If you like it, please consider ordering a copy of Mark's collection, Tales From the Midnight Shift, Vol. 1. I promise you won't be disappointed. I read this one in a single sitting, and that's not something that happens with me too often these days, the crazier life gets. This guy's the real deal. If I didn't think so, I wouldn't currently be collaborating with him on a really kick-ass novella (details to come soon, and I promise you guys are gonna love it!)
Get your copy of Tales From the Midnight Shift right here.
Enjoy! Like I said, I dig the hell outta this one. It reminds me of some of the best of Bentley Little's work . . . but don't take my word for it . . .
JAM
by Mark Allan Gunnells
8:10
Elliot was running late for
work. Which wasn’t unusual, was
actually quite the norm. He knew on
some level that he was probably acting out his dissatisfaction with his job through
chronic tardiness, but he wasn’t one for self-analyzing.
He checked his watch as he sped
down the interstate at eighty miles per hour, twenty over the posted speed
limit. He was already ten minutes late,
and he was about twenty minutes away from his exit, add another fifteen to get
to the office from there. That put him
at his desk at around 8:45. Even for
someone who was perpetually late, that was pushing it. But as long as he made it to the office in
time for the weekly department meeting at 9:00, he should be fine.
On cue, as if the gods had
heard Elliot’s thoughts and decided to teach him a lesson, he rounded a curve
in the road and saw nothing but cars up ahead.
Stationary cars. As in not
moving, still, going nowhere. Across
all four lanes cars just idled, stretching away to the horizon. It was like a fucking parking lot.
“Son of a BITCH!” Elliot
shouted, banging his hands on the steering wheel. A traffic jam, just what he needed. Whenever he was in a hurry he could always count on a train blocking
his path, or an endless succession of red lights, road construction, heavy rain
having washed out a chunk of the street, or a goddam traffic jam. He just couldn’t catch a break.
Elliot braked to a complete
stop behind a gray SUV. He was in the
second lane from the right, and he was soon boxed in as other cars rounded the
curve and got in line. The jerk on his
left, some teenaged dick with a backwards cap, actually honked his horn, as if
it were just a matter of people not realizing they should be going forward. Jackass.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER…
Traffic had not moved, not an
inch, not a smidge, not a bit. Elliot
assumed there must be one hell of a car accident somewhere up ahead. He could only see about a mile and a half
away, then the interstate crested a small rise and dipped down out of his field
of vision. Whatever it was had blocked
all four south-bound lanes and had traffic at a standstill.
But was it only the south-bound
lanes? Elliot noticed that the traffic
in the north-bound lanes of the interstate had petered out until it stopped
altogether. The north-bound lanes were
as empty as the south-bound lanes were packed with immobile vehicles. Could the hypothetical accident have been so
bad that it effectively sealed off the south-bound and north-bound lanes of a major highway?
Elliot turned on his car radio
and tuned it into the local station, WJAM 106.6. If there was some disaster up ahead, WJAM was sure to be covering
it. The hours of 7:00 to 11:00 were
devoted to Dillard and Kimbo—or Dullard and Bimbo, as Elliot thought of
them—the station’s morning disc jockeys.
Elliot rarely listen to them because their inane and monumentally boring
chatter was enough to tempt him into plowing straight into a guardrail.
“—and that’s why I always use
tinfoil instead of plastic wrap,” Dullard was saying as Elliot found the
station.
“Well folks, you heard it here
first,” Bimbo said with a laugh. “How
to avoid that unfortunate freezer burn.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll tell you why I prefer whipped cream over chocolate
sauce.”
“Hey, hey, keep it G-rated there,
Kimbo,” Dullard said with mock seriousness.
“There may be kiddies listening.”
“Oh come on, Dillard, you think
anyone is listening?”
“Yeah, my mom for sure.”
“Please, everyone knows your
mom prefers the Chuck and Kelly show on WBKY.”
“Mom, no, you swore—“
Elliot punched the button to
silence those humorless pricks.
Whatever was happening apparently wasn’t dire enough to warrant a break
in the standard routine of easing people into their work day by making the
commute so excruciating that they were practically begging to get into the
office by the time they finally got there.
TEN MINUTES LATER…
Elliot dug through his satchel
looking for his cell phone. He
obviously wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
He had the car in park and was considering turning off the engine
altogether. The gas gauge was hovering
just above the E, and he needed to conserve every drop.
He finally found his cell
phone, but pushing the small button on the side did not turn the damn thing
on. Apparently the battery had no
charge. Leaning over, he popped open
the glove compartment and rummaged around for the battery charger that plugged
directly into the car’s otherwise unused lighter.
“Gotcha,” Elliot said, snagging
the charger and plugging in the phone.
The small screen lit up and played a little tune, letting him know it
was operational and happy to be so. He
keyed in his boss’s number and put the phone to his ear. Nothing.
He looked down at the small screen and saw that the phone was not
getting a signal.
“Goddam piece of SHIT!” Elliot
yelled then tossed the phone into the passenger’s seat. It pulled loose of the charger and lay
there, dead, as useless to him as a block of cheese in a crisis.
