18 Wheels of Horror

by Eric Miller

  Brendan would turn her, and they could travel the world together, all three of them, see the things she never thought she’d see.

  Well, everything except Italy maybe.

  ***

  He led her through the trees.

  They were in a forest preserve across the highway from Happy Joe’s. She had never gone into these woods, never had a reason to. She wondered what his lair was like. Was there some dilapidated mansion deep within the woods that no one remembered? Did Brendan keep a normal house, or maybe a trailer with blacked out windows like the vampires in Near Dark? Well, she hoped it wasn’t that. She hated that movie. She supposed she would be happy no matter where they were of course, as long as there was someplace they could lay down together, as long as they were alone.

  She had waited for this so long it seemed. Really only a week, but it felt like an eternity.

  She giggled. She didn’t really know anything about eternity, did she?

  But her dark angel, her boy that would never grow up, would show her.

  She would be like Wendy if Wendy had decided to stay in Neverland. Gwendolyn had never understood why Wendy had gone home. She had been responsible for her brothers, yes, but Gwendolyn had always thought had she been in the story, she would have brought her brothers back to her parents, told them not to worry, then dove out the window with Peter and Tinkerbelle and flown in the ship back to Neverland. Anyway, with the Lost Boys to take care of, Mr. and Mrs. Darling had plenty of kids, and wouldn’t have missed just one that much.

  It was such a silly thing to be thinking about now. Fairy tales.

  “What’s so funny?” Brendan asked, looking back over his shoulder.

  “Nothing,” she said, beaming at him. “Are we almost there?”

  “We’re here,” he said, drawing her into a moonlit clearing.

  There was a creek nearby, which Gwendolyn heard before she saw. The silver light cutting through the trees dappled the flowing water like icing. She didn’t see a house anywhere.

  He put his arm around her and pointed.

  Up the creek was a stone retaining wall, and in the wall was a great black hole, a dark culvert that trickled into the creek.

  “Through there?” she whispered, laying her head against his shoulder.

  “Mm hm,” he said. “Come on.”

  He started to splash across the creek, felt her stop short, and frowned back at her. Then almost immediately his brow slackened and he hoisted her up in his arms, carrying her to the culvert across the water. She laid her ear to his chest and closed her eyes. No heartbeat of course. She couldn’t stop smiling. She felt like a bride being carried across the threshold.

  “What’s that smell?” he asked, when they had reached the yawning black gap in the wall.

  “I wore it for you,” she said. “Do you like it?”

  When she opened her eyes and looked up into his, her smile fell a little. He was grimacing at her.

  “Have you ever sprayed perfume on a cat?” he asked.

  “Once,” she admitted. Her grandmother’s cat, Jake, had come in from the alley one night reeking of whatever garbage can he’d been into. She’d thought she was doing the animal a favor, since cats didn’t like water, and spritzed him with her atomizer. Jake had gone into a terrible hissing and scratching fit, every hair on end, like a wild thing. She still had the scar on her forearm.

  “It hated it didn’t it?” his tone was sharp, almost scolding. “It’s the smell. It’s too much.”

  Of course! He had heightened senses, like a cat’s. She pursed her lips, disappointed. Had she ruined everything? Stupid! He wouldn’t even want to touch her now. She felt her eyes brim. She wanted to jump from his arms and scrub herself clean of the perfume in the cold creek.

  “I’m sorry,” she whimpered.

  “No, it’s alright,” he said after a minute. “It’s okay. I can deal with it.”

  “I’ll never do it again,” she promised. She meant it.

  “I know,” he said, finding his smile again.

  He set her down and climbed up into the hole. He crouched inside and turned to stare down at her, perched and smiling. He held out his hand.

  “Don’t you have a flashlight or something?” she asked, craning her neck to look over his shoulder at the thick darkness from which he seemed to spring.

  He shook his head slowly. “Are you scared?”

  She straightened, and held back her shoulders. “Not if you’re with me.”

  She took his hand.

  He pulled her lightly up into the culvert, turned, and led her into the shadows.

