The Fever Dream

by Sam Jones

  Gibson, who was nearly a hundred percent positive that he couldn’t go through with the operation, gripped onto the handle of the scalpel with a tight fist. He turned around and faced Roenick, several moments passing as Gibson looked defiantly into the man’s cold blue eyes.

  “No,” he said.

  Gibson then swung the knife towards Roenick’s neck.

  Just as the blade was about to make contact with skin, Roenick caught Gibson’s arm, spun him around, twisted his wrist, and then used the momentum to force Gibson to stab himself in his own throat.

  Gibson fell forward and blood gushed out from under his chin in a Tarantino-like fashion, his eyes wide and mouth agape as silent screams vacated his lungs, the scalpel buried in about an inch and piercing through the bottom of his tongue.

  Roenick let the man bleed all over his shirt as Gibson slowly fell to the floor. He gripped onto Roenick’s pant leg with a clawed-up hand as life left his body.

  Kaplan and the remaining mercenary stared on, dumbfounded, as Roenick grabbed a towel and wiped some of the blood off his clothing.

  He then stepped over Gibson’s corpse, reached for a clean scalpel, and said—

  “I’ll do it myself.”

  The semi converged onto Highway 15.

  Black attempted to shoot the other SUV and take it out of the game, but the person posted up in the back seat returned fire from out of the rear windows with what appeared to be yet another submachine gun.

  Black and Cassie ducked as bullets peppered the right side of their car. Strays narrowly missed both of them.

  As soon as the commotion ceased and the person in the SUV went to reload, Black returned fire. The 93 and the 318 began to merge into a single road. The Land Rover and the SUV were now fifty feet away from one another as both cars began to take a significant amount of damage from the other’s gunfire.

  The sign for Highway 15 was coming up on the right, the semi a half-mile ahead of it.

  The SUV was getting ready to sideswipe the Land Rover. Cassie could make out Dez’s profile in the driver’s side, a concentrated and lethal look on her face.

  Determined to win.

  “Hold on,” Cassie said to Black as the roads completely merged.

  She slammed on the brakes, The Land Rover skidding and shaking as the SUV pulled in front of them. As soon as they had enough distance, Cassie accelerated and rear-ended the SUV. The car lurched forward about twenty feet as a result.

  Black, having just reloaded his rifle, leaned out the window of the Land Rover and began shooting at the rear tires of the SUV.

  Thirty rounds later he succeeded in tearing them apart.

  Smoke and chunks of rubber flew into the air as the SUV turned left, went up on its side, and flipped over itself six times. The black metal box compressed into a ball as the tires, axel, bumpers, glass, and damn near everything else was torn off and scattered along the highway.

  The Land Rover went around the remains of the SUV (and the blood and chunks of flesh that were now soaking the metal) and approached the rear of the semi.

  “Pull up along the right side,” Black said as he tossed the MK 18 into the back seat.

  “You trying to prove you’re flexible again?” asked Cassie.

  Black took out his Beretta and kept his eye line on the side door of the semi, the truck now a half-mile out and closing.

  “Something like that,” he replied as his index finger coiled around the trigger.

  Roenick held the scalpel over Amanda’s chest.

  “All units are down!” Kaplan shouted to him from the side door.

  “Very impressive,” Roenick said, his focus still on the scalpel.

  Just then, Amanda’s eyelids fluttered and opened. Her eyes immediately connected with Roenick’s as she realized her exposed and fucked up situation had reached a climax.

  “Go back to sleep, my dear,” Roenick said. “You don’t want to be around for this next part.”

  Amanda, in defiance of logic and physics, shot out her left arm and ripped it free from the restraints.

  Even Roenick was shocked at the turn of events.

  Amanda gripped the hand Roenick was clutching the scalpel with, the two of them now engaged in a tug-of-war for her submission.

  Outside, the Land Rover moved up along the right side of the truck.

  Black aimed his Beretta.

