Night Trip

by Peter Ackers

  "…INTO THE DANGER ZONE…"

  Some way down the motorway, my thoughts started to come slower. I could actually feel them chugging through my head as they faltered like cars approaching a motorway pile-up, until I could barely concentrate on anything but driving. I passed a junction with a sign telling me some place was 15 miles away, but I was past the sign before I could fathom the word written on it. That was when I realized that the night had indeed been a long one, and I was perhaps getting tired. The dashboard clock said it was passing 5.00 a.m.; the sky was lightening to announce a new day. I felt hot.

  I wound down the window to let in some fresh air, but that didn't help. In time, I started to feel sweat sticking my legs and trousers to the seat, my back to the backrest, and my head became harder to balance upon my neck. Surfer-dude's drug - was it wearing off, letting my true state of tiredness announce itself?

  The traffic was still light. The sun was creeping up, not yet visible but preceded by light permeating the darkness at the horizon ahead and to my right. I stared at it. The darkness in that area was becoming ragged with snakes and swirls of reddish light stabbing upwards and slowly expanding, as the sun's rays scoured away the night like a flame devouring a sheet of black paper.

  I slowed as a van and trailer filled my windscreen. Despite the low amount of traffic, the vehicle was moving slowly in the first lane. I noted the lettering on the back of the trailer, which stated that this was Big's Burger Bar. There was a settling in my stomach as I realized how hungry I was. All normal feelings were returning, it seemed. Much as you might wake after a night on the booze to greet a killer hangover, I was expecting my body to mutter the consequences of my exertions this night as the drug wore off.

  My stomach rumbled again. I made a decision. I needed a burger. Hopefully Burger-man would pull over soon and set up his bar. I wanted two cheeseburgers with relish. And a hot tea. Yes.

  But he didn't pull over, and my hunger pangs got worse. So eventually I pressed down on the accelerator and nudged ahead of Burger-man using the middle lane. I drew my van in front of his, eliciting a honk of his horn for my bravado. I checked the wing mirror and saw Burger-man's face in his windscreen, shaking, mouthing at me. This guy looked the sort who would not care about food hygiene when he was hawking burgers. Probably the sort who posted his van near nightclubs to attract the drunken, people who would happily pay through the nose when the smell of burning meat and bubbling cooking oil hit them after the stifling atmosphere of sweat and perfume and beer. Yesterday's burgers re-grilled into the high end of the danger zone before being slapped with rubbery cheese and squashed between stale bread discs made soft once more by microwave technology. I wondered how many victims this criminal might have clocked up; how many people throwing up their guts of a morning and blaming, not the uncooked food but the alcohol. Guy like Burger-man, he needed to be taught a lesson - two even, including how to cook the perfect burger.

  I put my hand out of the window and gave him the finger. He returned it. His mouth was still moving. I saw no passenger beside him or hands-free kit for a mobile phone strapped to his ear - I guess I was the guy he was talking to. But I couldn't risk taking my eyes off the dusky road long enough to lip-read his threats. So I slowed down, forcing him to slow, too, and he did so with a blare of his horn and a shake of his vehicle's head, as if he were trying to decide which side to pass me on. But he didn't pass, he slowed, and his horn went haywire, and then I pulled into the hard shoulder, and he pulled in, too. I could see a break in the hedge a short way off and I indicated and took the break slowly, like it had been my destination all along. A hundred metres down a worn track, I stopped. Burger-man was still on the horn, but now he let it alone and threw his door open, and out he came carrying an old-fashioned car jack, waving it at me, shouting about what he was going to do to my head with that implement.

  I had known this guy at college called Sammison, something Sammison. Not his original name, for he'd entered this country as a citizen when his parents bought a business off some other Indian family. In fact, maybe Sammison wasn't his name at all, instead just a Chinese Whisper of his name in my head now, some two years since his death.

  He had only just passed his test when he arrived in this country, but already his dad had bought him a brand new BMW that swamped his tiny frame. He flaunted that car and his money and his ego all round the college, and that had pissed a lot of people off. Including Karl Mack, a lawbreaking cunt who'd somehow landed a job in the college refectory. Mack watched and listened and plotted.

  En route home one day, Sammison was cut up by a guy on a moped. Mack lived close enough to the college to prefer to walk the journey, so no one knew he owned a cute green Vespa. A honk of the horn gained Sammison only a finger flipped back at him. Mack knew that when Sammison first arrived in this country, he'd been shown the finger and told that it was a kind greeting to one's elders and betters, and Sammison had shown tutors and parents and friends his good manners before learning the embarrassing truth, and since then when someone flipped him the bird, he went apeshit.

