Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  The car slid off the road and into someone’s yard. And that someone came shambling out of his house. I squinted, making out the swarms of flies following him through the front door. The man was naked from the waist up, as if maybe he’d been lying in his recliner, having a beer, watching his favorite football team snort cocaine and run interference when some fool came driving up onto his lawn. Now he was coming toward the car. His face was rotten flesh, his head badly ripped apart, and you could see into the gorge, his bloody brain. A substance similar to jelly curdled out his ears, and a putrid cream, more like a creeping yeast, dribbled from his nipples to mat in his chest hair.

  I screamed like an eight-year-old girl watching The Exorcist all by herself in a big empty house at midnight. I expected this rotten dead dude to reach into the car and tear me apart like a rag doll.

  But instead, he said, “Howdy, mister. You’ve reached your

  destination.” His voice was damply husky. “You’re in the Land of the Dead.” He grinned, and there were maggots squirming in the gaps between his rot-black teeth.

  I screamed again as I stepped on the gas. I still had no traction, because I was in the dirt. Mud sprayed all over the place, hitting the windshield, the house, and the swarms of flies retreated a bit. Were they afraid they’d get dirty?

  And that man with the exposed brain was still coming toward me. He was getting closer and closer and closer, stumbling like the zombies in those Romero movies. You know the kind—they’re so plodding, you can’t fucking believe the other living-meat cast members can’t outrun them. And yet I wasn’t exactly getting away swiftly, was I? Yeah, it’s always easier from the armchair nightmare’s perspective.

  Then the car jerked forward. It started moving. I wobbled onto the road, did a donut on the blood-drenched surface of the street, and turned the car in the opposite direction.

  “Come back. You belong here,” the man said, spitting worms. He lifted an aberration of an arm, and I could see right down into the gouged armpit, as if it were the gangrenous entrance to a tunnel.

  I kept the pedal to the metal, and the car lurched as fast as it could, which wasn’t all that fast, down the road.

  Something was bubbling in front of the car, effervescing out of the blood. I drove over it, unable to stop or swerve and not really willing to change my direction from forward and outta there. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw it bubbling in the car’s frothy wake, too. My gut did the same. Man, was I nauseous, and at this point, truly ready to shit my pants, but I just told myself, No, this is a sick dream, a concussion nightmare. Don’t shit your pants, or else you’ll show up in the emergency room packing a load. No doctor is gonna rush to save Mr. Poopy Pants.

  Nothing came out, though. Either out of the street or out of me.

  I did a double take in the rearview mirror. The sign welcoming me to the Land of the Dead was gone.

  I was being taken out on the backboard, head strapped down with the goose egg on my skull trapped and pounding. Leather restraints that would have done a dominatrix proud pressed hard against my neck and shoulders. There was no padding on those like on a regular gurney. It’s like riding on a marble slab from the coroner’s office. And they’re cold, too. That was the reason I was shivering uncontrollably, right?

  At least I was back in the real world—but my situation hadn’t improved. I’d gone from surreal nightmare hell to plain old everyday car accident hell, the kind you see on the news. Could I whisper a safe word to get out of all this? Feelings of panic, claustrophobia, pain, and nausea were overwhelming. I was afraid I would vomit while strapped down on my back, choking on it, suffocating on a crimson tide of half-digested pizza. Was there a more helpless way to go?

  My world was a dizzy mix of fear and fantasy. It felt like I’d just watched The Wizard of Oz and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the same time. On acid. Things were either gaudy and blurred or stamped out in stark gritty focus.

  “I thought you were a goner,” the paramedic said.

  “Why didn’t you stay there? You were where you belonged,” someone added softly, as if murmuring right up against the leather strap around my forehead.

  I blinked at the paramedic. “What?”

  “I said, I thought you were a goner,” the man replied, smiling with compassion as if he understood how I felt.

  But he didn’t know. No way.

  “He’s one lucky motherfucker. It’s not every day you survive getting hit by a truck.”

  That didn’t sound like a paramedic or a doctor. It was much too old a voice. It must have belonged to the truck driver, the one who’d smashed my car up like an empty beer can underfoot.

