PTSD Pixxa can stand for a lot of things.
Pizza, toppings, sauce, and discounts was the original acronym.
Post-traumatic stress disorder was understandably the most applicable acronym to the brand since a few of the jobs left us with exactly that.
But with our insomnia, long hours into the night and the early morning, and deviant imaginations, it warped into too many things at once.
Porn, tits, sex, and drugs.
Pleasure, terror, Satan, and demons.
Piracy, trespassing, stealing, and destruction…
…and pixxa, of course.
We took the double Z’s out of the word pizza because we barely gave ourselves any time to sleep, and with the products we were pedaling, you’d be seeing X’s in no time.
Pizza delivery in Limbo was never meant to be this interesting.
All of us were holdovers from life, plans on pause until we could get together enough money to do something better. And we couldn’t think of anything better to do other than get in our cars, speed down the road, blast heavy metal, and deliver hot pizza straight to you.
Nobody was really looking for this kind of work. It was just on offer as a last resort. There wasn’t even a job interview. Showing up in a rust bucket, a cock rocket, a skateboard, or even on foot meant you qualified to deliver.
That’s how I came to work at PTSD Pixxa. No prospects, no promise. Just me, the hills, and a bicycle that I’m legally required to tell you that I “inherited” with the help of some bolt cutters. Until then, I merely existed as a faceless person in the crowd. I needed an income to keep the couch I slept on, and the free pizza helped too.
The introductions were quick. There was Gretchen, blonde, 20’s, new car for her birthday, tattooed to the nines, brimming with energy to get the hell out of the shop and to the next party that night with free pizza.
Wenona, or Wendy as we called her, black hair, 20’s, motorcycle, and aspirations to get into law or break it as she often did.
There was a regular rotation of kitchen hands, kids with stars in their eyes, and the bare minimum in their bank accounts.
But then there were the others. The dead drivers.
They were known as the dead drivers because they were kept off the books for one reason or another. Welfare, child support, tax breaks, parole conditions, insurance and disability scams, and other under-the-radar reasons that I hadn’t heard of until then.
Felix was a drug dealer in a muscle car decades ahead of online food delivery today by supplying narcotics whenever coded messages would get ordered through PTSD Pixxa. “Send Felix, please,” was as complicated as it got. That kind of genius truly got the drugs off the street and straight to your door instead.
Rex got his name from writing off other cars in traffic collisions. His body count so far was four vehicles, but his mini-beast of a black stallion remained standing every time. Just a scratch and a bit of blood on the dash, nothing serious. He wasn’t even supposed to be driving since his license was suspended, but that didn’t stop him from delivering pizza, even to the cop shop.
Evelynn was the most notorious of the bunch. She played around with her name to match her satanic taxidermist witch aspirations. “Eve” was on her blood recipient card. “Evil-Lynn” was the bumper sticker on her broomstick, a black utility vehicle fresh from a graverobbing if the dirt and the casket were anything to go by.
And then there was me, vacant, without identity, a nickname, or a car, until I met the other dead drivers.
They went with Ozzy, or “Oh-zee-zee,” since I was from Australia and bared a slight resemblance to Ozzy Osbourne.
The dead drivers rolled their eyes upon seeing my only mode of transport parked in the broom closet, collectively fetching a set of keys from the kitchen and instructing me to follow them into the parking lot.
I wouldn’t be delivering the first order of the day on my bicycle quite like I thought. I’d be delivering in the company car: a little buggy of a vehicle with the company lights on top and the stickers on the side.
The vehicle had some chop shop work done to it recently. White-painted parts were swapped out with red spares, panel beaters hammered out imperfections with sledgehammers, and there was no masking the smell inside, not even with the pizzas steaming up the windows.
“Be careful,” they warned me. “This car will kill you.”
This car had some history behind it; I could see it on the dashboard. The digital clock only lit up with eights. Limitless time in limbo, four times over. The radio cracked and squealed as it tried to find a frequency to another world, fine-tuning through ghostly broadcasts and outer space until it made contact with hell itself.
“What do you mean?” I had to ask. “What do you mean when you said this car will kill me? What’s wrong with it?”
The dead drivers looked at each other in disbelief, another explanation falling on the driver who drew the shortest straw.
“I’m not touching that fucking car ever again!” Felix declared, walking away from the situation.
“All yours, Eve!” Rex stated, the proximity of the company car giving him goosebumps.
Eve just rolled her gothic-shaded eyes, leaning into the driver’s side window to turn the ignition and start the car.
“They’re just superstitious,” she explained.
“The last two guys who drove this car never came back.”
I would nod in understanding, or so I thought.
“You mean they quit?” I had to clarify.
Eve’s eyes wandered side to side as if she were bewildered by how stupid I sounded.
“No, I mean they never came back,” she reiterated with some disbelief.
“They straight up vanished.”
Eve whisked out a cigarette from nowhere and struck sparks from the cinderblocks behind her; smoking some sweetness like disappearing drivers didn’t bother her at all.
