The Plan

Waiting in the woods, Eugene thought of Wilson, and smiled. That old prick had been his favorite. Eugene never wished for anyone in particular, but he was so happy when the Plan had caught Wilson. On that night, once it was clear no one was walking away, Eugene went over to the car, ducked down to peek through the shattered driver-side window, and saw Wilson’s eyes staring right back at him. If Wilson hadn’t been dead at that point, he was going to be real soon. Eugene liked to think his face was the last thing that asshole ever saw, but hey, either way, the Plan worked.

Eugene first thought of his Plan back when he was a teenager, one day as his dad was driving him down Route 78. The road ran alongside the massive state forest that bordered the town. Because of the peculiarities of the forest, Route 78 was about as twisty a road as you’d find. It was like a go kart track, Eugene’s dad would say. That day in the car, he said something else:

“Wouldn’t take much to get yourself killed out here.”

Eugene asked what he meant.

“Well, all these twists and turns, you can barely see what’s ahead of you. You turn around the bend, and see some kind of animal, or come up on something that’s fallen off the back of a truck, and that’s it. You’d go skidding off the road and find your death on the other side.”

“Wouldn’t take much.” That’s the part that stuck with Eugene, becoming the first inklings of the Plan.

Eugene never asked his dad a question about Route 78 again. He grew up, graduated high school, stuck around town, worked at the gravel supply store, or at the hardware store, and then eventually the grocery store. His dad was dead by then, his mom gone long before, but Eugene’s life remained about the same.

When he wasn’t working, Eugene was thinking about the Plan. Mostly he liked the Plan because he hated everyone else in the town. Hate was probably not the right word - he didn’t care about the people he had to see every day. He gave them no thought, other than what was necessary. He relied on them to get food, water, and whatever else he wanted, but that was the extent of his caring. They were tools to use, just like anything else.

The Plan seemed so simple that Eugene was afraid he’d be caught. At first, there were just a few parts to it. Go out at night, never bring too much, and be patient. If nothing happens one night, wait a bit and try again.

The first time the Plan caught someone, he had used an old trash can. The metal kind. He placed it right at the curve of one of the twists, about a mile from town, where there was no tree cover. He had chosen a night with a bright full moon, so the light reflected off the metal. Someone came speeding down the road and spun out as soon as they saw it. They went right off the side and into the ditch that separates the road and the forest. Eugene waited and nothing happened. He didn’t recognize the car. Soon he heard some sirens coming from town and decided to wait and see. The volunteer ambulance corps showed up and some guy opened the door of the car and easily walked out of the ditch. Started talking to the paramedic like nothing was wrong.

Eugene was so frustrated, but he kept out of sight, just a few yards back from the road under the cover of the trees. Right then he came up with another part of the Plan: Stay hidden.

Some of the other idiots in town may have given up on the Plan after that miss, but not Eugene. He kept trying. Different spots, different objects, different times of night. He couldn’t drive, because that got too close to not following the “stay hidden” part of the Plan. He had to walk through the woods, off the roads, hauling by hand whatever he needed for that night. He would make it out to Route 78, place what he brought on one of the twisty turns, and wait.

Soon, people started making noise about getting police stationed out on the road at night, or some speed bumps to slow things down. Someone started asking why all this garbage was falling off so many trucks.

Of course, the police just said that if people didn’t want to crash, maybe they should slow down or not drive drunk. But Eugene got nervous, so he came up with another part: remove the evidence. This sometimes conflicted with “stay hidden”, but Eugene made it work. All good Plans are complicated, he told himself. If he caught someone, and no one was walking away, it was pretty easy to just run by and swipe up whatever was in the road. If they could walk away, Eugene waited until they were gone to collect the evidence.

Cinder blocks were his favorite. They were heavy enough, but not too heavy, and if the cars hit them right, they could do a lot of damage. They were easy to grip, so he could run into the road and grab them quickly once the Plan worked.

If Wilson had been his favorite, the cinder blocks gave him the catch he thought about the most, even when he didn’t want to: Melissa MacMillian.

That night he had decided to bring three blocks. He put one in a backpack and carried the other two in tote bags from the grocery store, one for each hand. The bags were surprisingly sturdy.

