by Rio Youers
“I appreciate that, but I’ll be fine. Only a few more hours ahead of me.”
This is a lie, but the truth was none of the kid’s business.
The clerk nods absently, scanning the last item, tossing it in a plastic bag. “Where ya headed?”
Brandon hesitates.
How a man faces death—or flees from it—is a private matter.
“Home,” he says. “I’ve been traveling for work.”
This, too, is a lie.
Or is it?
His brow furrows as he tries to remember—
The truth.
Yes, the truth.
But what does that even mean?
Truth is subject to interpretation, filtered through your own perception.
But what if your barn is shot so full of holes that all the chickens just slip out to hunt pattern-eels in the dead of night?
Barn?
Chickens?
Not that. Your brain, not your barn. What if your brain is so rotted and full of holes that all your thoughts—true or otherwise—escape you . . . what do you do then?
Brandon lies to the clerk because he knows the young man will not understand the truth. He is on the run, fleeing something vicious and unforgiving, trying to shake a relentless dead man on lonely stretches of blacktop weaving through the fields and hills and forests, past truck stops and secluded strip clubs and oh-so-many cruel and mocking mile markers.
And even if he could understand the truth, the clerk will be gone soon.
The surroundings already displayed signs—symptoms—of the encroaching Blight.
“Traveling for work, huh?” The clerk shakes his head and sucks his teeth. “That’s rough. Well, I can’t even imagine being away from my Kendra for that long. Working this counter, there ain’t much special about it, but at least I get to see her when I get home.”
Brandon eyes the total on the cash register, hands some crumpled bills to the kid, and scoops up his purchases. He doesn’t wait for change before turning away. “Tell Kendra I said hello.”
The clerk cocks his head, his brow furrowed.
“What’s that?” he says. “Who’s Kendra?”
“Sorry, I thought you said—” Brandon catches himself. He must remember that the Blight is close now, tendrils flowing in around him, waiting to envelop him completely. “Never mind.”
He shuffles out the door and across the lot. In a parking spot near the front door, a fourteen-foot centipede waits. Its chitinous hide glistens wetly from the misty drizzle. It has a saddle on its segmented back and handlebars sticking out of the back of its head. It must belong to the other traveler, the kid who is visiting the store’s facilities. Brandon gives the creature plenty of space as he moves toward his car. He tears the no-doze packet open, popping the pills, chasing them with a five-hour energy shot, chasing that with a swig of coffee. He yanks the nozzle out of the tank, returns it to the pump, then slides back behind the wheel.
From the window of the store, the clerk watches him.
Who the fuck was Kendra? Where did that name come from? He digs deep, trying to remember where he might have heard the name. Maybe it was someone he had known in college, in high school. Maybe he worked with her at some point. She might have been one of the many faceless co-workers who rotated in and out of one of the many forgettable jobs he’d held over the years.
That’s how the Blights works.
Sometimes, it called up long forgotten names or faces. Sounds. Bits of church hymns you might’ve sang when you were four. Sudden, sharp smells and tastes. Your mouth might water at the thought of a ribeye you ate 30 years ago. Goosebumps might rise on your skin as you recall in vivid detail a drunken one-night stand that you barely remembered the day after it occurred.
Even as he speeds out of the parking lot, the muscles of Brandon’s neck and shoulders tighten. The sudden burst of energy from the coffee and the no-doze and the energy shot is already draining away. He is already . . . dead . . . behind the wheel. He shifts in his seat, hoping the movement will keep him awake long enough for him to put some distance between himself and the expanding borders of the Blight.
The desire for sleep pulls at him.
If he sleeps, though, he might meet the same fate as the world around him.
If he sleeps, he might wake up different.
***
Pale, emaciated figures running alongside the car, keeping pace at 80 miles an hour.
They look sickly, but they move fast. They glide along the road, moving in a unified herd. They know the terrain so well they don’t need to watch where they’re going. Instead, they look toward the car.
Their faces are blank. They have been wiped away. Erased.
One of the faceless white things breaks away from the others, turns sharply, darts out into the highway.
The car swerves.
The brakes catch on slick pavement.
The car jerks to a stop.
Headlights wash over pale skin, making it glow.
And then the errant creature comes apart, like a puff of smoke, vanishing, as if it was never there in the first place.
The others have stopped, and they stand alongside the road, as still and as straight as signposts, waiting, watching without eyes.
When the car starts to move again, so do they.
They are pilot fish swimming in the wake of a shark, eating scraps.
***
Another hundred miles, and Brandon’s eyes betray him. He glimpses movement in his peripheral vision. He slams on the brakes for no reason at all, and he spills what’s left of his coffee all over his lap. It’s gone cold. He tries to blink the hallucinations away, but when he closes his eyes, they resist opening once more.
And he can’t sleep, no matter how much he wants to, not even for a second.
Somewhere out there, the dead man stalks him. He never relents, never gives up. And when Brandon sleeps, that’s when he moves most quickly.
