Hitches
by Nick Williams

   Kurt sat hunched on his backpack on the edge of the southbound lane of the highway, a joint pinched between his lips. The road was a strip of asphalt streaking through the tranquil New Mexico desert like the stripe on a skunk. Off in the horizon, the mountains were faintly demarcated against the clear night sky.

   A few feet away was a slab of roadkill – an unidentifiable, squashed animal languishing in a pool of viscera, flies buzzing around it, smelling ripe, bones sticking out. He had been flicking pebbles at it for the past few hours while waiting to catch a ride, making a game of it to see how many he could get into the pancake carcass’s ruptured belly. His score had gotten up to 21 when he noticed a pair of headlights gliding up in the northbound lane.

   He ground out the joint with his heel, picked up his backpack and duffel bag, crossed the road, and stuck out his thumb. The green Ford pickup (at least the patches of peeling paint among all the rust were green) braked with a screech a little past him. Kurt cursorily noted the Texas plates, along with some scabby bumper stickers on the askew bumper – a Rebel flag, one that said "Speak English or get the fuck out!", and another that said "How’s My Driving? Call 1-800- EAT-SHIT!".

   "Hop on in!" the driver yelled in a raspy drawl out the open passenger window as he approached.

   Kurt deposited his luggage in the footwell and himself in the passenger seat. The interior of the cab reeked of stagnant cigarette smoke and potent liquor. Static-sprinkled country wafted from the archaic radio. He tried the seatbelt, but it was jammed in place. Just as well.

   The driver stamped on the gas precipitously. The motor revved as he brought it up to 75. "So where you headed, feller?"

   Kurt appraised the guy. He had a stained wifebeater stretched across a tremendous beer belly with a sleeveless flannel over it. His bald pate was wreathed with mangy dark hair. A patch covered his left eye. "Nowhere in particular, just wandering abroad. I’m a bit of a nomad."

   "I hear ya, I hear ya." A moment of awkward silence, then the guy said, "Don’ mind the patch, by the way. I got me this kind of eye cancer, but I don’t have enough insurance for the asshole doctors to remove it, so I sez fuggit, let the damn thing eat it up. I can do just fine with one eye. And if it gets to be too much of a pain in my ass, I’ll just gouge out the blasted thing myself. That’s all it is. I just wanted to let you know I’m not no sicko killer or nuthin’."

   Kurt nodded. "Got ya’." He leaned forward, unzipped the canvas bag, rummaged around in it a bit, found what he was looking for, and grasped its wooden handle. "Hey, by the way, don’t mind this, because I am some sicko killer." He slowly produced the meat cleaver.

   "Huh?"

   Before the guy could react, Kurt backhand swung the cleaver and wedged it in his neck. He stiffened back against the seat, thrust the gas to the floor, and spastically groped at the cleaver. The truck weaved wildly down the road as the steering wheel swiveled back and forth. "Shit! Shit! Fucking shit!" Kurt yelled. Luckily, this stretch of highway at this time of night had virtually no traffic, and even less police presence.

   Kurt leaned across the seat, grabbed the wheel, and straightened the vehicle back into the lane. He glanced at the speedometer – the needle was at the maximum. "Let go of the fucking gas!" he commanded. The only response was a gurgly wheezing noise, dark blood spilling out of his mouth, wracking with death throes.

   Kurt kicked and pulled at the leg, but it was set like a stone pillar. He clutched the cleaver and extricated it from the neck. The claret from the severed arteries sprayed everywhere. Kurt tucked his head down to avoid it. He hacked away the leg at mid-thigh, screaming with each strike, "I said – get – your – fucking – foot – off – it!" Slicing through meat and bone, he hit through to the seat. Kurt lifted the divorced limb and prodded the brake. The truck halted with a squeal and violent lurch and he fell off the seat.

   The hemorrhage from the man’s neck had petered out to a trickle; his head was lolling back, splaying the slit. Practically the entire driver’s side was drenched with blood; Kurt’s face and clothes were glazed with it.

   Kurt eased the truck over onto the shoulder and parked it. He sat back in the seat, wiped some blood away from his eyes, breathing heavily to catch his breath and giggling. "Wooooo-yeah! Fuck yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!" Adrenaline pumping through his veins, heart beating a mile a minute, he stomped his feet and drummed a tattoo on the dashboard. He put his arm around the corpse’s shoulder and pulled it close to him like an old drinking buddy. "Damn, you sure know how to treat a passenger," he quipped, and kissed the cadaver’s bloody cheek.

