**On Sale for Only .99 cents!!**
Wet
Work, by Donald J. Bingle
Prologue
Truth told, Jerry Caufield hated his wife’s
car. It wasn’t that he wasn’t eco-friendly and all that, but he was a big
guy—six foot two and beefy—so squeezing behind the steering wheel of the hybrid
sub-compact practically allowed him to steer with his stomach muscles. Okay,
his beer belly. The disconcertingly claustrophobic two-door hatchback could
barely contain him as he scrunched down and tilted his head so he could see out
the windshield.
His discomfort and anxiety over the tiny
vehicle was even worse when, like today and almost every day, he was surrounded
by huge dump trucks. A constant, smoke-belching stream of growling behemoths
hauled gravel from the pits across the bridge, down by the Des Plaines River as
it meandered through Joliet. The shallow, placid river paralleled the darker,
deeper Sanitary & Ship Canal connecting Lake Michigan (via the Chicago
River) to the Mississippi basin.
Driving his wife’s power-starved mini-car
next to semis on the open road was bad enough, but the steep hill descending to
the main bridge crossing the canal made him feel even more cramped and
threatened than usual. Newbie truckers exiting the bridge and stopping at the
light on top of the hill tended to drift back precipitously before they got
their rigs in gear, then spit gravel at his windshield as they jolted and
shuddered forward. And he never could be sure that one of the heavily-laden
beasts coming up on his tail on the steep downslope entering the bridge on this
side of the canal had good enough brakes to actually halt their load before
crushing him and his car like the splattered mosquitos littering his
windshield. Accordingly, he always stopped well back from the vehicle in front
of him on the downslope and maintained a continuous stare into the side-view
mirror for approaching danger.
Today was the day his paranoia finally paid
off. A fully-loaded truck came barreling down the hill fast, much too fast. He
flicked his eyes forward to make sure the lane for oncoming traffic was clear,
manhandled the wheel hard to the left, and punched the accelerator to the floor
to escape being rear-ended to death.
The subcompact whined like the overstressed
golf cart it was, slowly inching to the left until the gas motor kicked in to
assist the batteries and the vehicle trembled into stuttering acceleration.
Jerry stared at the mirror, watching as gravel flew off the pile in the back of
the truck and skittered across the roof of the cab as the unshaven trucker
braked hard, his eyes wide, a fat cigar falling out of his surprised, open
mouth, as his body lurched forward from the attempted hard stop.
It was going to be close, too close.
Jerry wasn’t a religious guy, so no prayers
whispered forth from his mouth as he watched his ignominious death approaching,
his reaper laying black rubber on the pavement and churning out white smoke as
worn tires tried to overcome the momentum of tons of loose, shifting rock.
Instead, a stream of invective flowed from Jerry’s snarling lips as he imagined
the huge tires of the behemoth rolling atop his wife’s little bug of a car and
stomping it down, greasy, bloody, and flat. He was going to die a stupid,
needless, painful death simply because his wife needed his car today because it
was her turn to carpool their kids to elementary school.
He hoped she would feel guilty about it at
his funeral.
Closed casket, of course.
But, then ... then the crappy automatic
transmission in the peapod of a car he was driving kicked up a notch and it
began moving faster. He leaned forward instinctively, whether fleeing the
upcoming death from behind or attempting to push the car downhill faster, he
didn’t know. As Jerry swerved left into the open lane, the truck driver swerved
right toward the curb and the empty sidewalk, each of their actions giving a
minute boost to the rapidly-shrinking distance between the vehicles.
Maybe, just maybe ...
Suddenly, the hybrid farted forward, as if it
had just seen what was about to happen via its rearview camera. Jerry kept his
foot on the floor—he didn’t want to take any chances. But, then, he looked up
and saw the garbage truck turning into the lane from Canal Street, which
paralleled the dark, murky waters of the commercial canal. In the old days, mules
had trundled that path, pulling barges from the shore. Now ... well, now
garbage trucks trundled along it, picking up dumpsters from the back entrances
of the local shops that showed their prettier faces uphill, along the main
drag.