  It was damp and the only light was from the moon behind. Her shoes splashed as she walked, and she heard his feet too. Her breath echoed back at her off the walls of the concrete tunnel. How far did this go? Would there be some kind of side tunnel leading to a maintenance room he had claimed? Maybe something he had made himself? Furnished with antiques from around the world?

  It seemed they walked for a long time, until the light of the entrance was a pinprick behind. She had never been in a tunnel so long. She couldn’t see the other side either. It was just black ahead. She gripped Brendan’s hand tighter. She didn’t think of herself as claustrophobic, but suddenly the knowledge that they were well beneath the earth weighed on her. How old was this pipe? Was the concrete sound?

  “You okay?”

  “How much further?”

  “We’re here now,” he said, stopping at last. “Home sweet home.”

  “Here?” she asked. “I can’t see anything.”

  “Do you want to see?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She heard him moving about something in the dark. Something clanked, and after a bit a camping lantern hissed to life, casting a whitish orange light all around.

  The first thing she noticed was the size of the cockroaches that scurried in erratic curly-cue patterns before retreating into the dark.

  They were deep in the culvert, but there was no antechamber or hidden stair. The pipe had apparently collapsed in the middle. She could see they were at a dead end, and a wall of broken concrete segments lay before them, through which only the water could hope to pass. It trickled in rivulets from dozens of cracks.

  The lantern sat on a rock, evidently brought in from the creek bed, and a dingy, filthy blue and white striped mattress was propped in the muddy corner. She could smell the rotten fabric.

  There were tied garbage bags of clothes in the opposite corner.

  She looked around, nervous.

  “Brendan?” was all she could manage.

  “This is where I sleep,” said Brendan, hunkering on his heels and resting his elbows on his knees, back against the wall. He motioned to the disgusting mattress. “Have a seat.”

  Gwendolyn looked at the mattress dubiously, then back at him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Vampires have to sleep in the same earth where they were made. Didn’t you know that?”

  She shook her head.

  “But…you were made a vampire in Italy.”

  “Oh,” Brendan snickered. “That. Listen. Have you ever seen a movie made before nineteen-eighty-nine?”

  She frowned, her eyebrows knitting together. She felt strange, and hugged herself. Why did he ask her that?

  “I don’t like black and white movies,” she said lamely. “What are you talking about? Weren’t you turned into a vampire in Bible times? In Italy?”

  He reached across the pipe to her and slipped her purse off her shoulder. She was too amazed to say anything when he unclasped it and began to paw through it with one hand.

  “I can’t really remember when it happened. Not before I wound up in this pipe. I think there used to be a drive-in where the truck stop is. I used to watch the movies.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Can you remember when you were three or four years old?”

  “I think so.”

  “What happened on the first Thursday you c
an ever remember?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t remember ever not being a vampire. I don’t remember who made me into this. I think it was a man. A fat man. I think my earliest memory is of kneeling in front of him in this place. I don’t even know if that was him. It could’ve been anybody. That’s what I do here. I come here with people from the truck stop. Usually men.”

  He pulled out the pack of condoms and looked at her, smirking.

  She felt her face color. Her cheeks were so hot her eyes felt like they were sweating.

  “What were you gonna do with these?” he asked.

  “I thought…I thought tonight would be…special.”

  “Well you wouldn’t have any use for these, honey,” he said, tossing the condoms into the muddy water at their feet. “I haven’t had a hard-on since I became like this.”

  “Why are you talking like this?” she gasped, tears blurring her vision, making him run in the lantern light like a spoiled painting.

  “Vampires don’t drink, we don’t eat. We don’t piss or shit or fuck. You humans find us so attractive though. I dunno. I guess it’s like the light on one of those lantern fish. Have you ever seen those?”

  She stared at him, huffing in her misery, her eye makeup spilling down her face now in oily black cascades.

  “Of course you haven’t,” said Brendan.

  He stood up slowly.

  She backed away, but only a little. She still couldn’t believe. Didn’t want to.

  “Don’t you love me?”