When he got to the location for the night, he set up the blocks in the middle of the right lane, stacked with two on the bottom and one on the top, like a pyramid. He went off into the woods to wait and almost tripped over something. He looked down and saw it was a large tree limb that had fallen to the ground, with the leaves still green on the branches. He thought for a minute, then picked up the limb and put it on the left side of the road, blocking the way for any cars that would drive in the opposite direction. Then, he hurried back into the woods.

The Plan could not have worked more perfectly that night. A car came fast down 78, Eugene could hear it from far away, getting louder as it got closer. It was on the branch side of the road. As soon as its headlights appeared, Eugene knew he had a winner.

The driver saw the tree limb and immediately swerved into the blocks. The car hit them straight on and went up and over, crashing right into the ditch.

Eugene waited. After a while, he heard screams. They didn’t sound muffled, like they were coming from inside a car. They sounded out in the open.

He wanted to stick to the Plan, and stay hidden, but he couldn’t help himself. He made his way over to the car, trying to keep out of the patches of moonlight. He tossed the branch to the side of the road and looked for the blocks, but they must have gotten stuck under the car. He heard another scream. It sounded more like a gurgle.

He got closer to the car and peeked into the ditch. He saw the back of someone’s head, and a set of shoulders sticking out of the windshield. Whoever had been driving must not have been wearing a seat belt. Bad choice for them. Eugene couldn’t help but smile.

At first, he resisted going over to get a better look, but then he realized he knew the car: Light blue, Honda Accord. He’d know that crappy car anywhere. Melissa. Whenever he saw her pull into the grocery store parking lot, he made sure he was near the register to watch her walk in. He instinctively moved to see her face. But then he stopped himself. He remembered the Plan. He couldn’t be seen.

Eugene created another part of the Plan that night. It was shameful, something he kept buried deep down, something that he did not like to admit was there. But he also knew himself better than anyone else, and he knew what he had to do to keep himself safe. No one else would do it for him. So, that night, he made a new part of the Plan: Nothing sexual.

After Melissa, Eugene put the Plan on pause. The longer he went, the harder it was to resist. He had to add yet another part of the Plan to keep himself out of trouble: When someone dies, the Plan goes on pause for at least two months. Eugene didn’t know why it was two months, but it seemed good enough for him.

Slowly, he worked his way back to it. Marcus at the gravel supply store asked him why he kept taking so many cinder blocks, so he went back to whatever random junk he could find. He started using roadkill for a bit, which helped with evidence removal. He'd just leave the carcass on the road, and no one would suspect. One night he used a dead deer and sent a whole family into the ditch.

Tonight, he was using the same thing he used that first time: A trash can. This one wasn’t the old metal kind, but the large plastic kind with wheels. He had a hard time rolling it through the woods, but he had made it. Now, he just had to see who showed up.

Eugene got lucky. Tonight, someone came early. He could hear their engine down the road, probably about half a mile away.

He had camped out at a particularly twisty part, a sharp turn to the left if you were coming from the east, which this car was. From where Eugene was hiding, he could see the incoming long stretch of road, as well as the abrupt turn where he had placed the garbage can, just out of sight for a driver.

The car approached but was moving slower than usual. Eugene stuck to the Plan. He was patient. He didn’t mind waiting. The headlights grew brighter, and the car moved along, probably at no more than 20 miles per hour. When it reached the turn, it slowed down almost to a crawl. When the headlights came upon the trash can, the car immediately stopped, brakes screeching through the night.

The car sat there, engine idling. Eugene became very aware of the noises around him. The car’s engine, about 10 yards away. The crickets chirping. An owl let out a hoot somewhere from within the woods.

No one got out of the car. This was different, Eugene thought. Every so often, the cars would stop, see whatever Eugene had placed on the road, and move it out of the way. That was fine. The Plan prepared him for it. Don’t be seen, be patient. The drivers moved the debris, or drove around it, and that was that. Eugene tried again another night.

But this time, the car just sat there. The sound of the engine mixed in with the sound of the crickets, and Eugene started to wonder if he should go talk to whoever was inside. Maybe they knew about the Plan, too, and wanted to help. The cricket noise grew louder in his ears, or maybe it was the engine, or maybe it was both.

Then, he heard the car window roll down.  

Eugene, instinctively, took a step forward. One part of his brain told him to go to the car. Another part told him to stick to the Plan. He took another step, and a voice in his head, trying to keep him safe, screamed at him: “Stick to the Plan!”

