Tag: AI

Hijack: Part 3

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

3.

The drive to Schaumburg felt longer out of a rig. In truth, it was probably faster, but something about the commanding presence of Gail’s Kenworth altered time. She suspected it had something to do with the shifting of gears, or perhaps the lack thereof. The afternoon faded into night all the same. The silence turned to the quiet sounds of Marla snoozing beside Gail.

Neither of them had much to say anyway, too polar of opposites for anything beyond casual pleasantries. Marla was young, pretty, and attached herself to things too easily, often sentimental to the point that changing a tire was a kind of loss to her. If Gail’d had a choice, she’d have drug Darian along, but he was the only one qualified to analyze Buddy’s logs. Whatever had caused that rig to crash, the event was too coincidental for her; M-T’s pricks show up, and suddenly one of her drivers rolls.

“No way in hell,” she muttered, eyes on the road.

Marla stirred in her reclined seat, but remained asleep. Gail sighed. She couldn’t outright say how, or even for certain that M-T had a hand in things, but there was no denying the feeling in her gut. Ferrero was a veteran driver. He’d been on the road longer than anyone at the company, Gail included. He had an immaculate record, and aside from a DUI at twenty-two– almost forty years ago now– he was a straight-edge that drove by the book, never shirked sleep, and never so much as sped.

The more she thought about it, the more it seemed impossible that the wreck was Ferrero’s fault. The dash-cam had shown enough to say that the rig had tipped, either from hitting something, or avoiding hitting something, and then caught fire. The line of cars behind it, though a few were totaled, said their accidents were secondary. So far as either cam had shown, there were no vehicles in front of nor near enough to the accident to have caused the initial issue. That left only the rig itself at fault, but until Darian could finish his review there was no way to say how it was at fault.

Something felt off. Ferrero drove a T680, a Kenworth that was, by far, the least problematic of the fleet. It had only had a few, minor issues in its more than a decade of run-time. Those were regular things; old alternators, suspension work, a few, minor engine repairs– all things expected from a vehicle doing upwards of 45,000 miles a year. All the work done had been preventative too, never after an accident or incident.

It didn’t add up. Not the way someone would expect it to. Gail’s gut agreed.

Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket and she fished out her corded headset, “Go ahead.”

Darian yawned, exhausted from staring at a computer screen, “I’ve gone through the bulk of the logs and footage of the accident.”

“What did you find?” Gail said, voice firm enough that Marla stirred awake.

“It’d be better to show you, but it’s inconclusive at this point,” he admitted.

“How?”

She could hear his head being thrown back over his chair. “Buddy didn’t hit anyone. Not from the front-end. From what I’ve seen, it looks like he lost control. Rig rocked back and forth and tipped.”

Gail’s face squirmed with unnatural confusion, “What?”

“Look, I called to tell you…” He trailed off for a second. When his voice returned it was quiet, “Ferrero’s dead, Gail. He died at the hospital. Internal injuries.”

She muttered under her breath, “Sonuvabitch.”

Darian didn’t hear it. “The Cook County Coroner called to inform us. They figured we’d already know, but they’re doing an autopsy before shipping the body back to Buddy’s wife and kids.”

“What about the rig?”

She must’ve sounded more cold than usual, Darian hesitated, “Some place in Schaumburg’s got it. I’ll pull up the details, send ’em to your phone.”

“Thanks, Dee,” she said, attempting to counter the last impression. “Get some rest for the night. There’s nothing more you can do now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

The phone went silent.

Marla was awake now. Gail’d have to tell her about Ferrero. It wouldn’t be right not to, but she cringed at the thought of the girl’s sentimentality making her overly emotional. Gail didn’t do grief, mostly because her default states were indifference and wrath, but also because she’d never gone in for the mushy crap it required. She didn’t want to hug anyone and tell them lies about how everything’s okay, or how it would be. That was bullshit. Especially now. Everything wasn’t okay. She had a totaled rig, a dead driver, three dick heads vying for a piece of her, and a cut-throat public ready to string her up.

Ultimately, none of that was Marla’s fault though. It didn’t feel right taking it out on her. With what little mushiness Gail could still feel, she pitied the poor girl. She was just a mechanic, drug along out of need. She’d probably end up out of a job over all this– along with everyone else. No need to pile on more.

Gail took a deep breath, glanced over at Marla. It was now or never. She’d never had trouble revealing bad news before, saw now reason for it now, but it was as if a mental block had suddenly been thrown up. It might’ve been the sort of glisten in Marla’s doughy eyes– they were like someone had over-cooked oatmeal cookies, figured something was better than nothing, then stuffed them into her head.

“What is it?” Marla asked.