The dead man created the Blight Engine—a great, grinding mass of gears and pistons, with towering smokestacks. Instead of smoke, the pipes billow horror and insanity, an endless deific cloud of it slowly spreading across the sky, mutating anything it touched. Brandon saw it in a nightmare the last time he slept, the night before he rushed out to his car, left everything and everyone behind, and . . .
. . . just . . .
. . . started . . .
. . . driving.
He left his wife and son at home.
No, not a son. He’s remembering wrong. He always wanted a son, but he has daughters.
How many?
Just the one, and her name is—
Kimmy?
He crept out in the dead of night, jumped into the car, and drove.
He had no destination in mind. He only wanted to avoid getting swept up in the Blight for as long as possible. He had not told his wife and son—his daughter—about his plan because he knew they would try to stop him. The infection . . . the entropic influence . . . had already seeped into their flesh.
Knowingly or not, his family served the dead man now.
And the dead man hated Brandon almost as much as he hated the world.
***
And, lo, the dead man so hated the world that he deemed to destroy it.
He started small, so no one would notice, so no one would rally against him.
Methodical.
Patient.
But now, he pushed his machine to the limits, filling the world with strange terrors.
All because one man had discovered him.
***
Red and blue lights flash in the rearview. Brandon looks up, squints at the glare. A state trooper’s cruiser rides his bumper.
Brandon pulls to the side of the road, and the trooper’s car pulls up behind him. He leans to the side, watching in the side view mirror as the trooper gets out of his car and dons a hat covered in plastic. The trooper moves alongside Brandon’s car slowly. Brandon rolls his window down.
“
Evening,” the trooper says, leaning in. It’s night, but the trooper wears mirrored shades. He puts a hand on the side of the car to assert dominance, as if to say, “This vehicle belongs to me until I say otherwise.”
“Good evening,” Brandon says.
“License and registration?”
Brandon fishes his ID from his wallet. The registration is in the glove box. As he gathers the paperwork, he considers grabbing the other object he keeps in the box. The thought plays in his mind only for a second before he dismisses it.
The trooper looks at the license, his face impassive.
“You’re a long way from home,” he says. “Where are you headed?”
Brandon looks into the distance. He doesn’t even know what highway he’s on. He tries to remember the last road sign he saw, tries to remember what city or town lies ahead.
The trooper doesn’t wait for an answer. “You were weaving quite a bit back there. That’s why I pulled you over. Have you been on the road for a while?”
Brandon nods.
“Thought so.” The trooper hands the license and paperwork back to Brandon. “Look, driving exhausted is dangerous. You should get some sleep.”
The trooper turns his head, his gaze following the painted lines on the pavement. Behind the shades, Brandon sees tiny pattern-eels wriggling in the man’s eye sockets.
“There’s a motel a few miles down the road. If you follow me, I’ll lead you to it. You should check in for the night. Wherever you’re headed, you’ll get there safe after some rest.”
“That’s a good idea,” Brandon says. “I was hoping I’d run across a place to crash—uh, a place to sleep—soon.”
The trooper nods curtly, drums his fingers against the side of the car, and saunters back to his cruiser.
Brandon grips the steering wheel, blinks . . .
. . . and the trooper is gone.
Brandon turns in his seat, looks out the back window. There is no sign of the cruiser. Could he have fallen asleep while the trooper drove past? If that was the case, why wouldn’t the trooper stop and backtrack when he saw Brandon wasn’t following?
He puts the car into drive, eases off the brake, and drives on.
In ten minutes, he finds the police cruiser. It is parked in the middle of the highway, crossing two lanes. The lights on top flash steadily, pulses of red and blue coloring the surroundings, and the doors are open. There is no sign of the trooper. The cruiser sits at the back of a long line of empty, unmoving vehicles, hundreds of cars and trucks and massive centipedes, blocking both sides of the highway. It looks as if a mass evacuation had been taking place, and when the road became impassable, the drivers abandoned their transport and continued on foot.
Brandon sits there, unable to decide what to do next. Should he leave the safety of the car? It isn’t like he will be going anywhere. The other cars that choke the road are empty, engines dead, doors hanging open. They’ve been abandoned by their drivers. There is no way around them. Even the shoulders of the highway are blocked by driverless vehicles.
Sluggishness threatens to overtake him once more, and Brandon shakes his head, forces himself awake. He chugs the rest of his energy shots, one right after another. If he stays here . . . if he just sits in his car doing nothing . . . he will surely fall asleep. If he falls asleep, the Blight will overtake him.
He will wake up different.
So different, it won’t be like waking up at all.
He opens the glove box. From within, he takes a folding pocket knife. For years, the knife had rested unused in a cluttered drawer in his kitchen. Almost as an afterthought, he had grabbed it before leaving on this trip. He had left his wife behind. He had left his daughter. But he hadn’t left the blade. The knife isn’t for protection against some outside threat. It isn’t made to hold up in a struggle.
He keeps the knife so that, when the time came, he might kill himself.
Shoving the knife in his pocket, he exits the car. He knows he will never see the car again, but he doesn’t bother looking back. By the time he has taken ten steps, he has almost forgotten what the car looks like.
He walks.
