Route 50

death and hitchhikers

Photo by Akin Cakiner on Unsplash

“Ok man, give me your best shot,” said Sean with a sideways grin. “But you should know, I’m a horror writer. So you might not impress me.”

The old man stared straight ahead from the passenger seat. He wore a dusty suit that didn’t fit right. Pale, hairless wrists and ankles stuck out of the cuffs, while his wrinkled neck seemed to retreat into the collar like a turtle’s.

“This is the last day of your life.”

“Well, alright! That’s what I’m talking about!” Sean laughed, slapping the steering wheel. “Kill your driver in the first sentence. Fucking wild opener, man.”

The old man didn’t respond.

A jackrabbit ran across the road. Sean tapped the brakes and empty beer cans rolled forward under his seat, coming to rest against his boot heel. He scooched them back under. He was in no shape to drive, but that’s why he loved Route 50. It swallowed your sins.

“Come on man, keep going. I won’t cut you off again.” Something about the man reminded Sean of his grandpa. That’s what had convinced him to pull over in the first place, though it wasn’t the first time Sean had picked up a hitchhiker. He loved to ask strangers for their scariest story.

The man said nothing.

“Alright, so I’m your main character,” Sean said, deepening his voice for drama, and to hide the clinking cans. “A lonesome man on the road, blindly headed for disaster. You’re the tortured psychic, wrestling with horrible visions.”

“I wouldn’t say psychic, but sure.”

“You can’t tell me how I’m going to die.”

“Correct.”

“But you receive some cryptic clues from beyond.”

“No clues. I only know this is the last day of your life. This conversation with me is the last you will ever have.”

Silence wedged into the truck like a third passenger.

“The end?”

“The end.”

Sean pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek. He shifted in the worn leather seat as a trickle of sweat meandered down his spine. His eyes clicked to the mirrors, but they were alone. Not everyone could tell a good story.

He reached for the radio. The old pickup still had a scan button and he pressed it. Stations rolled by, static in every flavor, the sonic equivalent of a tumbleweed. Middle of fucking nowhere. He switched to A.M. and caught a preacher’s voice. The preacher sounded like he was talking through a garden hose: …skin flayed in the boiling pits of Hell…time to repent… Static drowned the voice.

The old man smelled minty, like bad aftershave or one of those car air fresheners. It mingled with the taste of airy beer in the back of Sean’s mouth and he started to feel a little sick.

He rolled down the window and spit. Hot desert wind filled the cab with the scent of sagebrush. The scent of freedom. He took a deep breath and shook his head, tossing the fog. In his rear view, dark purple ate away at a brilliant orange sunset. California dimmed, her details smeared out in a wash of dulling dread. A couple hundred miles and that dread feeling would evaporate. It always did.

“You could have stayed alive in California.”

Sean turned his head, taking his eyes off the road in disbelief. He stared at his hitchhiker.

“What the fuck?” He spat out the question like vomit.

The man stared straight ahead.

Sean jerked the steering wheel and the truck came to rest on the shoulder, her weary shocks rattling. A cloud of dust rose up around them.

“The fuck is going on here? Are you threatening me?” He felt like shoving the guy, but he hesitated.

The old man never looked away from the road.

“This some kind of shakedown?”

“I don’t want your money.”

“Answer me or I will leave you in this desert to die.”

“Sean. We both know you won’t.”

Sean went cold.

“How do you know my name?”

“Let’s say I’m…a fan of your work. I’m not going to hurt you, I just wanted to meet you before—.” The old man gestured at the steering wheel without looking. “Please.”

“Before I die? You are really fucked up, man.”

Sean had met a few obsessed horror fans. But someone obsessed enough to track him to the middle of the desert, pose as a hitchhiker and then threaten him was something new. Should have used a pen name, Sean thought to himself.

In the rear view, the sunset had cooled to ash. Sean turned on the headlights. The arc of their feeble light only made the darkness darker. The white flashes of moths appeared and disappeared.

Sean searched the windshield for some hint of the moon or stars, but there was nothing, the night sky a blackout curtain in a cheap hotel.

He itched to dump the old creep, but he couldn’t leave anyone out here alone. He looked at him again, feeble in the beat up suit. If it came to it, Sean could take him. Maybe he had a gun, but so did everyone out here.

He put the truck in drive and pulled onto the road. The engine coughed. She didn’t like to idle.

“I’m never sure if this old truck will make it to the next town,” Sean said with a nervous laugh. “Maybe we’ll both die in the desert.”

“Maybe,” said the old man.

There was a motel in Eureka where he could cool his heels. A rude old waitress named Marva who made terrible coffee and never asked a question.

Sean pressed on the gas, gaining speed. He knew he shouldn’t push the truck, but he wanted this to be over. He guessed they had 60 miles to go until the safe puddle of a streetlight would show itself. Then he could drop the old guy at a truck stop, get some sleep behind a locked door, and clear his head.

The yellow lines in the road unspooled, rising up to meet the headlights. Beyond their light, the desert stretched out black, touching the horizon in every direction. It was the darkest night Sean had ever seen. He kept searching for a pinprick of light but not even the dimmest sheen made its way to the road.

An ancient memory drifted into his mind: his grandfather speaking without looking at him, contemplating the horizon from the deep shadow of his porch.

Sean had one boot in the car—it was a muscle car back then— and he stood on the other in Pop’s dirt driveway, feeling for the right moment to leave. In his pocket, hot as fire, was his first book advance.

“Wherever you go Seany, you’re always going to be there.”

Sean stood still but he felt like he was on the edge of a runway. He understood what Pop was telling him, but he was wrong. Sean had learned to make money out of thin air. Scary stories scrawled on a page. Flesh-and-blood monsters and inner demons, slashers and outlaws and vigilantes—they cost him nothing to invent, but people would pay him real money for those stories. The world was his.

Every cent he made since then had gone into the gas tank.

Sean felt tears press on his eyeballs.

“I picked you up because you look like my grandpa. Did you research that? Part of your plan to get to me?”

The man turned towards Sean. Sean glanced at this movement, the first time the old man had looked directly at him, then did a double take. This was not the person he picked up.

In the sickly light of the dashboard, the man’s eyes glowed yellow from deep shaded sockets. His thin skin was pasty and taut, stretched over prominent cheekbones, wrapping around a lipless mouth. A deep rumbling vibrated in Sean’s chest and the cab was filled with a sound like screaming. The man opened his jaw like a rattlesnake and revealed a swirling darkness so elemental, Sean felt himself break apart.

By the time he resolved the screaming sound into the warning of a semi’s horn, it was too late.

The windshield exploded. Sean looked to his passenger through a rain of crushed cans and glass shards, but he was alone.

The truck came to rest upside-down, her one intact tire spinning uselessly in the air. Fluids dripped and steamed. Sean’s chest was lanced by the steering column, pinning him to the cracked leather like a butterfly in a display.

Overhead, the Milky Way blazed. The driver of the semi could not remember ever seeing it so bright.

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