by Eric Miller
He licks his lips and heads into the diner.
Most restaurants off the highway don’t play any music. If they do it’s piped in corporate Muzak. But a jukebox plays in this diner between the waiting area and the hall leading to the restrooms. It’s playing something slow and dreamy, not what he’d expect. There’s an edge to it that feels out of place. It’s all sweet and soothing and then there’s this tinge of distortion like it’s reminding you it can all go wrong at any second.
A row of four truckers sitting at the counter drinking strawberry shakes turn in unison and stare at him, before turning back and sucking on their straws again.
A waitress shows Matt to a booth in the back corner. Her name tag says “Irene.” Her hair is dyed a red a shade brighter than the curtains. It all clashes with the faded-brown Naugahyde booths. “Coffee? Or a shake? We’ve got the best strawberry shake in the state,” she says a little too fast, like she’s had too many cups of coffee or is trying to save time by cutting out the spaces between words.
“Just coffee.” Coffee’s not the best idea at this hour, but if he’s going to have heartburn anyway, he might as well go for it. While she goes off for the coffee, he looks over the menu. Might as well just top off that cheeseburger with some chili-cheese fries. That will light the fires in the gut furnace.
A car lights up the window next to him as it parks. It’s that Dodge. He’s considering giving the driver a piece of his mind, but he watches as five men climb out, and he decides to mind his own business when they come into the diner.
The first thing they do is spread out. One man, wearing a hat with a feather in it, stands to the left of the counter with the milkshake sipping truckers. The driver remains at the entrance. He wears a suit of some shiny material. Sharkskin maybe. His thin hair is greased back. The other three men walk into the main dining area. Two of them head to the restrooms. After eyeballing all the people at the tables and checking the restrooms they return and shrug to the man that was driving the Dodge. The driver snaps his fingers and they all file out again. The door shuts, and moments later the Hemi engine roars to life and the car drives off.
The waitress returns with a pot of coffee. “What can I get for you, hon?” She peers down at Matt through her rhinestone glasses.
“I’ll have the bacon cheeseburger and a side of fries.”
Irene disappears into the kitchen just as the front door opens again and a young woman walks in. For just a second, Matt’s sure that she’s the spitting image of his wife, but he shakes his head and rubs his tired eyes, and realizes that while she bears a passing resemblance, the length of her black hair and maybe the shape of her figure, it’s just that he’s exhausted and is seeing what he wants to see. He remembers reading somewhere that human eyes can’t see clearly at a distance, that the brain doesn’t want to admit it doesn’t know something, so it fills in the blurry image with something familiar until the object or person gets closer. As the woman in the entryway walks past, the truckers ignore their milkshakes, staring at her until she’s passed down the hall into the women’s restroom.
The waitress drops off Matt’s burger and heads back to the kitchen. The Dodge returns and its crew fan out into the restaurant again. They search, return to the front empty handed, and shrug to the driver boss man. This time instead of snapping his fingers, the driver steps out to the jukebox area. “Excuse me,” he says, loud enough to be heard over a Clash song, something off Give Them Enough Rope. “Did anyone just see a young woman walk in here? She’s about,” and he puts his hand up to show the height of the woman that’s just gone into the restroom.
No one says anything.
“I see. So no one saw anything? How about you?” he turns to the row of milkshake drinkers. They look spooked. In unison, they reach forward and point to the restroom.
“So she was here. Son of a bitch.” He grimaces.
The man in the hat says something in the boss man’s ear.
The boss shakes his head. “No. She had time alone in that restroom. She could be anywhere. Come on.”
The men follow him out the door and back to the four-door in the parking lot.
Matt leaves his meal half-finished, drops some bills on the table, and leaves the diner.
The truck looms ahead in the lot. Nights like this the sleeper is misnamed. He’s in for a night of staring at the walls. And then the worry will take him and spawn its own spiral of anxiety and sleeplessness. Worrying about the worry already has his stomach upset.
When he gets to the cab, she’s standing there in the shadows. “Can you help me, sir? I require transit.”
For just a second, she sounds so much like Lucy he almost says yes without thinking. “Those men after you? I’d love to help, but I can’t go far. I’m at my limit for the night. I drive much further and I’ll need to pull over and sleep or there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Can you take me just as far as you can? I will wait with you while you rest.” It’s odd. She doesn’t move her lips or even open her mouth when she speaks.
“I’m afraid… I don’t do that. You see I was married, and while she’s no longer with us, I kind of think it would be untrue to her memory.”
“You believe I would sell myself to you?”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. You don’t mean that. But wouldn’t it be weird to you to just wait while I sleep?”
She reaches out and puts her palm on his forehead like a priest blessing him.
***
The next thing Matt knows he’s at the wheel. He comes to with a panic attack of having just nodded off, but he’s miles from the truck stop, hours past his eleven, and he has no idea how he’s gotten here. He manages to keep the truck on the road at least. He knows many drivers that have crashed not because they nodded off to sleep, but because they overcorrected when they snapped back to consciousness. He keeps the wheel steady. The sky has that blue, predawn glow. He looks around the cab, but there’s no sign of the girl he was talking to in the parking lot.
