by Eric Miller
I had a half-eaten Mickey-D’s and a bag of Fritos. I gave them to her along with a bowl of water. She scarfed the food. Might have saved her life for a day, but no more. She didn’t have long to live unless she accepted help. I stepped away from the cab door.
“You wanna go for a ride?”
She whimpered and edged closer to the coolness that flowed from the air-conditioned cab. She thought it over. Clearly, she belonged to somebody; a leather band encircled her neck.
“Okay if I take a look at your collar, girl?”
She didn’t back away as I kneeled. I ran my fingers through the fur on her head as I read the tag. Randi. An address in Casper about forty miles ahead. But no phone.
“You’re a long way from home, Randi,” I said. Her ears perked and her eyes sparkled at the sound of her name. I offered her my opened arms. She didn’t think twice, and I lifted her into the cab. Before I could even buckle myself in, Randi fell asleep in the passenger seat.
A trucker’s always got time for a good deed, so I headed for Kirkwood Avenue in Casper. Tonight, Randi would be home with her family.
Technically, I’m not supposed to cruise on side streets in neighborhoods, but the trailer rolled empty and I figured I could sweet-talk any law enforcement Johnnie I came across. Cops have a soft spot for lost animals; just don’t ever ask them to admit it.
I cruised down Kirkwood Avenue. A nice neighborhood full of houses built before Sputnik. Big grassy lawns. Shingle roofs. Brick foundations. Nothing ritzy. Just good ol’ American homes.
Randi whimpered awake when I rolled to a stop. In a yard enclosed by a picket fence, a middle-aged dad played baseball with two young boys.
“You’re home, girl,” I said, but Randi didn’t move. She turned her back to me and snuggled into the leather of the seat.
I hopped from the cab, and the man came to the fence. I expected friendly. But his walk looked mean and the way he held the baseball bat didn’t make me comfortable at all.
I smiled. “Hey. I’ve got your dog in the cab. I found her about forty miles down Highway 25.”
“We don’t have a dog, Mister.”
The man spat a wad of phlegm at my feet.
“You haven’t even looked at her. She’s got your address on her collar.”
The two boys ran to the fence.
“Did you find Randi?” the older boy said.
A woman, carrying a toddler, stepped onto the porch. Even from the front yard, I could see one eye ringed in a dark shadow. Behind me, Randi jumped from the cab and ran weakly through a gate to the young boys who both wrapped their arms around the dog’s neck.
“You kids get in the house.”
Without a word of protest, the two boys abandoned the dog and scurried across the grass, up the brick stairs, and past their mother. She followed the kids inside. The screen door slapped shut behind her.
Randi collapsed onto the grass.
“You better get her to a vet,” I said.
“I told you. We don’t have a dog.”
The asshole raised the baseball bat and smashed Randi’s hindquarters. I heard her hips break. Then he popped her rib cage. I heard the snap of bones splintering. I expected Randi to fight or squeal or growl or bite, but mercifully, she just slipped into unconsciousness.
The man raised the bat at me. I barely knew what to do.
“Look, I’ll give you a grand for the dog,” I said.
The man nodded at Janet 784.
“Get moving. And mind your own fucking business.”
I looked at Randi lying in the grass. She hadn’t been trying to find her way home; she’d been trying to escape. And I’d brought her back.
“I’m sorry, Randi,” I said, but that dog couldn’t hear a word I said. But the man did. He raised the bat to strike Randi again but changed his mind and threatened me instead.
“Don’t make me hurt you, Mister. You don’t know what trouble that dog caused and now you’ve gone and fucked everything up.”
Now I know it’s illegal but truck-jacking is more common than you think. Underneath my driver’s seat, I keep a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum. Not a weapon like Big Ben’s Heckler & Koch Mark 23, but big enough to scare off amateurs.
I stepped slowly to the cab like I was making to leave and reached in. I flashed the gun at the man. He backed away. Every fiber in my body wanted to put a bullet in his head.
Instead, I put a bullet in Randi’s head. Mercy, that’s what I call it. She died without a whimper.
