A Spark in the Darkness

They stopped in front of an eighteen-wheel monstrosity. RANDY’S TRUCKING, Ravenswood, West Virginia was stenciled in bloodred letters across the clean, white cab.

“Your chariot awaits, milady,” he said.

“You’re a truck driver?” Shit-faced drunk even by her own quasi-alcoholic sensibilities, she couldn’t hide the surprise in her voice. He didn’t look like any trucker she’d ever met. Not that she had anything against truck drivers. Hell, if it weren’t for the lonely working men and women of the road, she never would have made it this far.

This far? she asked herself, grimacing at her own deluded sense of reality.

“Why else would I hang out at a dump like this?” Randy said. He opened the door, and threw Edie’s suitcase into the back of the cab-over. Wrapping strong arms around her waist, he helped her into the passenger seat. “Besides, Brandi,” he said sternly, “I’m hauling freight bound for Toledo and Cleveland—Omaha’s right on the way.”

Edie admired her surroundings: black leather seats, a red cab liner, and video screens mounted above both ends of the windshield. The opulence of the cab spoke to Randy’s impeccable taste, making it easy to shake off his increasingly uneven demeanor, swinging wildly between gentleness and prickishness.

She marveled at the dark tint of the windows, barely able to see the dusk-lit prairie through them. The pleasant scent of sandalwood and cinnamon tickled her nose as she ran her fingers across the plush liner, the finest velvet she’d ever touched.

“Best digs you’ve seen in a while, huh?” he said, climbing into his seat.

Mouth agape, she nodded.

“If a man’s gotta do this work then he might as well do it in comfort.”

The engine roared. Lights dimmed. Video screens came alive with pulsing, blue-hued shapes.

Lovely, she thought.

Then the hectoring twang of country music sliced through the calm.

“Eww.” Her smile turned into a frown. “Seriously, Randy, what’s with the fucking hoedown?”

Bathed in azure light, he returned her glare, images from the monitors dancing like hell-bent angels in his eyes. “Come on now, Edie,” he growled. “I know they have country music in Los Angeles.”

A rapid series of mechanized clicks pinged through the cab.

“How did you…?”

Suddenly cold, she pressed herself against the door, desperately seeking the latch with her right hand. Trembling, she gasped, unable to breathe, unable to form words. She found the latch, frantically tugged on it. No use. It was locked.

She pressed her face against tinted glass, looking for someone—anyone—and managed a thin scream that ricocheted around her.

Above the din of her own distress, she heard a hollow cracking sound. Dead tree branches? No. Bones. Wild animals invaded her mind’s eye, pulverizing dry limbs with sharp-toothed jaws.

She whirled on Randy, ready to fight. But what she saw froze her blood. Randy’s cheekbones grew large and sharp. His eyes—silver orbs—widened, chin burgeoning downward. Hair receded. Tanned flesh quickened to pallid gray.

She screamed again, this time louder, but knew it was futile. The resonance of her voice told her the space was soundproofed.

His mouth grew impossibly wide. Rows of silver, razor-sharp fangs sprang like switch knives from behind his teeth.

Reflexively, she swung at his face.

He caught her arm in a tight grip, and then twisted it. Admiring the inside of her wrist, his eyes ran along the veins as if he were an archeologist studying a rare fossil. His long, pale tongue waggled like a puppy’s tail.

Her heart hammered a fierce tattoo against her chest. Nerves thrummed violently between each beat. Bile burnt a trail up her throat, and she pushed back on it. But the force of fear won. She bowed her head, gin-rich vomit cascading into her lap.

He sniffed her arm.

“What are you?” she gasped.

In response, Randy bit down on her wrist. Blade-like teeth sank into flesh and muscle with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. Then, fangs planted, he shook his head. A fierce, almost mechanical, sucking hummed from his mouth.

Intense pain. Millions of jagged needles stabbed every nerve. Throwing her head back, Edie screamed and cried in spastic intervals. Soon, reduced to a writhing mass of agony and fear, gravity faded. She drifted. Tendrils of psyche shattering brutality, ravenous slurping, and steel guitar, united into a singular hum, prosaic and painless. Terror still burned at her core. But numbness ripped through every fiber of her being, extinguishing the human condition.

Growing cold, Edie thought about her daughter for the first time in months.

“Gail…”

The name fell from her lips like a dying dream, eyes rolling into the back of her head.

Then, without so much as a gasp, Edie fell into an empty, timeless sea of despair and nothingness.