Gail knew she couldn’t have been watching Marla for more than a second or two, but the acknowledgment must’ve been enough to rouse her suspicion.

Gail refocused on the road, “Ferrero’s dead.”

“What?” Gail didn’t have to look to see the glimmer of water in Marla’s eyes. “B-but I j-just saw him today. How can–” she broke off with a sharp gasp.

It took all of what remained of Gail’s heart– the non-stone parts anyway– not to throw her head back in exasperation. Sentimentality bred tears. That was the reason she hated it. Gail had been raised, if one could call it that, to “buck up,” “suck it up,” and “deal with it.” Anyone watching from the outside would’ve thought those were the only phrases her parents knew how to speak. Then again, in Gail’s case, they’d have thought all she knew how to do was bitch and cry.

“Internal injuries. I’m guessing from the accident.”

Gail winced at Marla’s wracking sob. No shit it was from the accident. What else would’ve caused it? She swallowed her discomfort, dealt with it.

“I know you’re upset, Marla, but I need your head clear.”

“How’m I supposed to do that?” Marla blurted.

“Channel it,” she instructed with a side-long glance. “Take your grief, and mold it like clay– or transmute it into fuel. Use it to keep focused on figuring out what happened to the rig.”

There was a momentary silence, Gail’s eyes on the darkening road. Marla sniffled, “I-I don’t know if I can do that.”

“You can.”

Gail wanted to say more, but wasn’t sure anything else was apt. Any more confirmation might not allow Marla her own, inner-strength to carry on. Likewise, expounding any further might defeat the purpose of saying anything at all, forcing her to rely on Gail instead of herself. As much as Gail was indifferent toward Marla, overall, the last thing she wanted was the girl leaning on crutches.

Marla sensed the purpose of Gail’s succinct reply. “I’ll try.”

That much was a given, at least. She’d try and fail or try and succeed. In either event, she had a job to do, and Gail would be damned sure she did it. The whole company might be riding on her.

They drove on through the night, the exit signs for Schaumburg appearing with their count-down of mile-fractions. Traffic was light enough that the way in was largely empty, small as it was, especially in comparison to Oakton.

I-290 led on to a four lane avenue and into sprawling suburbia at the town’s outskirts. The residences were all pristinely manicured. Gail guessed the fresh siding and constant lawn care came from one of those wave-like effects where one neighbor’d tried outdo the last. The appearance continued through-out the whole town with a smell the money that permeated even through the car’s closed windows. The area was obviously prosperous.

Oakton was a different world from this one. A fast-paced grindstone that sharpened the strong’s wits and minds and shattered the rest. Oakton was city-life in all its gritty, incessant forms. People there lived and died by the dollar. Here, the dollar was a thing people decided to wipe their asses with or not; housewives draped it over themselves, husbands spoiled their brat-faced children with it, and the rest of the people groveled for it as opportunists or sycophants. Gail knew for certain, had the Third Reich still existed, its greatest recruiting ground would be places like this.

She re-focused her mind on the work-order, her other thoughts threatening to heat her fury to a rapid boil. Ferrero had been on a short haul. A day to get there. A day to get back. He’d stay the night in a motel while dispatch tried to work out a shipment to get him home or not. If not, he’d take the rig home alone. According to the work-orders, Ferrero was to make delivery of the aluminum shipment to a local courier. It wasn’t uncommon for the short hauls. Courier companies contracted a rig to haul from point-A to point-B, take delivery, then divided the shipment onto smaller trucks for various point-Cs or destinations. This time, it didn’t get that far.

From what she recalled of the accident, the Rig was just outside of Schaumburg when everything went tits-up. 290 was a long interstate, but the same she’d taken the last leg of the way into the little village. Even so, there wasn’t a single sign of an accident. The ILDOT crews had done a hell of a quick job cleaning up. More than likely, they’d fucked with the truck doing it.

Gail made a mental note of it; Marla and the other mechanics would have to try to separate out the wreck from the ILDOT’s personal brand of destruction. Until they could take the rig back to the garage though, Gail doubted much would be found. As good as Marla was, she was hardly the expert Darian was. Apart from being educated, and naturally mechanically inclined, he was also the most anal retentive bastard in the world when working on rigs. Funny for a guy that only changed his jumpsuit twice a week.

Gail checked her phone to re-read the text message Darian had sent. The name of the tow-yard was hyper-linked with a set of GPS coordinates. She thumbed the coordinates and a GPS map maximized across the phone’s screen. The locator in her phone pinned itself to the road she was on, highlighted the route to take.

They arrived at the lot of “Joe’s Garage” from a side-street of the main road. It’s front-lot was as clean and manicured as everything else in town, as if a lone weed was an affront to God itself. The rear of the lot though, was encircled by a high-fence of slotted aluminum– so whatever ugliness lay there didn’t offend sensibilities or tastes.

