“You’re washing my naked body for the third time this week. Don’t think it could get much more embarrassing than that.” He was wrong.
She leaned in and whispered, “Not supposed to tell you this and please don’t repeat this, but when the doctors were trying to revive you in the E.R., you were naked on the table as per protocol and you…um…spontaneously erupted…” Her eyes widened as her flush went even darker. His eyes bulged and he broke out laughing.
“Are you telling me I came while on the table in the E.R.?” They were both laughing now. Nurse Amanda added, “Yes, all over this pretty little nurse who was assisting the doctors. They had to keep the sheet off of you while they were looking at your wounds and you just went off like a bottle rocket. Caught her right in the left eye you did!” They were laughing hysterically now. It was indeed the most embarrassing thing he’d ever experienced, but it was good to be laughing and to be around people who were there to help him and to be kind to him. He’d had enough negativity for one life. But, as with any injury that can be overcome, we struggle, then heal, then return to our normal lives and jobs. So it goes, forever and ever, amen.
****
Vincent Vanderfelt returned back to work on a Tuesday, roughly six months, give or take, after the accident. The truck had been totaled and the company rewarded him with a brand-new Pete. He was finding certain tasks of the job tiring and painful. He was still pretty sore all over, but it was improving. He wanted to get up off of his ass and get back to it. He had put on a few pounds being off of work and hated that. He was now all saggy in the middle, starting to develop man-tits. Some of this had been from the previous several years of trucking and trucker food. Not much in the way of exercising when you drive all day and night for a living. Too erratic of a schedule. He backed his truck under his new trailer and hooked up. He got out slowly and hooked up the air and electric lines and dollied up the trailer legs. He did his pre-trip walk around and stood at the back of the trailer watching a few other drivers. They jumped in their trucks, backed under trailers, hooked everything up and jetted. No walk arounds, no checking their brakes out, no pre-trip of any kind. It immediately got under his skin, but he decided to let it slide. Fuck them if they want to drive unsafely. And fuck the company if they won’t enforce safety. He finished his thorough walk around, and fired up his truck. E-log up to date, he hit the road.
It happened almost from the gate. He pulled out onto the highway in front of the company and a car came flying over the hill just up the road. It all happened very fast. He threw his hand up reflexively to shield his face from—what? the car?—and the car all of a sudden swerved and ran off the road and straight into the ditch. It was so unusual because the car wasn’t even up to him yet. It could have easily come to a halt, albeit a screeching halt. The driver must’ve been drunk. The whole thing ate up about an hour of his on-duty time. He stopped and helped the guy out of his car and saw the dazed look on the guy’s face. He used his cell phone to call for an ambulance and waited there until the guy was transported away. He also called his boss and told him what happened. They reviewed the footage on the company cameras and saw with no doubt that Vincent had nothing to do with this man swerving into the ditch. They handed over the footage to the authorities who logged it in as evidence, just in case mister speed demon wanted to try pressing charges or suing. Then, finally, Vincent was up and on the road again. He rolled easily out of town and hit the interstate. His first run took him across the country to California. He would never make it to this destination. In fact, no one who knew him ever saw him again.
The drive began innocently enough, with the exception of that car incident, but he had put that behind him and only the road was ahead. No sooner had he hit the interstate, someone opened the flood gates and a barrage of cars and trucks came blasting toward him and around him. It was pretty close to lunch rush in the city by this time and that always meant an increase in traffic volume. Everyone was in a big goddamned hurry that day. He felt himself almost unconsciously slipping back into the rage he had felt for so long. It began with a simple thought. Vic. His twin brother Vic. If he had still been alive today, maybe they could’ve done team driving. Vic always mellowed him out. Mom used to tell them Vincent was the fire, Victor was the water. But no, his brother, his own twin for God’s sake, had bitched out on him and 86’ed himself. Selfish little prick. He didn’t notice, but he was going as fast as the truck would allow, a touch over 60, and following entirely too close to another car. The cars and trucks in front of him all began flashing on their brake lights in an instant and so did the car ahead of him do likewise. It registered in his brain in a single split second and all that came across his lips was, “No.” Softly murmured, severely meant. He was going to rear-end this car right now. He simply couldn’t stop. But, with the utterance of that one simple “No,” the car ahead of him simply winked out of existence. He now had plenty of room and traffic was already moving again slowly. He came to a near-stop just behind a Dodge Dakota and then began rolling slowly with everyone else. His facial expressions were none, blankness masked him completely. His eyes looked straight on ahead and he saw an off ramp. He signaled and turned off, taking the shoulder to park immediately. He put the truck in neutral and popped the parking brake. He sat there with his head buzzing and humming, cars and trucks whizzing by, collecting his scattered thoughts. What the fuck had just happened?
