Choose Your Own AdveNture: Dial N For Murder, Part II
(*Author’s note: this is my own version of a Choose Your Own Adventure. Since Halloween is creeping closer and this is a sports blog, I thought: why not mix the horror of the creepiest month of the year, the campiness of the fun childhood classics, and my favorite football team together for a crowd-sourced bit of fun. I cant’ do it alone, though, so this is full audience participation requested. I’ll be polling you, the reader, to determine what you want to happen and I need you to help me craft this Macabre tale of Crimson and White doom. For part One, click here.)
Your feet step towards the mysterious blonde, but your mind reflexively yanks you back to reality.
To Tim.
To drunk. Ass. Tim.
With a frustrated sigh you toss your hands up into the air and turn on your heels to go back and look for your missing friend.
“Hey, guys and girls!” You bang your hand on the the flip-cup table and Ryan turns down the Ying Yang Twins right in the middle of their 3–6–9ing, a necessary tragedy. “Has anyone seen Tim? You know. Boat shoes. Thigh-showing khaki shorts. Looked like he was an undercover cop trying to sneak into Martha’s Vineyard and shit?”
Blank stares. Some so blank that you know they’ve just cleansed the mental palate with a shot from that label-less bottle that just has “Red Drank” written on the side in permanent marker.
“Alright: Alyssa and Dave, can you two come with me? I’m legitimately a little worried. Just a tiny, little, miniscule, f-ing bit.” You say. The annoyance clearly there, but beneath it is something different. Something strained and a little worried.
In the fall in the Midwest, night swings low like a pendulum; sneaks up on you on the padded feet of dusk, shadows pouncing silently before you have a chance to notice; darkness ambushing you with the October guerilla tactics. Right now, these shadows seem to schism and grow, running together like beads of water that slide away and then slip back together.
You and Dave and Alyssa spread out in the tailgating lot, walking party to party. Encountering drunks and ragers and raging drunks. Spot after spot. Fighting the urge to start to worry and fighting the urge to say “Why, yes, I’ll have one” each time an extended drink is held in your direction.
Finally, after a Tim-less search that yielded nothing other than 3 beers (What, you couldn’t say no to all of them, that would be just rude) and a rising sense of anguish, you reconvene with Alyssa and Dave.
“Any luck,” Dave is slightly out of breath and you can tell he’s been working the hardest to locate Tim.
“I couldn’t find anything, either. I wonder if he just went — ”
*Pssshhhhttt*
Your concern is interrupted by Alyssa opening a can of Busch Light and drinking down half of it. She notices the glimmer of worry in your eyes, but doesn’t stop chugging.
“What, I had to do something to calm my nerves, damn it.” She sheepishly smiles and shrugs her gently freckled shoulders. “I didn’t find him either. But, those guys over there said that they saw him sometime after halftime with a girl. So…”
She trails off, sipping another drink as her ellipses slides over the last of the day’s light like a solar eclipse.
“Well, listen. If I had a girl and I was Tim: there’s no way I’m leaving the party. I’m going to try to find somewhere private, definitely, but he would never leave the parking lot during the game.” Alyssa tilts her head in understanding and your own mind starts whirring towards the lock’s combination.
The lock seems to snap into place simultaneously. Click.
“Lover’s lane!” You both say simultaneously.
“Gross.” Dave says, already turning towards the old alleyway that runs behind the tailgating lot, sarcastically dubbed ‘Lover’s Lane’ due to the high number of couples arrested there after getting a little too “amorous” in their post-Husker victory celebrations.
You reach the alleyway, blotchy early evening darkness clinging unevenly to portions of the rough-paved cement throughway, and pull out your nearly dead cellphone, holding the light in front of your body.
“Tim!?!” You call out, scalp tingling slightly with the light, thrumming vibrato of fear; the low-voltage electricity that instinctively pulses anytime you enter into a dark, narrow path.
“Hey, Tim, you there, man?” Alyssa has her phone aloft and is standing shoulder to shoulder with Dave.
Two steps more into the edges of the ink-bleeding darkness. It’s creepy. It’s dark. It’s exactly the kind of place Tim would try to sneak off to with some girl he was trying to get with.
A faint rustling tickles, suddenly, at the exposed part of your inner ear. A shuffling, barely there noise that makes you shake your head slightly with annoyance.
“Did you — ” before you can finish your question a sudden burst of motion at the far end of the alley. A shapeless mass leaping from the margins of sight and dashing towards the exit at the far end. You drop your phone, a iPhone-shattered exclamation point to your shocked yell. “Hey!”
Whether it’s the booze or the adrenaline coursing through your veins, you’re feeling bold and start suddenly down the alleyway, grabbing your phone off the damp concrete and giving chase.
In a full sprint, the kind you haven’t felt rocketing through your adult limbs in quite some time, you lurch down the black tunnel of the alleyway, faltering light of the phone shakily lighting your way when you suddenly trip on something sticking out from behind a delivery truck. You skid to a halt, pulse jackhammering in your ears as you try desperately to see what nearly took you down.
It’s a body. It’s Tim’s body.
What do you do?