Soon, he sees other people walking along, winding through the maze of bumper-to-bumper vehicles as far as the eye can see. There are men and women, children and the elderly. Some are dressed in business attire. Others are dressed in pajamas, as if they woke from sleep and hurriedly fled down the road. Brandon hurries to catch up with them.
“Hey!” he calls. “Wait!”
No one acknowledges him. They move forward, their eyes fixed on the blackness of the horizon.
“Are you running from him, too?” he asks, hoping to find someone who can share the burden of his fear.
Silent, they keep walking.
Not just walking—marching. Their legs move in unison. Their feet beat a staccato on the pavement. Brandon feels a moment of terror as he realizes that he has fallen in line with their progression. He must concentrate to break free from the herd.
The towering sign of a roadside motel rises out of the darkness. This must be the place the state trooper had tried to lure him to.
THE SLUMBER INN
AMERICAN-OWNED
WEEKLY RATES AVAILABLE
And below that, in bright neon:
NO VACANCY.
Of course, no rooms are available. More than four dozen people walk alongside Brandon now, all of them fleeing the end. They do not talk. They do not look at one another. They trudge along somberly, heads down slightly, mechanically putting step after step between them and the dead man’s influence.
And their faces are vanishing.
The skin of their eyelids grows together, sealing shut. Their noses recede, leaving small nostril holes in the flesh, and soon those too pucker closed. Their lips wither, their atrophic mouths nothing but a thin line that will disappear altogether soon. A dull glow shines beneath their skin.
Every step makes the other travelers less and less who they once were.
Brandon touches his own face and breathes a sigh of relief when he finds his features still intact.
But the people around him—if they could be called people at all anymore—continue to change. With every step, they become more glow than flesh. Soon, they will come apart, like mist, and cease to exist altogether.
Brandon’s heart sinks. He thought he was ahead of the Blight. He thought if he kept moving, he might avoid it. Now he knows that is not the case.
The disappearing travelers lumber forward—and entropy embraces them.
The Blight, Brandon realizes, is not behind him. It is all around him, closing in. He stands in the eye of a storm. The eye, though, like the eyes of the other travelers is sealing shut. The influence of the Blight rushes in all around him, filling the world like water filling a gaping hole, and soon it will drown him.
The light of the motel sign flickers. Where once the words NO VACANCY had glared through the mist, now it reads VACANCY.
Brandon breaks away from the other travelers. He pushes past them, pushes through their ghost-like countenance. He approaches the motel. Dozens of cars and trucks are lined up alongside the two-story structure. Inside each, something slithers and oozes against the windows. Pattern-eels fill the vehicles completely. Brandon hopes that the passengers were able to escape the vehicles before they were suffocated by the slimy creatures.
He steps into the motel office. No night manager greets. He taps the ringer of a little metal bell on the counter a few times, but no one appears. “Hello?” he calls, but no one answers.
Music plays softly from little speakers on the counter.
A popular song.
He’s heard it on the radio many times.
The shrieks of mutilated infants and the bleating cry of sacrificial goats.
A ledger sits on the counter. On the ledger is a key on a plastic, trapezoid-shaped keychain labeled with the number 1E. At first, Brandon thinks another guest must have left the key there as they checked out, but a
s he looks more closely, he sees his own name had already been written in the book.
His own name—in his own handwriting—written next to the denotation for room 1E.
Brandon scoops up the key and hurries out, heading to his room.
1E looks like any other cheap motel room. Heavy, dark curtains were drawn across a large window, a gap that cannot be closed letting the harsh glare of the street lamps into the room. The bed is made neatly, cheap, stiff blankets smoothed over the mattress. Bad flea market art—featuring a sinking ship and women and children drowning in a sea of blood—on the walls. A small TV on a dresser before the bed. A connected bathroom. The cloying stink of carpet cleaner and Lysol heavy in the air.
He realizes that he hasn’t visited a restroom in a long time.
Now, it hardly matters.
His pants are damp and stinking.
He has pissed himself, and more than once.
On the table next to the bed is a telephone. He picks it up, starts punching numbers randomly, and holds the receiver to his ear as he hears a ringing from a cross the line.
“Hello?” A voice answers. A woman’s voice. Worried and worn thin. “Hello?”
“I shouldn’t have called,” he says. “I can’t be sure if it’s you I’m talking to, or if you’re just a ghost.”
“Brandon? Brandon, is that you? Are you all right? Where are you?”
“This is the end, I think.”
“Brandon, I’ve been so worried about you.” The woman speaks a name, but it comes across as an electronic screeching, like the connection of a fax machine. “—has been so worried. We want you to come home . . . or at least tell us where you are so we can come and get you.”
Through the gap in the curtain, Brandon sees a shadow pass, someone moving slowly down the walkway that runs along the front of the motel.
Someone is coming.
“Are you there?” the woman says. “Hello—”
“Unzip me,” he says, “and I am full of squirming, festering things.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, “but what does that—”
“I have to go. I have company.”
Brandon hangs up.
Did he make the call or had the phone been ringing when he walked into the room?