He was sitting in the driver’s seat with his eyes closed and his hands firmly on the wheel thinking it was all just a dream, like fucking Jen. None of this was really happening. But each time he opened his eyes, he remained where he was. He began to replay the events in his mind. OK, hotshit, here’s what you think happened. You were daydreaming, check. Traffic comes to a stop, check. You got caught with your pants down and couldn’t stop in time so you…what? Vaporized a car to make room for your truck? Is that what the fuck you think? Stupid fucking broken brain! But, try as he might to convince himself he was crazy, he couldn’t refuse what he had just seen…or possibly done. He surveyed the area and said out loud to himself:
“All right, hotshit, try it out. Test your new powers…” (“I am going to put a power in your body”) echoed a voice from out of nowhere. He pretended not to have heard it. “…and prove it to yourself that you are crazy.” He looked around. There was a large field out the passenger’s side window. A few scattered farms and houses and one car lot further down. He saw in the field an old rusty piece of farm equipment sitting abandoned and forgotten. He focused hard on making it gone. Nothing happened. He tried harder. Still nothing. “See?” he said out loud, “fucking crazy.” He was instantly pissed off. For one brief, but glimmering moment, he thought he had been fucked into having a super power. He began hitting the steering wheel with both palms shouting: “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” He looked back out at the farm equipment mocking him with its presence and shouted, “And fuck you, too, you piece of shit!” This time, the farm equipment did not wink out of existence, it did not just sit there doing nothing. It went full-on nuclear. It exploded in a blinding blast of fire and light that shook his truck where he was parked, two hundred or so yards away. The heat penetrated his truck as tears of ghastly awe stood out at the corners of his eyes. The explosion rose up into a small mushroom of fire and smoke as debris scattered all around the field. Vincent thought it was time to go. He put the truck in gear and hauled balls out of there.
Fifty miles or so down the highway, he began to calm down and relax. He had a story worked out that if someone stopped him asking questions about the fire, he’d say he left because the explosion had frightened him and he never set foot out of the cab. No one did stop him though. He began to relax and found after another fifty or so miles had gone by, he was relaxed enough to turn on the radio and sing along to some old country song he remembered from his childhood. Something or other his granddad used to listen to while working on his old Oliver 55 tractor, back when the world was easier and he didn’t harb
or such blind seething rage inside him. He wondered from time to time when and where it had begun. It surely couldn’t all have come from Vic’s suicide. As he was lost in this reverie, a Dodge Charger came zinging past him in the fast lane. It shot past like a bolt and had to be doing 90. Vincent squinted his eyes, focused them sharply on the quickly diminishing shape in the distance and whispered, “boom.” The following explosion of the Charger caused all four wheels to blow straight out and away from the car at a high velocity. The chassis separated from the body as the body of the car rose twenty feet in the air, did a backward flip and landed crushed flat on the side of the highway. The fireball separating the body from chassis was brief but intense. Vincent was amazed. Not at the explosion or the use of the new power Jen or whomever had given him, but rather that he never even batted an eye. He never flinched. There was no fear now. He was beyond fear. He had graduated from Fear University as the magna cum laude valedictorian. Head of the class. Fear was for bitches. He was a god now. He burst through the remains of the fire and wreckage with his big Pete nearly screaming out the lyrics to the song he now had at top volume. He was on top of the world. Time to let the rest of the world know it.