I raised the gun at the man again and I didn’t care how many of his neighbors saw it. I figured they already knew what a dickwad he was and didn’t mind if someone called him to task.
“My trucker friends and I are going to keep an eye on you, asshole. Every time you see a big rig I want you to wonder if it’s me or my pals. If I ever hear about you hurting your wife or kids again, the same thing will happen to you. A bullet in the head. Now get the fuck out of here.”
The man hurried to his house and slammed the porch door behind him. I lifted Randi’s body to the rig. Nothing left of her but skin and bones and now a bullet hole. I buried her in the mountains outside of Casper and not a day goes by that I don’t think about that dog and how pretty she could have been if someone had just loved her.
But right now, I thought hard about that gun stashed under my seat, Tiffany, Big Ben, and Mama. Maybe I could salvage this situation. Maybe I could make everything right.
“Find a side road and pull off,” said Big Ben.
Tiffany groaned.
“It’s feedin’ time,” said Charley.
My stomach curled.
***
Rumbling into a forest, I parked Janet 784 on a Forest Service road some fifty miles west of Flagstaff. Moments later, two black helicopters roared overhead. From the forest’s edge, I watched as they thundered past, headed to the far horizon, then arced back our direction.
I heard Big Ben calling me.
A moment later, three of us stood at the rear of the trailer, Tiffany lay unconscious on the ground because Big Ben had popped her in the head again.
The helicopters thumped toward us.
“Shit,” said Big Ben, running to the cab. Throwing open the passenger door, he yanked out a duffel bag. A split second later, he shouldered something like a bazooka, but smaller.
Charley hurried to his side. His voice carried in the stillness of the forest.
“You think it’ll come to that?”
“It will if they’ve seen us,” said Big Ben. “You disabled the rig’s GPS, right?”
“We’re running super dark. Promise.”
“Then keep calm. Let’s feed Mama.”
By now, the military birds were nearly on top of us. We were a quarter-mile off the highway, and I doubted the ‘copters knew we were hidden beneath the tall pines. Still, we’d left a few tracks in the dirt road.
I slipped to the driver’s side of the cab and retrieved my Smith & Wesson. The CB radio squawked unexpectedly and I nearly squeezed off a shot. I hid the gun under my tee.
“Janet 784, you got a copy? This is Rebel 33,” the speaker’s voice reverberated with military precision. “You got your flappers on? We know you’re out there.”
“Bluffing,” Big Ben’s voice carried as I hustled to the rear of the trailer. “If they knew where we were, they be on us like shit on a dog’s ass.”
“Let’s get this horror show on the road,” Charley said to me. “Open the fucking doors.”
Out over the highway, the helicopters swung west, and disappeared. Big Ben was right. They were flying blind.
I popped the refrigeration locks and slid the cams open. A wave of fog poured into the dry desert air as the doors swung wide. A layer of ice coated the interior of the trailer; all of the humidity coming off the tank had frozen on the walls.
Mama stared, awake. But the refrigeration unit had cooled her tank until it thickened with ice shards. She flippered to rotate, cutting a path in the thick water t
o face us. I swear her indigo eye stared at me, and only me. Her human arms stretched out to all of us, fingers twitching, hands grasping.
Hungry.
Eat.
Big Ben hoisted Tiffany’s limp body onto the floorboards of the trailer and climbed up after her.
Eat humans.
“She eats people?” I asked aloud. I couldn’t help myself.
“DNA,” said Big Ben. “She thrives on DNA. I figured we could make it to San Pedro but then this hooker came along, Too good to pass up, man. Charley and I don’t know how to make the soup they feed her. I sure hope this works.”
“You hope this fucking works?”
“Shut your cake hole.”
“You never mentioned killing anyone.”
“We’re not killing anybody. She absorbs them. Look at the arms. She didn’t have those the first time I saw her. They fed her a cadaver. A day later she sprouted those. As far as I can tell we’re offering what’s-her-name eternal life.”
“You really think it’s wise to give her a meth addict?”
“You got a better idea?”