Then, a voice from inside the car: “Come on out, Eugene. Let’s talk.”

----

One night, months after the accident, Rachel had what she would later describe as a break from reality. Her grief had pushed her into a place with no rational thought. She got it in her head that she needed to see Melissa one last time, and to do this, she had to go to the place where she died.

Rachel walked. She wasn’t going to drive - she hadn’t been in a car since the accident. But she knew where to go because she had walked to the spot almost every day after it first happened. She brought flowers, balloons, those little stuffy keychains Rachel had loved when they were in school. Eventually, everyone knew to look out for the best friend whenever they drove down Route 78. Now, the shrine to Melissa had been swept away and Rachel remained alone in her grief.

That night, when she desperately wanted one last chance to see Melissa, she was wearing a robe and flip flops. Luckily, it was a warm summer night. If it had been winter, she would have gotten frostbite before she made it out of town. She was about a mile from the scene of the accident when she saw someone jump out of the woods.

She recognized him immediately. Rachel was very good at noticing people. Her and Melissa used to sit in the park and Rachel would point out who everyone was, even with their back turned. Melissa called it Rachel’s superpower.

It was Eugene, from the grocery store. Some old creep who had never left town. Didn’t talk much to anyone, and no one really wanted to talk to him. He walked into the middle of the road and laid down what looked like a big spool of barbed wire. Then, he ran back into the woods.

Rachel immediately stopped walking and ducked into the woods herself. She waited, and within a few minutes, a car came around the bend and ran over the wire. The car stopped, the driver jumped out, looked under her car, pulled out the wire, and then tossed it into the ditch. The driver got back in, and the car kept driving.

As soon as the car was out of sight, Eugene came out of the woods. He was hitting himself in the head, muttering something. He grabbed the wire out of the ditch and stomped back into the woods. Rachel watched the whole thing.

She never made it to the place where Melissa died. Instead, she walked home through the dark and began thinking up her Plan.

---

“Come on out, Eugene,” Rachel said from inside the car. “Let’s talk.”

Rachel observed Eugene a few more times out on Route 78 after that first night. Her parents didn’t know what she was doing, but she had been happier lately, and so they didn’t ask. She would go to his house and wait. If he didn’t go out by 11pm, she’d go home. If she saw him make his way to the woods, lugging whatever he had chosen for that night, she’d follow behind.

When she saw him haul out cinder blocks, she knew for certain. The full Plan clicked into place. She had always thought the cinder blocks in the middle of the road were weird. The police had dismissed it as an unfortunate freak accident, likely fell off someone's truck. 

She rented a car from one town over, all in cash, wearing a hoodie and sunglasses, because there were probably security cameras. She didn’t say anything to her parents, which she felt bad about, but the first part of the Plan was that no one could know. Not even suspect.

She didn’t catch him right away. But that was another part of the Plan: Be patient. Eugene didn’t always leave his house, and she didn’t always find the trap when he did. She was running out of nearby places to rent a car. Luckily, tonight, she was driving down Route 78, slowly, when she saw the trash can.

She expected him to come out right away after she stopped the car. He didn’t, so she had to toss out one part of the Plan: No communication. Once she called to him and heard him coming, she was ready.

Eugene bent down to look in the window. If he recognized her, she couldn’t tell. She picked up the gun she was holding in her lap and pulled the trigger. He went down. No explanation, no speech. She didn’t have one, and he didn’t deserve one.

She got out of the car, and walked over to the body to make sure the Plan was successful. It was - all the target practice had paid off. Her dad had been so happy to take her to the range, excited she was showing interest in something he liked, or anything at all, given how hard of a time she'd been having. 

Then, she wiped down the gun and placed it in a plastic bag. This was the next part: no evidence. Luckily, not much blood splatter was on the car, and she wiped that down too. She probably missed some, but hopefully she had gotten enough. She put the towel in a separate bag. She changed, and her clothes went in the last bag. When she realized the bags were the totes from the grocery store, she laughed. They would all be at the bottom of a lake soon.

She got back in the car and started it up. She turned it around, avoiding the body and the trash can. As she drove off into the dark, listening to the noise of the engine mix with the noise of the crickets, Rachel smiled.