This is a rewrite of the first story I posted online, like 10 years ago. Hope you like it.



The Hitchhiker


It had been a great day so far for Julie Huerta. It was a Friday, she had felt very comfortable with her Physics exam in sixth period, she had crushed it in basketball practice, and Vinny had finally found the balls to talk to her. That conversation had been both intriguing and stimulating to say the least, and they had tentatively set up a date for this weekend.

To top it all off, it was snowing. While snow was an annoyance for some, for kids in the New Mexico desert it was a rare treat. Julie wasn’t exactly a kid, but she wasn’t too old to build a snowman or smack her brother in the face with a snowball, and if her luck held, the snowfall would continue all night and into the morning. When Cyndi Lauper began to belt out Girls Just Wanna Have Fun from the car radio, Julie couldn't help but sing along. Unfortunately it seemed not everyone was having as great a time as she was.

Through the shifting veil of snow shuffled the muddled shape of a man. As Julie approached the figure this man's terrible misfortune became painfully more apparent. Wrapped tightly around his body was a light wind-breaker; the type of garment better suited for a stroll through the park on a sunny autumn day. It offered very little protection against the frigid air on an unforgiving day like today. The man's chin was tucked tightly against his chest, his arms hugging his body, in an effort to preserve what little body heat he might still be retaining. Narrow legs clothed in thin slacks and capped with leather loafers trudged stubbornly through drifts of snow alongside the road.

Julie's heart went out to the man. She could not remember passing one single vehicle since she had piloted her yellow VW Beetle onto this barren stretch of pavement. Realizing that they were still at least ten miles from town, she pulled onto the shoulder. It was the only humane thing to do. Watching in her rear view mirror, she saw the man's face light up as he hustled to her passenger door. She leaned over and yanked the handle, popping the door open. A cold blast of air rushed over her, instantly dropping the temperature inside the bug ten degrees or more.

There, outside her vehicle in the wintry air, stood a strikingly handsome, clean shaven man who appeared to be in his early thirties. A sheepish grin shown from his windblown, cherry red face. Dark, guarded eyes peered up at her as she studied his wonderfully symmetrical features.

An overwhelming impulse to stomp on the gas pedal, peel out of there, and never look back washed over Julie, but she quickly shook it off. That was nuts. She couldn't drive off and leave this poor man standing here like this.

"Need a lift," Julie asked coolly.

The man said nothing, but he climbed into the car with liquid speed and agility.

"It's fucking cold out there, huh?" Julie offered. The man smiled. Julie was still not completely comfortable cursing in the presence of adults and it pleased her that this man was not put off by her use of the 'f' word.

Beaming at her own maturity, Julie extended her hand. "My name's Julie." The man looked at her hand for a moment before seizing it with his own sturdy grip. His hands were deathly cold from the icy weather outside.

"You're very beautiful, Julie," the man told her. It was true, Julie was amazing. Every inch, every curve of her soft, young, athletic body was perfectly proportioned to her five foot six, one-hundred thirty pound frame. Rich, shoulder-length, chocolate-colored hair spilled down around her high cheek bones and squared jaw, while her lush lips, sparkling blue eyes, square chin, and celestial nose completed the most stunning face to ever grace man’s existence. Her flawless body was wrapped in a fair, pink skin so smoothly complected it might have been stolen from a new born’s ass. Much of that skin was presently on display, as she had swapped her shorts for sweats but opted to remain in her practice top, a sleeveless half shirt with the number thirty-four printed on it, which meant her belly and shoulders were bare despite the freezing temperatures. It was impossible to even imagine such beauty, but something about this man’s comment struck Julie as odd.

Perhaps it was the way he said it, with a hint of regret and sadness. As Julie tried to pin down what exactly was off, the man released her hand and produced a Heckler & Koch HK45 from the confines of his jacket. He moved in the same smooth, fluid motion he had used to climb aboard Julie's ride.

No stranger to deftness and dexterity, Julie averaged nearly three steals a game her sophomore year. Her hands moved lightning quick, but she had just managed to grab the barrel of the gun and only slightly alter the angle in which it was pointed before flames flashed, a deafening boom filled the car, and Julie cried out in surprise.

Warm pressure began to build in her guts and she tasted metal in the back of her throat. A thousand thoughts raced in her mind at once - the most prominent one being, Am I going to die? It just didn't seem possible. It all seemed so surreal, like a bad dream. As she sought to solidify her grip on the gun, it bucked in her hands again and she felt the pressure in her abdomen swell to something greater.

