18 Wheels of Horror

by Eric Miller

  The truck starts. Whatever was wrong with the electrics is fixed. Matt guesses it had something to do with what they were up to in that roadhouse. Of course the truck’s fixed. Otherwise it wouldn’t be here.

  There isn’t all that much town to Los Lunas, but it’s twenty minutes before they find the highway entrance. They join State Highway 6. Matt still hasn’t come up with the right question to start. Eventually he goes with, “What’s your name?”

  “You can call me Mara.” Before he says anything she adds, “I know that you are known as Matt.”

  He wants an explanation, but he’s not sure what to ask first, or if he should bother. He’s always wondered if this is the way things are. That if you get off the wrong exit, you’ll find the world completely different than anything you’d expect. You know what things are like at home. You think you know what they’ll be like at your destination, but in between there are infinitely weird possibilities.

  He figures he’ll wait until they reach I-25 before he asks Mara where she’d like to go. As the sun starts to set and the on-ramp gets close, his mirrors light up with headlights from the Dodge.

  “Go north,” she says.

  “Why north, is that where you need to go?”

  “No. But it is away from south. Their power comes from their base. In your town of El Paso.”

  Matt shifts it and takes the route north.

  ***

  For the first half hour the muscle car hangs back, like they’re waiting to see what Matt does. When he gets close to Albuquerque and has the choice of hitting the 40, they roar even with the truck. Matt pushes the fuel pedal down. They pull even again. They play this game for a while. Matt slows down. They slow down. This pattern continues onto the I-40 headed east.

  “The good news is we can outlast them until they need to gas up.” Matt upshifts, the engine roars, and they gain again on their pursuers. The gauge shows the tanks are over half full. He has at least six hundred miles of range. The Dodge will have to stop well before he does.

  His headlights pass over an exit sign, but the sign makes no sense. In the instant he sees it, the numbers change to characters he’s never seen. They look like crosses between letters and pinwheels, then they swirl to pitchforks and sickles. He looks back, trying to make sense of what he’s seen. When he looks forward again, a sign on the overpass does the same thing.

  “What the…?”

  “This is not good. They are altering things.”

  Her face conveys no sense of emotion, just as her mouth doesn’t move when the words play in his head. Matt looks back at the road just in time to get the flash of headlights of an oncoming vehicle. He starts to crank the wheel to avoid the car, but Mara grabs it and “NO!” reverberates in his skull.

  They pass through the lights and an ephemeral outline of an old Plymouth Valiant. The truck shudders but does not crash, and there are no signs of the car in his mirrors. Just the muscle car. Shivers shoot through Matt’s wrists, up into his shoulders, and meet in a stabbing ball of pain in the center of his back.

  He wipes a bucket’s worth of sweat off his face, looks back at the road behind them, then back to Mara hoping for answers.

  “You will not be able to trust what you see. Some will be true. Others not. It will get worse.”

  “How am I supposed to keep it on the road if I don’t know what I’m looking at?” Matt cycles through his memories of the road ahead. Past the outskirts of Albuquerque there’s nothing. Scrub brush and hills. Matt’s been through here plenty, Amarillo is often one of his rest stops.

  “We might be able to see what they are doing at least.” Mara waves her hand over his rearview mirror. It goes to snow, like television static. When it comes back, it’s the reflection from the Dodge’s rearview mirror, focused on the men inside.

  The boss man is driving and grinning. The man in the feathered hat sits in the passenger’s seat. He’s working the dial on a handheld device with an antenna. It looks like an old walkie-talkie or maybe a Geiger-counter. He pulls the dial full to the right, and the lights of a weigh station flash in front of the truck: SCALES OPEN. TRUCKS MUST WEIGH IN.

  Matt instinctively panics and moves for the wheel before remembering that there’s no weigh station here.

  “So, all I have to do is ignore whatever they do?”

  “No. It is not so simple. As they add power, they can make changes more than pictures. They could end the road into a cliff if they can give the machine enough power.”

