True Short Horror Story: A Late Night Walk In My Township

No lists of rules, evil A.I.’s, or cursed objects appear in this story.

It doesn’t take place in a haunted apartment, a supernatural forest, or secret laboratory.

There aren’t any ghosts or demons, either–

Although I suppose you could say that there are monsters.

The year was 2007. It was after midnight on a Thursday night, and my best friend Sean and I had nowhere to go. I was a wannabe writer, he was a wannabe artist, and we had twenty-nine dollars between us that somehow had to buy all our food and gas until the end of the month. That night, we discovered a half-empty bottle of Everclear vodka behind a fake panel in the wall of our apartment: it was like finding buried treasure. We poured it into two bottles along with some expired orange juice–trusting the alcohol to kill off any bacteria–and set out for a walk.

Walking, at least, was free, and those days it was our main recreational activity.

Instead of going through the historic district or out by the meat-packing plant, we headed along one of the many railroad tracks that criss-crossed our town.

We’d had some close calls before, but we’d always managed to scurry into the bushes when a train came roaring through. So far, anyway.

Maybe it was the booze, but I felt bored with the railroad tracks that night. I wanted to explore one of the gravel roads that led away from the tracks. There were dozens of them, strange little paths that led up into the tree-lined hills or down into the dark gullies behind the tracks.

I picked on at random, and Sean sighed when he saw how steep it was. Fueled by curiosity and vodka screwdrivers, we trudged up into the woods.

We hadn’t gone far when I began to suspect that maybe, just maybe, we’d made an awful mistake. I felt…watched. Although I couldn’t see anyone among the dark trees, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up. Goosebumps covered Sean’s arms, and one look in his eyes told me that he was feeling it, too.

We didn’t dare to speak. A single word might break the spell, causing God-knows-what to come charging at us from the depths of the woods…

How far were we from town by now? Forty minutes? An hour? Help would never get to us in time if we called for it…and there was no one around to hear us scream.

There was a heavy, silent, expectant feeling to the air, like someone or something was awaiting the arrival of our crunching footsteps.

I couldn’t tell what it was at first: that black shape looming beyond the horizon of the hill. To our overactive imaginations, it looked almost like a ruined castle.

As it turned out, it was an abandoned rock quarry.

That feeling of being observed only intensified as we entered the ring of crumbled, graffiti-covered walls and huge machines we couldn’t identify. I felt drawn to the building to the right, but maybe I just wanted to get out of the line of sight of the concrete tower at the far end of the quarry, the one with narrow windows that stared down at us like empty eye sockets.

Approaching the building, Sean and I were hit by a foul smell: a weird mix of diesel fuel, sweat, piss, and something else I couldn’t identify. We turned on the flashlights on our phones and stepped through the doorless entrance.

The moment I saw the filthy, torn-up clothes and mattresses inside, I wanted to get out of there–and I’m sure that Sean did, too.

But running meant facing whatever might be waiting for us on the road back, and neither of us were ready for that, not yet. Shaky phone flashlights in our hands, we kept going, stepping over junk half-glimpsed in the dark:

A decapitated teddy bear.

A pink plastic bowl full of maggots.

A long hallway of metal doors.

One of them screeched as it swung on rusted hinges.

Was someone else here?

We kept going until we reached the end of the hallway, where a concrete staircase led upward. Sean opened his mouth to say something, but stopped when he heard footsteps behind us.

Whoever they were, they could walk just fine in the dark–

And they had no trouble staying out of the reach of our dim phone lights.

“H-hello?” I whispered.

There was no response. Sean and I headed up the staircase, afraid to go forward but even more afraid to go back.

Upstairs, more rusty metal doors. Some of them were padlocked.

From behind one, we heard weeping.

In other rooms, multiple voices held hushed conversations in languages we couldn’t understand. Beneath the door beside us, an orange glow flickered–

Like firelight.

The footsteps behind us grew closer, ratcheting up my nerves until I didn’t dare to turn around–

The door beside us swung open. Now I saw the source of the orange glow: some burning rags on a broken plate. I caught glimpses, shadows of figures moving inside–

But most of my attention was fixed on the large, bearded man who burst out of the room, jabbing his finger into my chest and shoving me. Spit flew out between the gaps created by his missing teeth; his breath reeked of vomit and sickness.

Red, wormlike veins stood out on his face as he screamed at me. I had no idea what he was saying, but the meaning was clear: I watched in slow motion as he picked up a chunk of rubble, reared back with it–

The footsteps that had been following us came running out of the dark.

A dirty, snot-nosed kid tugged on the man’s sleeve. He hesitated for a second–

And that was all Sean and I needed.

We sprinted down the hallway, pursued by eerie echoing shouts and hurled hunks of rock. There was a rickety fire escape at the end of the hall–

We’d barely started to climb down when headlights appeared on the gravel track below. Something about their brightness made me feel like a hunted animal, and I gestured to Sean that we should hide. Sticks and briars jabbed through our jeans as we climbed up the wooded hillside and squatted down behind a half-rotted log.

Three black vans parked in front of the “abandoned” quarry. There was something ominous about the way they left their engines running. Five men got out of the vans and rushed inside the building where we’d found the man and child. Their shadows were long and freakish in the headlights, and while I couldn’t make out their faces, I did catch the glint of a nickel-plated pistol.

More shouts echoed from inside; we could see flashlight beams dancing in the hollow windows. The five men marched about thirty people out of the ruined building and loaded them into the rumbling vans. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than five minutes, but I’d swear I saw the kid who’d been following us look up into the hills and give a little nod before disappearing into the darkness of the rumbling unmarked van. I finally understood: the man and boy hadn’t been threatening us–they’d been warning us. Trying to get us out of there before it was too late.

With the vans locked up and ready to go, I got a better look at the five armed men–

And what I saw gave me chills.

They looked…completely normal.

A short chubby guy with a goatee, a blonde kid not much older than me who kept checking his phone, an older man with a leathery face and ballcap who I’d seen a few times in the bars around town, and two others with their backs to me–

All of them calmly smoking cigarettes and telling jokes like they hadn’t just kidnapped dozens of people at gunpoint. One of the men opened a canvas bag he was holding–it looked like it was full of passports and documents–and set fire to them one by one with the tip of his cigarette.

When they’d finished their smoke break, they left the smoldering sack on the ground and drove off with their human cargo.

It was like they were never there.

Almost half an hour passed before Sean and I dared to move from our hiding spot.

The same question was on both our minds as we tread carefully down the anonymous gravel road: what the hell had we just seen?

I wanted to go to the police with our story, but without any evidence, who would believe us? Besides, as Sean pointed out, we’d have to explain what we were doing on the quarry’s property in the middle of the night, reeking of alcohol.

A few days later, a black-and-white poster in a roadside rest area caught my eye.

I saw two faces I recognized: a pudgy guy with a goatee, and an older man with a leathery face, wearing a ball cap. Both were wanted in connection with a human-trafficking ring.

They’d brought hundreds of people into the country on false pretenses, destroyed their documents, and shipped them off to work as forced labor–or worse.

Sean and I had unwittingly stumbled onto one of the transport hubs of their operation.

I’d always thought that human trafficking was something that happened to people far away: at shipping ports, border crossings, or international airports. I never would have imagined it in the sleepy college town where I lived, but maybe that was the genius of it.

There are a lot of abandoned buildings in midwestern America.

There are a lot of gravel roads with no clear end in sight.

In the quietest of towns–maybe even your town–there are a lot of places where evil can hide.

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