  “Oh no,” Brendan said, pursing his lips.

  She shook now, trying hard to keep the sobs from bursting wholly from her grimacing lips. She felt like a bullet was already spinning in her heart trying to work its way slowly out of her chest.

  “There it is,” said Brendan, reaching out to her, his hand on her chest, cold skin to hers. She sucked in her breath sharply at his touch.

  He moved very close to her now, embracing her. He ran the side of his face against hers. They rubbed noses. He kissed her and inhaled her. She trembled. She was so confused.

  He moaned.

  “So sweet. You’re so sweet,” he whispered in her ear.

  He pulled her slowly down to the rotten mattress. She felt her jeans soak through from without and within. She cried and sighed at the same time. She tried to push him away, but he was iron strong. His kisses were hard and loveless. He was just tasting her, lapping at her skin, nibbling at her with his sharp teeth. They were like the bites of a cat.

  His hands moved over her breasts and shoulders and back and his nostrils sucked at the skin of her neck.

  “Oh baby,” he groaned. “Nothing’s sweeter…to me…than…a breaking heart.”

  She pulled him to her. She put her legs around his waist. Maybe it was a lie. Maybe he had been alone so long he didn’t know how to joke around the right way anymore. Maybe…maybe they could still…

  She reached for his belt and fumbled with trembling hands to undo his pants.

  He laughed in her ear.

  “Still trying, huh?”

  She nodded.

  “Uh huh,” she said hotly as he kissed and licked at her neck.

  Her heart was hammering. She yanked apart his jeans and slid her shaking hands behind the band of his underwear, felt down his hard stomach, fingers moving through the bristling, weedy pubic hair to the loose lump of dead flesh that nestled there, cool as a sleeping viper. She stroked and rubbed as if trying to start a fire, but he did not respond.

  She worked at him furiously in her confusion and frustration. She desperately wanted him to share in her own passion, which despite all that he had said, was still waxing below her navel, fluttering like a maddened bird beating its wings against a window.

  She still wanted him. She wanted him more than anything.

  He said something muffled in her neck.

  “What?” she whispered.

  He pulled his head back. His face in her eyes, she stared in disbelief at the blood broadly painted across his face, dripping from his long teeth, spilling down his chin.

  She hadn’t felt the bite.

  “I said ‘this,’” and he flicked one of his protruding canine teeth with his finger, “is what you’re looking for. On a vampire, it’s these.”

  She understood. She darted her face forward and kissed him, tasting her own blood, like a mouthful of batteries. She thrust her tongue between his lips, lapping at his teeth. He nearly pulled back in shock, but she clasped her hands behind the nape of his neck and ground her heaving body against him, seeking his sharp teeth flicking at them with the tip of her tongue.

  Brendan gasped and bit her.

  The pain was unimaginable. She shrieked into his gulping mouth, eyes bugging in her skull.

  Her tongue pierced, instantly both their mouths filled with a gush of hot blood, so copious it jetted directly to the back of Brendan’s throat, warm as fresh milk. He gagged at first, but fought past it, letting her life seep down hot as whiskey to his eager, hungry belly. He sucked at her bleeding tongue, gripped the sides of her head.

  Her body moved furiously against him, but he was utterly unaware of it. All his concentration was on draining her through her tongue, like a thirsty boy on a hot summer day sucking from the garden spigot.

  Gwendolyn’s eyes fluttered and something burst deep within her. Something that spurted fire like a Roman candle up and outwards into her whole body. Her stomach and legs locked and she fell back quivering against the grimy mattress, blood leaking from her lips, her mouth full of rust.

  Tears ran down from the far corners of her eyes as she looked up at Brendan, straddling her. Blood, her blood, all down his chin.

  He was heaving too, though no breath came from his lips, only flecks of her own blood dropping on her staring face. He smiled down at her with his sharp, animal teeth. The edges of her sight blurred and darkened. Maybe the lantern was going out. Maybe she was dying. Maybe it was only her mortality dying. Maybe all of this had been some rite of initiation into immortality. A lesson in letting go.