He’s calculating how many hours he’s lost, when the clock flickers and the truck loses all its power. The road goes dark as his headlights kill. He manages to steer the rig to the shoulder and in the low predawn light, rolls it to a stop on a flat, loose surface.
He’s stopped for what seems like a long time before he stops shaking. First he loses time, then the truck loses all its electric power. He checks his cell phone. Dead. Same for his tablet. He’s all alone out here, and he doesn’t know where “here” is. He hasn’t seen a sign, and his GPS is as useless as the rest of his gear.
Climbing out of the cab he grabs his emergency kit. He puts up his reflector cones. It’s a miracle that he broke down where he did. There’s nothing but a wall of mountain on the other side of the road. Any earlier there’d have been a cliff past the shoulder. The loose material under his feet is straw. With the light of a flare he realizes he’s not in a field at all. It’s a parking lot. There’s a flicker of light ahead. The flicker disappears, but he can now see the outline of a building a hundred feet from him.
He walks toward it cautiously. Highways are littered with abandoned buildings and ghost towns. There might be someone at this one who can help him. Or there might be camp of crazy homeless people. He gets about halfway to the building and stops. The Dodge is parked at the edge of the building.
He can see a little better now, with the sun starting to climb. The building’s a boarded up roadhouse. The boards covering the door have been removed, but are leaned against the doorjamb to cover the opening. The light comes from a window to the right of the door.
The inside of the abandoned roadhouse is lit by candles. The candles form a circle on the floor surrounding a flat rectangular object.
Five men stand around the exterior of the circle. The same five men from the diner.
Their leader waves his hand. He’s manic. Vibrating. Matt guesses he’s on a shitload of speed. “Let’s get this show on the road. Fire the damned thing up!”
One of the men reaches down to the floor. There’s a series of boxes next to him, five car batteries wired together. He pulls a switch that’s planted to the floor and sparks fly, first from the switch, then across the row of batteries. Lightning arcs to the ceiling, coiling around a rectangular object that Matt recognizes as a flat-panel television. He’s not sure what’s holding it to the ceiling, only that blue current flashes up on either side of it. The television is mounted directly over the large flat object in the circle on the floor.
The leader turns around. There’s something taped to his throat. An old-fashioned radio microphone in front of his mouth. He raises both hands in front of him. His voice is distorted, grating and metallic through the amplification of the microphone.
“Calling the hub. Listen in.”
The other men say in unison, “Come in. Prepare transmission.”
The leader raises his hands. “The deal is set. We await delivery through the interchange.”
The other men echo this with like a call and response in a church, “Send the merchandise.”
“Open the lanes. Send it through.”
“We await the goods.”
Glass shatters upwards from the rectangle on the floor. It flies up to the television screen on the ceiling. Behind the glass there’s a spray of some viscous fluid, and chunks of wet flesh fragmented into smaller particles chased by a larger sprawling mass. A flash of light is followed by darkness.
“Lights,” the boss man shouts, his voice no longer modulated.
Flashlights illuminate four circles in the room. The circles bounce and rotate around a wet mass on the floor. The mass is shaped like a boulder, but it’s undulating. The top stretches, and an arm punches through the membrane. Then another arm. This is followed by the head.
Matt takes a step back from the window and realizes that he’s not breathing. That head. That thing. It’s not human. It is humanoid. Its eyes are elongated ovals, longer up and down than side to side. Even in the flashlight circle he can see that its eyes are partitioned. Like thousands of squares of black glass pieced together in a mosaic. Its snout stretches out like a hook squash. Four half-moon orifices ring the edge of the snout.
“All right,” the leader sounds exasperated. “Help it out already.”
The two youngest men pull the creature up by its arms. Its torso is the oddest part of it. Its ribcage is on the outside and the color of grey metal. Knobs are riveted to the ribs.
Matt turns to leave, trips over a rock, and lands face first in the straw and the gravel.
When he looks up, the boss man is standing over him. “What have we here? Some sort of peeper? Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere, friend?”
***
Stabbing pain expands from between Matt’s eyes, filling his head with shards of hot glass. As he wakes, he becomes aware not just of the immediate agony in his head, but also of a dull ache from the rest of his body. He’s covered in one great bruise. His throat is so dry the skin might crack if he breathes in. And then there’s the pain from his wrists. They’re bound behind his back with something tight. Electrical wire maybe.
Memories of last night come back in waves like the nausea of a hard hangover. The girl at the truck stop, the breakdown, the weirdness at the abandoned roadhouse, but nothing afterward.
He’s on the floor of a motel room. He can tell by the carpet and the painting above the bed. The bathroom door is open just a crack lending the room a trickle of light.
A hot flare of pain shoots through the base of his neck. More memory comes with it. Being grabbed and thrown into the trunk of the Dodge. A needle jabbing him in the neck. With that memory, a series of visions flash past him that he can’t separate from dream. An ethereal face turning to a skull in front of him. Tied to a chair in a motel room while people asked him questions in a language he’s never heard before. Slumped on the floor against the wall, while the men around him discussed something and moved that painting above the bed…something about that painting. They replaced it with a new painting facing the television screen. Why?