   After basking in the aftermath and calming down, he took out a machete and chopped off the guy’s remaining leg, arms, and head and tossed them out the open passenger door, off an embankment that sloped down the roadside and into a ditch at the bottom. He paused as he was about to discard the head though. He usually liked to take a souvenir. He slipped off the eye patch. The guy wasn’t kidding about the cancer; it looked to probably be in its highest stage. The white was abnormally streaked with veins, the iris was contused, the pupil was slightly murky, and there was crimson seeping from the edges.

   He took his Swiss Army knife and squeezed it in between the outer corner of the socket and the lymphatic eyeball, being careful not to score it too much. When it was deep enough to allow adequate purchase, he levered the knife down. The ocular organ prolapsed with the sound of a cork popping. There was the tumor all right, latched to the back of the eye like a leech, all mottled and lumpy and membranous. He severed the nerves attached to the eye and dropped it in the Ziploc bag with the rest of his trophies and pitched the head and last but not least the dismembered torso.

   He changed his clothes, storing the stained ones in plastic, and wiped himself off. He piloted the truck a ways until the land flattened out and stowed it behind some shrubs. If he couldn’t trap himself another tonight then he would double back to it, clean it up, and use it to head home. He had already gotten two tonight. One was on an average night, two was on a good one, and he was lucky to ever get any more than that. But he would go ahead and see if he could snag one more before he retired just yet.

   He had just returned to the highway when bam! Out of nowhere, like Kurt’s thoughts had acted as an invocation and it just materialized out of thin air, a sleek, black car pulled right up in front of him. The driver, without looking at Kurt, motioned him in. Settling into the passenger seat, Kurt said, "Whew! Thanks man, I’ve been waiting out there forever."

   Still not acknowledging him, the driver resumed his journey.

   Kurt assessed the interior. It was rather plain, all gray, even the upholstery. The stereo was off, the contained atmosphere devoid of music, which he found odd considering the time of night.

   The guy himself was as stark as the car, like he had come right off the assembly line with it. Behold, the new Conformist model! He sat upright and rigid, his back not even touching the seat, like he had a steel pole running through his body and was inflexible. Or more like he had a stick jammed up his ass and was afraid to relax ‘cause he might break it, Kurt thought. Probably another one of those egotistical bureaucratic pricks who regarded himself as superior to everybody else. Probably had picked up this piece of drifting refuse for a good laugh, to give his self-esteem a nice boost by proving how better off he was than a lot of people. He despised those kinds of people. Despised them, but cherished executing them.

   Well, Kurt would fix his little red wagon. He’d prove to this dickhead that he was the complete opposite – he was nothin’ but a little worm impaled on a fishing lure. He fished a hammer out of the arsenal in his canvas bag and reclined with it propped up on his thigh. He wasn’t planning on doing him quickly. Nah, maybe torture him a bit first. Nothing like a good excruciation to pass the time.

   "Tell me," Kurt said, "how much money you make, man?"

   The only response was a flick of the eyes in his general direction.

   "Oh c’mon, surely you must be proud of the shitloads of green you reap. Come on, give me a general figure – yearly income, salary wage, somethin’. Lookin’ at this hip piece I’d say it must be a pretty penny."

   Still nothing.

   "Hey shitheel, I’m talking to you. What’s wrong, you afraid if you answer me your membership in the Brotherhood of Rich Bastards will be revoked? Oh, I know, you’re one of those guys who makes a lot of money, but doesn’t like to flaunt his wealth. Probably even donates a good chunk to charity every once in a while to atone for his greed."

   The guy was a virtual statue.

   Kurt scooted across the seat, coiled his free arm around the guy, and pressed the claw end of the hammer to the hollow of his throat. "Let me tell you something I’ve learned in life," he hissed in his ear. "It’s not the sum of money you make, or how big a house you live in, or how beautiful a wife and kids you have that determines your worth. It’s how much blood you shed, how much agony you inflict. God knows, I’ve spilt a ton of it, gallons of it. Shit, maybe even enough to fill the fucking Grand Canyon. Maybe it’s not much in synthetic society, but in the world outside, in actual existence, it’s easily more valuable than gold.