“It’s part of the reason why we’re the dead drivers,” she explained, her eyes lingering away from the conversation.
“Because we’d rather be dead than disappear in that thing.”
Awfully reassuring stuff for my first delivery was made all the more comforting by the receipt Eve recognized.
“Hey, it’s the same place they were supposed to deliver to as well!” she pointed out with some aloof humor.
“Well, go on! Pizza’s getting cold! Have fun!”
Two out of three of the dead drivers were convinced this car was somehow cursed.
The third seemed to have stakes in the delivery address being the culprit.
It was two or three blocks before I could really get used to the car’s kinks and quirks. The driver’s side window didn’t wind all the way down, the brakes would stick now and again, and the radio was a lost cause, cutting in and out of the shallows of radio stations and intercepted police broadcasts.
The address was out of town, down a dirt road, past the light of the lampposts and beyond the edge of darkness, and into the marshes where the headlights hardly lit the road ahead.
How the crickets were louder than the engine was beyond me. Not even the mosquitos stood a chance out here with the army of frogs ready to eat them.
The radio cracked in and out of existence, even though I swore that I had turned it off earlier after fruitlessly trying to find a station. Maybe I was far away enough from the interference of town to finally get a clear signal.
“You’re…lost.”
Voices overlapping, backmasking, talking to each other, or talking to me, like ghosts trying to break through the threshold through the microscopic gateway that was this radio.
“You…should…stop.”
It was like a skipping song on a CD, but good advice considering how listlessly I was driving. I stopped the vehicle and pulled up the handbrake, focusing sternly on the radio, turning the dials to try and find the source of these mysterious words.
“Fear…not.”
Odd advice considering how terrified I was.
“You…should…leave.”
Haunted swamps and possessed cars weren’t my deal, and the suggestion of leaving was a good one at this point.
Goosebumps flared up my arms, whether from fright or the static shock of the radio.
I exited the car with urgency, feeling the need to flee and get as far away from here as possible.
That’s when I saw it. I comprehended it without taking another step.
There were matching tire tracks along this dirt path, parked close to the edge of a steep quarry hill.
It was oblivion down there, an abyss unable to be seen in this darkness around me.
Whatever would fall into those endless depths, the darkness would swallow whole.
This car had indeed been here before, if not as recently as yesterday.
The headlights were no help, and they wouldn’t have lit up the end of the road ahead.
But somehow, the car wanted to survive…or offer another body to the abyss below.
The message from the radio had muddled intent, after all.
“You’re lost. You should stop. Fear not. You should leave.”
I was lost.
I did stop.
I shouldn’t be afraid.
One more step, and I certainly would have left.
As terrifying as it was to stand on the edge of certain oblivion, there was a temptation.
No prospects, no promises, no pain.
It was a guarantee to get out of limbo for good and onto better places one way or the other.
It would be a lame irony that would end up being my savior, though.
A stupid sense of duty compelled me to check the receipt, examining the details in the fine print.
The address listed didn’t exist beyond this point.
There were no numbers to begin with, only an eight on the receipt and no other numbers along this dirt road to begin with.
Infinity and eternity was represented with a solitary number in an unending loop, just like on the clock in the car radio.
A phone number was conveniently listed, though, so I decided to give it a call.
At first, there was no answer.
Then there was feedback, not only coming from the phone but the radio inside the junkyard of a company car.
Curiosity drew me back to the car, where the feedback only became louder and more high-pitched.
I quickly hung up my phone, perplexed and spooked by the mystery presented to me.
Was this a hazing ritual for the new guy at PTSD Pixxa or cosmic circumstance, a test of my will, a defiance of fate?
Was this a diabolical plot to get me to drive out in the middle of nowhere, out of contact with the outside world, for nefarious purposes?
I had heard the stories, after all.
I had a hot pizza sitting in the passenger seat, so I had that going for me, at least.
I returned to the car, closed the door, and popped the box open to take in the bounty that awaited me.
Hawaiian monstrosity with too many pineapple pieces to count.
Perfect.
I should have walked off the edge instead.
First night nerves took hold as I tried to figure out how to explain this to Gretchen and Wendy on the drive back to the shop, but upon my arrival, they seemed more surprised than displeased.
Even the kitchen hands and the dead drivers were looking at me like they saw a ghost.
Plot foiled or genuine surprise, I don’t know.
“What happened?” Gretchen asked.
“They weren’t home,” I explained.
“And I tried calling them, and there was no answer.”
I wasn’t technically lying.
Whoever they were, they weren’t home in that gigantic chasm of darkness.
And I tried to call them, and there was no answer, just feedback from the radio.
Judging by their reactions, I had all my bases covered.
But that didn’t mean I was immune to their critique of my performance.
“You’re off the hook,” Wendy informed me.
“But if it happens again, you’re dead.”
That declaration felt callous, but it was nothing Eve wasn’t ready to blow off.
“Don’t worry about it,” she reassured me.
“You made it back alive with the car and the pizza, at least. You’re one of us now. A dead driver, ‘till the end.”