Playing Possum
Not all possums are roadkill...
by D. L. Winchester
“Cody! Look out!”
I slammed on the brakes. The car screeched to a halt, and we were thrown back against our seats. The impact knocked the wind out of me.
“What? What’s wrong?” I gasped when I could finally breathe.
The headlights illuminated a stretch of blacktop with trees on one side and a field on the other. About thirty feet in front of our car, a lump lay on the road. I could see the pointed mouth and long, curved tail of a possum.
“You freaked out over roadkill??” I asked.
“It’s probably not dead,” Sarah replied, undoing her seatbelt. “Haven’t you heard of playing possum?”
I rolled my eyes. “It shouldn’t be playing in the highway.”
Sarah opened her door. “I’ll go move it.”
I smiled as she got out. To a country boy like me, a possum was little more than a speed bump, but Sarah had a heart for animals no matter how insignificant they were to me. The last time we went to the farm, she had cried when she found out the piglets she’d gotten to know had become bacon, ham, and sausage.
I watched her approach the possum, making shooing motions with her hands. It didn’t move, confirming my suspicion someone had already run it over. It had probably been there a while —we hadn’t passed anyone since turning off the highway onto the back road that would take us through the mountains.
As she knelt next to the possum, its eyes opened. Instead of beady and black, they glowed red.
“Sarah! Look out!” I yelled.
It jumped off the pavement, flying toward Sarah’s throat. Needle-sharp teeth sank into her flesh, ripping it open. She screamed.
I fumbled with my seatbelt, trying to get out and help her. When I looked up again, Sarah was on the ground, a chunk of flesh ripped out of her neck. Blood sprayed from the wound onto the asphalt. The possum stood on her chest.
“Fuck!”
I finally undid my seatbelt and grabbed my baseball bat from the back seat, scrambling out of the car. The possum turned and hissed at me.
“Cody… Help…” Sarah gasped, pressing her hands against the wound.
“Hey! Get away from her!”
It leapt off Sarah’s chest and ran toward me, blood dripping from the fur around its mouth. As it got closer, I swear I saw it grin.
The little fucker was enjoying this.
It lunged for my throat, and I stepped back and swung the bat. It caught the possum in the abdomen, sending it flying. It crashed into a tree next to the road. I dropped the bat and ran to Sarah.
“Are you okay?
I knelt next to her.
“I feel weak,” she whispered.
I pulled her hands back from the wound. It was deep. The little bastard must have ripped open an artery. I managed to find the broken blood vessel and pinch it closed, but as I surveyed the pool of blood on the pavement, I realized it might be too late. Her spine was visible, the tissue around it ripped away to reveal bone, and the long tube I felt next to my fingers was her esophagus.
Help.
I had to get help.
I pulled out my phone to dial 911.
No service.
Fuck.
Sarah, my sweet, beautiful Sarah, was going to die here because of a damn possum, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I heard a hiss and looked up. The possum stood at the edge of the road, barely within the field of the headlights, about twenty feet away, glaring at me.
“Go,” Sarah whispered. “Save yourself.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I told her, wishing I hadn’t dropped the bat.
“Cody, I’m dying. I love you.”
“No, Sarah. Hang on!”
Her eyes closed, and the heartbeat I’d felt earlier disappeared.
She was dead.
The possum charged.
Scrambling to my feet, I ran for the bat. I’d just snagged it when I felt teeth digging into the back of my calf. I swung blindly, making contact. The teeth pulled away, and I collapsed to the ground. Rolling face up, I felt tiny feet climbing onto my stomach and moving to my chest.
The possum stood there, staring down at me, blood dripping off its snout. It hissed, baring its teeth. I thought I’d soon be joining Sarah in the afterlife. But it climbed off and trotted toward her body.
Little fucker.
I tried to get to my feet but collapsed to the ground. Managing to sit up, I realized my leg was torn up from the possum’s bite. Muscle strands hung out, blood beading off the ends. My skin was shredded, and if it weren’t for the adrenaline, I knew I’d be in serious pain.
Fuck.
Using the bat as a cane, I hobbled to the car. Sarah’s door still hung open, so I closed it before going back and climbing in the driver’s seat. I dug through the center console and found some napkins to press against the bite wound, then looked up at the possum. While I’d been tending to my wound, it had carved open Sarah’s abdomen. When it realized I was watching, its sadistic grin returned.
It reached into her abdomen and pulled out a bloody kidney.
This is not what Sarah had meant when she said she wanted to be an organ donor.
Holding her kidney in its paws, the possum started nibbling on it.
“Fucker! It’s bad enough you killed her, but you don’t have to eat her!” I yelled, as another spasm of pain shot through my leg. Even if I could get out of the car, I’d fall on my ass before I got halfway to the possum’s grisly buffet.
The possum ignored me, devouring the organ methodically. Then the bloody paws reached into Sarah’s abdomen again, emerging with her liver.
“You sick bastard!”
It watched me as it ate, the red eyes daring me to do something as my fiancé’s liver disappeared a bite at a time.
I have to do something, I thought as the possum chewed the last of Sarah’s liver and dove into her abdomen for its next course. My fiancé was disappearing one piece at a time in front of my eyes while I sat in the car, impotent.
The car.
I could use it to kill the possum.
I’d have to hit her to get him. I didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t want to watch the possum eating her, either. The engine was still running. All I had to do was put it in gear.
The possum heard the engine rev as I sped toward it. I wanted it dead so I could kneel next to Sarah and grieve without it attacking me. As the gap closed, the possum watching from Sarah’s chest, I locked eyes with it.
At the last possible moment, it leapt off Sarah and landed on the hood. I slammed on the brakes, but the car was moving too fast. I hit Sarah’s body, the impact bringing the car to a sudden stop and throwing me forward into the steering wheel.
***
I woke to the sound of a car door slamming. I’d slipped off the horn, my head resting against the door.“Help,” I moaned, managing to sit up. “Help!”
Where was the possum? Was the new arrival in danger?
I started to roll down my window, then stopped when I heard a voice.
“Damn it, Hank. Another human?”
Whoever it was knew the possum.
It had done this before.
“Goats and sheep are bad enough, but when you kill a human, I gotta clean up after you, you little shit.” A pause. “At least you’ve had your supper.”
A shadow approached my car, and a moment later, a weathered face appeared in the crack in the window.
“I’ll be damned,” the man said, a grin revealing rotten yellow teeth. “Looks like you saved a snack for later, huh, Hank?”
After two rejections from Carnage House for not being gory enough, I said, “fuck it,” and went all in. You want blood and guts? Let’s go over the top! Drawing on the memory of a possum who shared my basement room when I was in middle school, I crafted this story taking a familiar sight here in Appalachia and turning it into a nightmare.
D.L. Winchester lives in the foothills of southern Appalachia. A former mortician, he searches the darkness to find tales worth telling. He is the author of over three hundred obituaries, numerous short stories, the novella The Screaming House, and the collections, Shadows of Appalachia and A Terrible Place and Other Flashes of Horror. D.L. also serves as the president and associate editor of Undertaker Books, an independent horror publisher. In his spare time, he can be found searching for inspiration in the world around him and helping his wife try to keep their children from becoming the next generation of horror villains.