  In the rearview, the man with the hat twists the dial full right, but nothing happens. The road ahead remains the same, straight ahead in a slow climb.

  “Turn the wheel.”

  “Right or left?”

  “Guess! Right! Now!”

  He turns the wheel. The left side of the truck hits something that isn’t there. Amid a shower of sparks, a guard rail shimmers into vision. The air is wavy like a heat mirage as Matt’s view of the road changes from straight to slight right turn.

  The Dodge pulls ahead of them.

  There’s no time to catch his breath, the man in the hat is moving the dial to full again. Matt does the only thing he has left. He upshifts and floors it, slamming into the muscle car. The grill and engine of the truck smash clean through into the trunk of the Dodge. Both vehicles lose control. The Dodge spins off to the left. The truck goes off the road, careening over a hill and sliding down, rumbling over underbrush before slamming into a boulder.

  ***

  Matt peels broken glass off his face. Through the blood clogging his sinuses, he smells something burning. Brakes and the rubber from his tires, but he also smells diesel. His next move should probably be away from his truck.

  A shape on the hill must be Mara. He staggers in the loose rock to get to her. When he taps her arm, she rolls to her side. Her face contorts, breaks into separate frames, and there are two images in its place. For a second, her face is more like the thing from the motel, before the image snaps and returns her features to the way they were.

  He reaches down to help her to her feet. “Come on, we’ve got to move.” There’s a light from a building uphill to their left. Remembering the roadhouse, he’s wary to approach random buildings off the highway, but he hears shouts from the road behind them.

  Three silhouettes are cast by the headlights of the overturned Dodge. One of them carries a handgun, Matt can’t tell if the others are armed.

  The terrain gets rougher. More brush, less rock. A rusty piece of sheet metal lies flat on the ground. There are the bones of a motorcycle, but not the wheels or engine. Matt slips on something slick, an old plastic trash bag, its contents are scattered all around, crumbled and decayed.

  Matt has seen these places before. These roadside dumps. Places where people have come to ditch their trash. The light’s coming from the window of a trailer. Maybe the owners have a phone. Maybe they will help them. Or maybe they’re with the men chasing them, and it’s hopeless.

  There’s a toilet in the ground to Matt’s right. About five feet from the trailer, there’s a refrigerator turned on its side and half buried in sand. They get to the refrigerator and the trailer door swings open. A thin man in overalls with a straw hat and a grey beard steps out. He points a double-barreled shotgun downhill at him and Mara. There’s a click, a sound like thunder, and a metal car door, rusted and flat on the ground is hit by the shot.

  “That’s what you call a warning shot. The next one doesn’t miss.”

  Matt raises his hands. “We don’t want trouble. But there’s some men after us.”

  “They ain’t after you, boy. They want that alien you got with you.”

  Does everybody know what’s going on but me? Matt shakes his head, no time for discussion. “You’d just let them take her?”

  Shouts come from the distance. The survivors from the wrecked muscle car have heard the shot.

  “I got my own species to think of first, boy.”

  There’s another crack and Matt hits the deck. The
old man falls to his knees. He twists down to the ground before Matt sees that the back of his head is blown out.

  Mara crawls ahead of him, over the body of the dead man, and into the trailer. Matt follows, wincing as another gunshot echoes through the night. He takes the shotgun from the hands of the dead man on the way.

  The inside of the trailer looks like a long line of hoarders have lived in it. There’s a stack of phonebooks that stretches from floor to ceiling. The rear of the trailer is inaccessible, the floor covered in boxes. The box on top of the pile is overflowing with hair combs. Matt throws it to the ground behind him. The next is full of cigarette lighters. Remote controls. Rubber bands. Toothbrushes.

  Mara starts rummaging through the drawers stacked along the wall. “Is there a mirror in here?”

  “I don’t see one. Do you see shotgun shells or a phone?”

