Part 1:
My name is Sarah, and I’ve spent twenty years trying to make sense of a world that often feels like it’s spinning out of control on the backroads of Colorado. It was 10:45 PM on a Tuesday, the kind of night where the stars look like ice chips embedded in a velvet sky. I was on Bluetooth with my best friend, Alexa. We were laughing about something trivial—a bad date, a weird coworker—the usual debris of being twenty. She was driving home, and I was just finishing a late shift.
“I swear, Sarah, if he texts me one more—”
Suddenly, there was a sound. Not a crash, but a sickening, heavy thwack, like a sledgehammer hitting a melon. Then, the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard: absolute, dead silence.
“Alexa?” I said, my voice jumping an octave. “Hey, girl, you there? Did you drop your phone?”
No response. Just the faint, rhythmic hiss of road noise through her open line. My heart started drumming against my ribs, a frantic, uneven beat. I called her name again, louder this time, screaming into the void of the cellular signal. Nothing. I didn’t waste another second. I pulled up her location on my phone. The little glowing dot was stationary on a desolate stretch of Highway 128. It wasn’t moving.
I drove like a maniac, my knuckles white on the steering wheel, praying it was just a blown tire or a dead battery. But when I rounded that final curve, my headlights swept across a scene from a nightmare. Alexa’s Chevy was crumpled against a fence, the engine still idling with a haunting, metallic whine.
I scrambled out of my car, my boots crunching on broken glass. “Alexa!” I yelled, reaching the driver’s side. I looked through the windshield, and my breath hitched. There was a hole. A jagged, massive hole right in the center of the glass. Resting on the dashboard, coated in a fine dust of crystalline shards, was a landscaping rock the size of a bowling ball. And Alexa… she was slumped over, her head at an impossible angle.
Just as I reached for the door handle, a pair of headlights flickered on in the distance. A dark pickup truck was idling fifty yards away. They weren’t calling for help. They were watching. As I stared, a camera flash strobed from their passenger window, capturing the carnage—and me.
The silence was broken by the roar of an engine as the dark truck began to move toward me. I was alone with a dead friend and a killer’s lens focused on my face. The nightmare was only beginning, and the truth behind that rock was darker than the Colorado night. The rest of the story is below 👇
Part 2: The Trophy Hunters
The truck didn’t speed off. Instead, it crawled forward, the tires crunching slowly over the gravel like a predator weighing its options. I dove behind Alexa’s car, my heart hammering so hard I thought it would burst through my chest. I fumbled for my phone, my fingers slick with cold sweat, and dialed 911.
“911, what is your emergency?” the operator’s voice was calm, a sharp contrast to the chaos in my brain.
“Highway 128… my friend… she’s been hit. Someone threw a rock. There’s a truck… they’re still here!” I hissed, keeping my voice as low as possible. I peeked over the trunk. The truck—a late-model black RAM—stopped twenty feet away. The passenger window rolled down, and for a split second, I saw them. Three silhouettes. Young. They weren’t hardened criminals; they looked like kids who should have been at a prom or a football game. But the laughter I heard drifting from the cab was cold, detached, and utterly inhuman.
“Did you get the shot, Kwak?” one of them asked.
“Yeah, man. Total bullseye,” a voice responded with a sickening chuckle.
The truck suddenly floored it, kicking up a cloud of dust that choked me. I watched their taillights vanish into the darkness, but the image of that camera flash burned in my mind. They had taken a picture. They had turned my best friend’s death into a souvenir.
Within ten minutes, the road was a sea of red and blue strobes. Detectives crawled over the scene like ants. I sat on the bumper of an ambulance, wrapped in a shock blanket that did nothing to stop the shivering. That’s when I met Detective Miller. He was a gray-haired man with eyes that had seen too much of the worst of humanity.
“You said they took a photo?” Miller asked, his notebook out.
“Yes. And they laughed. They called someone ‘Kwak’.”
Miller’s face hardened. “You’re not the first tonight, Sarah. Six other cars were hit. But Alexa… she’s the only one who didn’t make it.”
The next forty-eight hours were a blur of grief and rage. The news was everywhere. “The Rock Throwing Killers.” The community was paralyzed with fear. But I couldn’t just sit there. I remembered the ‘Kwak’ name. I started digging through social media, looking for anyone in the local high schools with that name. It didn’t take long. Zachary Kwak. His profile was filled with pictures of a black RAM truck and two other guys: Joseph Koenig and Mitch Karol-Chik.
I found a private group chat link on one of their public posts—a mistake they’d overlooked in their arrogance. I used a burner account to get in. What I found made the blood in my veins turn to slush. They weren’t just throwing rocks; they were playing a game they called ‘Moose.’ They had a point system based on the size of the vehicle and the ‘impact’ of the hit.