Gail and Marla pushed into the office, a lone man there was waiting for them in the late-hour. As much as his drivers would be on-call all night, he was clearly a day-person, this bit of overtime a mournful slight against him. His replies were short, monosyllabic, with just the slightest hint of spite. The name on the shirt keeping his monstrous gut penned said “Joe.” Either it was a coincidence, or Gail had managed to piss off the owner of yet another company.

“My mechanic’s here to make a cursory inspection of the rig,” Gail said formally.

Joe eyed Marla with something mixing derision and arousal, “Eh?”

She rolled her eyes, pressed on, “We’ll need the vehicle shipped back to Oakton as well.”

“I ‘ken do that, but it ain’t gonna’ be cheap.”

“I’ll drive it back. I’m certified to drive a tow-rig. That way you aren’t paying your driver and you’re pocketing everything you make off it.”

He thought on it for a minute. At least she knew how to talk to him, and he knew how to take an opportunity when he saw it. More opportunists. Great, Gail thought, just what the world needs.

“A’right. I’ll get some forms.”

He disappeared into a back section of the office, reappeared moments later to outline the liability releases and take a check for collateral. Gail hoped it wasn’t needed, it was a personal check and hotter than an eskimos taint during a equatorial, mid-summer’s heatwave. It would bounce higher than a super-ball if it were cashed.

A few signatures later Joe was leading the way out a back door, and into the fenced portion of the lot. Marla and Gail were instantly frozen; flood-lights left not a shred of darkness across the rear-lot, and only a few junkers were stationed around the various spots on the gravel yard.

To one side, their rig sat atop an extra-large flatbed. Gail recalled watching the water on the windows of the rig as its flames were doused, and suddenly wondered how the hell the windscreen had survived. What had once been a series of sleek, sleeper-cab curves and rigid, cock-pit angles, was little more than jagged steel, fiberglass, and peeled paint.

The whole front end was gone or melted down, like it’d never existed at all. Gnarled steel from engine parts stuck out here and there, but it was otherwise empty space scorched black from flames. It lay upright now, the rear half of the chassis twisted from the fifth-wheel back, sticking out at odd angles. Though it was difficult to tell, Gail was certain she saw blood along the left-over interior, shattered driver’s window, and door. It was a wonder Ferrero’d been pulled out at all, let alone in one piece.

Gail’s voice was breathless, “Holy shit.”

Hijack: Part 2

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

2.

Like most of her drivers, Gail didn’t have much of a home life. She lived and breathed asphalt and exhaust, time-tables and invoices, miles to go and miles driven. Mostly for the sake of paperwork though, she kept a small place near the garage, along with a beat-up, 4-door Chevy more often parked in Lone-Wolfe’s fleet-yard than the rundown place she called home.

She fell into bed sometime around noon. The mattress was a decade past its prime, still barely used. It was small. Home was small. Everything was. Not having many possessions nor sentiment did that, Gail guessed. Keeping three-quarters of her wardrobe in a duffel bag probably didn’t hurt. The few pairs of jeans, t-shirts, and underwear would get her through whatever haul she’d be on. All of it was topped off by a tattered jean-jacket and a pair of steel-toe boots that left her without shoes every time they were resoled.

She hit the bed, passed out in more clothing than usual, shit-kickers included. The haul had been easy for someone rarely needing sleep. It was one of the few things she knew made her a great driver. Unlike most people, she only needed four and a half hours sleep. Anything more or less and she was wrecked, but four and a half was the Goldilocks zone.

Four and a half hours later, she was up brewing coffee and squeezing into her train-compartment-sized bathroom to shower. By the time she was out again, it was a quick redress and mugful of sludge-black coffee before heading to the garage. The beater coughed out rust as it started, then did its job carrying her to work. She sympathized.

Coming home to find M-T’s suits in her office had left a bad taste in her mouth. It lingered, spurred by an accompanying stink of something like a high-end cologne bath mixed with money and the pig-stench of greed. She’d hauled everything from manure to sulfur over the years, and nothing was ever quite so rancid as a wealthy asshole. The more there were, the worse it got, too.

Her arrival preempted the shift-change. Before long, Walt Thacker was forced to belly away back and away from his desk like a slug. Gail watched him disappear from the outer-office as she refilled her mug with black sludge and Brianne Hampton sauntered in. The penultimate sweetheart of the office, Brianne made every man in the company salivate over– and every woman envy– her hourglass figure, big tits, and plump ass.