Jerry had managed to snatch his life from the
jaws of defeat and instead thrust it into the jaws of a Browning-Ferris
Industries municipal garbage truck. Instead of straightening out, he kept the
wheel hard to the left, hoping to jump the opposite curb and decelerate on the
sidewalk. With any luck he could stop
before he reached the corner and t-boned the big, green machine with “BFI”
blazoned on its side. His foot jerked up and to the left, then stomped down on
the brake as hard as he had stomped on the accelerator only moments, but yet an
eternity, before.
But, nothing happened.
Nothing fucking happened.
His foot went to the floor, but the brakes
did not engage. He searched frantically for the center-mounted emergency brake
with his right hand as he gripped the wheel tight with his left, his eyes wide
and forward now, scrutinizing this new terror.
Despite taking his foot off the gas, the tiny
car still accelerated down the hill. His fingers grazed the handle of the
emergency brake for a millisecond before the jolt from jumping the opposite
curb flung them up and off, grasping at air. He jinked the wheel to the right,
straightening out the car to avoid hitting the side of the building flanking
the sidewalk, while his right foot stabbed repeatedly at the brake pedal. He
gritted his teeth, bracing for the BFI, the Big Fucking Impact, to come. But
somehow, somehow, his lizard brain took over and he jinked the steering wheel
hard left again just at the right moment, at the very edge of the corner and
the car veered left. Miraculously, the shitty car cleared the back of the
garbage hauler by mere inches, avoiding the BFI.
There was a wondrous moment of sweet, sweet
bliss before his still accelerating midget auto-coffin cleared the narrow
breadth of Canal Street and rocketed up and off the embankment. Before he knew
it, the toy car was sailing way out there into the air, defying gravity in
glorious flight before arcing down and plunging into the stabbing cold, foul
black waters of the Sanitary & Ship Canal, the windshield shattering upon
impact, the water enveloping him in a torrent as he sank deeper and deeper.
Fuck.
The only things he feared more than enclosed
spaces were drowning and hypothermia.
Oh boy, a threesome, just not the kind he’d
always craved.
The
tiny car settled rear down from the weight of the batteries as Jerry, still
trapped by the cold shock of the water, the heavy pressure of the deep, and a
seat-belt auto-tightened by the impact with the embankment, struggled for
freedom. As the last wisps of faded gray-green light abandoned him, he watched
in mounting terror, his hands grasping frantically, as the air in the car
rushed past him from behind, bubbling out through the broken windshield,
seeking a sunny, warm freedom he would never know.
In mere seconds, his day had disintegrated
into chaos. As his consciousness faded to match the cold black of the muddy
bottom of the canal, one last thought flittered through his fading neurons.
He really, really hated his wife’s car.
Flash
Drive, by Donald J. Bingle
Prologue
May 28, 1993
Thwack! Yet another grasshopper slammed into
the glass, splattering yellow-green ichor. The windscreen wiper shoved the
smashed insect’s shell and one still twitching hind leg into a curving wall of
accumulated goo and viscera at the edge of the wiper’s reach. Archie stared
ahead, peering through the messy windscreen into the black void of the Outback
at night. He reckoned the multitude of twinkling stars were outnumbered by the
flashes from his headlights glinting off insects fluttering in his path. Still,
he held his semi to a constant hundred kilometers per hour on the lonely road
seven hours east and north of Perth.
Archie didn’t
really care if he could see well. The road was reasonably straight and he knew
better than to swerve if a ‘roo wandered into the big rig’s path. But he did
need to stay awake. If his ride wandered off the road into open ground, there
was no telling what might happen. He could hit a rock, slide into a dry wash,
or get caught up by bushy vegetation or soft soil, with no one around to help
get his tractor-trailer back on the straight and narrow.
He turned up
the classic rock on the cab’s tinny radio and cracked his side window enough
for a stream of air, but not so wide as to suck in a torrent of hoppers. For
the thousandth time, he wished he’d left the coast earlier so he’d be driving
this small stretch from Menzies to Leonora in the arvo, when it was still light
out. Sure, it would be warmer and the scenery was pretty damn boring when it
could be seen, but at least he would be able to see something besides the
flashes of insects in the black through a filter of insect guts. He squinted
his eyes and peered into the empty.
