The Needles Highway

By John Stewart Wynne

The Mojave Desert. The heat of the noonday sun.

A lonely stretch of highway.

A screenwriter enjoys a nostalgic visit to his childhood home of Needles, California.

But now it's time for him to leave that simple life in the desert and drive back home to L.A. and the lure of Hollywood. The highway isn't crowded—he hopes to make it home in time to join his wife for dinner. But apparently fate has a different idea.

He suddenly finds himself being chased by a skeleton in a pickup truck who holds a terrifying secret that will change his life forever...

A haunting new tale of horror from John Stewart Wynne, author of the acclaimed short story collection The Other World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Oct 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611874617

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The Needles Highway

By John Stewart Wynne

Copyright 2012 by John Stewart Wynne

Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

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The Needles Highway

By John Stewart Wynne

It was one of those brilliant California mornings in the Mojave Desert where the air is so dry and clear that you think you can actually see it shimmering in front of you. Fanciful thinking of course. You can’t see something that’s invisible. Like sunshine or thin air. Still, because of its transparency, the desert air lets you observe with a keen precision whatever object you choose. In my case it was the Needles Peaks off to my right as I drove along the Needles Highway toward Barstow, the first city I’d pass through on my drive back home to L.A.

I smiled inwardly when I spotted those needle-shaped cliffs which had given my childhood home, Needles, California, its name. Rising high, some distance off to my right in the desert landscape, sticking their sharp sawtooth tips into the milk blue sky. Those familiar points of reference that always brought back a flood of fond memories whenever they came into view.

If I had the time, I’d definitely make a detour and drive up to them over gravelly dusty roads and sit within the shade they provided and gaze at the world from their point of view, not mine, a world that was silent, calm and never changing. Where I could see hundreds of clumps of sagebrush, tough and sinewy, taking their rightful place as the perennial rulers of an undisturbed sandscape. And the blue crooked finger of the Colorado River that gave the promise of life along its banks. Like the Nile.

But I didn’t have time. My wife, Dana, was expecting me home for dinner at our house in Burbank. To get back by five or six o’clock would require me to drive on the straight and narrow and not take any dreamed of detours, like a drive to the Needles Peaks. And of course it would also depend on the amount