Mitigate and Investigate the Damage

His foot hammered onto the brakes but it was too little too late The tires shrieked and skidded, and Sam’s ears filled with the sickening crunch of what he hoped was the hood of the car, and not the rib cage of the unfortunate hart. Despite his best efforts to mitigate the over-steer, the doe tried its best to leap out of the way in a **** bid for its own life. To his horror, the victim was too out of the way to fall onto the windshield as a result of a direct impact, and instead Sam felt an ominous bucking as the right tire rung out a horrific and final BADUMP.

Sam’s stomach dropped and his hand whipped out to slap the radio silent. His breath formed clouds around him as he tried his best to procrastinate against the inevitable as he shambled around the back of the car to buy himself time to steel his insides for the upcoming sight. Its labored breathing was audible even over the sound of the idling engine and Sam dared not glance at the silhouette outlined in the headlights on the pavement.

One step. Two steps. He was almost to the roadkill now. Cell phone at the ready to call for roadside assistance, Sam ripped off the proverbial band-aid and whirled around the front of the car to survey the damage. He wasn’t sure what caused the gasp of surprise to escape him. Was it the fact that, where a heap of charnel should have been curled beneath his front bumper, there was only thin air? Or the fact that he what he once thought was a shadow cast by the deer was, in actuality, a vague outline of a humanoid form obscured behind the yellowed glare of the headlights?

Reaching for a pocket-knife, Sam cautiously took a step back, trying to escape the radius of his own car’s illumination to get a better view of the figure. Perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him. There had to be some sort of denial going on here. He wasn’t too well versed in how these kinds of things worked, so it may very well have been possible this was some sort of hallucination. A very, very vivid one at that. He could have sworn the deer was gone, as though his brain was manipulating reality to create a mental ‘camera trick’ of sorts. Yeah. That was the explanation he was gonna go with. The figure wasn’t real. This wasn’t real. It was laying there just as it should but behind some curtain drawn up by the shock of it all to cope with the long night that awaited. He was making this up. Maybe he was ****. Or was he… well, he didn't want to consider the alternative. Sam made a mental note that when he awoke, if he awoke, to get a head start on that near-**** experience biography. Then, she spoke.