Hitch hiker

She walks along the yellow-painted line:
Arms a wingspan, stretched horizontal, thumbs raised.
Crickets call in the distance and a car is beside her -
Those fatal words: "hop in" The driver's cab is cold with
The dubious vein of bleach and blood, chemical and core.

It's an interesting mask and she tastes it, smiling serenely
Scenery flashes by - it looks metallic at night, synthetic
As if God has put us all before a television screen.

The two pass machinery grinding and roadkill, that lie splayed.
Animals - that once has a home, stretched out and soulless
Eviscerated by a rubber car tyre. She watches these.
And, as they go further, she looks harder
At the other girls lying across the road
Their pretty hair dead in the wind
Their pale skins quivering, twitching
With the insects they now host.
Their eyes reflect in the headlights.

The car stops.

His hands are calloused.

She joins those roadkill girls
Walking along that yellow-painted line.

note: this is a rough draft of a poem I wrote about that French serial killer, Pierre Chanel. obviously, the protagonist is female rather than male, but I just had to write this because my 'empathy gland' (as i've so deemed it) was sparked by the irish mother of one of Chanel's victims.