  Mack had known that the road he fled down to escape the guy coming after him in the BMW led only to a single housing estate, but he didn't intend to ride that far.

  Mack had known that despite all his judo training, the fall in a secluded part of the road was still going to hurt. Nonetheless, when his bike skidded as planned, he flipped off the vehicle, rolled a few times and came to a halt, grabbing his leg, moaning.

  Nobody knew that Mack had narrowly avoided prison for stealing cars. Nobody knew he went equipped for this with a long screwdriver that was also his weapon of choice.

  Burger-man didn't know about Sammison and Mack, or that I knew about them. Might he have been surprised to learn that a car jack was actually the very implement that Sammison had approached Mack with, shouting the same threats and "lunatic driving" insults? If he had known about the Mack case, might he have felt a flicker of fearful recognition when I jumped out of the stopped van, squelched rapidly through the mud, and raised the long knife I found in the van's glove box? A kind of Shit, this is a trap recognition.

  "Knees," I said, indicating with the tip of the blade that he should get down. He did so, his mouth moving as if it were practicing a plea I might soon hear. One hand was up in a defensive gesture, and his splayed fingers looked so inviting I nearly lopped them off with a single swipe. On his knees in a muddy track a hundred metres from the quiet motorway, Burger-man began to feel his mortality like a heavy meal in the gut. His lip quivered.

  "Take the van, man," he said. "I don't need it." His expression held more fear than his voice, which surprised me. He almost sounded like a man trying to make a business deal rather than a plea for his life.

  "Why would a dead man?" I said, slowly, watching for his reaction.

  "Nah, man, don't kill me. I ain't seen your face or nothing. Don't know you."

  "But you've seen enough. The police will put you under hypnosis and you'll remember. I can't take the risk."

  "I won't, I won't let them. I'll forget all about you. You can come back and kill me if I do, I promise."

  I almost laughed. "That's very kind, thanks," I said instead.

  Both hands were up now. He looked like a man pushing against an invisible wall. "If you kill me, man, the cops, they'll do tests and shit. Blood spatter, you'd never get away from it -"

  "I'll dump my clothing, burn them."

  " - the knife wounds, they'll know what to look for, check all the shops, find where you bought it -"

  "I found it in a field, and it'll go back into one afterwards."

  " - witnesses. People who saw you, saw me-"

  "I'll kill them all, too."

  " - DNA on my body, your footprints in the mud, satellite photos of the killing-"

  "How long does it take you to cook a burger?"

  It didn't even throw him: he came back quickly with an answer of "five minutes." I considered this. Five minutes, no way. Not unless you use
d a blowtorch. So I put it to him: make me a burger in five minutes and I'll let you go.

  I watched him carefully as he first got to his feet, then moved to his trailer and slung the rear door wide. He seemed to be torn between that doorway to his right and the dirt track to his left. A hundred metres down that track was gateless gateway in the perimeter hedge, and Burger-man was surely thinking of running, hoping to beat me over the hundred-metre dash, and hoping to flag down someone who would help him and overlook his crimes.

  Deciding against valour, it seemed, Burger-man entered the trailer, and a few seconds later the serving hatch opened. I almost expected him to ask me what I'd like on my burger and be all smiles about it.

  I watched him hook up the griddle to a large gas bottle, turn on the overhead light and arrange the utensils he needed. He moved with all the professionalism of a surgeon getting ready to operate. I was suspicious. When he reached into a cooler by his feet, under the griddle, I skipped away from the serving hatch and round to the back, quickly stepping up and inside, making sure that Burger-man saw the knife in my right hand as I held out my left.

  "Give that to me."

  Slowly, Burger-man held out a plastic storage box, and I took it. I could see through the clear plastic, see the meat inside. I set the container down and flipped off the lid.

  It was full of raw burgers, but they had been haphazardly thrown in, not stacked, so that they were all deformed, some pulled apart, some bent so out of shape they looked more like balls of meat ready for a rolling pin. And the container was slightly warm to the touch. I looked down at the small cooler by Burger-man's feet.

  "Is that cooler turned on?"

  The guy looked a bit put out by that question, and I knew immediately what the answer was - the real answer.

  "Yeah, it's a special one," Burger-man said. "Keeps warm things warm and cold things cold together. The cans of pop are cold, the meat I keep lukewarm to keep the bacteria dormant."

  Yeah, like the old joke about the idiot who gets a flask that keeps hot things hot and cold things cold, so he puts coffee and a choc ice in it. If he'd tried to convince someone who didn't know anything about food hygiene, he would have gotten away with it. Unfortunately, the guy was a twat if he thought someone my age could spend his whole life without learning that stored meat needs to be kept chilled. Bad luck, Burger-man.

