I wrote this one ages ago, and when I opened the original draft, it was in pretty rough shape. I still thought the idea was fun, though, so I did some revisions and decided to add it to the blog.
“Gonna be a cold one tonight, folks, but hey, sometimes you need one of those, don’t you think? Nice cold night in with a hot chocolate, some marshmallows…maybe put a candle on, throw one of those weighted blankets over your shoulder…”
Mark took his hand off the wheel long enough to smack the “Seek” button on his radio. He hated that DJ. He didn’t know the guy’s name, but he always came on the modern rock station and started talking for an eternity.
Mark had no patience for his least favorite DJ. He was stuck in the worst Boston rush hour traffic he had seen in months. Rush hour always got bad in early September, when beleaguered parents were forced back onto the highway by their kids’ soccer practices. It wasn’t fair, Mark thought. He didn’t even live in Boston. He just worked in Burlington and lived in Worcester. But Boston took up so much real estate in the middle of Massachusetts that the city couldn’t help but make its problems everyone’s problems.
It was 5:45, and the route was clogged with cars. Lots of Hondas, Mark observed. Early 2000s Hondas. Most of them filled with trash. Empty coffee cups probably littered their floors, he thought —crumpled bags from fast food chains, food picked up in the last minutes by office workers trying to beat traffic and get to work by 9. That probably described eveyone’s car — after all, that was what covered the floor of Mark’s car. Everyone else was in the same boat, right?
He was still north of Boston in that one stretch of highway where he always got stuck. The highway was flanked on one side by clean-shaven hills and on the other by…not woodlands, exactly, but “roadside” woodlands: thin stretches of dying trees gasping for life in the carbon-soaked air. A lome office building perched on the hill to Mark’s left kept watch over the traffic. He imagined the paralegals or receptionists or salespeople or whoever worked inside looking out at the traffic, thinking “Boy, glad I stayed late today. I’d rather be dead than caught in that gridlock.”
A couple of cars over, he could see his coworker, Ed, sitting in his own car. Ed’s face was planted firmly in his fist and his face was fixed in a scowl. Mark took out his phone, thought about texting Ed, then shrugged and put it back. What difference would it make, letting Ed know that they were both stuck in the same traffic? Ed didn’t even seem to like Mark that much. Mark was indifferent towards Ed. It was just an interesting distraction, seeing a familiar face in a flood of blank expressions.
The radio kept scanning. Mark considered stopping it on the news, but the news just exhausted him. He had once been a fairly responsible follower of NPR, keeping tabs on which countries were at war with which countries, which governor had just been humiliated by which scandal, which ice cap was melting into which ocean. But as Mark got older, as he saw the specter of middle age coming to greet him, he became less and less enthusiastic about hearing how the world was going to hell.
“…oo na na…”
“…and that’s it for Champlain, he’s got maybe one more season in him and he’s out…”
“…keep on turnin’, Proud Mary keep on…”
Mark just let the radio scan. He was only half-listening. He was thinking about his tires, how they were overdue for a rotation. He imagined them slowly peeling away on the asphalt as he inched forward with the gridlock. He wondered if they were going to shred to pieces the second he picked up speed. It was paranoia, he knew, but he’d survived one highway tire shredding and it was enough for him to live in perpetual fear of another such incident. It wasn’t the fear of physical harm that kept him paranoid, either — it was the cost. Mark’s budget was shrinking, rent was due, and a single tire could be enough to force him back on the streets.
“…”
“…half of my heart is in…”
“…really the GOP is doing the sensible thing here…”
He peered into the window of the car in front of him. A woman was arguing with what looked like the scrawny arms of a teenager. He could only make out the silhouettes of their hands as they waved furiously at each other, like a couple of geese fighting over a piece of bread. It made Mark feel better about his own loneliness, sometimes — the sight of other people fighting. It would give him a brief feeling of gratitude that there was nobody sharing his car, screaming at him. But the feeling would pass, and then he would continue to be lonely. When he got lonely, he would turn to the radio, hoping that the sound of a voice would make him feel less alone.