Gail had never understood the fixation on Brianne’s “type.” She agreed she was an attractive girl, but apart from being good with numbers, she didn’t have much personality. She was a blank page of dullness that sometimes reflected other peoples’ color, but also happened to be the daughter of an old friend Gail had owed a favor to. If it weren’t for Brianne’s father, Murphy, Lone-Wolfe would’ve never gotten off paper. The least she could do to repay the debt was hire his airhead daughter for dispatch work.

“The rather succinct gist of it,” Gail had once told Darian, her chief-mechanic, was that Murphy had run his own shipping business for decades before getting heavily involved with the Union. The “friend of a friend” situation connecting the two gave her an in to the Union. Even with a rig-license, and thirty years of political progress, the Unions were still largely male-oriented. Murphy’s acquaintanceship overrode that, at the promise that she one day return the favor.

When that marker was called in, Brianne was hired, no questions asked. Gail had since sussed out that Murphy had been investigated– and eventually tried and convicted– of bribery. The loss of his kickback-fueled income to a family on caviar and wine tastes was jarring, but so long as Brianne remained useful, and didn’t screw the company like she screwed everything else, Gail didn’t care.

A newspaper plopped onto her desk from the body in front of her. Carl Reyer was awake for once, and dreadfully alert to the world around him. He nodded at the paper between them, and she unfurled it to read the headline; “NHSB to Local 413: Integrate or pay-up!” She looked to Carl over the paper, “Who the hell d’they think they are?”

“What matters is the content,” he said dismally.

She skimmed the article, “National Highway Safety Bureau has received reports citing… non-integrated trucking as number one cause of accidents!? What the fuck?”

“Flip to the back.”

Crinkling newspaper flapped and folded. She skimmed some more, read aloud what she knew Carl was intending her to find, “According to a study conducted by Mechanized Transports.” She lowered the paper, “Those asshats are actually trying to spin this against us?”

“Not just us,” Carl reminded. “The whole industry.”

Gail gnashed her teeth together, growled from the back of her throat. Anger seemed pointless, especially given the article wasn’t directed at her, but for the trio to have come in on the morning the paper was printed showed just how they felt about the industry around them. It was as if thousands of jobs and livelihoods were no more than pawns in a game of money. She wanted to shout, but could only manage a frustrated sigh.

She folded the paper up, gave it back, “Give me some space, Carl.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.”

She knew as much; her fury was something of a legend, though it was rarely directed toward her employees. Unless they’d severely screwed the pooch, it was generally directed at corporations, competitors, or politicians. The lines her employees couldn’t cross had always been thick enough that it wasn’t often someone toed them, but when they did, Gail gave “Hell hath no fury,” new meaning. For now though, she wasn’t going to scream or rage. She needed to think. She wasn’t even sure why, or what about, but calm was necessary.

Beyond the office, Carl passed Brianne and Jude Gardner on dispatch. It was looking to be a quiet evening after an even quieter day. Only a few rigs were out at the moment, and running two dispatchers was more for keeping the place staffed in case of emergency rather than out of need. Brianne was on auto-pilot. The twenty-something was an air-head at the best of times, but that transitioned to ace dispatcher when necessary. Even though her mood never seemed to change, nor her dolled-up face for that matter, she knew her job. Most everyone figured it was a savant-like trait– something had to fill up that head when the oxygen content drooped.

Something was different now, Jude noticed. Brianne was poised over her keyboard, hands working as she hailed a driver over the headset. A lack of external sound from the noise-canceling headsets dispatchers wore was usual, but it seemed more poignant. The edges of Brianne’s figure hunched toward her screen with a hand at a headphone, tension outlined her joints and limbs. Jude’s heart leapt into his throat; everyone knew Brianne rarely reacted to things, that she was, terrified him.

He nudged a speaker off his ear. “Bud?” Brianne said in her nasal-tone. “Bud? Come in. I didn’t–”

An alarm screamed in her headphones. It was so loud she threw them onto her shoulders and yelped. Jude was up. Gail heard it, threw open the door to her office, and jogged over. Carl peered in from a doorway. Darian and his crew appeared behind him, pushed for views of the scene. Gail heard the alarms; the tracking software was programmed to alert of various events in certain ways. From the sounds of it, this was a critical alarm. A rig was in serious trouble.

“What is it?” Gail asked, bracing against Brianne’s desk and chair.

Brianne rubbed an ear, “Buddy. Ferrero. Running aluminum to Schaumburg on a short haul.”

Gail looked over the status warnings on Brianne’s screen. They were red and yellow, flashing. This was critical. A fire in the engine somewhere. Based on the codes being thrown out, it had to be near a fuel source. What was more worrying though, was the “Collision” and “Unbalanced Load” alarms. The truck hadn’t just caught fire, it had hit something and overturned first.