   "So I’m gonna ask you one more time, and depending on your answer, maybe I won’t gut you like a pig and gag you on your own bowels. How – much – money – do – you – make?"

   The guy wouldn’t even budge.

   "ANSWER ME!"

   It was like trying to coerce a statue.

   "Aw, fuck it." He lifted the hammer-claw and scythed into the mute guy’s chest and cut down to his underbelly.

   Kurt leaned back, utterly baffled. He had meant to eviscerate the victim, had intended to lay him open like a coroner performing an autopsy. But he had felt no tearing of fabric, no rending of flesh, no grating of bone and meat. What it had felt like was trying to slash foam rubber padding. Appraising the guy, who was still motionless, Kurt saw his shirt wasn’t even scathed. There was just a slight furrow down the middle that was steadily rising back up.

   The guy finally turned his head towards Kurt, and there was something wrong about the way he did it. The skin didn’t twist right; it wrinkled too much. And now that he saw the full face, the excessively stern, expressionless face, there was something even more wrong with that. It wasn’t just like it was inert, but molded out of inert material. It was artificial, had to be, no face could be that deadpan. It was a goddamn mask! Even the eyes gazing at him seemed to be plastic.

   Primal instincts triggered alarms in Kurt’s head, and he heeded instantly. He yanked on the door handle. It didn’t budge, even though the lock peg was up. As he tugged and tweaked on the handle, the guy turned a dial on the radio. The handle disappeared out of Kurt’s grip, just faded like a hologram. The rest of the door vanished too, revealing another door underneath, one composed of seamed silvery metal instead of plastic and latex.

   The car’s interior followed suit, the veneer dissolving to expose glittering steel, parts transmuting into other parts. The steering wheel converted into one that would be more at home in an airplane cockpit. The stereo became a console with switches and blinking lights and a computer screen with some arcane jabberwocky processing on it.

   "The hell kind of car is this?!" Kurt shouted.

   The metamorphosis complete, the vehicle having cast off its camouflage, the driver now unmasked himself. The faux person’s clothes and then rubbery tissue dispersed into oblivion. Kurt balked up against the door in abject awe at what lay underneath.

   The being was thin, lanky, probably only half the girth as a normal man. Its hide had the complexion and texture of a ripe plum. The neck was an up-bent stalk; the head at the end was configured like a vertical barbell, a slender middle with a flat node at either end. On the bottom node were four vestigial orifices undulating in a row. The eyes were spaced like a hammerhead shark’s, with one on either side of the top node, and they each were colored murky like the yellow of an egg with multiple pupils. The hands each had two flat, broad flippers and a thumb.

   Confronted by this unearthly thing, Kurt reacted how any other human might react – with violence. It was ironic, he had always killed for pleasure, and now on the one instance when he was killing for survival, when his viciousness finally was justified, he found himself not deriving any pleasure from it whatsoever.

   He lashed out with the hammer. The claw impacted with its chest – and bounced right off like thick rubber. "No, not possible," Kurt mumbled. He could understand when it had been in its disguise; it probably acted as an armor as well. But now, that it was fully exposed, it should be invulnerable. "You should bleed. Everything bleeds. EVERYTHING FUCKING BLEEDS!" The monstrosity gaped at him with its widely-separated eyes.

   Fine then, if he couldn’t fight, he would flee. He cast the hammer across his chest and over his shoulder and swung it hard at the window. Instead of shattering, it stretched outwards in compliance with the brunt and returned to its original form, repelling his hand.

   Ferocious, berserk, his countenance manic, he glowered at his captor and released a ballistic, feral roar.

   On that note, the alien pressed a button on the steering wheel. A corrugated hatch where the glove compartment had been rolled up and back and a mechanical, jointed arm emerged. The claw at the end in a flower design bloomed and clasped Kurt’s deranged visage. A needle in the middle pierced him square between the eyes and tranquilized him.

   His eyes fluttered open sometime later, only to be met by a bright, nearly blinding light from high above. He squinted down. From what he could gather, he was lying naked on a metallic slab. He could hear the faint droning of electricity. He tried to move, but couldn’t. Except for his eyes, he was completely paralyzed.

   What had happened? Was this some kind of dream? He recalled he had blacked out. Then he remembered what preceded the blackout. That strange shapeshifting car, and its even stranger shapeshifting operator. Had that also been a nightmare? Were both that and this dream in an R.E.M. procession? Had he fallen asleep out on the road. Wouldn’t be the first time it happened.