  Cassie pulled up to the side door.

  Black caught a glimpse of Kaplan and the mercenary in the doorway and fired—

  BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  Kaplan ducked back inside as the mercenary took all four rounds in the chest. He fell out of the side door and onto the road in a 90-mile an hour impact, the Land Rover then running over his body and turning him into a stain.

  The entire car rocked as Cassie drove over the body.

  “Eesh,” she said with a disgusted look on her face.

  Kaplan retook position and aimed his submachine gun at the windshield of the Land Rover.

  Cassie dodged left as bullets tore up the road, the Land Rover pulling into cover behind the semi.

  “Fuck this,” Black said as he holstered his weapon and crawled out of the car. “I’m going to hop on the back and work my way inside.”

  “And what the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime? Watch you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Black, his body halfway out of the window. “Improvise!”

  Cassie didn’t protest. She slowed the Land Rover as Black climbed out and mounted the hood, the rear end of the semi-truck now ten or so feet out. He could smell and feel the diesel fumes hitting his face. The heat from both the pavement and the behemoth semi formed an invisible and sweltering cloud around him.

  Black rolled two fingers in the air in a churning motion.

  Faster, Cas!

  She took the hint and hit the gas, the gap between the semi and the Land Rover just shy of a foot.

  Black spotted a handle welded into the backside of the truck. He held his breath and reached out towards it.

  Please don’t let me fall…

  The Land Rover made light contact with the rear end of the semi.

  Black jumped off the hood of the Land Rover and landed with a hard thud onto the back end of the truck, a satisfied grin on his face as he gripped onto the handle with both hands and held himself in place.

  His thoughts went back to his Resistance Training when he was fifteen—

  Climbing mountains while an instructor shot at you.

  What was his name…?

  Mister Enbom, that’s right!

  The scent of the diesel fumes brought him back to the moment. The road passing underneath him (now at a hundred miles an hour) was just one bad slip away.

  He refocused and scaled his way onto the roof of the vehicle. As soon as he was on top, he felt the force of the wind pushing him back. He laid his body flat, crawling towards the side door, which was twenty or so feet up and to the right. Each gust of wind nearly picked up Black and threatened to blow him off the top of the truck like a scrap of paper.

  This is going to be fun.

  Cassie pulled out her SIG and disengaged the safety.

  She steered the Land Rover away from the rear of the semi just as Black had made it to the top, his body now lying along the roof.

  Is he really going to scale his way inside?

  Cassie couldn’t help but smile.

  “Prick…”

  She accelerated and turned right, the Land Rover once again paralleling with the right side of the semi. Kaplan was just barely visible as he re-aimed his submachine gun out the door—

  RATATATATATAT!

  The windshield of the Land Rover started to look like Swiss cheese. Cassie laid a concrete foot down on the accelerator. Her distance was so dangerously close to the side of the monster vehicle to her left that she was in danger of being chewed up underneath its tires.

  She tore ass past the side of the semi as Kaplan’s bullets ripped apart the interior of the car. W
ith her body ducked low, and her left hand on the bottom of steering wheel, Cassie blindly unloaded her SIG out the right side of the Land Rover, her and Kaplan now exchanging gunfire from maybe five feet out—

  BAM! BAM! BAM!

  RATATATAT!

  BAM! BAM!

  Kaplan took two in his vest and fell backwards into the truck.

  Cassie took three in her own vest as well as she sped past the side of the semi. The feeling from the impacts hit like several fists burying into her chest and knocking the air out of her lungs.

  A ping emitted from under the hood of the Land Rover.

  Oil began to spray onto the windshield, splashes of it went through the holes in the glass and speckled across her face like freckles.

  Cassie cocked her head.

  Gimme a break…

  She hit the windshield wipers, the oil smearing and spreading a thick layer of brown across the glass.