  “Yep. He sure is lucky,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AFTER THE CRASH

  Pain, pain, go away—fuck me up another day echoed in my head. It sounded like a choir of sadistic schoolchildren, getting off on my misery.

  And all these little bratnicks were pulling semiautomatic weapons out of their Pokémon lunch boxes and Beanie Babies backpacks. I could see them—each with one enormous eye—drawing a bead on me down the gunsights.

  I had fallen asleep on the couch again. I’d been watching some lame Saturday morning cartoon and had drifted off. After the crash, I found watching TV to be a difficult task. Commercials felt like movies because they seemed so damn long. And real movies were far too complicated for me to follow in my pain-induced fog.

  I suddenly remembered an old commercial. I hadn’t seen it for a few years, but now it was coming back to haunt me. It had shown a glib Christopher Reeve in a wheelchair saying something like, “Don’t let your disabilities disable you.” But when you’re paralyzed, hospitalized for several months, and you can’t even turn your head to see the person next to you, then yes, you are disabled. Sorry, Superman. I’d admired his spunk at the time, but now he was dead and I was totally fucked.

  Okay, let’s forget about the inconvenience of the discomfort, even though the pain was like a beast gnawing at my insides all the way down to the nerves, the bone, and right inside the marrow. The drugs lasted only so long, and then the beast returned.

  And the beast was back with a vengeance that day. I looked at the clock—ten minutes to noon. That seemed like an eternity, yet I had a strict schedule for my meds. But I just couldn’t wait.

  I now saw my life in two different stages. Before the Crash (BC) and After Demolition (AD). None of that politically correct, nonreligious before the Common Era crap for me. BC and AD. In my mind, I could wrangle my sense of calendar around a sympathy with innocents being thrown to lions in an arena of death.

  I couldn’t believe it had been nine months since the commencement of AD. How time flies when your life is falling apart.

  But then, BC—aka my regularly scheduled life—had been heading toward a crash anyway. I hadn’t really realized it before, but the pain was making me see everything in a shitty new light. I’d been skating on academic probation at the University of Dallas, because I was working too many hours making deliveries at Mr. Pizza. I didn’t have rich parents, unlike some of my coed cohorts. I didn’t have a scholarship or any financial aid. In fact, my dad and stepmom, Irene, were in debt because of her family farm.

  After Mom’s death, Dad had quit the insurance biz, and we moved around for a while. Dad had a few odd jobs here and there. Eventually he met Irene the Farm Queen and married into that money pit. Yep, he’d married a farmer’s daughter. In time they inherited her daddy’s farm and all the bills that went with it.

  Dad had figured that farming was the way to go. He’d grown up on a farm himself, and he’d thought that whatever he’d forgotten, Irene could teach him. But even so, Irene couldn’t show him how to grow a money tree. The only thing he grew was more in debt. One good thing did come out of this union, however. My stepsister, Caitlin, joined the family. She was Irene’s daughter from a previous marriage, and she was pretty cool. She was six years older than me, but she had a fun sense of humor and never looked down
on me, so I always thought of her as being my same age.

  I’d had a pretty good relationship with my dad, so I was shocked when he didn’t even come to see me in the hospital. The farm was too far away, he told me on the phone. The chores were keeping him way too busy. He hoped I was okay, but the bills were really mounting up on the farm, so hopefully insurance would take care of me. After all, he’d been in the insurance business and had helped a lot of folks get back on their feet.

  But now Dad didn’t have a minute or a penny to spare for his own son.

  I’d cried for about an hour after that call. At what point had my dad turned into such an asshole? In college, I’d known there was never any family dough to fall back on, so I’d always worked hard and studied harder. Even though it took a substantial toll on my relationship with my girlfriend, Sheryl. But now, at the time when I needed his help the most, I was only worth a quick call. Guess he didn’t want to pay any long-distance charges.

