The Breakdown

One dark night a boy and his girl are driving along out in the countryside. They're making good time when suddenly the car starts to sputter. The fuel light blinks. They roll to a stop at the side of the road, and try as he might the boy cannot get the engine to start again.

After a while of sitting there in the dark, the boy decides that he's going to go for help. The girl begs him not to go; after all they're out in the middle of nowhere, and he's almost bound to get lost. But the boy's already decided that he's not going to sit there all night waiting for someone to come along. So he gets out and heads off up the road to find a phone.

The girl sits on her own in the car. After a while she starts getting pretty nervous, being all alone like that. She locks the doors, but she's still scared. In the end she climbs into the back of the car, lays down across the seats and covers herself up with a coat. At least that way nobody will be able to see her.

After a long time, when it's starting to get light, the girl starts hearing noises. At first it's nothing much, a few night time rustlings, but then suddenly there's this terrible banging on the roof of the car. Someone's out there for sure, and they're hammering on the roof something crazy. The girl doesn't know what to do. She's terrified to look but she has to know what's making that noise.

Before she can make a decision either way, there's the wailing of a police siren. She sits up. Not far off there's a police cruiser, and an officer with a megaphone. He sees her, and he yells through the hailer for her to get quickly out of the car and walk towards him.

"Just walk towards me," he says, "and don't look back. Whatever you do, don't look back."

So, puzzled and scared, the girl gets out of the car and runs towards the officer. All the while she can hear the banging noise still going on behind her. But, like the officer said, she doesn't look back. At least, not until she's reached him. When she figures she's safe she turns around to see what it was making all that noise.

There's a man on the roof of her car. Long beard, filthy clothes, drooling and jumping up and down. Crazy as hell. And in one hand he's holding something which he's banging again and again on the roof of the car. She recognises the thing he's holding at once. She should do; it's her boyfriend's severed head.