  Cassie focused her breathing as the aching in her chest continued. She drove the Land Rover completely past the side of the semi and proceeded to pull in front of the cab.

  Improvise.

  Now fifteen feet ahead of the semi-truck, Cassie slowed the Land Rover, took off her seatbelt, and opened the sunroof above her head.

  Kaplan was on his back. He checked himself over for holes while Roenick continued his struggle with Amanda. Their limbs were entangled with one another, the scalpel still gripped in Roenick’s fist as he tried to smother her to death with his bodyweight.

  “It’s like I told before,” he said. “I admire your heart. Now be a good girl and give it over.”

  In a surprise move, Amanda craned her neck and managed to bite onto Roenick’s left ear with a Tyson-like chomp.

  Roenick pulled away as Amanda spit out a quarter-sized portion of his flesh onto the floor of the trailer with a wet smack, the flare in her eyes combined with the blood trailing out of the sides of her mouth made her look like a vampire.

  Roenick touched a hand to his now-deformed ear and smiled as Kaplan stood up and re-took his position by the side door.

  Amanda removed the rest of her restraints and grabbed her gown from off the floor. As she draped it over her shoulders, she saw the tiny incision that Gibson made in her chest between her bare breasts, still soaked with disinfectant; the wound itself was just beginning to clot as dried blood mixed with the brown fluid.

  Roenick pulled his Walther back out of his waistband and aimed it at Amanda, who stared back at him with a killer’s set of eyes.

  “Do it,” she said.

  Thumping noises rang out from above the semi.

  Roenick and Kaplan looked up.

  “Is that you, Martin?!” Roenick yelled.

  He turned to Kaplan and nodded.

  Kaplan raised his submachine gun towards the roof and fired.

  RATATATATAT!

  Multiple bullet holes punctured the roof to the right of Black.

  He quickly shimmied to the left as one of the rounds nearly clipped the thumb off his right hand.

  RATATATAT!

  Another burst of fire came through the roof, forming a line of holes an inch away from Black’s head.

  It’s gonna cut me in half!

  Black released his grip as the line of fire tore down the middle of the space where he had been laying.

  The high-speed winds outside then picked him up and threw him off the left side of the truck.

  Oh, shit!

  Cassie Palizzi was getting tired.

  The smoke from the soon-to-be dead engine of the Land Rover was getting into her lungs and made her face reek of oil and gas.

  “Suck it up,” she said to herself as she hovered her foot over the brake pedal; the Land Rover now consistently paced thirty feet ahead of the semi.

  She looked in the rear-view mirror and could make out the outline of the driver in the truck as she slowed the car and engaged the cruise control.

  Just then, she spotted Black tumbling across the roof and off the left side of the semi, his limbs flailing in the wind as he fell overboard.

  “Marty!” Cassie screamed.

  Right as he went over the side, his right hand shot out and gripped onto a cluster of bullet holes in the roof that provided him with something to hold onto. The rest of his body dangled, knees and feet slamming against the metal of the container. His fingers were getting cut open from the torn metal of the bullet holes. Blood was on his hands.

  He wouldn’t feel the ache until the morning.

  Cassie released the breath she had been holding onto.

  “Now pull yourself up, you little prick.”

  Black pulled himself up.

  He slipped.

  He planted his foot again, tightened his grip, and climbed.

  He remounted the roof of the semi and went flat. Once he was sure that he was anchored down by his weight; he gave a thumbs up to the Land Rover on the highway.

  Cassie honked the horn in reply.

  Black looked ahead and to the right and saw that the side door of the semi was only five feet away.

  “Here I come, assholes…”

  Roenick still had his Walther aimed at Amanda. “Is he dead?” he shouted to Kaplan.

  Kaplan poked his head out of the side door and scanned the road. “I don’t see anything,” he replied as he ducked back in.

  “Check again,” Roenick said to him.

  Kaplan turned his head back and found himself staring at the upside-down barrel of a Beretta, the hollowed center of the gun looked like a tunnel, leading to some barren abyss.

