The week was a complete failure. By Thursday, I was ready to go home. I tried to save the account, but the shipper refused to negotiate. A general rate increase across the board was straight up bullshit and there weren’t enough fancy restaurants or Grizzly tickets to convince the owner otherwise.
“Are the Grizzlies going to pay my shipping costs?” he repeatedly asked. “I don’t give a damn about anything in Memphis.”
Friday morning, I woke up with little sleep and a torturous headache. The company preferred hotel smelled like mildew and bleach.
“Room 202, checking out” I exclaimed loudly.
“Ok. Hope you enjoyed your stay,” bellowed a jovial young woman.
“I didn’t. This place smells like shit and a poor attempt to clean it up.”
Her demeanor soured and she squinted her eyes in anger as she slammed my receipt down on the desk. She reached under the desk and it looked to me as if she was pushing on something.
“You’re a good candidate. I’m sure no one will miss your sorry ass.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” flashing a large smile as she spoke.
I tossed my luggage in the back of the rental, got in the car, and punched my address into the phone. Arkansas to Nashville, a good three and half-hour drive.
The floodplain leading up to the Mississippi River and the bridge into Tennessee was a broad swath of yellow on either side of the highway. The floral waves were unbroken up until they approached the muddy, lifeless banks of the river.
It wasn’t long until I was on I-40 East, the last major leg of my trip home. I turned off the radio and listened to the hum of the road. I was contemplating some way to make money without working. I entertained different scenarios, some reasonable, but most were incredibly unrealistic. My fantasies always spiraled into insanity, but there was something more sinister this time. A darkness crept into my imaginary world. Reality had encroached upon my mind, prying my thoughts away from invention and upon something more absurd, something undeniably situated in existence.
There was a slow cognitive awakening that I hadn’t noticed until I concentrated on what I was perceiving. I-40 had an inordinate number of roadside memorials. Crosses and plastic flowers of every sort lined the highway. There would be a stretch of miles where there were no memorials, but then suddenly a string of twenty or so in formation, lining the road like a battlefield fence.
The exhaust brake of a diesel engine growled as a tractor trailer pulled up behind me. The truck was riding close, right on my rear, the vision of the rig encompassing the entirety of my rear-view mirror.
“Get off my ass dickwad!” I said to myself.
I pulled the car over to the slower lane, but the truck still didn’t have enough room to pass. The driver laid on his horn, making me jump in my seat. The horn blared incessantly; I could feel the anger and the impatience. If it was morse code, it was telling me to get the hell out of the way. The driver kept on honking until I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road.
I came to a complete stop and watched as the tractor-trailer passed. The tractor had a long sleeper cab attached. It was black, with dark tinted windows, and bright silver wheels. The most incomprehensible aspect though was the length of the trailer. I watched as the trailer passed by for a good ten minutes. It was as if a train was on the road. As the end of the trailer passed, I realized why it couldn’t pass. The trailer occupied not only the lane it was in, but half of the other lane.
I waited for at least ten minutes. I wanted to let that monstrosity get further down the road. I looked in my rear-view mirror to see if the road was clear and noticed the crosses behind me. I hesitated to pull out onto the road, but there was nothing to impede my progress towards home, so I forced myself to resume my journey.
I stayed in the outer most lane and drove slower than usual. I expected other cars to overtake me, but the road was desolate and forsaken. The isolation worried me. The sky grew darker with the approach of fat, indignant storm clouds.
A sudden downpour of rain bludgeoned my windshield. The wasn’t a natural crescendo from sprinkling to heavy; a river fell from the sky. My windshield wipers couldn’t move fast enough to keep my view clear. I slowed down and moved closer to the window, my chest touching the steering wheel. Up ahead in the distance I saw some red taillights.
As I got closer, I realized the headlights were not moving. They were stopped and in the middle of the interstate. It was the extraordinarily longer tractor trailer that had passed me earlier. The shoulder of the road was wide and smooth. I figured I had enough room to drive past the rig and get ahead of it. From there, I would push the accelerator to the floor and put some distance between me and the rig.
I maneuvered the car halfway onto the shoulder and blew past the end of the trailer. The rig accelerated from a dead stop and got back in front of me. It wasn’t a slow acceleration that was the norm for most tractor trailers. It shot beyond me like a drag car, but without any clumsy veering to the left or right. It was a smooth movement from nothing to eighty miles per hour.
I was staring at the back of the trailer once again. Following the rig produced an agitation in my soul. My heart rate increased and my stomach churned. I pulled off to the shoulder of the road and stopped. This time though the rig did the same. It stopped and pulled over and then drove in reverse until it was damn near on the top of my hood.
I put the car in reverse and started backing up. When I looked back from the direction I was traveling in and towards the rig I saw the door slowly rise and disappear into the top of the trailer. The curtain was drawn, the villain revealed.
There, positioned at the end of the trailer, was a spindly entity dressed in black leather. Its head was covered with a hood and its eyes concealed by thick, tinted googles. The beast was almost as tall as the trailer. It manned what looked like a gigantic harpoon gun, with a four-pronged hook.