  I had to tell myself: it’s not Dad talking—it’s the debt. He’d told me often enough that bills were eating the farm alive. I knew that for a fact. The farm was over six figures in the hole. And it was over a hundred miles away from the hospital. He couldn’t afford to pay anyone to take care of the daily chores while he visited me. Even though it was the hard truth, it still felt like a punch in the gut. It was as if my folks had abandoned me and I was alone in the world.

  I would have sunk into total despair if Moose hadn’t stopped by my room sometimes to cheer me up. And of course, he brought Boom-Boom. Besides “Boom, boom, out go the lights,” the sock frog had one other pet phrase—“Rub it. Rub it.” Moose used that as a come-on for girls, but it never worked. I’ve got to admit, seeing that ridiculous frog with Moose’s big hand stuck up its sock poop chute always used to make me laugh.

  He tried to sweet-talk the nurses with Boom-Boom, but they’d merely respond with condescending smiles. I knew they wished they could tell him that the only rubbing he was going to get was from the sock, but that was simply not the nursely way.

  “Rub it. Rub it,” he intoned to one red-haired nurse. “Boom-Boom wants to come over to your pad.”

  She gave Moose a tired smile and said, “Sure. You can babysit my kids while I go see a movie.”

  Sheryl visited me only once in the hospital, and it was an awkward experience. She sat in a chair facing the window and hardly said a word. She cried the entire time she was there, which was brief. After that, I never heard from her again. She was probably afraid I’d become too much of a scarred freak for her.

  So what about AD? I had to drop out of the University of Dallas, because of all the costs associated with the accident. The loss of income was bad enough, but to make matters worse—shit, what could be worse than being this physically fucked up?—the truck driver’s insurance company refused to pay for anything.

  I’d tried and failed to get a lawyer to take the case. In Texas, 80 percent of juries sitting on accident suits weren’t awarding to the injured parties anymore. Neither were judges. The average and never-having-been-crushed-before citizens were tired of high insurance premiums, the insurance companies having duly convinced them that this was due to people faking injuries to scam big settlements.

  Apparently all that crashing and smashing was a hoax, right? Yeah, okay, there probably were some cons out there. But what the hell about the rest of us? Crippled. Pretzeled. Lives rearranged courtesy of a Detroit steel Cuisinart.

  I was far from faking my injuries. Far? We’re talking light-years. My paralysis hadn’t lasted, thank God, but no thanks to the insurance company and the laws of the great state of Texas. Pinched vertebrae had been fixed—sort of. The pressure on my brain from the concussion I’d suffered was lessening with time. But my lower back had been given such a savage twist that I now had one leg shorter than the other. The lumbar and cervical muscles were torn and would require more months to heal than the broken bones in my face. And speaking of that face, my boyish good looks were now puffy and scarred. Good thing I hadn’t been counting on a career in modeling.

  God, it made me furious to think I was categorized as a cheat.

  I permitted myself revenge in dreams only. I would hire those taunting school kiddies with their crazy-ass guns, then take my band of juvenile mercenaries into the offices of the insurance company. “Fake this” would be our war cry. But somehow, the revenge fantasy always went wrong. The offices of the satanic insurance adjusters dissolved into a bloody street scene with curbs like snake spines lined with ghastly feeding troughs.

  Eventually I was released from the hospital. I might have been physically ready for this step, or the hospital’s administration might have discovered my balance due was going up. My own insurance company had paid a few initial bills with the policy’s PIP, Personal Injury Protection. But $2,500 doesn’t go far with those kinds of major medical expenses. The doctors probably looked at me and saw a big black hole.

  So after all that, including the aforementioned dropping out of college, I moved in with my stepsister, Caitlin. My dad hadn’t invited me to move back to the farm, but that wouldn’t have been a possibility anyway. It would have been too far away from any facility that might offer the kind of physical therapy I needed.

  Caitlin lived in a small one-bedroom apartment on Jupiter Road in Garland. She wasn’t even a blood relative but was ready to do a lot more for me than my own dad. Caitlin used to bail me out of trouble when I was a kid, and now she seemed happy to do it again.

