John could only stand there and watch in horror as the car rolled forward. There was no one else in sight and the young boy wouldn’t get out of the way in time. The car bumped up and down and the boy cried out for a few moments and then all was silent.

   There was nothing he could do, nothing he could have done. All the same he rushed over to the car but it was empty and the doors were locked. How or where it had come from briefly puzzled through his mind but he didn’t have time for questions. He ducked down to see if he could get to the boy.

   It was hopeless. The soft muddy earth was already giving way to the weight of the car and the boy was only briefly visible as he was pressed into the ground.

   They’ll think it was my fault

   A new fear gripped him and he was all but certain that he was being watched but as he looked around there was no one else there. The street was dark and otherwise abandoned but still the fear of being blamed for the accident continued to well up inside of him until he was suddenly overwhelmed and he fled into the inky night. The empty car and broken boy were swallowed up in the darkness behind him.

   He couldn’t remember how he got home. He just woke up in his bed the next morning, still dressed and dirty from the previous day.

   There was nothing about the accident on the news. The road he’d been walking on the night before was seldom used, being part of an abandoned housing project, and he wondered how long it would be before someone discovered the accident. Would they be able to trace him to the scene? His heart thumped painfully in his chest and he skipped breakfast in the hopes of calming his knotted stomach.

   Work was unbearable. People laughing, talking, working, all as though the world was a normal happy place where empty cars didn’t come out of no where and run over small boys. It took everything he had to keep from crying out and he spent the day just sitting and staring at his computer screen.

   That night when he tried to fall asleep he kept seeing the boys face, this time pleading with him to do something, to tell them. Screaming echoed through his mind until dawn.

   The next day was the same. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. His supervisor sent him home early to get some rest, thinking he was sick. That night he decided he would have to confess but he was too sick now to do it; his hands wouldn’t stop shaking and he could barely control his legs enough to stand. He’d have to wait until morning. For now, he let himself dry heave. Fighting would only prolong it. His heart pounded harder and it wasn’t until midnight that his stomach stopped convulsing. Shortly after, his heart stopped hurting.

                                                                              *

   It took a few days for John’s supervisor to call the police. None of the other contact numbers he had on file had worked and John hadn’t been in to work for a week now. The problem was, when she gave them John’s address the police were shocked.

   “He can’t live there,” they’d told her, “that’s a ghost town out there. Mostly half finished houses left over from some failed government project.”

   They said they’d drive out there but she doubted they actually would. From the sounds of it, they thought John was a transient who’d tricked her into hiring him.

   None of it made any sense though. John had worked for her for almost a year and he’d always seemed normal, always been on time, always done a good job. However, she couldn’t deny the oddness of his address.

   At the end of the day she decided she’d swing by John’s address and see for herself. Even if he was a transient, perhaps he’d still been honest about his address and she would find some evidence of where he’d gone.

   It was surreal to drive into the neighborhood. From the outside it looked like any other neighborhood but as soon as she was just a couple houses in, she began to notice the unfinished roofs, collapsed walls, and broken windows. There were no lawns, just bare dirt, but that wasn’t so uncommon. Considering the description she’d been given by the police she had expected the houses to all be incomplete but in reality most of them seemed to have at least had their exteriors finished.

   At last she pulled up to the house John had listed as his. It looked to be in decent shape, none of the walls had collapsed and the roof still had most of its shingles. The door, however, was hanging off its hinges and the windows were nearly all broken. She pulled out her cellphone to use as a flashlight as she pushed her way into the darkened house.

   “Hello?” She called out timidly while she swept her light back and forth through each room. There were old and molded pieces of abandoned furniture. Whether they were from the original inhabitant or brought here later she couldn’t tell. The house itself looked like it had been completed. Though years of dirt and grime had collected everywhere she could still tell that the walls had been painted and most rooms still had their carpet.

   Unfortunately, there was no sign of any recent habitation and after checking the last room she had to admit that John had never lived there. She slipped back out the front door and looked around the neighborhood one last time. There was something eerie about abandoned places and she felt briefly like she was being watched. She looked up and down the street but no one was there. The only thing of note was an old, rusted car that was half sunk into the earth. It was parked well off from the road and she wondered if it had been parked there on purpose or if it had been part of some accident and then left forgotten over the years.

   Curiosity got the better of her and she went over to check it out. It wasn’t far, just halfway down the block from where she’d parked her own car. Judging from the state of the car she guessed that it was probably abandoned at about the same time as the rest of the neighborhood. The glass was all missing and the upholstery was black with mold and dirt. A small tree was trying to grow out of the back seat.

   The front end of the car was sunk down into the earth to the point where she couldn’t even see the front tires. Looking around she could tell this was a low point in the ground and figured the ground must become quite boggy when it rains.

   Something on the ground beside where one of the front wheels was buried caught her eye and she turned her flashlight towards it. She thought at first that it was another young tree trying to grow but its pale bark didn’t look like anything she’d seen before in that area. When her light moved onto it she knew at once what it was, and it wasn’t a tree. A tiny, bony arm stuck up out of the ground. A few pieces of the wrist bones were still attached. Several other bones gleamed in the light on the ground.

   She hesitated.

   It must be a raccoon or something, right? Maybe a dog? Yet she found herself already dialing the police for the second time that day. What exactly she said to them she couldn’t quite remember as she stood there in a state of semi-shock, all the while hoping that the little bones she found were from an animal.

   “Excuse me?” a voice spoke behind her and she spun on the spot, startled by their approach.

   John stood a few feet away from her. He looked terrible, as though he’d been sick. His skin was pale and his hands were a bit shaky.

   “John!” she exclaimed, “Where have you been? Are you alright?”