When I saw the gun and the entity behind it, I mashed down of the accelerator. I turned and concentrated on the road behind me. I didn’t know how fast I was going, but I knew I had to get as far away as possible. I felt a sudden jolt and heard a clanging and the release of steam and fluid. I looked bac to see that the rig had backed up with the same amount of speed. The harpoon had been shot. My car was tethered to a thick chain and I was being reeled in towards the trailer. The engine died and the dash lights flickered off. I was caught. The rig immediately reversed its direction and began dragging me along, while slowly pulling me inside the trailer.
A ramp extended from the back of the trailer; sparks flew as it touched the moving road. The front wheels of my car ascended the ramp. I looked around for a weapon. We were going too fast for me to bail. I had no choice; I had to fight, but there was nothing in the car that would suffice as a weapon. As my car was pulled into the trailer, the beast and his gun moved further into the trailer, as if on a track. When the car was completely in the trailer, the trailer door slammed shut. I was in utter darkness.
I could hear the beast in the dark. It was making a sound, both a clicking and a growling. A flood of light came on, bright fluorescent lights lined the length of the trailer. The trailer was so long that I couldn’t see the end of it. Hanging on the trailer walls were saws, needles, and other such surgical instruments. The beast lumbered off from its gun towards the front of the trailer.
I once again searched the car for a suitable weapon before I realized the stupidity of my actions. On the walls of the trailer were hanging an assortment of weapons. I preferred a gun, but if hand-to-hand combat was the only thing available to me, then that was better than nothing.
I opened the door of the car and got out. I surveyed the instruments before me. They neatly hung on the walls, with labels above them, wording in a script I did not recognize. Further down the trailer, I saw a long pike with a sharp point. I figured this would be the best bet, since the beast and his supposed cohorts were so tall.
I took the pike down off the wall. As soon as I did, the lights shut off. Once again, I was in darkness. I was at a standstill. I didn’t know if I should make my way back to the car and wait, make my stand there, or get to the cab and surprise my abductors. After much deliberation, I decided to crawl up to the cab and fight. There wasn’t any escape. I figured if I fight, I’d either win or they would be forced to kill me quickly. I sure as hell didn’t want to be an experiment with a drawn-out, extended amount of suffering. I needed a victory or a quick death.
I got down on my hands and knees and began crawling, hugging the side of the trailer, dragging the pike as I went. The further I got, the worse the inside of the trailer smelled. It felt as if I crawled for more than an hour before I bumped into the nose of the trailer. I could hear a strange alien language from the other side of the wall. I would wait in ambush. In time, they would come for me.
But they never came. I waited for an extended amount of time. I lost patience. I reached up and felt around for some sort of handle. There had to be an entrance from the trailer to the cab. I didn’t hear anything, a presence, or any kind of movement, as I was moving through the trailer that would have indicated the creature was still in the trailer. I didn’t find a handle, but I did feel a large smooth button. I pushed it and the lights came on.
Instead of tools hanging on the wall, now there were animals or beings of all sorts pinned to the walls with large bronze spikes. Their abdomens were split open to reveal a diverse assortment of entrails and organs, some human, but most from species not endemic to Earth. It looked like a macabre collection of beings for an aspiring universe-travelling naturalist, a glass case of classified dead beings, a taxonomy of murder.
The light must have alerted the creatures to my close proximity, because within a short time of me turning on the lights, a door opened. The tall leather-bound creature bent through the door. Instinctively, I thrust the pike into its neck. It screeched and grabbed at its neck. I pulled the pike out and then shoved it into its abdomen. It fell to the ground, writhed and squirmed, and then suddenly went stiff- an instant rigor mortis.
From the cab I heard a babbling of nervousness, the driver speaking in an unknown language, but the inflection unmistakenly communicating fear. The creature in the driver seat was exposed, not dressed in any clothing. It had a demonic human face, with fangs and large red eyes, but its body was insect like, with a bulbous, green thorax and a small red abdomen. It had six appendages, the upper most have human-like hands. The creature was a hybrid of human and insect.
It slammed its deformed hand against a button on the dash. Through the windshield I could see a spinning vortex open up and reveal an alien world just on the other side. The creature reached back and tried to push the door shut. Before it could do that, I shoved the pike into its deformed face. The creature grabbed the shaft of the pike and tried to pull it out, but as it exerted more effort, the quicker it died. It slumped in its seat and its arms fell from the pike.
Time slowed; the rig was caught in a force field. I made my way to the front of the cab. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds, barely able to pick up my feet. With excruciating pain, I worked against the exponentially growing force of gravity to get to the passenger door. I pulled the door handle with both hands, and pushed the door open. I moved in slow-motion, the rig gaining precipitously close to the vortex. Finally, I pushed my head and shoulder beyond the door. I felt a release as if I was trapped in quicksand. Time resumed its normal pace. I jumped as far as I could from the cab to the grass on the side of the road.
I landed on my side, bounced and rolled. I felt a jolting, sharp pain in my ribs. I watched as the truck and trailer slowly disappeared into the vortex. I closed my eyes and rested for a while. The rain began falling again, but this time it was a comfortable, soothing mist. I finally stood up and started walking, hoping for the first time in my life that I could hitchhike and catch a ride to the nearest hotel. I promised myself that I would be nice to the receptionist, exceptionally nice.