I've gotta stop the slide, she thought, and when the gun went off a third time she succeeded. More lead smacked violently into her belly and ripped through her bowels, but the slide was held in the back position, unable to chamber a new round. Julie kept her right hand firmly in place and brought her left thumb up into the handsome bastard's eye. She had the satisfaction of hearing him scream before his left fist clouted her in the side of the head.

It took a second to shake out the cobwebs, and when she regained her senses the hitchhiker was rubbing his eye and recklessly waving his weapon at her. She flinched back against the door as another shot boomed, and she felt the impact in her right shoulder.

So much for stealing his gun.

She decided that she had to get out of there; she had to get out of the bug and away from this man. As she turned to open her door she saw that the bullets had passed clean through her body. Her blood was splashed across the handle of the driver's side door and she could see a couple of holes in the paneling. She pushed open the door and gingerly stepped out into the snow.

Another booming shot rang out behind her. The slug entered the small of her back, furrowed through her intestines, exited her belly, and careened off the pavement on the other side of the road. She squawked and stumbled to the ground as more of her blood sprayed from her body.

Julie struggled awkwardly to get back to her feet while clutching the numerous holes in her midriff. There was a tight trio of entry wounds around her navel - left, right, and above - and an exit wound nearly the size of a fifty cent piece farther off in the left side of her gut. Blood was pouring over her hands and between her knuckles. The taste of it filled her mouth and she spat red. Leaning against the car for support, she managed to stand.

Am I dying? she wondered. Am I really dying?

With her tiny hands splayed across her tummy, Julie tried to run. Normally she was one of the fastest girls on the basketball team, but while there was nothing wrong with her legs, the fire in her belly made her ungainly and the most she could achieve was a graceless lumber. She was around ten yards beyond the rear bumper when she heard the crack of another gunshot behind her.

Her right leg went stiff as a bullet punched through her thigh. Another shot quickly followed, and Julie caught it with her perfectly rounded right butt cheek. An exit wound exploded in her hip, severely hobbling the beautiful teen, but she continued to limp forward, desperate to outrun her fate. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed the bastard had gotten out of her car and was now pointing his pistol at her.

"No no no no no no no no no," Julie muttered in a panicky little voice. The hitchhiker clearly had no intention of letting her escape. This was so fucking bad.

Another pair of gunshots rang out in the quiet desert air, and both rounds found their mark in Julie's lower back and punched fresh holes in her midriff. A gurgling sound escaped her throat and she sank to her knees. Her eyes grew wide with disbelief as she examined the latest exit wounds in her belly. The two holes were a couple inches right of her navel, one just above the other, spilling alarming amounts of blood down the front of her sweat pants. Spurts jettisoned from her wounds in rhythm with her heartbeat and landed steaming in the snow before her. She kept both palms pressed against her belly, but it did little to slow the bleeding. Her guts burned with intense discomfort.

"Ah fuck!" Julie squealed, her voice rising shrilly in terror. Another slug ripped through her, spraying more of her precious blood from just beneath her right breast. Her back arched as the bullet pierced her body, then she twisted and fell forward, pressing her right hand against the ground to support herself. She coughed up more blood and swiped the drips from her lips with her free hand.

"Oh Gawd," she muttered miserably. The pain was terrible, but it was better than feeling nothing at all. She began to straighten her back and try to get her feet back under her when she was shot again, this bullet catching her in the back of her left shoulder and tearing through the tender flesh below her collar bone. She cried out and spun with the force of the shot, ending up with her back in the snow and her legs twisted beneath her.

Her killer was now quickly approaching, swapping an empty click for a fresh one he had found inside his jacket. She turned her stunning blue eyes upon herself, dismayed to see what had become of her healthy, young, seventeen-year-old body. All of her wounds were bleeding profusely. Her white top and gray sweats were soaked. The snow beneath her was stained an ugly red.

"Oh God, lookit me," Julie moaned. Her eyes widened as the man pulled back the slide and chambered a fresh round. "Oh shit," she mumbled.

Her tennis shoes scuffed at the snow as she tried to scoot backwards, desperate to get away from this psycho and his gun, when he plugged her high in the abdomen. The bullet smashed into the soft flesh beneath her sternum, pummeled the tissue and organs housed there, chipped off a piece of her spine, and exited the center of her back. She coughed up another mouthful of blood and grunted in agony.

"Fuck, you fucking bastard," she gasped, a split second before the bastard shot her in the chest. The bullet left a hole in the top of the three over her right breast, and it also must have punctured a lung, because Julie suddenly found it increasingly difficult to breathe.