I kept my trap shut. I didn’t have a better idea unless I killed them all. I rested my palm on my Smith & Wesson. A freaking dilemma. Maybe Mama needed saving. Maybe she needed killing. I didn’t have a fucking clue.
So I hesitated.
A plexi lid covered Mama’s aquarium and Big Ben unfastened it and slid it aside. Jumping to the floor, his hand clasped Tiffany by the neck, and in a single lift, he thrust her scraggy body into the tank.
Mama didn’t move; and Tiffany’s body neither sank nor floated.
“Dammit,” said Big Ben. “There’s a sheet of fucking ice.”
“I’ll take care of it,” said Charley, scrambling atop the aquarium to look. Straddling the ice, Tiffany made a cooing noise in her throat. She stirred, waking. Must have been the coldness of the ice.
“What’s going on?” slurred Tiffany.
“You got a crowbar, Roy?” asked Charley. “I gotta break this up. It’s super frozen.”
An explosion of ice clattered against the trailer walls. Mama rotated in the tank and her human arms shot to the surface, smashing the ice and yanking Tiffany into the tank. For some reason, I expected a blinding flash of light, but nothing much happened except that somehow Mama consumed Tiffany. Mama had no mouth so maybe absorbed described it better. Regardless, a moment later, only a floating Lakers top, hot pants, and a sinking pair of platform stilettos remained of Tiffany.
“Wow. Son of a super bitch,” said Charley, and those were the last words he ever spoke. Mama’s hands flashed again and a split-second later, Charley’s cammo clothing floated free in the icy water.
Big Ben leapt from the trailer, and together we slammed and bolted the doors.
“Shouldn’t we put the lid back on?” I asked.
“Hell no. They can deal with this in San Pedro,” Big Ben yelled as he climbed into the cab. For the first time, there appeared a crack in his armor and fear in his eyes. I jammed the gears and rolled back onto Highway 40, heading west. I slipped the Smith & Wesson back under the seat.
Big Ben didn’t seem so big anymore.
***
Later, Big Ben lit another cigarette and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. Over the last few hours, he’d smoked nearly a pack. But he hadn’t said much.
I squinted into the oncoming headlights. Neither of us had slept for two days. Just past midnight, traffic was scarce across the California desert heading to Barstow,
“Just what the hell is Mama?” I asked, for the umpteenth time.
Big Ben puffed his cigarette for a few more miles. Clearly, he thought about what story to spin. Finally, he spoke.
“You ever heard of Roswell?”
“You think I’m an idiot?”
“Well, it’s like that, but for real.”
“What? Are you trying to tell me Mama is…alien?”
“No. Yes. Well, sort of. A saucer crash happened, but not in New Mexico, and not in ‘47. Walla Walla, Washington, that’s the place. November 24, ‘63. Two days after Kennedy. The saucer exploded in the atmosphere and crashed in a snowy field in the middle of freaking nowhere. A saucer team out of Slick Rock recovered a truckload of metal and some critter tissue the size of your pinky. That’s it.”
Big Ben lit a new cigarette from the butt of his old one. The ashtray overflowed, so he opened the window and flicked the butt out.
“So?”
“So, the military spent the last fifty years trying to clone the tissue. Or grow it. Or replicate it. Or fuck whatever, I’m not a scientist. All I know is that Mama is the only one of thousands of experiments that survived past a few weeks. Of course, she’s not pure. She’s a random mix of a thousand gene sequences. Frog. Cat. Gator. Whale. Gorilla. Alien. I’ve got no idea what’s in her. All I know is that she’s worth fifty million if we can deliver her to that ship in San Pedro.”
“Fifty million bucks? Are you kidding me?”
“Nope. Mama’s pregnant. Self-replication, they called it. And somebody wants her bad.”
“You’re selling out?”
“I’m cashing out of a shit system,” said Big Ben. “You, of all people, ought to know that.”
A blinding light suddenly flooded the windshield. I couldn’t see a damn thing. Janet 784 shuttered to a stop as I hit the brakes. All of a sudden it struck me that I hadn’t seen any traffic on the highway for the last half an hour.
