growl of the engine as they circled the onramp and finally gained the open road. Just before the final turn that put the Lighthouse behind them, Shiloh saw its beacon, red now, red like rage, no longer spinning but instead fixed upon her, watching her like an accusatory eye.

“Ricky?” Shiloh whispered, her voice tremulous. She placed a tentative hand against her chest; the wound felt like frozen steel to her touch.

“You’re gonna be fine,” Ricky said, his knuckles white as snow on the wheel.

Tears beaded in Shiloh’s eyes, blurring her vision. Mile marker seventeen hurtled past. She only glimpsed it for a moment, but it left an afterimage in her mind, like she’d just taken a Polaroid. “We’re headed back south?”

Ricky jerked his chin toward Shiloh’s wound. “North didn’t work out too well.”

They rode in silence for a long minute. Shiloh closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window, listening to the sweet growl of the Mustang’s engine, feeling its gentle vibration in the glass. The Mustang had brought her out of hell and into a new life. It had brought her to Ricky, her safe port in the storm... such as he was. It had brought her to freedom.

And it had also brought her here.

Desperate for comfort, she began her mantra. Breathe in: ragged, painful. I am alive—

No.

Breathe out: shaking, sobbing. I didn’t survive.

The pain in her chest was fading into a frozen numbness. She marveled that there was no blood, only that strange, starlit void, even as she was very sure she was dying. Again.

Finally, she said, “Baby, I don’t think we get out of this.”

“We’re getting out of this.”

“You said that last time, and the time before that, and it keeps going wrong. Ricky, I think we did a real bad thing, and I don’t think we ever get out.”

Ricky frowned, and Shiloh wondered how many more times she’d have to die before he finally understood.

“I really wanted to see California,” she said, her voice catching.

Ricky shook his head. “You’re going to see California. Just a few more hits, and we’ll save up, we’ll get out, and we’ll finally be norm—”

The oncoming car materialized out of the snow like a vengeful ghost. Ricky leaned on the horn, but he was too slow to react, and the last thing Shiloh saw before she died were two shadows staring back at her from a red 1967 Mustang, their terrible glowing smiles suspended in the night.

Afterword

The thesis of Horror × Hope is that horror is more interesting when it engages with hope… but that doesn’t mean hope always has to win.

When the Black Wind Blows is in some ways a hopeless story, leaving Shiloh and Ricky trapped in a seemingly-eternal death loop, but it also centers Shiloh’s own hope—her dream of getting out of the loop, out of this life, and finally seeing California—in contrast with Ricky’s blind devotion to repeating the same old patterns and cycles of abuse.

Incidentally, the cycle of abuse and the cycle of the death loop are very intentionally linked. I adore cyclic narratives, and it was a lot of fun to finally write one.