There’s a low, sad moan from the bathroom, a deep drone like a whale’s song. Matt gets up to his knees, doubles over, and vomits on the floor. He pulls at the wire binding his hands, wishing he could wipe his mouth. There’s another moan from the bathroom, this time more tentative, like it’s calling to him.
He spits and manages to get to his feet and stagger to the bathroom door. He presses his shoulder to the door to push it the rest of the way open. There’s another sound, something mechanical and repetitive, a whirring, a sucking, a gear turning, and it repeats.
The thing is there in bathtub. The thing from the roadhouse.
Thick pea-soup-colored mucous shoots out of the bottom right hole on its snout. The low moan begins again, as the machine cycles once more. The creature is hooked by its eight rivet-nipples to this thing that looks like a combination of a pachinko machine and an automatic milker. Matt can’t be sure if it’s milking the creature or pumping something into it or both. But he knows what it reminds him of, the chemo machines. Those horrible days when he watched as Lucy was hooked up to the machine pumping her full of poison that never worked anyway. But Matt doubts that the intent here is to cure the poor creature writhing in the bathtub.
“Would it help you if I can get you out of that?” Matt’s not sure it understands him. He has no idea how to unhook it from the machine, but figures that freeing his own hands is probably a good first step. The binding is a power cable for a radio. It’s tied tight, but he gets it under the sink and tries using the faucet for leverage. It cuts into his skin. He manages to get hold of the soap to the right of the sink and lathers it up over his wrists. The skin lubricated, he puts his hands back under the faucet and manages to pull the wire off.
The front plate of the machine is covered in dials and knobs. Matt hasn’t any idea what will happen if he starts turning these, or if he can just start unhooking the creature. He tries to convey his confusion to it by raising his hands. The creature bellows at him, and Matt interprets that as the go ahead to proceed.
He reaches for the first of the hooks clasping the creature’s rivet-like nipples. The creature’s call seems to indicate that this will help. But the clasp is fastened tight, and Matt struggles to loosen it.
Matt’s so busy struggling to free the creature, he doesn’t notice that the men have returned. Their leader says, “That’s enough of that, hero. Dope him.” Sharp pain pierces his neck, and darkness swirls into nausea.
***
When Matt’s eyes open, his vision is blurry and smeared like light in an impressionist painting. His chin is on the toilet seat. His hands are now bound in front of him, his arms wrapped around the base of the toilet.
The machine is still on, but now the sucking sound is more of a wheeze, as it draws nothing from the creature in the tub. There are no more moans from the beast. It lies there, still, an empty husk. The room reeks. Vomit coats the sides of the toilet. Then there’s the smell coming off the dead thing in the tub. Rancid meat. Roadkill.
Matt wonders why they’ve left him alive. Maybe it’s just less trouble? Who is he going to tell that would believe him? On the other hand, he guesses it wouldn’t be much more trouble to just kill and dispose of him the same way they plan on dumping the body of this creature. He pulls, trying to free his hands, but the wire just bites harder into his wrists.
His vision flashes white. He remembers reading about stroke victims seeing bright flashes of light before they drop, and he wonders if this is it. He opens his eyes again and sees through the blurry light something that can’t be. The woman from the parking lot outside the diner is climbing out of the wall mirror. The glass of the mirror ripples as she steps through and just her arm is still inside the glass. She pulls her arm through and the glass solidifies.
She looks down at the beast in the tub and blinks. As she does this Matt is suddenly filled with an overwhelming sense of sadness. The sense of loss repla
ces his fear for himself. For just a moment, there’s no pain from his wrists, his bruises, or the two needle jabs he’s taken to his neck. There is only sadness.
“Can you walk?” she says without moving her lips.
“My hands are tied.” The pain returns and the sadness subsides. She kneels down and snaps the wire. He’s able stand, but he hunches over and cramps up. With effort he starts to limp toward the door. “They think I know where to find you. You won’t be safe with me.”
“I’m not safe anywhere. But I think there’s a place we can go. If you can drive me.” She pulls his arm over her shoulder and helps him to the door. She places her hand over the peephole and closes her eyes. “There’s no one outside. Come.”
She opens the door and the daylight hits him. He can’t remember the last time he’s been out in the sun. Not since he left LA. The time saved by driving at night seems pointless now that he’s overdue. He realizes he doesn’t know how overdue he is. He doesn’t even know how many days he’s been inside that room. And he doesn’t know what they’ve done with his truck.
They’re on the second floor of a Motel 6. The parking lot below is empty.
As they get to the base of the stairs, a car comes off the road and turns, kicking up dust into the parking lot. The Dodge.
The woman grabs Matt’s hand and pulls him around the corner of the motel. Behind the building, there’s a field, and his truck. He races for the driver’s door with a renewed step to his stride. They must have not even considered that he’d get away, because they’ve left the keys in the cab. On the other hand, they’ve taken his phone, his tablet, and wallet. Even the CB is torn out, leaving a spaghetti mess of wires hanging from the dash.