Wave

I punch my fingertips into the screen as I careen toward the intersection, West Ashton dissipating in my rear-view. The city is dead. A big rig stumbles back the way I’ve come from, and a few drunks meander outside the Waffle House that sits perched atop an incline to my left. I stutter to a stop at the intersection, the light red and bright against the late Summer night. No clouds in sight, and no moon, either. Grumbl slaps another order across my screen, trying like hell to stack me with a pick-up that will throw me ten miles off course.

“No,” I growl, and slam my index finger against the screen again. It takes two tries to clear the damn thing, and in the mean time, the light flips to green. I’m still staring at the phone, my mind haggard from the last five hours of delivery driving. The screen is buffering, and it’s obfuscated the GPS from my view.

“Shit. At this rate, maybe I’ll just canc-”

“HONK!!!”

I jump, my foot coming off the brakes and causing my car to inch forward. At the same time, I drop my phone into the crevice between my seat and the console.

“HONK! HONK!!!!”

“I’m going!” I shout. Infuriatingly, a pair of floodlights glower back at me. I hit the gas and take a left turn. Fuming, I pull into a gas station on the corner to my right. I coast around the perimeter slowly, trying to pierce the brain-fog and adrenaline to remember what side of the Civic my gas tank is on.

As my nerves settle and my mind gets to working again, I drift toward one of the gas pumps. “Already late,” I mumble to myself. “might as well top off… It’s dark as fuck on the road out to John’s Island. Shit… I meant to call my mom back earlier. Wait. Shit! I had a doctor’s appointment today, too,”

And I continue thinking out loud like that. I come to a stop at last, and I’m about to kick the Civic into park when something clicks in my brain. I glance at my rear-view again, and I see a figure in an outfit that fuses two shades of gray; they wear a hoodie with the hood down and a pair of sweatpants cinched tight around the waist.

The skin is white. The hair is long, dark; it could be brown or black. Their face wrinkles, crinkling upward in a way that implies a grin. They wave at me. Not at my car, at me. I’m not sure how I can tell. Maybe it’s the angle of their head. I don’t think it matters; my gut knows.

I glance at my fuel gauge and see I have a quarter tank left. I’d planned to stop driving before this order appeared; the pick up had been less than a mile from my last drop off, the route was generally quiet, and the payout would likely tip me over to a $300 night. From here to the drop off, I think, is about ten miles; from there to home would be comparable. I should make it. I will make it.

I throw my car into reverse and back up, and thud, I’ve run up against the curb. I cuss and glance reflexively at the rear-view and I see a pair of big white bloodshot eyeballs peeled wide open, fixed right on me. A scream rips its way through my vocal folds. I throw it back to drive and slam on the gas. The Civic jerks forward and almost gets out from under me; I jam a foot into the brakes, rip the wheel to the left to turn, and floor it again.

I don’t look left, but I do flick my blinker to the right a second before I shoot out of the parking lot and blast off down the eight mile stretch of road headed toward John’s Island. A neighborhood zips by me quick as you like, and soon I’m surrounded on either side by marsh. My heart pounds in my chest, but the liquid flame of fear is draining up out of my arms. I catch my breath.

“Shit, where am I going?”

In my panic, I’d failed to fish my phone back from the abyss betwixt my seat and the console. I start to shove my hand into that space, but the memory of that thing and its eyes flits through my head. I recoil, the Civic swerving a bit in response. I grip the wheel with both hands until my knuckles turn white, sucking in deep breaths and then letting them back out in a slow, careful stream.

I glance in the rear-view, and the side views; there’s nothing outside save for the inky night. I sigh and shove my hand down there to fish for my damned phone so that I can drop off the bag of grease-covered nonsense in my backseat and go home.

My fingers brush against steel and cruddy fabric from the late nineties before settling on the ridged rubbery back of my phone’s case. I shimmy the device up and up and then, voila, we’re back on track. I jam the device into my cupholder and fiddle with the lock button until-

Crunch.

My Civic and I sit awkwardly on a slope that leads down into the marsh. One of my headlights is out; the other casts weird shadows over the sea of grass before me. A bit of smoke wafts up from under my hood and I feel like I should throw up. I try not to. A glance toward the miles of woodland waiting for me on the other end of the road nudges me toward panic. A glance back the way I’ve come, back the way that thing might still be waiting for me, pushes me over the edge.