He continued on down the road. A red and gold Freightliner was just up ahead of him. He couldn’t believe it. Had he truly found a rolling roadblock that was even slower than him? Must’ve been loaded down or… Nope, the Freightliner gave one swerve, then two, catching the fart strips on the side of the highway and buzzing up a good length of them. Then, the guy swerved shortly back into his own lane, then even further into the fast lane. Vincent watched this common scene with growing fury. His father’s voice came to him then, echoing back through all the misspent years of his life from his childhood, urging him to: “keep your temper, son.” Vincent had had enough of keeping his goddamned temper. This jackhole in front of him was texting or Facebooking while driving and doing a piss-poor job of, likely to kill someone if he’s not careful.
“Not today, motherfucker,” Vincent hissed. “Not today.” He grabbed the fast lane and came up carefully on the truck’s left. He got window to window with the other driver. He made eye contact with the other driver—who was in fact texting on his cell phone, a big no-no in commercial trucking—and gave the guy a “what the fuck?” gesture with his hands out, palms up. The other driver looked at Vincent and threw him a loud and clear “fuck you, pal” by way of his middle finger. Vincent’s smile grew and the other driver began to look concerned. Vincent raised his right hand and made a shooing away gesture, like he was being bothered by a fly, and the instant he did, the Freightliner began to tip and continued rolling momentarily on his 9 passenger’s side tires. This elated Vincent. He had seen this stunt done with a car, never with an 18-wheeler. It only lasted a moment though, then the big rig was rolling down the steep embankment toward the grass land below. Vincent didn’t even stop to watch the fun. He put the hammer down and kept rolling as the other truck disappeared from his mirrors. He remembered seeing a trucker movie as a kid, Rolling Vengeance was the title, about a trucker whose family was either raped or murdered, depending on the sex. Then, this pissed off trucker turned his big rig into a monster truck rig and took out the garbage. That was what he felt like just at that moment. The Rolling Vengeance. Vengeance for all the good guy truckers and just good guys in general that wanted to make a difference in the world, or just wanted to do a good job and go the fuck home alive, and shitheads like the texting guy or the Charger guy gotta put other people’s lives in danger. He was rolling out the vengeance on all of these motherfuckers and had no intentions whatsoever to stop. He drove on.
That day, so many other drivers came to bad conclusions as the Pete rolled steadily down the interstate. A camper full of drunk hunters, teens too stupid—in his opinion—to have driver’s licenses, old people who should have had their licenses revoked decades ago, moms applying make-up while driving and most of all, overly-pumped up on testosterone Dale Earnhart wannabe’s. The let’s see if we can do a hundred on the interstate, then take three lanes to just barely make our exit group. Poof, poof and poof again. All gone. Some exploded, some imploded—that had been pretty neat to see—and some just vaporized. To quote Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption: “they up and vanished like a fart in the wind.” He was having the best day of his entire life. Sunny, blue skies, radio up on some metal tunes, window open to feel that warm wind blowing in, no one to fuck with him or get in his way. He could do this forever if it was like this all time. He was driving and reliving the last ten hours of rolling vengeance when shit went sideways, in a big way.
Fortunately for Vincent, the road at that moment was all but deserted. A few cars and trucks hummed by on the other side of the grass median. No one at all, it would seem, was goin’ his way. That was just fine with him. He yawned and felt like he might have to pull off and get some sleep soon. Still midday, but he felt absolutely drained. Plus, his brain was doing this funny trick on him. For some weird reason, the Rockies—where he should be by now, or at least within spitting distance of—looked more and more like the smoky mountains down in Tennessee. That was a bit odd. He had been to Cali many times and this just looked wrong, but he was so tired and…
“You’re not tired.” The voice came swirling up from thin air, centrally located directly over the passenger’s seat. He swerved. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t dump the rig over, but he was sure he had spilled the load over in the trailer. He began slowing down, checking his mirrors to be sure no one was going to rear-end him, but also never taking his right eye off the passenger’s seat. He rolled another two miles, slower now, and came to an off-ramp that appeared to go nowhere. Some small highway that led to Hicksville, U.S.A. He pulled off onto the shoulder, put it in neutral and popped the parking brake. He threw off his seat belt and was out the door a second later. He ran around to the other door and threw it open. Nothing. A fire extinguisher on that side of the truck stared back blankly at him as if to say, “Hey chief, where’s the fire?” He sighed heavily and closed the door. He turned around to have a piss on the shoulder of the ramp and there was a rotting corpse of a man standing behind him in the grass. He fell in shock backwards against the truck and slid down to the ground. The corpse still stood there, not moving nor speaking. Only watching. Vincent screamed out in horror, but they were in the middle of nowhere and it was really a pointless endeavor. He continued screaming, trying to back up further, but he was flat against the side of the truck.