Still intent on resisting her fate, her animal instincts still locked in the flight of survival, she sighed tiredly, flipped onto her knees and elbows and began to scuttle away from her Beetle and her killer.

She managed to cover maybe three or four feet of ground before she was shot for the fourteenth time. The bullet chewed into her back and left an exit wound the size of a sand dollar where her left nipple used to be. Her plight was becoming grimmer by the second. Blood spewed from her lips, she muttered, “Oh fuck,” and she dragged her dying body forward another foot or two.

The gun barked for the fifteenth time that day, and Julie felt her left shoulder pulverized and smashed by hot lead. Her arms gave out and her face ended up in the snow, but she continued trying to pull herself forward. She was still struggling to find her grip when the handsome hitchhiker’s boot nuzzled against her ribs and flipped her onto her back.

Her bewitching blue eyes blinked against the snow, staring up into the barrel of a gun. Is this it? Is he gonna blow my head off now? Her brows arched and her perfect face grimaced in terror, and she begged for mercy, “Please. Please no.”

The man hesitated, the gun wavering ever so slightly, and then he exhaled heavily. “I’m sorry, Julie.” He knelt beside her and began rummaging through the pockets of her sweat pants. All he found was her Samsung flip phone and her lip gloss. “A flip phone?!” He seemed insulted.

Julie tried to answer him, but she spit up blood instead. If she had been able to speak, she’d have told him he sounded like her friends. Everyone was always busting her chops for it (Who are you calling, Julie? 2005?), but her parents weren’t well off, and she didn’t need to be on Twitter and Instagram all the time like the other girls in her school.

“Don’t you have a wallet?”

Julie gurgled and coughed and let a torrent of blood spill from the corners of her mouth before she replied, “It’s on the dash. I think there’s like thirteen bucks in there.” She was amazed at the tranquility and steadiness in her voice. It sounded as if they were discussing the weekend weather forecast over a cup of tea, even though in Julie’s mind she was desperately throwing water out of a sinking ship.

“Thirteen dollars? You bitch! You stupid fucking cunt!” The bastard kicked her in the jaw.

“I wanted to help you,” Julie protested.

“Help me?” the man asked, and he punctuated his question by shooting Julie in her perky right tit, inside the upper arc of the three this time.

“Oof,” Julie grunted.

“Do you have twenty-thousand dollars somewhere? Because that would fucking help me.” He shot her again, in the lower curve of her right breast, near the middle tip of the three.

It was then that Julie understood that she was dying for nothing. This man was in debt to some dangerous people, and he would not be able to pay them back. Despite the fact that he was killing her, it was easy to empathize with his situation. After all, he was just trying to survive, and as she lay there staring death in the face, she knew what that was like.

“Take my car,” she told him. She lifted her head to look at her bullet-riddled body before adding, “I’m not gonna need it anymore.”

“That piece of shit isn’t worth five hundred dollars, and now it’s full of blood and bullet holes. Nobody will buy it.”

Julie loved that car. Her parents had bought it for her on her sixteenth birthday, and it cost them countless hours of overtime and working weekends. It was a representation of their devotion to her, so hearing this man call it a piece of shit stung her. She laid her head back in the snow, licked the blood from her lips, and rolled her sparkling blue eyes. “Well, I guess you killed me for thirteen bucks then.”

“Hardly even worth the ammo I spent on you.” The man seemed to consider putting one more round in her, and Julie wondered if she’d feel the bullet caving in her forehead or if everything would just suddenly come to an end before she even realized it. In the end the man just took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, Julie. You shouldn’t have stopped.” Then he turned and left her for dead.

She heard the door to her bug slam shut and raised her head just enough to see her beloved yellow VW Beetle disappear into the snow. I shouldn't have stopped, she thought. Oh God, what I wouldn't do to rewind the clock by two minutes and just not stop. Sadly, there were no second chances this time, and she understood with absolute certainty that this is where she would die.

Her mind returned to the conversation she had with Vinny that morning. Ironically, they had discussed how fleeting life can be, and how important it is to cherish every moment. In hindsight, it seemed almost prescient.

Vinny had told her that the average life span was around eighty years, which meant they only got eighty springs, eighty summers, eighty autumns, eighty winters, eighty birthdays. I want so badly to have eighty birthdays. He had been watching a video on YouTube, a Ted Talk maybe, and it had inspired him. It was what motivated him to finally tell her how he felt. He told her that she gave him hope, that the world was a little brighter because it had people like her in it, that she made him feel so many things at once it was overwhelming.