“Pull up the dash-cam,” Gail ordered.

Brianne’s fingers worked. Dash-cams had been added years ago to better capture accidents and resolve insurance disputes. Fifth-wheel and trailer-cams had been installed as well, but neither would be as important given the fire. A video player flashed on-screen, buffered for a few seconds. It gave way to a bright-orange glow that obscured everything but curls of black smoke at its sides.

“Trailer Cam,” Gail said.

Brianne keyed it up. The afternoon road behind the trailer was tilted left, ninety degrees. Worse, a line of cars had piled up along the left side of the road. A few were utterly totaled. Gail’s heart was in her throat. Blue and red lights flashed. Squad cars bounced along the median and shoulder, rocketed toward the trailer. A pair of cruisers sped past, another pair forced their way over to set up a perimeter, begin directing traffic. A news chopper hovered in the distance. From the angle, a few miles back, but enough to catch the line of cars probably stretching for hours backward. More emergency lights flickered in the camera’s periphery, red and white; fire-trucks and ambulances. EMTs rushed over the median toward the worst cars. More lights, more EMTs, fire-fighters.

Gail became acutely aware of the group at the door shifting behind her. Jude still had one headphone on beside her to monitor his frequencies, but he stared, open-mouthed. As if instructed to by Gail’s thoughts alone, Brianne pulled up the dash-feed beside the trailer-cam.

Jets of water and foam rained down the windshield. Like the trailer, the rig was on its side, obvious from the angled, flashing lights of fire-trucks on the road ahead. The fire was shrinking, but anything beyond the storm of fluids was impossible to discern. Shadows flickered behind the camera, as if from lamps casting back-light on the camera’s view. It took a moment for the washed-out color to re-focus. When it did, the bulk of the rain had fallen away to streams trickling along gravity’s pull. Bodies of firemen and EMTs were formed up around the right edge of the view, by the looks of it, all working together. Gail knew what was about to come next, but she shuddered anyway.

Buddy Ferrero’s dark-skinned body peered from between the emergency workers that rushed him across the feed. Someone fought to fit a mask over him and squeeze a breath-bag. Buddy disappeared behind the cluster of bodies that rushed him to the median, reappeared for a moment as he was lifted, then disappeared as the group reformed. They rushed him to the rear of an ambulance, then dispersed as the doors shut. The ambulance pulled a U-turn through the gawker’s pace of traffic, and sped away with lights flashing. They watched until it became a mere blur of color, and disappeared.

Gail’s shaking hands pushed her upright. She glanced ahead and sideways, “Jude, Brianne, get back on the radio. Darian?”

“Yeah, boss?” The slim, jump-suited, black kid replied.

“I want you in my office. Pull all of Buddy’s routes for the last month. Go through them one-by-one, starting with today’s. Find out what the fuck happened to that rig. I want a month’s worth of history. I’ll be back in to review everything soon.”

“Sure thing, b-boss,” he stammered, mind caught in what he’d seen.

“Marla, you’re with me,” she said to the tomboyish girl now standing where Jude had been.

“Whatever you need, Gail.”

“The rest of you make yourselves useful, help where and how you can. If you’ve got hauls, check your rigs now,” she instructed, heading for the office to grab her jacket.

Marla followed her to the door, hands in her jump-suit pockets, “Where’re we going?”

She grabbed her jean jacket from the chair Darian sat in, handed him a two-way radio, “If anyone calls us, let me know A-SAP. If it’s the press, hang up.”

“Got it.”

She pulled Marla along for the door and out of the offices, “I need a mechanic, and you’re the only one I can spare. Gerry and Simon are still rebuilding the alternator on Felicia’s Coronado.”

Marla followed her out to the beater Chevy, “So, uh… where are we going?”

“To Schaumburg. I don’t want anyone else examining that truck before we do.”

They slid into Gail’s car as she internalized her last thought; because this is way too fucking coincidental.

Hijack: Part 1

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

1.

The Kenworth W900 whined and whistled along I-70 East, bound for Oakton, Ohio. The long-haul rig dragged a 40-foot tanker filled with diesel from a Washington refinery. An exchange had been made near Seattle for a load of corn-oil. The diesel-delivery was assigned for four days to give better time for sleep and reduce the risks of accidents. Gail Wolfe was never one to wait though. As a driver, and owner of Oakton’s Lone-Wolfe Shipping, she saw it as her mission to make it into Oakton ahead of schedule.

For most, making such a long haul in a short time was dangerous. Back in the days before Unions fought for standardized breaks and drive time, countless accidents, incidents, and total nervous breakdowns had dominated the industry. The drivers that had built America through its shipping and transportation operations, and worked it for over a hundred years, were simply out of fuel. The profession itself had become so weighted under stereotypes, global economics, and international pressures, that no driver was immune. Even Gail admitted, once or twice, had she been driving then she’d have felt it too.