   Then another, more daunting thought struck him: maybe he was dead, and he was in a morgue, awaiting postmortem. Maybe his body was defunct, but his soul was still lingering for a time.

   His train of thought ceased altogether when the plum-creature approached and stood over him. Out of its chest extruded a console of bone with organic, gelatinous buttons and levers. The alien’s amphibious paws worked away at it. A great, round object descended from above, partially blocking out the light. It was a spherical blob, a lucid, amber-tinted membrane with intertwined green and maroon veins pulsating just beneath and a long rudimentary slit bisecting it. As the blob loomed closer and closer, the slit – maybe it was a mouth – opened, the edges curled up. Clustered inside was an array of outré implements, a dental arsenal from hell.

   The alien continued to fiddle away at its corporeal console. Something that looked like an exaggerated security camera detached from the assembly and floated down. A neon-red beam projected from the barrel. Some invisible force lifted his scrotum and the beam made a horizontal incision below them and diverged into two beams that continued up either side of his groin. The laser traveled onward and delineated his abdomen and chest, traced up the sides of his neck and face, and converged at the top of his forehead and retracted. That same force that had lifted his genitals now removed his entire anterior torso in one sheet of flesh and it floated away over his head.

   Throughout this scene of deviant surgery, Kurt would have expected to feel unimaginable anguish, but felt nothing. It was like being anesthetized in an operation but still remaining conscious. But that made it even worse. There was no feeling to distract him from the sight of being dissected. He would’ve liked the option to shut his eyes to it, but of course his eyelids had been stolen with rest of his façade.

   Another device, this one like a robotic spider, drifted down. It roved his anatomy, the tips of the legs lit like embers probing his entrails. The legs made clicking sounds as it crawled along his ribcage, poking in through the grille of bone to explore his lungs, then using the drill that had for a head to crack open his sternum. Then the spider ascended back up into the mouth.

   Another laser came down, only this one a little bit clunkier and the beam was a dull green and looked more liquid than electrical. It first played on his pancreas, which soon began to hiss, seethe, melt, and finally disintegrate into a black sludge. This process was repeated on his digestive and reproductive systems before moving up to his face. It dissolved his right eyeball first, giving him half-vision, then his left eyeball, blinding him altogether.

   As the laser broke down his lungs and heart and brain, he found himself rapidly submerging into a much deeper void, a darkness beyond darkness.

   The alien appraised its latest subject, which was now little more than a hollow sack of tissue laid out on the examination table. The alien stored the information it had assimilated into the database of its computerized brain. The remnants of the specimen were collected in a capsule and entered in the vault.

   The alien teleported from the lab to the dock, where another alien was fiddling with the corpconsole projecting from its chest. They engaged in a tacit exchange via their intrinsic neuromodems.

   "Any progressive results?" alien two transmitted.

   "Negative. I excoriated the subject, scanned it, delved it, and atomized its essence, but found nothing indicative of a virus or contagion or whatever it is that compels them to commit such heinous and depraved acts. There was a slight degeneration in the brain and lungs which I have observed in other specimens, which I have traced back to a type of native vegetation that some of them burn and siphon the vapors off of, but I have already ascertained that ingested substances like this are only vaguely correlated to this conduct, but not a direct impetus."

   "This species does some ludicrous things. What did you say they were called again?"

   "Humans."

   "Absurd nomenclature."

   "I am baffled. On all the other planets I have researched, including our own, I have always been able to pinpoint the biological incentive for this behavior, and sometimes was able to treat or even cure it. This is the thirty-second case I have gone through and still have reached no conclusions. There must be something I am missing, something vital eluding me. If only there was a way to put the humans through the vivisection process without terminating them."

   "They cannot survive vivisection? This species is extremely fragile."

   "Indeed. Enter the next set of coordinates, I must keep searching."

   "Affirmative."

   While alien two complied, alien one went to the masquerizer adjacent to the launchport and programmed it to the description of a young, buxom female human with brunette hair.

©2004 Nick Williams

Nick Williams is 20 years old, lives in Dayton, Ohio, and is currently attending Sinclair Community College. He has had a story published here at The HOuse Of Pain, titles "Through Unblinking Eyes" .