Exit Only: A Collection of 17 Rural Horror Short Stories

Every exit on Interstate 58 leads somewhere. Not all of them lead back.The road crosses one wide, quiet state: sage flats and wheat, cattle country, a mountain pass with a runaway ramp, and a truck stop where one shower room is always open.The people in these stories aren't investigators or thrill seekers. They're ranchers and road workers, night porters and farm widows, travelers passing through and people who never left. Each of them notices something wrong in a place they thought they understood, and none of them gets away clean.Fill the tank before dark. It's a long way to the next exit.Inside: - Total Loss: An insurance adjuster photographs a wreck in an impound yard that hasn't finished happening.- Pickup: A roadkill contractor finds the carcasses in the pass laid out for him, every tongue removed.- Brownout: Pulled over in a dust storm, a woman hears a pileup working its way up the line of cars behind her, closer each time, and each time, so far, nothing there when the dust clears.- Sixteen Head: A rancher counts his herd through the underpass, and one more animal comes through than he owns.- Renewable Once: Memorial markers are going up above a river bridge before the deaths they mark.- Windbreak: Stranded drivers walk toward the only farm light for miles. Not all of them reach the porch.- State Twelve: Nobody has driven the old highway in decades, but headlights still come down it, one pair for every car that passes on the interstate. They hit like the real thing.- Alone With Her: Driving her mother home through the night, a daughter stops at a rest area and realizes something is wearing her mother. It only needs a minute alone with someone new.- Shower Six: At a truck stop, drivers sent to shower six never come back through the lounge.- Test Loop: A lonely highway radio station starts broadcasting in the voice of the last person who recorded its messages. It describes the cars driving past, and it knows things about them it shouldn't.- Shed: In the back room of a roadside reptile house, a covered pit leaves sheds shaped like the day's visitors.- The Guard: Something in a dark coat stops at a cattle guard and walks the fence, looking for a way in.- Rearview: A woman driving away from her marriage finds that every look back leaves salt on her skin.- Clearance: A widower keeps nightly watch on a county overpass and meets the man who still drops rocks on the traffic below.- Hard Turn the Knob: A coin-op viewer at a scenic overlook shows a figure climbing out of empty country.- The Grooves: A team driver wakes in the sleeper berth with the road printed into his skin.- Red Lights: A little girl waits at a school bus stop retired years ago, and each morning she waits closer to a stop where children still get on.