The Driver
by Emma Rather
Emma Rather (She/They) can be found kayaking, or in racing sims when she isn’t at work or writing down her many tales. Inspired by cosmic horror, paranormal and fantasy stories along with truck driving music and Emma’s own experience from long hours on the road. She aspires to one day have a published novel to call her own.
It was easier when she was younger. Her knee ached less back then, and so did her spine. The driver found herself in a familiar place on a familiar road. A road well-travelled in days past, but now?
Now the driver walked along the old road, her cane clinking against the asphalt with each step toward the wrecked SUV. The Lonely Road of eld. Someplace deep in the desert with no living thing for hundreds of kilometers. And yet, people still found their way there.
The driver’s pale hair whipped around her face, spurred on by a dry dusty wind, carrying the deep clatter of a semi’s engine behind her. Her large, flat-nosed, dark-green vehicle with millions of kilometers on the odometer just waiting to roll once again.
A cloudless sky signaled that which was always known to the driver. There’ll be no rain coming. Ever. That was another’s domain. The Lonely Road was hers.
The driver stopped next to a man in tattered clothing sleeping in the ditch under the shadow of the wrecked SUV. It had rolled enough times to turn the white vehicle into a twisted hulk of metal, completely unrecognizable to its former glory. The man was as sun-beaten as the driver and looked like he’d seen better days. Days which were past him now and the driver’s job was all too clear.
The driver poked the man with the rubber sole of her cane. “Hey,” she said, poking the man again, and again. “Wake up.”
The man rolled onto his back and glanced up at the pale woman, shielding his green eyes from the scorching twin-suns above her. The largest of planet shards hung in the air below the twin-suns like the shattered moon it tried to imitate.
“Where am I?” the man croaked. Cracks ran across his lips like many tiny canyons. Long dead skin flaked off the dry riverbed-like texture of his face.
“In a ditch on the side of the road,” the driver replied flatly. She turned her cane onto the SUV and tapped the twisted door a few times, letting the rattle linger for a moment. “Took a tumble and hit your head, eh?”
“Are you an angel come to rescue me?” he asked.
The driver shook her head, then gripped the cue ball-sized topper on her cane and pointed the stick the way she had come from. “I’m just a driver doing her job. Come on, I know you’ve the strength to follow me where you need to go.”
“What if I don’t want to go?” The man’s eyes went to the mangled SUV before he looked around the shrub-filled desert. Car and semi-truck wrecks dotted the road as far as he could see in either direction. Smoke darkened the western skyline as an eternally burning inferno raged on through the Ashen Wasteland unabated as it had been since the Collide.
“I’ll wait.” The driver leaned on the cane, lifting the weight from her prosthetic leg so it wouldn’t hurt as much. She had thought her employer would have fixed that little issue. It’d be simple to do. A snap of Her fingers and all would be well, but no. She decided not to. For it was a reminder the driver was once mortal and kept her bound to the living plane.
“Are we in the Amarillo Desert?” the man asked, his voice hoarse and desperately in need of water. “I see the Ash Wastes out there.” He pointed at the smoke looming over the western sky.
The driver shook her head slowly. “The Lonely Road. It just looks like Amarillo.”
“Oh. I’m not thirsty anymore… Weird.”
The driver took a cigarette from her cargo pants pocket and snapped her fingers, engulfing her thumb in a sickly green flame. She brought the flame close enough it turned her face green with the light as she lit the cigarette. A strange scent drifted into the man’s lungs. Like he just walked into a crypt and opened a long forgotten casket.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” the man asked. He felt his body where blood darkened his shirt, but no pain coursed through his veins.
The driver shook her head, inhaling deeply before exhaling a grey cloud above them. Her colorless eyes sparkled like diamonds when the twin-suns hit them.
“Dying?” the man queried.
She nodded.
“Are you Death?”
She shook her head again.
“Then who are you?”
“I am the driver. I haul the Lonely Road, picking up hitchhikers and lost souls, transporting them where they need to go. Whether that is to Death’s Door or Life Anew.” She knelt next to the man and offered him the cigarette. “You’re in the void between worlds. Some call it Limbo, others call it Asphodel. I call it home. You crashed alone on the road and I’m here for you for as long as you need me.”