They had both agreed to live in the moment and to stop stressing over petty, insignificant things that wouldn't make a difference in the end. Still, no matter how stirring that discussion had been and how much weight she had given Vinny's words, she never imagined that this would be that end; that she wouldn't even live to see another sunset.

For some reason her killer had left her flip phone in the snow beside her. It was probably the same reason he had shot her seventeen times without managing to hit her heart even once - he wasn't cut out for this sort of thing. The reason didn't really matter though, it fell into the category of insignificant things that wouldn't make a difference in the end. What mattered was the phone was here, and she intended to use it.

There was no point in calling nine-one-one. They couldn't save her and she didn't want to spend her last moments talking to a stranger. Her parents would both be at work and wouldn't be able to answer her call, so she recalled the number Vinny had given her that morning and dialed it.

As the phone rang she considered how amazing a simple thing like a memory was. It was something she always took for granted, but there was so much information and experience and emotion in her memories, and soon it would all be gone. All of it lost forever, as she would cease to exist. It was a devastating thought.

"Hello?" It was Vinny's voice, made distorted and metallic by technology, but Vinny nonetheless.

"Vinny, I'm dying."

"What?! Is this Julie?"

"Yep. I…" A convulsion overtook her mid-sentence, but once she got it under control she continued, "I’m fucking bleeding to death."

"Julie, that’s not funny. Don't even play like that."

"I'm dead serious," and Julie chortled at the unintentional pun.

"You’re not fucking with me?"

“I wish I was.” There was a moment of silence from Vinny’s side of the connection, and Julie tried to imagine what he must be thinking. It had to be a mind-blowing call to receive.

“Julie, you gotta hang in there. Where are you?”

“Lying on the side of the road like fucking road kill.”

“Did you call an ambulance?”

“Vinny, I’m fucked. They’d never make it in time.”

“Is it really that bad? What happened?”

“I got shot to fucking shit. A bullet for every year of my life. My stomach looks like swiss fucking cheese." Julie lifted her head again to look at herself, as if to reaffirm what she was saying. A part of her was still in disbelief.

“You got shot? Who shot you?”

“Just some guy. Doesn’t matter. Don’t sweat the small stuff, remember? I didn’t call you to talk about him.”

“It’s not small stuff, Julie. He shot you.”

“Yeah, seventeen fucking times. I don’t want vengeance or justice or any of that bullshit. What I really want is to live, but… that’s not happening. Listen…” Julie felt the world fading, and she forgot what she was saying. All she could think about was the crushing finality of it all.

“Julie.”

Vinny’s metallic voice was in another world as despair took hold of her. This is it. This is really it. There’s nothing left. A snowflake landed in her eye, and she blinked at the tears spilling down her temples. It’s so beautiful. She was staring up at the wintry sky - a blanket of gray dotted with floating white flakes. I won’t get to play in the snow. I won’t be able to enjoy this beauty ever again.

“Julie?”

It was that voice again, from somewhere far away. She remembered the boy she had called. The boy with whom she had connected earlier that day. It was too late. It wasn’t fair. Everything was being taken from her.

“Julie, are you there?!” Vinny’s voice was loud and panicked.

Julie’s response was soft and trembling with emotion, but she still sounded remarkably calm. “Yes. You were right. Life is too short. Way too short…” She had wanted to tell him something, but what? Did it even matter? Does anything matter when you’re dead? “You should…” Julie licked her lips and summoned all her strength. “You should have asked me out years ago. Don’t make that mistake again. Don’t… keep things inside.”

“Julie, I’m sorry.” He was crying. “Please don’t die.”

“I don’t want to…” It was the last thing she said. Her words trailed off, but she still clung stubbornly to her life, struggling mightily to fill her ruined lungs again and again.

It took several minutes for her to finally bleed out, and she suffered immensely. Vinny remained on the phone, calling out to her every few seconds, but she could no longer respond. She made choked gurgling sounds often enough for him to know she was still there, but it was not an attempt to communicate. Vinny and her phone were forgotten. All her efforts were focused on the continuation of her existence.

I wanted to help. This is how my kindness was repaid. I can’t believe this shit. It was her last coherent thought before her consciousness descended into delirium. Soon after, her jaw wrenched in agony, her perfect, full lips parted, as she finally fell back into her death throes. Her back arched and her blood-stained tennis shoes dug at the snow. This went on for close to ten seconds. Then Julie lay still. She was dead at last. It was a terrible death that no one could possibly deserve, especially one as young, innocent, and naïve as Julie.