  This distance put me pretty far from Sheryl, but that was okay. She couldn’t handle the scarred flesh, so she was out of the picture. During my life BC, I had been average-guy cute—girls used to call me cute, so that’s not just me talking. But AD, I resembled Frankenstein’s monster more than Leonardo DiCaprio. I’d have been more handsome without the face. Leonardo DeCapitated.

  Moose later told me he’d seen Sheryl at the mall with some new guy from campus. My luck was going from bad to swirling down the shitter.

  I enrolled in Richland College, still in Dallas but only ten miles from the apartment in Garland. It took an hour by bus, because of the different transfers and delays.

  Public transportation was a joke in the Dallas metropolitan area. The city officials kept promising a five-year plan, then another five-year plan and another and so on. The city was too spread out to realistically get around via public transportation. To live and work there, you had to own a car. You were pretty much screwed without one.

  I had to go to physical therapy three times a week, feeling groggy and sick to my stomach from the assorted anti-inflammatory, pain, and muscle relaxant meds.

  “Did you take your medicines?” Caitlin would say. “All of them?” And she would try to sneak a multivitamin into the mix, too, which was nice of her, but did I really need yet another pill?

  Caitlin wasn’t my only caregiver. “Good morning,” Rochelle, my therapist, would chirp as I was ushered into a curtained cubicle. “How are you feeling? Better? Worse? How would you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, one being the least amount of pain and ten being the most?”

  Can you bend this way? That way? Turn your spine into a Slinky? Put your face up your ass? Rotate your head so fast you end up smiling through the back of your neck?

  Then she’d hook me up to electrodes, have me lie back on a heating pad hidden under a barrage of moist towels, and do an electrical muscle stimulation that tweaked and pinched for the next twenty minutes, which seemed like an eternity.

  “Today we’re going to add a new exercise,” she enthused one morning.

  That was all I needed. Throw yourself down this flight of stairs ten times and then crawl back up as fast as you can. Okeydokey?

  Then Rochelle did traction, jamming my head into a boot device that pulled it slowly away from my shoulders, using my neck for elastic. Now, to her credit, she let me have control of the button, so it couldn’t pull too hard. But out of the skewed corner of my eye, I’d see her peeping in at me whenev
er I’d scream and mash the damned button, trying to convince the inquisitor’s instrument to let me go. I promised to tell it any sins I’d committed, confessed to being a witch, and described in detail the evil sabbats I’d attended.

  “That not helping?” Rochelle would tut-tut and tsk-tsk, keeping up that cheerleader smile even as she squinted at me as if it were all my own fault. “Odd, most of our patients love this. Well, let’s try a little massage.”

  Oh yes. Let’s. Unfortunately, her massages never worked their way south of the belly button, where I could have used the most tender loving care. Hey, Florence Nightingale probably would have given me a sympathy hand job, right?

  She spread lotion on me. The stuff was called Tei Fu, and I had to admit it was wonderful, penetrating like a tidal wave of ice and raw, sunny scorch. I actually started to relax as she gently smoothed this over my neck and down the rumpled spine to the twisted hips, caressing my naked buttocks with it.

  Then she began to dig in her fingertips. Pillow pressing against my cheekbones, I had the unappealing sensation of the damaged muscles there crawling, my face changing. Changing into what?

  “I can feel the muscle spasms in your lumbar. It’s like there’s a bunch of ants in there. And there’s still hardness in these damaged cervical tendons,” Rochelle commented as I squirmed and jerked.

  Try not to jump. Relax. Think of something soothing. Like a giant space crab coming along to scoop out all your injured muscles and strew them steaming on starry sand, so there’s nothing left to hurt. Or maybe a nuclear holocaust that leaves no more armies to fight and no one around to hate anymore.

  Then she did an ultrasound, using a wand to deliver warm pulses into the muscles to further relax them. Rochelle lastly applied a layer of hydrocortisone cream in gauzy patches at the worst points across my back where she’d detected major muscle spasms. The patches were affixed with about three feet of tape apiece.

  “Leave them on for eight hours, then peel them off,” she said.