Who Should be Afraid?

The sun was sinking — not slowly, but like something wounded — when I first saw them.

Two figures on the shoulder of the road. Still. Watching.
Something made me ease off the gas.
Some instinct — or mistake — told me to stop.

I opened the door.
They didn’t move.

Both were wrapped in rough, hurried bandages.
One had his head swathed so tightly that blood had begun to seep through — a dark thread winding down like something alive.

They stared at me first.
Not grateful.
Not desperate.
Suspicious.

Only when they were certain I wasn’t a threat did they enter — one beside me, the other in back, each moving with the careful stiffness of the freshly injured. Their politeness felt eerie, almost ceremonial, as if they were holding themselves together from the inside out.

We drove in silence for several miles. The road stretched on, empty and indifferent. Finally, I asked how long they had been waiting.

“Since early afternoon,” one whispered.
“No one stops anymore.”

I nodded — people fear hitchhikers now.

He turned toward me, slowly, like it cost him something.
“You think only drivers are afraid?” he said.
“Hitchhikers are just as afraid of the ones who stop.”

The thought hit me harder than I expected.
I had never considered that they might fear me.

“Why?” I asked.

His answer came flat, without anger or self-pity, as if the words were just facts that no longer belonged to him.

“This morning two men picked us up. We thought we were lucky. A few miles later they pulled over, beat us with baseball bats, and took everything. Someone eventually found us and dropped us at a small clinic. After they bandaged us up, we came back. We have nowhere else.”

The car felt colder after that.
The road darker.
And every mile carried a quiet echo: violence does not always wear a warning.

I took them as far as I could and left them in a place where they could sleep, or at least stop bleeding into the bandages that had already given too much.

Before I drove away, one final detail surfaced — one that made everything heavier:

They were Army veterans.
Men who had survived war
only to be ambushed
on an American highway.

And long after I left them, I could still feel their eyes — tired, stunned, and searching for a world that made sense.