It was a different world now though, and even the old W900 felt it. The truck had been new twenty years ago, when Gail first built Lone-Wolfe, but they were older, slower, and just a little more tired with each haul that passed. What was worse, Lone-Wolfe seemed to be headed into the same downward spiral. It wouldn’t have been the first of the “old-timers” to go, but if Gail could help it, it would damn well be the last. She’d hold out until she croaked, stubborn to a fault.

Most other companies had been “acquired” by one corporation or another– the big ones, that wrote a lot of zeroes on checks to get their way. One of them, Mechanized Transports Incorporated, had even tried with Gail– Or rather, was still trying. She’d told the reps from M-T precisely where and how far to shove their offer.

The whole thing was a way to shut up people in power, and phase-out drivers for auto-drive software built into new, high-efficiency trucks, or retro-fitted into the older ones that didn’t offend bottom-lines too greatly. Gail had a hard time seeing how the buy-outs were anything less than bribes. Even the Unions were struggling to keep owners from taking them.

But Gail wouldn’t. In fact, if given a choice, she’d burn anyone that did– whether figuratively or literally. They weren’t worth the air in their lungs, let alone the sweat off her back. She’d fight to the death to ensure everyone knew that.

I-70 morphed into highway 127 South. The light of a new day rose to Gail’s left through a quilt of farm-land with river-like striations of trees along it. The rural road was vacant in the early morning, and even the best of GPS programs and software wouldn’t have foreseen how much time Gail would shave off her remaining route. That wasn’t the point though. She’d always gone into Oakton along the Masseville highway. Apart from its emptiness, it offered a modicum of serenity beyond the curtained sleeper-cab.

Fresh, cool dew clung to plants and matured crops near-ready for harvest. Dawn splayed through droplets, stank with the crispness of a new day beyond the cab’s open windows. Gail kept the radios low to soak in the beauty. The occasional murmur of other drivers or dispatchers mumbled from one radio while something old and vaguely folk-ish crooned from the other. The high-whine of the rig was the only other thing to break the still quiet. With that, it left waves of life in its wake, as if the harbinger of day arousing nocturnal dreamers from their slumber.

The rest of Masseville passed in similar fashion. A half-hour of winding roads and sharp-intersections forced Gail to downshift, then roar back up to speed again. To say she was somewhat of a romantic for Masseville’s views was to miss her otherwise utterly unsentimental nature. She couldn’t help but find a special place in her heart for the open road, however cold it was to everything else.

The quilted farmland began to degrade into the urbanity of Oakton’s outskirts. The shift had always been gradual, but there was no denying its jarring effect. Trees and fields turned to sparse homes and small office-complexes. Full-on city suddenly appeared, as if progress were shoved up to eleven to allow the metropolis to unfold.

The way in was clear enough that Gail hit only a pair of stop-lights before the diesel delivery-station. The place was a warehouse-sized shipping-receiver with a fleet of various rigs and trailers. She eased up to the guard house, diesel idle purring like a house-cat, and handed over her work order. A guard directed her across the lot near two other tankers. Before long, she had the trailer backed in, the work order signed, and the W900 ready to pull away.

Lone-Wolfe’s headquarters were partitioned to a large, industrial lot on the city’s West side, just a few miles from the delivery location. Making it to the garage from anywhere in the city was more habit than anything, and when the truck finally came to a rest amid Lone-Wolfe’s fleet vehicles, Gail was ready for the business-end of things before finally conking out– probably hours after her return.

The interior of Lone-Wolfe was more like a repair garage than anything. There was enough space for three rigs, loads of diagnostic equipment, toolboxes and the like, and some vending machines with couches and coffee tables to one side. One of the drivers, Carl Reyer, was passed out on a couch, his face hidden under a trucker-cap as he snoozed away.

Gail ambled past. Carl was the type to be on the road more than home. Most of the time that meant he was or crossing the country, long-hauling haz-mat cargo or the occasional low-boy with hired hands flagging ahead and behind. Like Gail, he had a sort of love for the open road that kept him running when he should’ve been at home, in bed. Even his wife had gotten tired of it, left him. Since then, he’d taken his sleep in his cab or on one of the garage-couches. Gail empathized, if little else.