He would definitely not be
there for the 9:00 meeting, and he had no way to get in touch with his
boss. And it wasn’t even his fault this
time, for Christ’s sake. Act of God,
force of nature, my dog ate my homework, whatever, but for once it wasn’t his
fault and he had no way to let his boss know that.
HALF AN HOUR LATER…
Most of the people around
Elliot had turned off their cars, several of them stepping out to stretch, walk
around, grab a smoke. Conversations
were struck up, laughs were shared, complaints were swapped, speculations
arose. The prevailing theory seemed to
be that two tractor-trailers had collided, one laid out across the south-bound
lanes, the other across the north-bound lanes.
There was nothing to support this particular hypothesis—Dullard and
Bimbo, heard through the rolled-down windows of several cars, had still made no
reference to the colossal traffic jam on the interstate—but it seemed as
plausible as any other.
Elliot sat on the hood of his
Celica, playing a handheld Tetris game he’d found in the glove compartment when
searching for the phone charger. Maybe
his boss had heard about the traffic jam and concluded that Elliot was stuck
somewhere on the interstate, or maybe she thought he was an irredeemable
slacker and was planning to fire him as soon as he got in. Either way, he didn’t give much of a fuck at
this point. It would almost be a
blessing to get fired, to be able to wake up in the morning without a sense of
dread weighing down on him like a coffin lid.
Elliot stretched his neck until
it popped, then leaned his head back and gazed up at the sky. Easter-egg blue, with a few cotton-candy
clouds floating by like barges in the sea.
Damn, nothing like a traffic jam to get a person’s poetic juices flowing.
He looked around at everyone
milling about the interstate, visiting other cars, walking dogs, a ragtag game
of football had even broken out in the median between the north and south-bound
lanes. It was like an old-fashioned
block party, Elliot thought. Not that
he’d ever been to a block party, but he’d seen them on television. The whole situation had a surreal quality to
it, like something experienced in a dream.
The teenaged dick from the Ford
pickup to Elliot’s left was flirting with the teenaged daughter of the driver
of the SUV directly in front of Elliot.
Papa was keeping a disapproving eye on the whole affair. To his right was an elderly woman who seemed
made up entirely of wrinkles, chewing on beef jerky while leaning against the
door of her gas-guzzling boat of a Chevrolet.
Behind Elliot was a minivan filled with screaming children and a
frazzled woman who looked like she might be contemplating suicide as an escape
from the hell that raged inside her van.
A light breeze sprang up,
cooling the sweat on Elliot’s forehead, and he closed his eyes and smiled. There were lots of grumblings around him,
people ready to get on their way to wherever they were going, but Elliot found
that in an odd way he was enjoying himself.
Sure beat the hell out of going to work. Where were you all day, Elliot?
Why, I was attending a block party out on the interstate.
Where else?
TWO HOURS LATER…
People were starting to get
hostile. The whole situation was
wearing on people’s nerves, and there was bound to be some spillover. Small disagreements sprouted, blossoming into
full-fledged arguments. Somewhere
several cars ahead there was a fistfight.
Some helpful truckers broke it up before anyone got hurt.
Elliot cranked his car for a
moment, plugged his phone back into the lighter, and tried again to make a
call. Still no signal. He’d heard several people complain of the
same problem.
A man who looked to be in his
mid-thirties, dressed in a suit and silk tie, knocked on Elliot’s window. “Hey, some of us are gonna go get something
to eat? You want anything?”
“Something to eat?” Elliot
said. “From where?”
“Well, there were a couple of
fast-food places off the exit about two miles back. A few of us are gonna hike back that way and get some grub.”
“What if traffic starts back up
while you’re gone?” Elliot asked, not really believing it would. It had been so long, the very idea of
traffic starting back up just seemed unthinkable. Had there ever been a time when these cars moved?
“My wife is staying with the
car,” Silk Tie said, pointing toward a very pregnant woman standing by a white
Subaru. “If traffic starts up again,
she’ll just pull the car over on the shoulder and wait ‘til I get back. Same with the other fellas going with me.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Elliot
said, fishing a five out of his wallet and handing it to Silk Tie. “I’ll take a cheeseburger and any kind of
soda. I appreciate it.”
“Not a problem,” Silk Tie said,
then he and three others headed off down the interstate, weaving through the
cars like survivors of some cataclysmic holocaust.
FIVE HOURS LATER…
Silk Tie and his three buddies
never came back. Silk Tie’s pregnant
wife couldn’t seem to stop crying, interspersed from time to time with some
hysterical screaming just for the sake of variety. People were scared; there was a lot of praying, more fights, and
more than a little fucking. The driver
of the SUV had been one of the three to go for food with Silk Tie, and his
daughter’s method of grieving her father’s disappearance was to climb into the
back of the SUV with the teenaged dick for about twenty minutes.
Elliot had discovered a
half-empty bag of M&Ms under the front seat of his car, buried
treasure. He huddled in the backseat
and ate them slowly, savoring each one, trying to be as discreet as possible. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to share, it
was just that he wasn’t going to share.
