“Yeah, so enjoy the time to yourself, you sucker.” “I had to kill a huge cricket in the basement. “I’ll have you know that I put it on the table. Not wild about the idea of staying an entire night here.” They were always screaming in the background. The kids were screaming in the background when she picked up. It was like staying at a hated aunt’s house. Nothing about the joint felt comfortable. He came to room 19, turned the key, and was greeted by a musty, red-painted room. He would’ve had to turn sideways to let another man pass by. The hallway upstairs was alarmingly narrow. “Ma’am, can you tell me where the elevator is?” he asked her.īen grabbed his rollerboard and awkwardly trudged up the staircase with it. She checked him in and gave him a room key. You’re in the middle of a gorgeous mountain region that has long been settled by humans, and you don’t think anyone has blazed a trail back there? He was gonna walk anyway. “No, I don’t think we have any paths around here.”īen couldn’t believe that. Is there a path I can go hiking on?” he asked her. Drinking at the hotel would take more planning than drinking at a hotel usually requires. “I think the bar closes around nine.” His little business dinner would probably end well after that. “What time does the bar close?” he asked the clerk. Eventually, the GPS, with an inhuman calm in her voice, led him off the highway, down a ramp and to the right, then up a hill and to the left. She kept silent for fifty miles as he looked out his window at the last gasps of fall in the distant hills-pretty red and yellow swaths of foliage surrounded by sad patches of gray, like an unfinished oil painting. His only companion in the car was the disembodied GPS lady voice coming from his phone. They had paved the asphalt with all that deer blood under him. They were just there, seemingly operated by some grand master switchboard, programmed to never stop. They didn’t seem to be driven by people at all. There were a lot of trucks on this highway, all of them faceless. Some of them were consigned to the shoulder, and he wondered if they had been dragged there or if the big, hulking trucks had plowed into them and chewed them up and spat them out in random pieces off to the side. After that, he saw more and more of the deer: some whole, some ripped in half, some just pieces of raw meat.
He drove past a street crew in orange vests carrying a dead one off to the side of the highway, gripping the animal by its dainty hooves and moving it like they were carrying a small table upside down.
Magary is the author of The Postmortal, a finalist for the Philip K. He has also contributed to Rolling Stone, Comedy Central, New York Magazine, GQ, ESPN, Yahoo!, Playboy, Penthouse, and various other media outlets. Magary writes for Deadspin, NBC, and Maxim. The following is from Drew Magary’s novel, The Hike.
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