She strolled across the smaller section of the garage to the offices in its opposite corner. Carl’s snores followed her in to the first section. The two desks, back-to-back, were reserved for the dispatchers running tracking and comm software, and monitoring traffic and weather with real-time uplinks to NWS and various news-agencies. From the two desks, the company’s six, dispatchers could communicate with and track the dozen drivers Gail employed 24/7. Apart from one or two other, necessary upgrades, Dispatch was the only thing Gail had let progress seep into. Even the rigs themselves were elderly by most standards. If it weren’t for Darian Foster and his crew, the fleet would’ve been dead years ago.

Darian was the highest paid employee at Lone-Wolfe, and for damned good reason. He had more mechanical expertise than a submarine full of engineers, and a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT. If it weren’t for the dire, crushing debt he’d had a decade ago, Gail would’ve never survived. She’d hired him in on basic salary in a downsizing economy, and before she could get out the door on her next haul, he’d proven himself worthy of a raise.

Presently though, Gail was focused on the back-office and the silhouette behind its frosted glass. She stopped to hand a file to Walt Thacker, a dispatcher with a beer-gut larger every time she saw it.

“Latest pay,” Gail said unceremoniously. “Make sure Brianne gets it before shift-change.”

He grunted an “eh,” in reply.

Truth was, she didn’t care to hear his Hutt-like wheezes anyhow. She glanced at the frosted glass, checked her watch, 7:30 on the dot, “Who’s here?”

Xavier Knaggs replied, “Suit.”

Gail’s face turned red, and she stormed for the office, “Son of a bitch!”

She burst into the office to find a pair of suits sitting in the chairs before her desk. A third one stood behind and between them like a guard dog. Something about the two men and woman said they felt accosted by the sheer thought of sitting in a dingy office like Gail’s. Part of her wanted to keep them there for that fact alone, but the rest of her won out.

She stepped around the desk, nostrils flaring. The woman in the chair extended her hand, “Missus Wolfe, I’m Eleanor Tyler, Mechanized Transport’s Acquisitions Department.”

It took all of Gail’s sense not to punt the scrawny bitch through the frosted glass– that, and the obvious bulldog look of the blood-thirsty lawyer between her and the window.

“These are my associates,” Tyler said with a gesture. “Lloyd Wembley and Matthew Benton–”

“I don’t care,” Gail snapped. “Get out of my office.”

“Missus Wolfe–”

“If you’re going to patronize me, at least get my fucking name right. I was married once, I’m not now. At no point during was my name Wolfe.”

The scrawny bitch recoiled from her own faux-pas. A mental flash of her arcing backward through the glass almost caused Gail to smile. She didn’t though, especially not now. Instead, she stiffened up, arms crossed, “I’ve told your company, I’m not for sale. Keep this up, and I’ll sue your asses for harassment.”

The bulldog’s ears perked up. Gail could’ve sworn she saw his ass wiggle like a tail. “I assure you, Mizz Wolfe, that these meetings are more than legal by any definitions of the law.”

Her eyes sharpened to pointed knives, “I may not be a lawyer, Mr. Benton, but the last time I checked, trespassing wasn’t. This is private property owned by Lone-Wolfe Shipping, and if I say leave, I mean it. Now go, before we see who’s right.”

The bulldog-face crumpled together. He muttered something and signaled a rise from the other two. Tyler followed Benton out immediately, but Wembley laid a card on the desk and gave a smug bow of his head. He followed deliberately, steps paced as if he owned the joint. She slammed the office door hard enough to rattle loose its panes of glass in their fittings.

She fell into her desk-chair, palm to her forehead, and glanced at the card. “Lloyd Wembley,” sat above “Board of Directors, Mechanized Transports Inc.” A phone number and a few other lines of contact filled out the corner. The only thing missing was the word “Prick” next to his name. Gail hoped someone was fired for the oversight.

Short Story: Too Real

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

She’d be at it near-on forty hours by the time it was over. She knew it ahead of time. Weekends like this weren’t uncommon for the chronically unemployed Sonia Rakes. She’d settle in on Friday night, greasy crap-food on one side of the desk, soda and water on the other with a bottle of Jack chilling beneath it in the mini-fridge. While her marathon choice of game booted, she rolled fat joints and blunts to pass the time, mind racing in anticipation of the glory ahead.

To say she was a burn-out would require ignoring the intense passion she wrangled out of herself for each and every imaginary world she eventually conquered. Sure, she was a little overweight, but the chair-sized ass she sat on made her all the more comfortable during the marathon sessions. Even if her pudge spilled over her waist-line, stuck out nearly as far as her free-bagging double-Ds, that just meant there was more of her to love. Besides, she’d long ago abandoned the realm of such social pressures in favor of the confined, fantastical ones she occupied for days at a time.