  I moved forward, urging Burger-man back with the knife. I bent, put my hand in the cooler and closed my fingers around a can of fizzy soft drink. It was warm. Everything was warm, including the fucking cooler because it wasn't even plugged in. The cooler, thus, was nothing more than a box that became a small greenhouse when the door was shut. Given a couple of months in there, I think the burgers might have eventually cooked by themselves. But for now they were probably home to enough parasites to cover the number of extras in a bacterial version of the film Ghandi. What kind of fucking idiot did he think I was?

  "Good, don't want food poisoning," I said. "Cook away. Five of them, please."

  He worked like a good little cook. He almost seemed to be enjoying himself, despite the threat hanging over his head. I went back outside and round to the serving hatch to let him work. I stood there like a regular customer as he did his thing. He peeled five burgers out of their container, two of which he had to assemble like a mini-jigsaws, and slapped them onto the griddle, and within two minutes they needed flipping. As he somersaulted the burgers onto their raw side, I saw surface burning on the cooked sides but red juice running from them. The griddle was set too high, way up on level six. No way could it safely cook the insides, even though the burgers Burger-man used were paper-thin.

  Soon the first burger was visually cooked and Burger-man scooped it up with a pair of tongs and slid it between the halves of a bun that he pried partly open, so it resembled Pacman swallowing a giant brown pixel. No Pacman ghosts here, although I might become one if I chose to eat that burger. It was undercooked, had been festering in a warm box for ages, and the bread was probably stale. It would be dangerous to eat that burger.

  "No, no, you have the first one," I said. I almost raised the knife but didn't: that would have indicated my belief that there was something wrong with the burger, and instead I wanted to see Burger-man's reaction. Would he accept, to fool me, or would he refuse and hope my offer was not some play but genuine kindness?

  He just looked at me, still holding out the burger. "I ain't eating five burgers, man." His eyes went to the stick of wood jammed between the corner of the serving hatch and the hatch cover, propping it open. Looked as if he was planning to slam and lock the hatch, sealing himself inside, if I suddenly turned aggressive.

  "Toast me a bun. I liked the buns toasted."

  He shrugged. Certainly didn't come across like a man who had been threatened to perform at knifepoint. Suddenly I started growing suspicious. Was he keeping me here, sidetracked by burgers, while rescuers came? Or maybe given this guy's job, he was no longer surprised by people stopping him in improbable places to order fast food.

  When he started tucking into the burger with one hand and toasting my bun with the other, I figured my last theory might be on the ball. We've all seen the hawkers outside nightclubs and stadiums and colleges, selling their crap. I heard about one guy whose trailer was tipped down a grass bank, onto a train track; a couple whose trailer was quietly hooked up to someone else's car and dragged away from a hungry queue. Pub gossip. So tonight over a pint Burger-man could regale his audience (those who didn't have food poisoning) with the tale of the young lunatic who was in such desperate need of food that he forced a burger vendor off the road and made him cook a meal at five in the morning.

  I felt let down. I had hoped to do my bit and put one of these dangerous hawkers out of business, but now it seemed I had picked the wrong guy. The way Burger-man wolfed down his burger, either he was sure it was cooked, or he didn't realise the dangers. Either way, it implied that he didn't knowingly hand over dangerous food, and I felt that whisked him out of my crosshairs.

  Burger and bun were ready. Pacman took a swallow and a big arm held the finished product towards me. I raised both hands, palms outward, fingers splayed: no thanks. I patted my stomach as if to say, Gotta watch the figure, turned, and walked away quickly. Burger-man had been the latest strange fellow in a night of strange fellows, and in ways the most unnerving. I half-expected to start feeling the impact of burgers lobbed like shuriken at my back. Why did darkness bring out the freaks?

  Hey, you're one of them, a voice said inside me. I laughed out loud, which caught Burger-man's attention.

  He hadn't looked offended that I'd refused his burgers; in fact, he was starting to pack up, as if at the end of a grueling shift. He shouted over, asking what I found funny, and it was genuine curiosity in his tone. Had he forgotten that I was the guy who'd pulled a blade on him, forced him off the road, coerced him into cooking food in the middle of a field? Maybe.

  "Just laughing at some people's naivety," I said. "You dodged a bullet this morning and don't even know it?"

  "Eh?"

  I trod a higher path than this guy and decided he wasn't worth any more of my energy. I walked away, my job here done, if not exactly completed.