   He nodded without looking her in the eyes. Instead he seemed to stare down at where the little bones stuck up from the ground. She followed his gaze, down to the bones, and then looked back up to him.

   “Do you know anything about this?” she asked him.

   John nodded his head once again and she felt her breath catch in her chest.

   “The neighbors left the car when they moved,” he said in such a quiet voice that she had to strain to hear him. “I thought it would be fun to play around with it.”

   She looked around anxiously while John spoke, wondering how far away the police were and fearing how John would react when they arrived.

   “I must have slipped it into neutral because all of a sudden it was rolling forward and I didn’t know how to stop it,” John pressed on, speaking as though he couldn’t stop now that he’d finally started telling someone. “It’d been raining all week and I was heading right into the mud. The car wasn’t moving very fast, I could run fast than it was rolling, so I jumped out thinking I could stop it with my hands. I got in front of the car and got my hands on the hood to push but…

   All of the momentum he’d seemed to have built up in telling his story suddenly ran out and she turned from him to look back at the car. How did his story explain the bones? Who or what had he run over? And how long ago had that been. The police earlier had made it sound like this place had been abandoned for decades and the amount of decay she’d found supported that timeline.

   Red and blue lights flashed and she looked up to see a police car turning down onto the road where she stood and she waved to them to make sure they saw her in the evening’s fading light.

   Two officers stepped out of their car and, after brief introductions, began to examine the bones. For a while they just poked around at the ground and muttered about how difficult it was to identify something based solely on the bones.

   “Here, look at this,” one of them said after some time, “the ground just pulls away  from the wheel well.”

   The other officer looked over as the first one angled a stick between the car and the earth and the ground peeled back. A clean, white, and most definitely human skull gazed sightlessly out at them from within the exposed wheel well.

   Both officers leaped back in surprise and they were suddenly very busy talking into their radios and questioning her about how she came to find this. She explained as best she could, all three of them noting John’s absence now, though when he’d left or where he’d gone now none of them knew: the police had never noticed him in the first place.

   It was a stressful evening to say the least but finally she was allowed to go home. She called in to take the next couple days off from work so she could calm her nerves. The story of the discovered remains hit the news the following day and before long she was being contacted by every news agency in the city. She had no desire to talk to them and so she muted her phone to put an end to their incessant calls. As much as she wanted to ignore it, to clear her mind of finding those little bones, of imagining how those last few moments for that child had been, she couldn’t help but follow each new discovery that was made in the investigation.

   At last, as the nightly news was beginning to wrap up, they made the announcement that they may have identified the remains. A young boy had gone missing from that neighborhood almost thirty years ago. The boy had lived not far from where the remains had been found and the boy’s age when he went missing matched with the estimated age of the remains.

   “I couldn’t stop the car,” John spoke from behind her suddenly and she screamed out in surprise.

   She threw herself off of her couch and spun around in horror at finding John in her apartment. Besides being a little less sickly he looked much the same as he had the night before.

   “I wasn’t suppose to be playing in the car and I knew I was going to get into trouble if they found out,” John went on, ignoring her screams and shouts for him to get out. “But then it was like I was watching it all happen from the outside. I wasn’t under the car anymore, I was beside it, and I couldn’t see my body beneath the car anymore because it was sinking into the mud. I didn’t know what to do so I ran away.”

   He wasn’t making any sense! He was talking as though he was the dead boy, but that was impossible. He was a grown man, for one thing.

   “I think I forgot about what had happened,” John continued, “I must have, since it wasn’t until I was out walking the other night and I saw the car and…and it was all happening in front of me again and…

   John put a hand to his head and rubbed his temple as though it ached.

   “Sorry,” he said faintly, “I just get…confused sometimes, you know? Like I can’t remember certain things that I ought to…or maybe I remember things that I shouldn’t.”

   She was edging her way across the room towards where she’d left her phone earlier that day. It was unlikely she’d be able to do much with her phone without John noticing but if she could just dial 9-1-1 then perhaps the operator would be able to hear enough from their conversation to figure out what was going on and send help.

   She looked away from John for just a moment when she reached her phone and quickly hit the ‘Emergency Call” button on the screen when it lit up at her touch. When she looked back to John he was gone. Or, rather, the man was gone and in his place stood a boy. He looked to be perhaps eleven or twelve years old.

   “I just wanted to say thank you,” the boy said, “for finding me, I guess. I missed my family and I bet they missed me,” his eyes were beginning to well up with tears now and he was screwing up his face against the tears and flood of emotions. “I didn’t mean for any of it to happen,” his voice cracked as he began to weep in sharp, stuttering gulps. “I’m sorry! Tell them I’m so sorry!”

   She was suddenly alone in her apartment. She blinked and looked around. Had she fallen asleep? Was all that just part of some nightmare?

   “Hello?” a voice called out faintly and it was a moment before she realized it was coming from her phone still clenched in her hand.

   “I’m so sorry,” she said with as much control as she could muster, “I hit the wrong button.” There was no way she could explain what had happened without sounding crazy so she didn’t try.

   She turned off the television and went to bed. The next morning the identity of the boy was confirmed and his parents were shown crying together as they were given the news. Their son, John, had gone missing just days before they moved out of the neighborhood, and they’d spent the intervening years desperately trying to find him.

   John, the John she’d known and worked with for the past year, looked strikingly like the husband, only much younger. A message on her phone was from the family. They wanted to meet her and thank her for finding their missing boy and she figured it would only be right to meet them. She set up a time for the next day, she was still too rattled to do anything that day.

   Whether she’d have the courage to tell them the story, John’s story, she wasn’t sure yet. All that she did know was that he was sorry, so sorry, and he wanted them to know that.