  But she wouldn’t let Brendan go. She strained to see him, until he became a tiny picture in a pinhole.

  Her dark angel.

  Her Peter Pan.

  No.

  No, he wasn’t Peter Pan.

  He wasn’t Captain Hook.

  He was the crocodile.

  Ian Welke has never driven a truck, but has spent many hours on the interstates, having driven the length of I-5, I-15, I-40, and much of I-10 in particular. Most days he rides a desk and keyboard. His short stories have appeared in Kzine, Big Pulp, Zombie Jesus and Other True Stories, and the American Nightmare anthology amongst others. His first novel, The Whisperer in Dissonance, was published by Omnium Gatherum Media in 2014. His second novel, End Times at Ridgemont High was released in April 2015. Follow him on Twitter @mewelke.

  SLEEPER

  Ian Welke

  ALONE AT NIGHT IN THE DESERT Matt feels like he’s drifting in space. He knows the desert’s out there. He’s seen it driving during the day, but at night there’s just blackness. His headlights shine over so little of the I-40 pavement, it feels like he’s floating on a disk of asphalt through the void.

  It’s easy to get philosophical on too little sleep and after too many miles. There hasn’t been much chatter on the CB. He hasn’t gotten a call all day on his cell. When he pulls in for his mandatory rest, he’ll have to check his email and the news on his tablet. Just the thought of the glow of that screen warms him. There’s an outside world waiting for him as soon as he can log on. But the warmth turns to dread as he contemplates what follows when he has to log off and force himself to sleep. It’s more than insomnia. It’s worse than just missing her. Every moment alone and sleepless heaps sorrow upon sorrow and anxiety upon anxiety. Once it’s just him alone with his fears, the walls of his sleeper will close in and smother him.

  Twin red points, taillights of another truck, flare ahead in the distance. Matt
looks for a mile marker. He’d hoped to make Flagstaff when he hit the eleven-hour limit. Time is another tricky variable when you’re tired and bored. He’ll have to stop short of Flagstaff. He won’t be able to sleep, but the hours-of-service rules won’t allow him to keep going.

  The taillights zoom toward him like someone’s hit the fast-forward button on reality. He checks mirrors, but there’s a car that’s come out of nowhere passing on his left. Matt feathers the brakes to avoid a skid. To make matters worse, the four-door Dodge on his left slows down to match speeds. At the last second, before Matt will have to commit to a full stop, the muscle car guns it and disappears into the night.

  Matt releases the brake, and shifts up, pulling around the slower moving truck. As he passes, he catches the glimpse of a woman silhouetted on the opposite side of the road. A hitchhiker? It can’t be. What woman would be hitching in this barren stretch of road at night? No. He imagined her, because he’s tired and stressed he imagined the very image of Lucy.

  Miles pass, none of them well, as he dwells on his wife’s memory. When you lose someone, they say you’ll keep the happy thoughts with you, keeping their memory alive in your heart. But when you lose someone to cancer, it’s the memory of their suffering that sticks with you alone in the night. It’s the memory of the failed treatments that haunts Matt on this dark highway. Just as the debt for the failed treatments haunts his daylight hours. He dreads the end of his eleven. The time when it will just be him in the sleeper with all his worst memories ensuring that he doesn’t sleep.

  A mass of lights cuts the dark ahead. A town, or at least a truck stop. His stomach growls. An hour short of his limit, he’ll stop there.

  ***

  Matt fills the tanks before parking the rig in the back lot, next door to a diner. He’s already lost the battle of willpower. Once upon a time, Matt was a vegan. In college, he was as straight-edged as they come. He didn’t even drink coffee. Some of that changed after he dropped out, went to trucking school, and started driving at the port. After losing Lucy, he went off the rails. Booze. Drugs. Despair. He hasn’t climbed out of the pit from that downward spiral yet, but he’s been meaning to, and he keeps thinking part of that process would be eating healthier again. Temptation is a bitch though. Tonight’s temptation is in the form of a bacon cheeseburger.