Through the windshield, Elliot
saw SUV’s daughter and the teenaged dick emerge from the SUV, tears on her face
and a grin on his. He swaggered back to
his truck, leaving her alone.
THE NEXT DAY…
Elliot sat on the pavement, in
the meager shade thrown by the teenaged dick’s pickup, gnawing on a piece of
beef jerky that Ms. Wrinkles had been kind enough to share with him. It was a lot like trying to eat
shit-flavored leather, but it was better than nothing. Elliot had finished off the M&Ms last
night.
Nearby a group of people were
having a theological discussion of sorts.
A fat woman in a floral dress was saying she believed there had indeed
been a horrible accident on the interstate.
Her theory was that they had all been killed in the accident and were
now in some kind of purgatory. Elliot
almost chimed in that he didn’t believe in hell, or heaven for that matter, but
then thought better of it. Tensions
were high, if he were to espouse the wrong opinion, these people were liable to
attack and tear him to pieces. He’d
read Lord of the Flies. Well, he’d seen the movie.
ONE HOUR LATER…
Dullard and Bimbo were
discussing the latest Keanu Reeves film as if it had the power to change lives
and enrich the world.
Maybe there was a hell, after
all.
SEVEN HOURS LATER…
Elliot noticed that he kept
seeing Minivan Mom, but he no longer saw any of her children. And he didn’t hear them in the van. The fat lady in the floral dress asked about
them, but Minivan Mom just smiled strangely and said, “They’re sleeping.”
THE NEXT DAY…
Silk Tie’s wife went into labor
early in the morning. People started
spreading the word up and down the line, trying to find a doctor. It reminded Elliot of that children’s game
where everyone sits in a row, and the first person whispers something to the
next person, that person whispers it to the next, that one to the next, until
you get to the last person in the row, the fun of the game being how different
the end statement is from what the first person originally whispered.
Is there a doctor in the house?
Is there a doorway for the house?
Where’s the doorway for the mouse?
Is he a boring mouse?
He’s a bore and a louse.
We’re never getting out.
TWO HOURS LATER…
No doctor was found, but two
nurses got the message and came to lend their services. Silk Tie’s wife screamed loud enough to wake
the dead, but not loud enough to summon back those in search of cheeseburgers. It was her first child, and the nurses
informed her that her labor could take hours.
A burly trucker organized a
scouting party. They decided to head
out on foot south down the interstate, to try to find the beginning of the
traffic jam and see what was causing it.
The plan was to walk for two hours, and if they hadn’t found the cause
by then, they would turn and head back.
The idea that they still believed something tangible and logical was causing the traffic jam struck Elliot as
funny. He did not volunteer for the
party.
SIX HOURS LATER…
The scouting party did not
return. No one really expected them to.
THE NEXT DAY…
It was a day of death and
violence.
Silk Tie’s wife gave birth, the
child stillborn. She began to
hemorrhage, and the nurses were unable to stop the bleeding. She and her infant were buried together in
the median.
The fat woman in the floral
dress went to check on Minivan Mom and discovered what everyone already
suspected. She had slit all their
little throats with a pair of scissors.
Minivan Mom would just smile and say, “Shhh, they’re sleeping.”
SUV’s daughter, who had been
ignored by the teenaged dick since their tryst in her vanished Papa’s vehicle,
took a switchblade she found in the back of the SUV and removed the offending
part of him. He was now just the
teenaged.
8:10…?
Elliot began to wonder if
perhaps they were all stuck in a single moment in time. Maybe it was still 8:10, and he could still
make it to the 9:00 department meeting if he could just somehow get himself unstuck.
Elliot recognized this as an
insane notion, but this was an insane situation. Two wrongs may not make a right, but can two insanes make a sane?
SOMETIME LATER…
The batteries in Elliot’s
Tetris game had died. His car would no
longer crank, so he couldn’t even plug up his phone and play the games on it. He had borrowed a book from Ms. Wrinkles,
but it was a romance novel with a plot as predictable as life never is.
Elliot was bored. It was time to go, time to get unstuck.
Going back didn’t help, going
forward didn’t help. What about off to
the side? A lovely green field ran
along the side of the highway to the left.
What if he just walked straight across it? Would he eventually run into civilization? Would he find people again, life, the
world? Or would he end up with Silk Tie
and the scouting party, in whatever dark place they had found along the
interstate?
Fuck it, he’d have to risk
it. He’d run out of things to do
here. Besides, people had dug up Silk
Tie’s wife and child and were roasting them, along with Minivan Mom’s brood,
for dinner. Elliot had a feeling they
might taste worse than the beef jerky.
He walked over to the shoulder
of the highway and hesitated just on the edge of the pavement. He wasn’t going to tell anyone what he was
doing, wasn’t going to invite anyone to join him. If this plan failed, he would doom no one but himself.
And if it succeeded, he’d send
help.
Or maybe he’d just get a
cheeseburger.
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