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Humidity slapped Mike in the face when he opened the cab door. The transition from western dry to midwestern moist was always stark, always a reminder he was getting further from home.
He climbed down into the sticky Nebraska night. Nights were best, he felt. Fewer cars to worry about, no traffic jams—quiet. He inhaled deeply, breathing in the smells of manure and imminent rain. It was almost three and the sky was alive with lightning, though the storm was far enough away that he couldn't hear thunder.
As he stretched, Mike looked around the mostly empty truck stop. A few other semis studded the lot, and he assumed most of them had truckers sleeping in their cabs. The area near the gasoline had all of one car, a van pulled up next to the pump furthest from the entrance. Odd.
Beyond that, nothing. There were fields out there, he knew, but they were invisible in the darkness outside the reach of the truck stop's lights.
He turned and partly climbed back into his truck to collect the Gatorade and water bottles on the ever-empty passenger seat. All of them were full, either with piss or split sunflower seeds that looked like cockroach carapaces.
Mike chucked the bottles into the trash can next to the pump, which he then turned on. He watched the lightning storm as his gargantuan tank filled and planned out his next moves.
It was possible to get to Iowa before stopping again. Taking four hours to cross the rest of Nebraska and bedding down near Council Bluffs before seven-thirty seemed doable, even if he stayed here long enough to shower.
The questions of passing time then occupied his mind. Sunflower seeds were an essential—Bigs only, of course— and he found that ranch and buffalo wing balanced each other perfectly. If they had a more unusual flavor, he'd pick that up too. He'd also grab more water and Gatorade (white, no sugar).
Truck filled and mind made up, Mike wound his way to the main building. His first stop was the bathroom, but just as he had stepped up to a urinal, another man entered.
Mike pretended not to notice him, even when he walked directly over and unzipped with a flourish. He stood half a step further behind Mike, whose heart sank. He wasn't one of those guys who got angry when this kind of thing happened, and he definitely wasn't one of those guys who got angry and said yes, but he still didn't like it. Best just to finish and leave.
"I'm Jack," the man said. It was obviously a lie; it would be. "What's your name?"
"Mike," he said. He kept his eyes front and racked his brain to find a way to signal his disinterest without anyone's feelings getting hurt.
"Ah, Michael. Patron saint of police officers and soldiers. Guardian of the Roman Catholic church. The warrior angel. Archangel, if you wish to be precise—and I value precision. Don't you, Michael?"
Mike didn't say anything. This wasn't the dialogue he'd expected.
"Precision," the man went on, "is the difference between a close shave and a nicked artery. Life and death—they're so close, don't you find?"
Mike wore a beard. The last time he had shaved it off, his son had cried.
"Are you uncomfortable, Michael?"
"No," lied Mike. By this point he had figured the man didn't want to give him a blowjob, but he had no guesses about what he did want and that made him uneasy.
"Be honest, Michael. I value precision, but I crave honesty."
"You're just freaking weird, man." He thought, but did not say, that the man's dick was not long enough to warrant standing where he did, too far from the urinal for the stream not to splatter the porcelain and its surroundings.
Mike's flannel shirt was part of those surroundings.
"I teach people, Michael. You can't grow without testing yourself against truth, you know, and I'm showing you a truth. The truth, even. Do you know what that truth is?"
"I drive trucks," Mike said. Whatever the man was on about was outside his lane.
"You drive trucks," the man repeated sardonically.
He'd been driving for twenty-two years, and he had been an owner-operator for eight of them. He had delivered food to Seattle after Leviathan's attack, driven every mile of every interstate, and had supported six kids while hardly getting to see them. He had spent his life on the road, and this man was making fun of him.
"I've unnerved you, haven't I? It's because I've violated all the social niceties and conventions, all those little fabrications we participate in to hide the fact we are just animals. Our fundamental nature. A bag of meat surrounding a smaller bag of meat that fills with water and has to drain. You see it and you fear it." He nodded down at the urinals. "All I had to do was stand next to you."
Mike had learned, thanks to his first wife, not to express his anger, so he just finished peeing.
"Have you ever seen that truth, Michael? Witnessed it for yourself? Seen that we're just bags of meat within bags of meat?"
There had been a motorcyclist once, pulverized and dragged by an SUV. He'd seen meat strewn and blood smeared across a roadtop. He'd seen a cop pick up the helmet laying on the shoulder a hundred feet off. It hadn't been empty.
He felt Jack staring hungrily at him. "Ah, so you have."
By now Mike was too angry to hide it. He jerked his fly up and turned to face this Jack, who looked a little bit like an actor who had been convicted of wife-beating a few years back. He wasn't just a freak about how he pissed; there was a Bowie knife shoved unsheathed into his belt.
"And what about lungs? Just bags of wind, huh?"
The man looked surprised, then annoyed, then amused. "You must have seen yourself in that—what was it, a car accident? Yes, it would have been. You drive trucks. What did you think when you saw the truth, Michael?"
"It's Mike." He buckled his belt like he was committing an act of defiance. "I gotta get going."
He strode over to the door and opened it.
"You didn't wash your hands, Mike," Jack said.
Mike let the door close behind him. He had hand sanitizer in his truck, and even if he hadn't he wasn't going to listen to any more of that. It was like some of those late night talk shows with hosts who said things that got in your head if you let them, things that burrowed deep and rotted.
A little blonde girl was in the hallway outside the bathrooms. "Hi there, Mister," she said brightly.
"Hey," he said automatically as he walked past her.
The door to the men's room opened behind him.
"Riley," Jack said, "this is Mike."
Mike was so surprised he stopped in his tracks. The man had a kid? He acted like that, walked around with a giant knife next to his dick, and he had a kid?
He turned and looked at her more closely. She was maybe ten and was done up in a cutesy trying-too-hard kind of way. His own daughters wouldn't have been caught dead in an Alice in Wonderland getup like that, and they'd never spend so much time curling her hair. That look was something adults did to kids, not that kids did for themselves.
Something curdled in his gut.
"Mike here didn't wash his hands," Jack said. "Mike went pee pee and didn't wash his hands."
The girl, whose eyes he now noticed didn't match, like a dog he'd had when he was little, tutted—actually tutted. Said tisk tisk tisk and shook her head. Jack did the same thing. They did it again in unison.
Mike backed away. He could have pointed out that Jack hadn't washed his hands either, but he was scared and didn't know why, which made him more scared.
Then he did the bravest thing he'd ever done and, he later thought, ever would. He turned from the father and daughter and walked away with his back fully exposed to . . . whatever evil those two carried with them.
He walked out of the truck stop without getting the sunflower seeds or Gatorade he'd wanted. Some instinct told him it was important to walk, even though running felt like the right thing to do.
The further away he got from them, the more on edge he became. The lone van, this weather, that freak man and his freak daughter—all of it added up to something bad
He scrambled into his cab, locked the door. His hands were shaking when he got the keys and he nearly sobbed when the engine started. Later, when the distress calls started coming through, he would cry.