  The door flies open. The man in the feathered hat steps in, gun pointed at them. Matt drops to the floor. Mara screams. Matt’s head fills with pain, but somehow he can tell that he’s just caught the backsplash of the blast aimed at the man in the hat. Blood comes out the man’s nose. He shakes and steadies himself and aims the gun at Mara. Matt pulls the trigger on the shotgun. The remaining barrel fires and the man grimaces and goes running from the trailer in pain. The door slams shut after him. There’s no blood on the wall. Matt guesses the shell was filled with rock salt.

  At least the door doesn’t open again.

  “Hey in there.” The voice of the driver.

  “What do you want?”

  “We don’t have any beef with you, friend. We just want the girl.”

  Matt thinks for a second. “She’s not here.”

  “What?” The boss sounds skeptical. Matt doesn’t blame him.

  “There’s a wall mirror at the back of the trailer. She went straight through it.”

  There’s a pause.

  “You wouldn’t mind if we came in and verified that would you?”

  “How do I know you won’t try and just shoot me anyway?”

  “I don’t know, friend. I could give you my word, but then you don’t know me.”

  Matt looks around the trailer wondering where the old man might have kept more ammo. The only thing keeping him alive now is that the men outside don’t know that he’s out of shells. But there’s no way out of this trailer. He wonders how long it will be until someone passes the wreck on the highway. Someone who will call the Highway Patrol. And then how long it will take the highway patrol to investigate.

  The men outside apparently don’t want to wait it out. A barrage of shots pierce the side of the trailer. Most of these are absorbed by the stacks of boxes and books, but one shot ricochets several times before embedding itself in the stack of phonebooks. Before the sound and dust clears the door flies open again. This time the man in the hat and one of the other men charge into the trailer, guns firing.

  Mara screams, but the sound is cut off. She’s hit. Matt swings the butt of the shotgun. He brings it down on the man in the hat’s gun hand with a satisfying bone-snapping crack. The other man aims at Matt, but Matt’s already swinging again. The wood connects with the man’s jaw and sends him out cold to the trailer floor. Matt picks up his gun and gestures for the man in the hat to go out of the trailer. Using the man as a shield, Matt follows him outside.

  “The girl’s shot.”

  “It’s true, boss. I think she’s had it.” The man in the hat’s words are panicked and slurred.

  “So what now?”

  Matt’s not sure how much longer he can hold the gun level.

  “The police would never believe any of this.”

  “So we go our separate ways?”

  The man in the sharkskin laughs. “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say.” His gun points down toward the sand.

  Matt fires. This is only the second time in his lifetime he’s fired a gun. The first was in the trailer, but unlike the shotgun there’s no spread on the shot from the handgun and the bullet streaks off into the night.

  The man in the sharkskin fires rapidly. All the shots strike the man in the hat. Except one, which passes through the hat man and hits Matt in the hip. He’s sure his hip is broken. He’s not bleeding, but he doesn’t have time to guess how hurt he is.

  Mara has crawled out of the trailer. She shrieks and it staggers the man in the sharkskin suit. Matt drops the dead man in the hat, uses both hands to steady the handgun, and fires into the leader. The boss man drops dead to the ground. Matt leaves the gun on him until he’s sure.

  He turns back to Mara. She no longer looks like the woman he’d seen before. She looks like the creature that was killed in the motel bathroom. Matt hears her voice in his head. “Do not worry. I am free from them. When I awaken in my home, I will be safe.”

  She’s still. Her image flickers and warps. Her face contorts, the image wavy like a broken channel on an old television. She’s Mara, then her face is Lucy’s, then back to the creature in the motel. The air around her shimmers like hot air off the asphalt on a desert day, and she is gone.

  Matt limps his way back to the highway, doing his best to ignore the pain throbbing from his hip with each step. The blood is all on the outside of his jeans. He checks the other side under his belt. There’s a terrible bruise that stings too bad to tighten his belt again after he checks it, but it’s a relief to know that the blood all belongs to the dead man back near the trailer.

