Chapter 4 – Chap 4

PART 4

MARK WALSH, LOCAL RESIDENT: Crybaby Bridge? Never heard of it.

PAMELA CHANDLER, LOCAL RESIDENT: The what now? Oh, The Crybaby Bridge. Yes, I’ve heard of it. I didn’t know they had one around here, though. Isn’t there one of those over in Winslow? You drive there and put baby powder on your hood and drive across and you’re supposed to see little footprints appear.

JIM BANKS: Yeah, I used to take the girls out there on Halloween. After a night of cruising town in my Marina Blue Chevelle, we’d head out there for a little bit of thrills and chills. Fear is the best aphrodisiac, let me tell ya. Haha.

ANGELA BANKS: Jim took me out there once when we were young and that was all she wrote. I think they call it The Crybaby because nine months later that’s what you end up with.

STEPHEN PARKER, SOMERSET HIGH, JUNIOR**:** So there we were at The Crybaby Bridge. I had never even heard of the place and Dylan was standing smack dab in the middle of the thing while a ghost or whatever was approaching him. Outside the truck the wind started to pick up, like it was blowing hard. Like enough to shake the truck. Then, the baby crying got louder, just wailing.

SKYE BRIGGS: I was just paralyzed in my seat, could only stare through the windshield in abject terror, my voice caught in my dry throat. In the backseat Hailey was just repeating “oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.” over and over, this sorta terrified mantra.

STEPHEN PARKER: It was chaos, really. Just all at once with the wind and the truck shaking and the baby crying and Dylan out in the middle of the bridge, the lady within arm’s length. I could tell he was faltering, tottering backwards. Nick, he opened his door and leaned out of the truck and yelled at him. “Dylan! Dylan! Hang in there buddy! Follow the rule!”

HAILEY ADAMS: She had a hold of his shoulder, was leaning in close, those white eyes staring at him. I can’t really blame him for what happened next. I was surprised he had made it this far, actually.

STEPHEN PARKER: Dylan lets out this awful scream, high pitched and cracking and just starts sprinting across the bridge to the opposite side for dear life. The lady she’s just kinda there one moment and in the next she’s gone and Nick…he starts chasing after Dylan calling his name.

SKYE BRIGGS: The streetlight surged into a blinding turquoise white. Exploded in a flash. Left us in darkness.

STEPHEN PARKER: I slide over behind the driver’s seat and I know this is against the rules or whatever but we’re beyond that at this point. I turn the headlights on. We can’t see Dylan. We can’t see anything except the bridge and as far as the headlights can shine. The crying has stopped. The wind has stopped. Everything is still.

**“**Where did he go?” Nick asks. He’s stopped at the edge of the bridge, cautious. My heart is racing and I’m afraid to get out of the truck. I’m thinking we should just drive across the bridge and look for him from there.

HAILEY ADAMS: Skye asked me to get my cell phone, call somebody, anybody. I pulled it out and the battery was dead. It was fucking dead.

SKYE BRIGGS: Nick started to cross the bridge and Stephen yelled for him to wait. That’s when we heard something. It was someone or something crying, “Mama. Mama. Mama.” But it was all mechanical sounding, like it was coming through a busted drive-thru speaker.

STEPHEN PARKER: Nick, he’s starting to cross the bridge and we start hearing that “mama” noise and I’m getting a bad feeling and I chase after him to stop him and that’s when we see him stagger out of the shadows.

HAILEY ADAMS: (looking at ground for a long time, distant) The worst part was that he was still mobile, that he was still walking. You couldn’t call it normal walking, but it was like he was trying to find his way back to us. I don’t know if he was conscious or if it was one of those things like a chicken with its head cut off, just neurons firing blindly and still sending signals.

STEPHEN PARKER: At the end of the bridge was Dylan and he was…he was…standing there and…(wells up)

SKYE BRIGGS: He was standing there and his outline looked so wrong and he had this kind of knock-kneed stance. He was able to take a couple of shuffling steps towards us and then at that point I figured out what was so wrong with him—half of his head was gone, like it had been sliced clean off.

STEPHEN PARKER: Hailey and Skye, they were screaming his name from the truck.

The last thing he did before collapsing into a pile on that bridge was sort of reach out weakly to us with his good arm. The other arm was sort of hanging on by a thread from his shoulder and collarbone. Damn near dragging on the ground.

SHEILA GUARINO, MOMADAY COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER: That had been my most interesting post mortem. I had honestly never seen anything like it in all of my years as a medical examiner. The skull was perfectly vivisected along the sagittal plane. The sinuses and cranial cavity and its contents were all visible from the outside, the brain perfectly cleaved in half. The murder weapon had continued its path through the bottom of the jaw and veered into the clavicle and subclavian artery and through part of the axilla. It had to have been a very sharp blade. The other portion of the skull was never recovered.

HAILEY ADAMS: I screamed for the other boys to get back. There was nothing we could do for Dylan. Half his fucking head and face was gone. He would be dead in seconds if he wasn’t already. Luckily, Stephen was tugging on Nick’s arm, pulling him back.

SKYE BRIGGS: It was good that Stephen stopped Nick. I know he wanted to be the big hero in that moment, but yeah there was nothing he was going to be able to do. When that big figure appeared from the shadows on the other side of the bridge, I think he got the point.

STEPHEN PARKER: I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. The size of him did funny things to my brain. The headlights gleamed off of bare skin and something big and metal and shiny glinted, something like a propellor in his massive hand.

“Holy fucking shit!”, Nick said and soon he was dragging me back to the truck, shoving me through the open driver side door. From there, we had a moment to stare at what was before us.

SKYE BRIGGS: He was seven foot tall at the least. Broad muscular shoulders and shirtless and not wearing much else. Some sort of grayish briefs or shorts or I don’t know what down below. His thighs were thick and knotted up and streaked with grime. His face..I couldn’t really tell at the time. It was just kind of a blank, like he was wearing a mask or it was a trick of the headlights? But the top half of his face was definitely a different complexion than the rest of his body. I couldn’t tell from that distance what was going on with the whole face thing.

HAILEY ADAMS: He was just standing there at the end of that bridge, watching us. He had that giant blade and was spinning it around. It was almost like he was daring us to cross. We knew it was him that had killed Dylan and before we could get all settled to just punch the accelerator and go full speed ahead and plow into that sick half-naked fucker, something happened.

STEPHEN PARKER: There was an explosion on the driver’s side of the truck and we shook violently. A giant object swerved in front of us and we were down to one headlight now as it had just smashed the one on the left. The fishtailing monstrosity swerving and sliding, banging into both sides of the bridge, somehow ending up perpendicular to the road with the driver’s side facing us. The door of the familiar looking Chevy Silverado opened up and out stepped Bubba Morgan, the redneck who had been at Buster’s pasture earlier. He wobbled and swayed like a fighter on the ropes.

“God dogs, that’s gonna raise the ol’ insurance rates up! Whoops, better get rid of the evidence,” he said and tossed a can of Keystone Lite into the weeds.

HAILEY ADAMS: Who else stumbled out after, laughing and leaning on ol’ Bubba? None other than Amanda Brackeen.

SKYE BRIGGS: Things would’ve been better had they just went off in a ditch and fractured their skulls in an instant. Another couple of drunk driving statistics. Tragic, but understandable. Something their parents and family would’ve wrestled with for years and years but ultimately accepted, not the inexplicable stuff that happened next.