Road Kill

I felt safe in my car, driving down the interstate at seventy five miles per hour.

What have I encountered on the open road that stirs a sense of alarm in my brain? Normal, in-front-of-you, every day things. Maybe a semi with his hazard lights on because the trucker is tired and needs a few winks before he starts driving again. Perhaps a deer, jaunting out in front of my vehicle. Once, I slammed in to one and almost lost it. I've never hurt anything in my life. I was oblivious until I splattered her, caving in the corner of her head with my cruise control on, spattering gray matter all over the well-paved roads of my home state.

Back then, I thought having the blood of a dead animal on my hands was traumatizing. I was horrified.

I was a soft and ignorant fool.

I remember what my father said to me when he put me in the front seat of my brother's Dodge Dart at age sixteen.

"Drive defensively, mind your own shit, and obey the law. Don't drink and drive, son. You take care of all that, and you'll survive from point A to point B. I don't want you to show up in my driveway dead one day cuz you were reckless and irresponsible, you hear me?"

My father never had a way with words. His inspirational speeches sounded mostly like rants, but there was gold in them, if you could pan through the slurred speech and the hypocrisy.

I hope heaven doesn't exist. If it does, then my father is looking down now, and he is ashamed that I have ever been born.

Some sick fuck actually planned all this out in his living room, or basement, or torture lair. I'd probably go with the latter. That's the part that really irks me and grinds my gears. The fact that they pull it off, right out here in the open, and no one ever catches a hint of it until they’re road napped.

It took me a couple of hours to drive from my friend's house across the state line back to my own place. I'd head up there and visit him for a weekend every couple months or so. He was a good guy and we tried to stay in touch. We had a nice, relaxing weekend for the most part. He gave me his best wishes and told me to be careful on my way back. How many times do we hear that? You've got your keys in your hand, your phone in your pocket, and you’ve started the engine. The last person you see before you walk out the door says, simply, "Be careful."

I was zoned out and I didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. They stayed on the right, using the shoulder to pass if they had to so they were never right behind me in my rearview mirror. They waited until we were the only two cars around. It was a deserted stretch of highway that was neither here nor there: no exits, no trees, just flat farmland and the thin light of a half summer moon.

It was a Volkswagen van. This one was charcoal black, rusted out at various parts of the body and chassis. It sounded like a stampede rumbling through a canyon when it got close to you. I FELT it, over my Alpine speakers that were thumping double bass riffs and face-melting guitar leads to my very core. I turned to look out my window, but the heavy tint prevented me from seeing the infernal rumble cage that was coming up fast on my right. In the exact moment that my power windows got all the way down, the driver was waiting, a vicious looking grin on his face. He wasn't even watching the road, and neither was I --- for a brief moment, we both stared at each other. He looked glad to see me. His face was absolutely unreal. I thought I was in a dream. My left side hit the ingrained tire treads built in to the pavement for the people that fall asleep at the wheel, but I barely noticed that I was careening off the edge of the road, or the gyrating protests of my vehicle as it rolled over the bumps at such a high speed. I could only stare, with the sound of Pantera blazing in my ears.

The first thing I noticed was the top hat. His skin was ghostly pale, a snow white color that stood out in sharp contrast to the dark brim of the hat. He had more than one passenger, and they were all right next to him, trying to catch a glimpse of me. They were all bathed in an odd, red light. The interior of their van looked like it was a mobile dark room for developing photographs. This was all unsettling, and I was still doing eighty, about to breach the edge of the pavement and hit the grassy median between the two-lane highways.

I caught myself in time to swerve back over to my lane, but the van was coming over in to my slot, parallel with me, blocking me from getting back. My road rage flared in that moment, and I decided that I was going to stop them from moving and confront the driver with the Louisville slugger in my trunk. I floored the accelerator and tried to get in front of them, but they stayed right with me. We were almost trading paint, and a retaining wall was coming up. If I didn't stop, I was going to hit it head-on and do their dirty work for them.

I never had the opportunity to even think about mashing the brakes.

I wish I never bought a car with a sunroof. Moreover, I wish I hadn't been in the mood to act so pretentious, rolling around with it wide open on the highway past midnight, blasting my music at inhumane decibels. Two things happened in that next instant. They weren't in slow motion. They were smooth, efficient, and practiced. I knew they’d done it before, the moment it happened to me. Before I knew it, my old life was over.