But the therapeutic benefits of the radio always wore off. At his age, the radio mostly just reminded him that there were people in the world who were more successful, happier, richer, and younger than him.
He sighed. Grey-black clouds were rolling over the hill. Rain, most likely.
“…Hen-a-ree the Eighth, I am, Hen-a-ree the Eighth, I am I am…”
“…and there’s no sign of anyone else in the family who can…”
“Stay in the car.”
Mark jumped in his seat. A chill ran through him. He stared at the radio. It had stopped scanning. He was just listening to dead air.
But if he wasn’t mistaken, he had just heard a very deep, very authoritative voice say…
“Stay in the car.”
Again. It hadn’t been a mistake. He looked at the display. The station was set to 0.00.
He took a breath. A weird joke, probably. Some jerk with a ham radio putting a scary voice on a loop.
But why had it stopped scanning?
Technology, he thought, and he switched off the radio. He glanced up at the hill. The clouds were blocking what last bit of light the sunset had to offer. His eyes grew heavy. The lack of sunlight was making him tired. Since late October, he’d been spending more and more of his precious free time inside, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, despairing. His psychiatrist had told him to get a sun lamp. Mark reminded his psychiatrist how much debt he owed, how much his pills cost, and how much his rent was. His psychiatrist nodded sympathetically, then told Mark to look online for a sun lamp.
In the car next to him, Mark saw one of his coworkers, Ed. Ed was a large man, bald, with a thin beard. He looked just as fed up as Mark. Mark tried to wave to him, but Ed was in a trance of his own. They were both completely stopped. Traffic had not moved for at least a minute.
“Stay in the car.”
There it was again. Mark’s skin went cold. He looked at the radio. It was turned off. He closed his eyes and looked again. It was still turned off.
“Stay in the car.”
“What the FUCK!?!” he screamed. He reached for the back seat, wondering if somebody had put a bluetooth speaker in his car as a joke. He felt around the back seat, reached under the passenger seat, and then as far under the driver seat as he could reach.
Nothing.
He turned the radio on. No sound. The station was 0.00. He hit scan. The digits scrambled for a second before turning back to 0.00.
I think…I think I really want to get out of the car…
Mark’s hand crept towards the door handle.
“Stay in the car.”
The voice was deeper, more insistent this time, and Mark jerked his hand away from the handle.
He stared at the radio.
It stayed silent.
He twitched his finger at the door handle.
“Stay in the car.”
Mark froze. He glared at the radio.
Okay, he thought, This has been fun, but I’m not going to listen to some random voice that takes over my radio.
He reached for the door when suddenly, a scream from outside stopped him just as his fingers brushed the handle.
The scream was coming from behind his car. He turned around to see an older, balding man running away from the cars and towards the wooded side of the highway. Car horns blared from every side of the highway. Somebody in a suit jumped out of their Prius and pointed up at the hill. The clouds rolling in were turning red, and arcs of lightning were leaping from cloud to cloud. They crept over the hills, covering the lone office building in darkness, then casting their shadow on the highway and its inhabitants.
A screech from the other side of the highway made Mark turn around. The older man who had run by was screeching. The trees were casting impossible shadows, shadows where there should have been no light, and those shadows were crawling towards him like spectral fingers. The shadows had touched the older man’s foot, and his foot was now pure ice. He was hobbling back towards the highway, bits of ice cracking off of what was once his foot, but the shadows were too quick. They enveloped his other foot, which turned to ice as well. The older man fell to the ground and feebly tried to crawl away, but in seconds the shadow consumed him, leaving only an ice sculpture of a terrified man..
Screams were coming from all around Mark now. People were bolting from their cars left and right. Mark’s eyes bulged. He wanted to scream with them. He desperately wanted to join their terrified throngs. Whatever was happening, if he could at least run and scream with the mob, it wouldn’t just be happening to him.
“Stay in the car.”