The man took the cigarette and puffed a couple of times. He eyed the driver’s dark tank top that exposed a tattoo sleeve on one of her arms that resembled a design unlike anything he had words for. Even just looking at the many shifting colors made his head spin.
“How long until I die?” the man asked.
“When you finish the cigarette.” She flicked a hand toward him. Then gently patted his shoulder.
He scoffed and shook his head. “You know, I thought angels would look different. You look like I could have met you on the street.”
“I was mortal at one time, but the memories are hazy now. Like someone else lived them and I am just an outside observer looking on as she flew over the edge. She wasn’t the greatest or the nicest, or even free from what you humans call sin, but she found a new purpose and that’s all that matters now.”
“Heh, so you made a deal with Death.” The man tapped the ashes from the cigarette. He held it up to his face and frowned at it being half-gone already. “I don’t have anyone… to realize I’m gone, thank you.”
“Anytime.” The driver glanced back at her truck, wondering if it was still there or not. They were the only two on the Lonely Road, and so, of course it was still there idling away, just waiting for another run. Her three meter long antennas wiggled like a puppy’s tail as it waited to play. “I have food and water in my truck if you’d like. Air conditioning, too. The good roof mounted kind.”
The man shook his head, then lightly banged it on the side of his crumpled SUV. “I tried to live my life to the fullest, but I don’t know. It seems pointless now. Why go? Why not stay on this road?”
“It was for something, eh?” The driver smiled at the man. She held a hand out for a handshake. “You might not see the mark you make on the world until you’re not there to affect it any longer. I know this from experience.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just because you don’t make the news doesn’t mean you still didn’t make your mark in some way. People notice.”
“Maybe. Doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“It matters to you. What you do from here on is your own decision. I cannot tell you what to do. Only sit here at your side until you decide.”
“What happens when I die?” The man brought the smouldering cigarette to his lips and puffed on it, taking a long, deep, breath.
“I’ll take you to a truckstop outside Midway and you can catch a bus into the city. There, Death’ll judge your heart, not me. I’m just a taxi as my step-father calls it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. There’s a city for you to explore, too.”
“Okay, driver, let’s go.” The man crushed out his cigarette.
The driver helped the man to his feet and over to her waiting semi. Once the man was situated comfortably in the passenger seat, and buckled in, she pushed in the brake knobs to release the parking brake.
Her dark-green semi drove off with a roar, kicking up a small cloud of dust as it hauled three trailers onto the asphalt.
The two of them talked the better part of the drive on topics ranging from the mundane to dragons. Meanwhile, the driver’s semi roared across the open plain, singing loudly for no one, but the occupants to hear. They passed clusters of destroyed cars every few kilometers along the dusty road and soon. A packed truck stop buzzing with activity came into sight like an oasis on the black ribbon of the driver’s home.
The driver pulled off the road a kilometer before reaching the truck stop and looked over at the man. “This is as far as I go,” she said, leaning on the steering wheel. “I cannot cross the threshold and must turn back here.”
“Hey, I never asked. Did you have anyone before… you know?”
The driver leaned back in her seat, nodding ever so slowly. “A wife and three children I only see when I have home time.”
“How often is that?” The man cocked his head.
“Two weeks for every decade I’m out. That is but one of my rules.”
“How’d you two meet?”
“That is a story for another time, eh?”
“Sorry. Where do I go from here?”
“You’ll find out when you leave my truck.” She held her hand out for a handshake again and flashed a reassuring smile at the man.
“Thank you,” the man said.
“Anytime.”
They shook hands and the man disappeared from her cab like the ghost he was.
She slid another cigarette from her pocket to savor the moment, leaning on the shaking steering wheel once again. The driver glanced up at the storage compartment where her pink cell phone lay dormant without any signal, just waiting for her to head home for a couple weeks. It’d been long enough she could ask Death for the time off, but what was one more run down the Lonely Road and back again?
After all, the call beckoned the driver to put her semi into gear and let the V12 sing into the nothingness that was the space between the living and the dead.
She pushed the brake knobs in and they hissed like snakes.
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