  When he gets back to the road, he finds his cell phone in the Dodge’s glovebox, but there’s no signal. As he walks down I-40, he wonders what the hell he’s going to tell the cops, or worse, his insurance people. He knows he should be afraid. It should all hurt more than it does. He doesn’t know if it’s shock, but he’s just numb. Seeing her fade makes it feel like it’s all happened again. Any hopes that he’ll ever sleep right again, are gone with her. There will never be enough miles in the rearview to fix him. He knows that, but he keeps limping one foot in front of the other down the highway.

  Michael Paul Gonzalez lives and writes in Los Angeles. His mind was forged (warped?) at an early age by the adventures of Jack Burton and his truck, the Pork Chop Express, in the greatest B-movie ever made: Big Trouble in Little China. Follow him at www.MichaelPaulGonzalez.com.

  THE IRON BULLDOGGE

  Michael Paul Gonzalez

  ROOK WAS DIGGING into the worst apple pie he’d ever encountered when the kid sidled up to his table. He’d seen the type before, hitchhikers, college dropouts starting a misguided romantic journey across the states. This skinny kid couldn’t have been more than a week into his trip. Clean blond hair, light stubble, didn’t stink, and his cheeks weren’t sucked in yet. Rook always wanted to tell them what life on the road was really like. When it’s in your bones and in your blood. When you’re on the road, you can’t wait to get home. You get home for a few days and then you’re burning to get back on the road. Instead, he just cut to the chase.

  “Where ya headed?”

  The kid shuffled his feet, surprised that he didn’t need to go into a sales pitch.

  “West?” the kid asked.

  “You don’t have to be so specific,” Rook grumbled, kicking out the chair on the other side of the table. “Siddown and let me finish this slop, then we’ll get going. What’s your name?”

  “Oh, you can call me—”

  “Not what I can call you. Shit, you hippies with your damn names. Not Moonbeam, or Supertramp, what’s it say on your birth certificate?”

  The kid looked down at the plate of pie. “Didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

  “Meh, it’s probably not. I’m eighteen hours into a run that was supposed to wrap up hours ago, so forgive my brusqueness.” Rook loved throwing five dollar words at the hippies. “How far west are you going?”

  “Gotta get to the ocean. I’ve never seen the Pacific.”

  “You ever see the Atlantic?”

  “Yeah, that’s where I start—”

  �
��Looks the same, just reversed.”

  “Look, if you don’t want to give me a ride, I get it. I can ask around.”

  “Nah,” Rook laughed. “Nah, I’m just giving you a hard time. Wanted to see if you had a sense of humor. Guess we’ll keep things quiet. I can get you as far as Salt Lake City, then you’re on your own. Word of advice? When we get there, buy a thicker jacket. You’re gonna freeze.”

  “I’ll get by. You mind if I grab a quick bite before we head out?”

  Rook shrugged. “Don’t try the pie.”

  “You can call me Sticks,” the kid said.

  “Nope,” Rook answered. “Your mama call you Sticks? Then I ain’t gonna either.”

  A waitress arrived in a cloud of scent that was somewhere between knockoff perfume and nicotine addiction. “What’ll it be, hon?”

  “The steak special.”

  “Outta steak.”

  “Ribs with no sauce?”

  “We make ‘em how they ship ‘em. You want ribs, you get sauce.”

  Sticks sighed. “Just a hamburger patty.”

  The waitress raised an eyebrow. “Gotta charge you the same either way. You’re getting the blue plate special, do whatever you want with the stuff you don’t eat.” She pivoted and hustled away to the kitchen.

  “Come for the atmosphere, stay for the service,” Rook muttered. “You got a gluten allergy or something?”

  The kid smiled. “Nah, it’s just…I’m a meat-eater, you know? It’s all I can eat. Don’t like it when it has the tinge of other stuff on it.”

  “Interesting,” Rook said.

  “It’s a long story. It’s part of the journey. I’m on a dare of sorts, I guess. Took a job delivering something cross-country. Big payoff. Lotta rules.”

  “Well, if it’s drugs or contraband, you’re gonna have to find another ride.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” Sticks said, checking over his shoulders as he leaned in with the shiniest trust-me grin that Rook had seen this side of a used car dealership. “You ever hear of fringe archaeology?”