And then came the twist that nearly broke me. As I scrolled through the messages from that night, I saw a photo uploaded at 10:52 PM. It was a picture of Alexa’s car through their windshield, the rock in mid-air, seconds before it shattered her life. But there was another message from Mitch, the one who seemed to be wavering.
“Guys, we need to stop. That girl… I think she’s dead. Joe, we can’t keep the photo.”
The reply from Koenig, the leader, sent chills down my spine: “Shut up, Mitch. We have a mole. Someone’s talking to the cops. If I find out who, they’re getting a rock next. Or a bullet.”
I realized then that the ‘friend’ who had tipped off the police earlier that evening wasn’t Mitch. It was someone else who had been in the car and escaped. But Koenig didn’t know that. He thought it was one of his inner circle. And he was planning a ‘cleanup’ tonight at the old quarry.
I knew I should call Miller. I knew it was dangerous. But I also knew that if Koenig felt the walls closing in, he’d destroy the phone with the evidence. I grabbed my keys. I wasn’t going to let them delete her.
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Part 3: Justice in the Quarry
The old quarry was a jagged scar on the landscape, miles from the nearest streetlight. I parked my car half a mile away and hiked through the brush, the smell of damp earth and pine needles filling my lungs. I could see the glow of a bonfire at the bottom of the pit.
I crept to the edge of the ridge, looking down. The black RAM was there. Koenig was pacing back and forth, a beer in one hand and a handgun in the other. Kwak was sitting on the tailgate, staring at his phone, while Mitch stood by the fire, looking like he wanted to jump into the flames to escape the situation.
“One of you rats called the precinct,” Koenig roared, his voice echoing off the stone walls. “I saw the cruisers near Mitch’s house earlier. Who was it?”
“It wasn’t me, Joe! I swear!” Mitch yelled, his voice cracking.
“Give me the phones,” Koenig demanded. “All of them. We’re burning the evidence, and then we’re leaving state.”
This was it. If those phones went into the fire, the digital trail—the photos, the ‘Moose’ game, the proof of premeditation—would be gone forever. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a heavy industrial flashlight I’d brought. I didn’t have a gun, but I had the element of surprise.
I didn’t think. I just acted. I threw the flashlight as far as I could toward the opposite side of the quarry. It hit a metal drum with a loud clanging echo.
“Who’s there?” Koenig spun around, aiming his gun at the shadows.
While they were distracted, I slid down the embankment, the loose shale tearing at my jeans. I reached the tailgate of the truck just as Kwak stepped away to follow Koenig. I grabbed the two phones sitting on the flatbed—Kwak’s and Koenig’s—and tucked them into my waistband.
“Hey!” Kwak screamed, spotting me.
I bolted. I ran with a speed I didn’t know I possessed, the adrenaline turning my legs into pistons. I heard Koenig scream an oath and then the deafening crack of a gunshot. The dirt a foot away from my boot kicked up. He was shooting at me.
“Stop her!” Koenig yelled.
I scrambled up the steep incline, my fingers bleeding as I clawed at the rocks. I reached the top just as the roar of the RAM’s engine ignited behind me. They were coming up the access road to cut me off. I sprinted toward my car, fumbling for the keys, when a wall of blinding white light hit me from the front.
Four police SUVs roared out of the treeline, sirens wailing, bullbars gleaming. Detective Miller hadn’t been far behind me. He’d tracked my phone the moment I left my house, knowing I’d do something reckless.
The RAM tried to swerve, but it was boxed in instantly. Officers swarmed the truck with rifles drawn. “Hands in the air! Get out of the vehicle!”
I collapsed to my knees, gasping for air, as Miller walked over to me. I reached into my waistband and handed him the two phones.
“It’s all on there,” I whispered. “The pictures. The game. Everything.”
The trial in 2024 was grueling. I had to sit in that courtroom and look at their faces—no longer the ‘tough’ kids from the quarry, but boys realized they had thrown their lives away for a moment of sick amusement. Koenig got life. Mitch and Kwak got decades. They cried when the handcuffs clicked, but I didn’t feel a shred of pity.
I went to the cemetery after the sentencing. I sat by Alexa’s grave and played a song we used to love. The Colorado wind was soft, no longer carrying the sound of breaking glass or mocking laughter.
“We got them, Lex,” I said, laying a single white rose on the stone. “They didn’t get to keep the trophy. You did.”
I walked back to my car, finally feeling the weight of that night lift. The road ahead was long, but for the first time in years, the silence was peaceful.
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