A strong, burly man scooped me up out of the driver's seat from the top of my moving vehicle like I was a ragdoll. In the same moment, another small man who was literally dressed like a scarecrow fell in to my passenger seat. As my seatbelt tore in half from the pressure he was exerting on it, the small guy slid over as I was being lifted up. The last time I ever saw my car, it was being veered back in to the left hand lane by Mr. Scarecrow, and he was flashing me the most wicked grin I've ever seen in my life.

I wish I could accurately describe to you how it is that I managed to end up in the back of this van, but I really can't. However they did it, these things have road-napped me.

We ambled along at around the same speed as my car for a long time. I didn't know where we were going, but I knew their crime would go unnoticed and undetected. I would be a random missing persons report. My car will would up in some deserted spot where I've never set foot before.

They were sick-minded, beyond anything I could have been ready for. They rigged me in the back of the van, and with a measure of haste, began desecrating my flesh with unnaturally hooked metal objects. I think they were old-school grass cutting sickles. I started bleeding all over the place, but that was least of my worries, to be honest. They had much, much more painful hooks, embedded in my skin at the shoulder-blades, my calves, my neck muscles --- everywhere. The hooks were jerry-rigged to sliding coat racks on the roof of the van, and they screamed with the deafening sound of metal against metal as they pushed me back and forth like a toy, a plaything. My skin began to stretch out, because my feet weren't touching the floor of the van after a few hours. After a hundred miles of pot holes, I was almost flat footed, but my vision was going blurry from the pain.

I was once an accountant. Listen. Listen to what I have become.

They had smiles that were permeated with long, thin silver rails. They smiled at me during the entire operation with ear to ear grins of galvanized steel. They rubbed iodine in to my flesh like a marinade for an upcoming dinner party. I could only stare upward at the red lights above the coat rack, crucified on the frame of seventies era German ingenuity.

I was once a pale man, with albino skin and a tendency to shy away from large crowds. I am now a member of something primal and efficient --- something with brown, leathery skin and a maw of gnashing metal, a cannibal that wears a guise of rotting rag scraps and a filthy hat.

I wish I could have resisted then. I could have knocked one of them out, or seized one of their sickles and separated their incessantly grinning heads from their bobbing necks.

I was too focused on the physical shutdown of my body, too concentrated on being seized with fear to think of what they held in store for me.

When they released me from the rack, re-clothed in their garb of stinking cloth scraps, they smiled and stared with burning eyes, watching me sob in my new visage.

The little road-napper was standing over my head. I thought the hooks were painful. The pliers that he shoved in to my mouth tasted like they'd been rusting in a monsoon before being exposed to humid summer heat.

He had the first two teeth out before I even had a chance to scream. I had to keep swallowing and spitting. I almost asphyxiated and perished from the tsunami of blood that was gushing out of my mouth and down my windpipe.

Blood tastes so much like metal. I know that now. They are almost interchangeable.

They weren’t finished. The first metal sliver had been shoved in to the cavity where my incisor used to be, and it was protruding out of my mouth downward over my bottom lip.

The cab became deathly silent save for the sounds of power tools. They completed their operation a few hours after they took me in, and then I was indistinguishable from the others.

They knew I wanted to escape. They knew I would do anything to shred them limb from limb, but I was too weak and my mouth felt as though it had kissed a sledgehammer. They kept me tied up, strapped to the rack, to watch and observe and learn their craft.

They only took in one in ten. The other times, they drove the victim’s car off the side of the road in a strategic location in the middle of nowhere. They had their favorite exits, their favorite landscapes for secrecy.

The others, they ate. Metal cleaves flesh so much easier than calcified bone. It all came down to a nightmarish form of cannibalism, encompassed by a thrill of violent and disturbed wonderment.

I have become a monstrosity in the eyes of the world. The only thing left is to indulge in the family business that they have going, or forfeit my life to a power drill.

Our next target is just ahead.

The person driving has failed the test. That means we’ve been following them for a long time, and my pale-faced Father in the top hat judged them too weak to join us.

That person will be my first taste of road kill.

Maybe, someday, my family will choose you.

Be careful.