  “What’s up?” Black voice said from above. Flat.

  BAM!

  Kaplan’s head was split apart and his brains hit the wall behind him.

  Roenick turned just as the corpse fell to the floor. He fired his Walther at the space in the roof where Black was positioned.

  As soon as he depleted his magazine, Roenick waited for a trickle of blood or a body to roll off of the back.

  That’s when Amanda came up behind him and buried a curved pair of surgical scissors into his lower back.

  Cassie climbed out through the sunroof of the Land Rover.

  The Land Rover continued steady and straight, the main road now cutting up through a barren area that was made up of nothing but the red and brown sands of the desert.

  The semi-truck accelerated and honked at Cassie with a deafening blow of its horn. She perched herself on the roof of the Land Rover as the semi came up directly behind her.

  Just as the two cars made impact, Cassie jumped off the roof of the Land Rover and onto the grill of the semi. If not for her preoccupation, she would have discovered the tips of her fingers being singed by the heat of the engine.

  She quickly scaled onto the hood as the truck bashed into the back end of the Land Rover and sent it barreling off of the road. The vehicle flipped over itself before obliterating to pieces.

  The driver inside the semi produced a Glock.

  Cassie pulled her SIG.

  Cassie was the quicker draw. She unloaded three shots into the driver. Arterial spray doused the window in front of him.

  As Cassie holstered her weapon and kicked in the window, the glass showered the dead body of the driver whose arm was now tangled-up in the steering wheel and turning it right. The semi slowly began to veer off of the highway and towards a ditch in the side of the road that ran for a mile.

  Cassie climbed in and pushed his body into the passenger’s seat, then got behind the wheel and attempted to steady the massive weight of the vehicle.

  It was too late.

  Black, still on top of the semi with his Beretta drawn, felt the truck tilting to the right.

  Uh-oh…

  The entire vehicle creaked with a spine-tingling resonance that Black only associated with animals shrieking out when their lives were in danger.

  Inside the truck, Amanda and Roenick felt their centers of gravity shifting.

  Roenick braced against the wall as he realized the truck was o
n the cusp of tipping over.

  Just then, he realized that all of his men were dead.

  And he was about to join them.

  And there was nothing he could do about it.

  “Oh, well…” he said with a defeated sigh and aimed his Walther at Amanda.

  Amanda braced herself against the wall and shut her eyes.

  Cassie tried to crank the wheel left. Her forearms burned from the resistance. It was like she was trying to pull a tank uphill with a rope.

  Nope. Not happening.

  We’re tipping over…

  She clipped on her seatbelt and slammed on the brakes as the right side of the semi began to flip over completely.

  Cassie Palizzi then closed her eyes and told Amanda she was sorry.

  The truck was falling to the right.

  Martin Black saw the grim reaper waiting for him about two miles down the road with multiple questions for him.

  Black’s eyes went wide.

  “To hell with this!”

  In defiance of fate, he climbed across the roof of the semi as the whole thing began to roll. He scaled it like a wall and slipped in through the side door just as the truck made impact with the ground.

  The crash was brutally magnificent.

  The noise alone was enough to scare away the local wildlife for at least twenty miles. A hard discord of metal bending and tearing, rubber burning, and glass breaking rang out and pierced the eardrums of those unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.

  The truck fell onto its right side and dragged about three hundred feet before hitting a boulder that caused the semi to flip onto its roof, the cab now dangling upside down like the head of a lifeless giant. The semi continued to drag and tear up the ground beneath it.

  Inside the belly of the beast, the passengers were shaken and thrown about, all of them making impact with either pieces of medical equipment or the truck itself.

  It dragged for fifty more feet before coming to a dead stop, smoke and dirt clouds settled in the air as the truck wallowed out like it had an actual pulse and lungs for screaming.

  Anyone who was inside was either dead or unconscious.