“Quite your belly achin’ and bitchin’. Sit down and shut the fuck up.” Vincent reluctantly stopped screaming, but felt the growing warmth of his bladder letting go. The look of grotesque revulsion on his face clearly amused the corpse man as he began to smile a rotten, toothless grin. Grey, flabby chunks of decayed flesh hung down in limp patches around his face and hands. He wore a suit that he had been buried in, Vincent guessed. Dirt fell in small bunches from various parts of it. His feet were skeletal, no flesh remained. Bugs however, found these feet to be quite delightful as they raced across the top of the foot and in between the toes, looking desperately for a missed morsel. “Have I got your fucking attention now?” the corpse man bellowed out at him. Vincent nodded, tears streaking his cheeks. The smell was of the most pungent variety. It made Vincent feel like throwing up. “All right, now I didn’t choose this form. It was how they sent me through. For fuck’s sake, quit making that whimpering noise already. Hold on, see if this helps.” The corpse man began to thump the right side of his cracked and leaking skull. Bone fragments and dry clumps of grey matter fell free and landed at his feet where the bugs found it at once and scurried over to claim their prize. It was like smacking the side of an old TV that had poor reception, same principle and same effect. Static lines of technicolor rolled up down across him vertically as his whole entire image waivered horizontally. Frankly, the effect was giving Vincent a bit of a headache to watch, but watch he did—too dumbfounded to look away or try running. The image of the corpse man finally stabil
ized and he was bent over forward, holding his head in his hands and laughing.
“Oh man, that was tough. Can’t imagine what’s going through your nugget right about now, bro,” the corpse man said and stood upright. It was no longer corpse-like. It was Vic. His brother Vic, standing here on the side of this interstate off ramp. Vic, alive and well right in front of him. Only…
“Vic? Is that really you? What the fuck…? How the fuck…? Why the fuck is your face all painted up like a clown?” Vic smiled.
“This was the only image I could come to you as. How we used to go to the old ICP shows, remember?” They smiled and Vincent shot forward and embraced his brother.
“I don’t know how you’re here,” he sobbed, “but I’ve missed you.” They hugged for a minute, then pulled apart.
“I’m here because I have to warn you about something and it’s pretty nasty. You’ve got to stop using this power that you have. That you think you have. It’s killing you and you don’t even know it. The one who gave it to you, Jen as you remember her? That wasn’t Jen. That was…” His brother’s voice was turned way low and he seemed to fade in and out of reality. Vincent stood helplessly watching. His brother’s voice grew louder again. “You’ve got to stop, Vincent. No more using that power.” Vincent waved a dismissive hand at his brother.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, as usual. I have never felt so alive as when I use this power. What would you know about it anyway, you fucking coward. Killed yourself. That’s how you used your power. Left me in a shit world by myself.” Vic looked down ashamedly at the ground.
“You’re right, Vin. I didn’t know or care how it was going to affect others. I only knew I was in a turmoil and didn’t see any other way out of it. But you have to listen to me now. Look around you. Something’s wrong. Can’t you see that? Don’t you feel it? This thing is evil, really really bad. You’re going to kill yourself, too if you don’t stop.” Vin thought it over for a moment and said:
Individually Wrapped Horrors Page 31
