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1
P.T.
The hot rain runs like tiny rivers across the thick glass of my rig’s windshield. Swiped clear by an infantry of thick rubber wipers, it reappears instantly. Almost foaming by the time it runs red. Crystals of colored light dancing through a pulsing wound that won’t stop.
Pinching my eyes shut. I seeheragain. The girl.
The blood.
The same face that’s haunted me for half my life, grinning back at me this time in my mind’s eye. Silently urging me to keep my eyes shut. Willing me to press my foot harder on the gas.
It happens. Truckers crack. And not just from rocks in a glass pipe to stay awake for three days straight.
Death by truck isn’t always someone hurling themselves in front of an eighteen wheeler doing a hundred miles an hour. Lot of truckers already have their spot picked out. Might be a giant tree someplace, might be a nice corner of a winding mountain road with a three hundred-foot drop.
It would only be for a moment. The fear. The pain. But what’s one moment more compared to a lifetime of it?
A big bang and maybe the sensation of falling before it finally stops. Before a man can finally get the rest he’s been craving since he stepped into the cabin of his rig twenty years ago.
But tonight, for this trucker anyway, the flashing red and blue of highway patrol mixed with a few wailing bursts of the siren somehow cut through the rain on the windshield as well as my own dark thoughts. Cuts through the kind of spell that only the dead can cast. The memories of my past vanishing as I snap fully awake to attention. My foot easing onto the air brakes instead of the gas as twenty tons of steel and rubber shudders to a slow and protracted halt.
The barrel of my .44 pressed against the armrest is level with the unusually tall patrolman's head once he trots up to the driver’s side of my rig. An already drenched plastic poncho and felt hat, coupled with his penguin that just shat himself trot of a jog letting me know he’s about as happy to stop me as I am to be stopped.
“You uh… You wanna see my logbook?” I call down, my window cracked open just enough to show my face. The rain like tiny whips against my still straining to see straight features. The hammer of the gun cocking back. My finger curling around the curve of the steel trigger.
But there’s no need for that. Not tonight. Not on this run.
Not yet anyway.
“…You gotta tail light out, fella.” He calls up, jerking a thumb in the air towards the back of my rig.
“…Roadhouse is a mile ahead so I’d recommend you get it fixed.Tonight.” He adds with a grimace, giving me the ‘I’m on my way home and don’t have time for this shit’ face but at least he’s doing his job right.
The edge of my mouth creases into the closest thing to a smile I can manage. The hand cannon pointed at his drooping felt hat feeling heavier in my hand as I ease the safety back on.
“I’m heading there right now.” I lie. But he’s already nodding to himself before turning on his heel.You’re damned right you are… Making me get all hunting dog wet. And right at home time too…
But I’m glad he did stop me. Better here in a downpour than the wrong guy at the border with a Kevlar vest and scoped assault rifle. But it hasn’t helped my mood any. Only reminding me that I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t when it comes to this ‘last run’.
Damned when it comes to my whole miserable existence, it seems.
The nasally, weasel-like voice of my boss ringing in my ears and churning in my thoughts. All mixed in with the same bloodied face of the girl. Still trying to drag me down six feet under with her after all these years.
But I never laid a hand on her. I only gave her a ride…
I pinch the bridge of my nose and run my hands over my face. Gripping my head as if it can make it all stop.
‘No stops. Not for anything, or Any-Fucking-One…Capeesh!?’ My nameless boss had warned me. More anal than usual about this cargo for some reason.
The last run… And already my gut’s telling me it will be somehow.
I growl to myself, annoyed. Finally rubbing the spot at the side of my head where that skinny rake actually had the gall to slap me. Knowing too that it’ll be more than a slap on the head if they find out I broke the one rule, theonlyrule: Don’t stop the rig for anything.
The faded red neon of the roadhouse signage flickers in the torrent up ahead. Through the javelin sheets of angry rain still whipping the glass, I squint and curl my lip again.
Leaning back and forward like a sneering drunk in the wind, the aging sign’s been damaged at some point in its long history. Reading ‘F UCKSTOP’ at a glance,on account of the missing ‘R’ and wonky ‘T’.
And with signage like that, I’m surprised the place isn’t packed. But it’s like so many of these places now. A ghost town relic from the past that somehow manages to stay open. And at a glance, I feel my insides clench tighter and it’s nothing to do with the other uneasy feeling.