My car makes a noise that I don’t like and spits out a plume of smoke. I throw open the door and stumble out into the dark. As I trudge away from the Civic, I wonder what it was that I hit. I’d seen nothing, and sure, I’d been preoccupied, but I couldn’t have been that oblivious, could I?

Could I?

I press my phone’s lock/unlock button and tug down a panel from the top of the screen. I flick on the flashlight and set its power to a ‘3’, then turn back toward my car. It looks like I ran into a guard rail or a lamppost, although no such thing sits along this stretch of road. I squint. Something black smears the steel chassis around my front driver-side wheel. Pluff mud? Maybe. But… It drips, reminding me a bit of the fake blood we used in theater class before I’d graduated high school.

Only… I inch closer, uncertain.

Wet mud plumps up around my shoes, painting them brown. Smoke billows continually now. Flame dances under the hood, lashes flicking up through the thin gaps along its perimeter. I draw close enough that I could leap forward and graze the door handle. Here, I can see enough that I am nearly certain.

That substance is writhing. It spreads slowly along my car, contracting inward and then stretching out again. Each movement pulls its mass further from the point of impact, further from the flames, and closer to the road. I take a step back, then two, and I start turning away from the scene. My foot slides through the thick mud and I fall to a knee, burying the hand that holds my phone down to the wrist in muck. I am plunged into darkness.

I scuttle up through the mire and back onto the road, wiping my phone against my jacket to clear mud from the screen and camera lens. Light does not return, neither from the flashlight nor from the screen itself.

“Bricked.”

I throw a gaze toward my car again and see that the writhing mass has amassed atop my trunk. It convulses, and like some bastardization of birth, a snow white hand claws its way from the inky dark something. Red not-quite-blood runs along its arm, its shoulder, and now its face. Already it grins at me; its eyes, mercifully shut, seem locked on me nonetheless. It’s paused in its emergence now, half of its abdomen exposed. Its fist hangs lazily over my taillight, dimly illuminated by the red blinking of my hazards.

Slowly, the arm rises and the fist uncurls. The thing waves at me. I swallow a lump in my throat and raise my free hand. It shakes like a tree in the face of a hurricane. I open up my fist, and I wave back.

The creature’s left eye opens, first a crescent, but soon a lazy half-lid. Its nose twitches. “It’s scenting,” I think out loud. I take a step back. Another.

A pair of headlights blip into view, less than a mile up the road. At the same time, the Civic reaches a fever pitch. The creature tugs itself from the strange black substance, one foot touching soil, the other stuck, stuck! It tugs to no avail, and its eyes open wide. It turns back and grabs hold of its calf, and with a great effort it rips itself from the black. From the womb.

The headlights draw nearer.

The creature looks at me, sees my hand still held aloft. It licks its lips, its tongue something between human and canid.

The Civic explodes. The creature stumbles into the road, recoiling. The oncoming car swerves, avoiding the the thing, and then swerves again to evade me. They come to a stop, and already I’m sprinting toward them. I slam into the passenger side door, banging on the window urgently.

“Help,” I plead, “please, I need a ride-- we need to get out of here right now, there’s-”

Sirens howl in the distance. A dim glow I’d missed before shines in the driver’s hand. I step back, realizing for the first time how insane this scene is. I look back toward the ruins of my Civic, looking for the monster.

It is no where.

The police take me for a lunatic when they arrive. I spend the night in jail; I spend a little under a year there when I’m pinned with reckless driving. I share my story where I can, but a reputation is hard to break, once its stuck on you. I’m a lunatic.

When I’m let go on good behavior, I find that I can’t drive. Not for legal reasons, but… I can’t. The second I’m behind the wheel, I start shaking. It doesn’t stop when I get out and settle on walking. Every face I see, every body on every corner, sets on end every hair on my body . I wave and I grin at them all until it hurts. Some people tolerate it. Most… Most are put off.

It must be this way, though. It must... Because that night after I waved at the creature- right before that other driver appeared- it started scenting. When a creature scents, it is because some new smell has wafted into its environment. Every new smell could mean new food. New threats. Or, perhaps, a new friend.

The creature waved at me, and I waved back.

Like a friend. You don’t eat your friends. Do you?