A moving
slash of intense yellow-white light assaulted his eyes, forcing them fast shut.
At the same instant, the radio music dissolved into a mass of crackling static.
Archie instinctively hit the air brakes, while simultaneously downshifting as
fast as his bulky transmission allowed, even though he had seen—could still see
in the scene momentarily imprinted on the back of his retinas—there was nothing
in the road ahead. Nor was there anything unusual in the flat salt expanses and
mounds of near-constantly dry Lake Ballard to the left—an area which should
have been enveloped in blackness this time of night. He opened his eyes,
catching a moon-sized streak of yellow-orange light in the sky ahead to his
right. At the same time, a long, deep, thunderous, pulsing roar assaulted his
ears and rattled the fenders of his slowing rig, like a rolling earthquake
triggered by a mining explosion a hundred times stronger than he’d ever
experienced.
Meteor
strike?
No, the
bright streak was still airborne, moving across the distant landscape too
slowly for a shooting star by his reckoning, about the speed of a plane. Unlike
what he knew about meteors, it also maintained a constant altitude as it
progressed, rather than arcing down from the sky and slamming into the ground.
By the time
Archie had come to a complete halt in the middle of the god-forsaken roadway
and flipped on his hazards, the light had disappeared behind distant hills. But
then a sudden horizon-to-horizon burst of blue-white light lasting several
seconds emanated from behind the hills where the light had gone down. He sucked
in a breath and waited. Moments later an overwhelming, low rumble thundered
across the barren terrain, like a freight train and an earthquake and a
gargantuan explosion all rolled into one. Where the blue-white light had
flashed, a red, spherical—or, at least, hemispherical—dome pulsed above the
horizon.
He flicked
off the staticky hiss of the radio, but let the truck idle as he got out to
take a clearer—less bug-smeared—look at the strange phenomenon. Now the
engine’s throaty chug was the only thing breaking the silence. Diesel was dear,
but he let it run. He worried whatever this was might mess with the electrical
system of his engine and he might not be able to start her up again.
Nuke?
He couldn’t
see a mushroom cloud, but the glowing red ball was much dimmer than the flash,
or even the streak of light which preceded it, so he couldn’t be sure. Besides,
that didn’t make a lick of sense. There was nothing out here in the never never
worth nuking. Route 49 wandered northwesterly past Leonora; the red orb
throbbed to his north but seemed too far east to be near the road. Lake Darlot?
No, farther east. Maybe down Bandya way. Nothing between the two fly-specks
‘cept maybe a few mines and even fewer sprawling sheep stations.
Maybe that
was the point. Nothing there. A perfect place to test nuclear weapons—maybe
even nuclear missile systems. But that meant a military presence: facilities,
equipment, personnel. And that meant large scale, convoy type movement:
Bushmasters, G-Wagons, personnel carriers, and trucks of all sorts. And he
hadn’t seen or heard of anything like that, not on the roads he traveled and
not on the roads—or godforsaken excuses for roads—that the drivers he hung with
at the diners and diesel pumps of local truck stops traveled. That meant black
helicopters and all that crazy conspiracy shit which went with ‘em. He hadn’t
gone troppo. He didn’t subscribe to such nonsense on a regular basis, but God
knows, there was nothin’ regular ‘bout what was goin’ on in the lonely nowhere
tonight.
A jet crash?
Maybe. Not a likely route, though, even for Qantas.
There wasn’t
really anything to do ... anything he could check or investigate ... not with
the source of the lights beyond the horizon, but he couldn’t just drive on.
Instead he waited, his rig’s hazard lights flashing behind him as he stood on
the side of the road, watching something unknown pulse in the distance. An
apocalyptic hazard light?
Two hours
later, the red orb suddenly winked off and he was alone in the dark with
nothing but a strange story, a million stars, and a billion or three ‘hoppers,
flies, and midges.
He’d barely
have enough diesel to make Leonora.
What the hell
was that?
I love thriller and this sounds like an excellent series!
ReplyDelete