The voice cut through Mark’s instincts. He froze with horror, stiff as the ice sculpture that lay in the road. Above the panicked crowd, the clouds had grown faces, human-like faces, with arms that reached out in plaintive gestures. A horrible sound came from the mouths of the clouds, a sound like an ancient scream, like a newborn crying in the catacombs of a ruined monastery. All the while, motorists were falling in the streets, their bodies turning to ice as the shadows claimed them. Those who were not caught by the shadows trampled the ice-sculpture remains of their fellow rioters, breaking the pieces into tiny chunks of ice that no longer resembled anything human.
Gray funnels of wind reached down from the red clouds, reaching like tendrils for the mob on the highway.
An older woman’s body fell across Mark’s windshield. Her terrified eyes met his for a brief second, and then her body was lifted into the sky, carried by a whirlwind that took Mark’s windshield wipers with it. All around, one by one, human bodies were being plucked from the ground by more of these whirlwinds. They flew up into the sky to meet the gaping maws of the faces.
Mark saw Ed racing towards the hills as fast as his out-of-shape body could carry him, racing through the screams and bellowing winds. Mark wanted to open the door, call out to Ed, tell him to stay in the car, just like the voice was saying. But what good would that do? But, Mark thought, wouldn’t he be a monstrous asshole if he just let Ed die? If he didn’t warn him? His mind swam; nothing was making sense. Nothing he could do would make sense.
“Stay in the car.”
Then the roar of a tidal wave was heard from over the hill. A gargantuan wave of blood crested the hill, painting the lone office building red and drowning the grass. The blood poured down into the highway, coating everyone who remained in the screaming crowd.
In the car in front of Mark, the teenager was screaming after her mother, who was abandoning the vehicle and racing down the highway to join the thronging masses. The teenager leaned over and slammed the door shut.
The shadows from the trees consumed one side of the road as the blood coated the other side and the whirlwinds reached down toward the earth. The three nightmares were converging. The faces in the sky were all merging into one enormous, featureless head. Mark saw Ed, swept back into the road by the flood of red. Half of Ed’s body entered the shadows and turned to ice. Ed screamed. For a moment, Mark thought his eyes met Ed’s, and Mark could swear he saw a hint of betrayal in Ed’s face. But the moment was too quick to register before Ed was carried by the winds into the featureless head’s hollow mouth. The mouth grew and grew, sucking the shadows, the blood, and any remaining human bodies left on the street into its black abyss. Then, the grass and the trees began to dissolve into dust, and the dust merged with the blood and shadows. Once the plants had gone, the asphalt crumbled beneath the car and flecks of black floated skyward. The office building on the hill was caught by a whirlwind. Its supports twisted around themselves and chunks of concrete broke into splinters that joined the cleansing wave of red. The building’s inhabitants fell from the destroyed building, screaming for a brief moment before they, too were carried up into the sky with the rest of the detritus.
With a final roar, the mouth spread across the sky until there was nothing above the world but darkness, and the last broken pieces of the world around Mark’s car fell upward. The blood and the shadows converged into an impossible congregation of being, then were carried up by the whirlwinds, which finally receded back into the eternal darkness above.
And then there was nothing. No sound. No light. No life. No world.
The silence held.
Mark cautiously reached up and turned on the interior light in his car.
He looked outside. There was nothing to see. Nothing but darkness.
He turned on his high beams. Their light bounced off the car in front of him. There was nothing else to see.
He tried to process the entirety of the situation, but nothing in the human mind had properly evolved to process something like this.
Slowly, his hand inched towards the handle.
The radio crackled to life.
“Stay in the car.”
.
I still remember what inspired this: I was driving back from work during a tornado warning in Massachusetts, and traffic was -- as it usually is when you drive from Northern Mass to Southern Mass at rush hour -- horrible. The whole time, the sky above us was covered in the most menacing clouds I've ever seen, all of them curling in synchronicity around a central point. I could swear a tornado was forming directly above us and we would all be trapped in our cars with nowhere to run. It didn't happen, but tornadoes did hit Massachusetts that day. It still stands as the most nerve-wracking driving experience I've ever had in my life.