She slid across the vinyl seat so that her tightly denimed thigh pressed against Dave’s.
Trying to project an air of insouciance, as if this middle-of-the-night rendezvous were an everyday occurrence, Dave didn’t speak. He merely reached forward and started his machine. But his hand shook and rattled the keys. Fearing he’d given himself away, he cast a furtive look in Christina’s direction. He caught a smile and worried that she thought he wasn’t cool.
When Dave reached the corner he switched on his headlights. Instantly the nightscape lit up, revealing blowing leaves and deep shadows.
“Have any problems?” Dave asked, keeping his mind on the road.
“It was a breeze,” Christina said. “I can’t understand why I was so scared to sneak out of the house. My parents are unconscious. I mean I could have just walked out the front door instead of climbing out the window.”
They drove down a street lined with dark houses.
“Where are we going?” Christina asked nonchalantly.
“You’ll see,” Dave said. “We’ll be there in a sec.”
They were now cruising past the dark, expansive Green-lawn Cemetery. Christina pressed up against Dave and looked over his shoulder into the graveyard with its stubble of headstones.
Dave slowed the car, and Christina sat bolt upright. “We’re not going in there,” she said defiantly.
Dave smiled in the darkness, exposing his own white teeth. “Why not?” he said. Almost as soon as the words left his mouth he pulled the wheel to the left, and the car bumped over the threshold into the cemetery. Dave quickly doused the headlights and slowed to a speed approximating a slow jog. It was hard to see the road beneath the foliage.
“Oh, my God!” Christina said as her head pivoted and her wide eyes scanned the immediate area on both sides of the car. The headstones loomed eerily in the night. Some of them gave off sudden splinters of ambient light from their highly polished surfaces.
Instinctively Christina moved even closer to Dave’s side, with one hand gripping the inside of his thigh. Dave grinned with satisfied contentment.
They rolled to a stop beside a silent, still pond bordered by droopy willows. Dave turned off the engine and locked the doors. “Can’t be too careful,” he said.
“Maybe we should crack the windows,” Christina suggested. “Otherwise it will be an oven in here.”
Dave took the suggestion but voiced the hope that there wouldn’t be any mosquitoes.
The two teenagers eyed each other for a moment of awkward hesitation. Then Dave tentatively leaned toward Christina, and they gently kissed. The contact instantly fueled the fires of their passion, and they fell into a wild, libidinous embrace. Clumsily they groped for each other’s physical secrets as the windows steamed up.
Despite the power of their youthful, teenage hormones, both Dave and Christina sensed a movement of the car that was not of their making. Simultaneously they glanced up from their endeavors and looked out through the misty windshield. What they saw instantly terrified them. Hurling at them through the night air was a pale white specter. Whatever the preternatural creature was, it collided with a jarring impact against the windshield and then rolled off the passenger side of the car.
“What the hell?” Dave yelled as he frantically struggled with his pants, which had worked their way halfway down his thighs.
Christina then shrieked as she battled to fend off a filthy hand that thrust itself through her cracked window and tore away a handful of her hair.
“Holy crap!” Dave yelled as he gave up on his pants to fight a hand that came in through his side. Fingernails sank into the skin of his neck and ripped off a piece of his T-shirt, leaving rivulets of blood to run down his back.
In a panic Dave started the Camaro. Jamming the car in reverse, he shot backward, bouncing over the rocky terrain. Christina screamed again as her head hit the roof of the car. The car slammed into a headstone that snapped off at its base and thudded to the ground.
Dave threw the car into drive and gunned the engine. He wrestled with the wheel as the powerful engine hurled the car forward. Christina ricocheted off the door and was thrown into Dave’s lap. He pushed her away just in time to miss another marble monument.