A helicopter thumped overhead. Through the bright light I could see some sort of a barricade on the highway. An amplified voice spoke.
“Get out of the truck and lay face down on the ground.”
I might have laughed at the cliché if I hadn’t been scared shitless. Not for me. Not for Mama.
I feared for the soldiers.
***
Roy.
Spread-eagled on my stomach, my face pressed into the gravel on the shoulder of the highway. My cheek hurt like fucking hell. Some jerk eighteen-year-old E5 pressed his boot harder on my shoulders.
The voice drifted into my mind. Help.
Now I’d swear, until the day I die, the voice I heard was Tiffany. I twisted my neck to see what the hell the soldiers were up to. Floodlights splattered the sides of Janet 784 with bright light.
On the highway, in the distance, two helicopters rested on the asphalt. A couple dozen men in Hazmat suits disembarked from convoy trucks. More than a few of them hoisted flamethrowers.
Not a rescue party.
Nearby, Big Ben spun a tale to an officer about how he and Charley had been forced at gunpoint to help in the kidnapping of Mama. He gestured at me and flashed his ID card again and again as he spoke.
Bastard.
Still, I remained calm. I knew what had happened at Slick Rock. I knew what Mama could do. Was the military that stupid? Maybe no one had told them what really had happened.
On the flip side, Mama had anxiety. Based on what I’d seen at Slick Rock, she could easily take care of a squad of soldiers. Why, then, ask me to help? Seriously, what could I do, that she couldn’t?
I heard the shatter of glass and a wall of water slosh onto the highway. I couldn’t see what was going on.
I decided to warn them.
“Jesus Christ,” someone said through a breather. “Keep your distance, men.”
The E5 kicked me in the ribs.
“Get up,” he said.
Men with flamethrowers ran to the rear of the trailer.
I rose to my feet.
“Who’s in charge?” I said. “I need to speak to him. Now.”
“Shut your face,” said the E5.
“I need to warn you about her.”
“We’re not scared of the bitch,” he said. “We know what she can do and we know how to stop her. Now, turn around, I have to cuff you.”
Then he fell to the ground.
As did they all.
So much for knowing what to do.
Big Ben looked at me as he c
ollapsed, a grimace on his face. He looked in pain and I hoped it killed him.
So, there I was, the last man standing.
Roy.
I carried the bazooka to the rear of the trailer. Mama sat free in the open air. Scales clacking. Blue-green aura. Her indigo eye stared. Like the blob she was, she was helpless out of the tank.
Now, I’d never fired a bazooka but Big Ben had left it loaded. I clicked what appeared to be the safety.
Roy, the voice echoed in my head.
Help.
Raising the bazooka to my shoulder, I focused the crosshairs of the sight onto her bulbous body. I put my finger on the trigger. I started to squeeze. Surely, the right thing to do.
Mama quivered, I swear she did.
And then I thought of Randi.
Maybe Mama was a stray I could save.
The voice pleaded.
Big water.
Please.
Then I got it. That had been her plan all along. There hadn’t been fifty million bucks. No ship in San Pedro. The whole stupid idea had been planted in Big Ben and Charley’s minds. I dropped the bazooka; it clattered on the highway. I slammed the trailer doors shut and headed to the cab.
I rammed through the barricade of military vehicles.
Mama could do many things.
But she couldn’t drive a big rig.
***
Once I hit I-15 in Rancho Cucamonga, I knew the military would never catch me. There’s twenty-one thousand miles of road in Los Angeles filled with cars, trucks, and taco wagons. The soldiers had no idea of my destination.
I gradually worked my way through the morning traffic. When the commute finally cleared, I put the pedal to the metal and went balls to the wall. I shot past downtown Los Angeles and headed straight for Manhattan Beach.
That’s where we’d find big water.
Near the Chevron refinery, there’s a parking lot with access to the Pacific. Now the Angelinos are an odd lot, and right on the beach, next to the refinery, ran a path filled with joggers, bicyclists, and skateboarders. I blew the air horn and backed onto the sand. But my wheels spun freely and I couldn’t finish that last fifty feet to the ocean.