She sparked up a blunt, took a deep hit, and swigged down some cola home-run style. The cola was swallowed away to allow a plume of smoke emerging from her nose and mouth. Her lungs re-inflated with fresh air and the high trickled in through the back of her brain. The slow immersion of brain into cannabis relaxed her shoulders and chest. She sank into her gaming chair with a deflation that would’ve made “truth” ads jealous.

But this was no ordinary immobilization of inebriated limbs. In fact, it was just the beginning of what had always been the ultimate in relaxation and comfort. Contrary to some opinions, that were no longer popular, getting high only enhanced most things. One of them, at least for Sonia, was the imagination. Gaming was nothing if not stimulating for the imagination.

She booted up, set the blunt aside for a minute, and made the momentary keyboard clacks to put her in-game. With the blunt hanging from a corner of her mouth, she plunged into the post-apocalyptic world of her now-favorite title.

Her avatar was made to look like her; long brown hair, big boobs, and slightly pudgy with green eyes. Most of that pudge had been lost during gameplay by the game’s now-famous strength building system. Many of the game’s mechanics were touted as revolutionary. For an RPG, they were somewhat ahead of their time, even if most had been explored before. Everything had a modifier to it, and every modifier affected a stat; every stat, in turn, gained XP each time it’s level changed, and those experience points then went into an overall character level.

Once leveled, a player could immediately boost stats instead of working them up, and gain new perks that allowed them to take on new challenges or better overcome older ones. It was, for all intents and purposes, a game with refined mechanics that flowed beautifully, to say nothing of its atmosphere, characters, or narrative.

But what set it apart, Sonia knew, was its Artificial Intelligence. She’d barely seen a third of the game, but her awe of the AI was unsurpassed. Whomever programmed the game certainly had the chops to pull off the best work she’d ever seen. Most games’ characters were like cardboard cutouts; at a distance they appeared real, their “lives” full, but the closer you got, the more you noticed they merely wandered along set routes, repeated a few lines of dialogue, and were otherwise one-dimensional.

This game was different, and she’d only begun to scratch the surface of how. Her inebriated mind wandered, wanting to immerse itself deeper in the game’s world before fully committing to a quest that might forward any progress and inch her nearer its conclusion.

She found herself in the center of a small town. It was hardly a town by any standard, really, merely a few buildings forming a three-sided rectangle around a large well. Small shacks and lean-tos kissed the horizon around it, built scatter-shot across fields of mutated corn, tomatoes, and wheat. She aimed for the old-style saloon in the center of the open rectangle.

The whole place was an anachronism, a sort of wild-west area built up along a bombed-out, rural highway neglected into disrepair since the bombs. She liked it for that alone. It was rare to find such attention to detail that even the Non-playable characters’ cultures differed from settlement to settlement.

With that in mind, she sauntered up to the saloon’s swinging doors, but hesitated. An NPC down the wrap-around porch mentioned something about needing to “head ‘cross the wastes for Ban’oover.” Something about his twang intrigued her. He had that friendly sort of sound that put her at ease, made him seem either an easy target, or possibly, a new companion, if she found him to her liking. It was an instantaneous decision to follow him.

She whirled to follow the NPC’s ratty flannel and cowboy boots, gave him a good head-start, then passed by the other NPC he’d been speaking to. It uttered a “howdy” with a slight head tilt as she crouched at the edge of a corn-field, and began to track the NPC. Her stealth skills were only high enough to keep him unaware of her at larger distances, but she could easily keep to the cover of cornfields and rocky, desert roads that would lead to Banhoover.

She kept him at the extreme edge of her visual field, then knowing his intended target, fell back to bask in the world around her. Through the haze of caffeine, liquor, and weed, the hot sun kissed her skin while arid winds carried dust across her path.

A sudden screeching shattered her serenity. She froze, terrified. Her big, anaconda revolver was out, sweeping the horizon for threats. She crouched low to steady her aim, circled in place. The screech sounded again; metal nails on a chalkboard. Her teeth rattled, nerves stabbed by the sound. Something small staggered and swayed onto the road ahead. It weaved left, then right, fell forward. Her weapon sank at the pitiful sight of a massive crow with a bloody puncture in its torso. She swallowed her fears and approached carefully. The screeching sounds came louder, faster with each step.

She crouched again by the bird, examined it carefully. It was easily the size of her torso, and given the wound, near death. Her med-skills weren’t great, but might be enough to help. These types of random events weren’t uncommon. She’d yet to see one in this game, but so much of it was unexplored such an event didn’t surprise her.

The way she saw it, there were two options; try to heal the bird, or put it out of its misery. She’d gotten lucky a few hours into the game, and had been healed by a passerby on a similar road to this. Like the bird, she’d been bleeding out, the world phasing in and out of blackness. She saw no reason not to try and repay the debt to the collective gaming Gods.

With a few hotkeys and clicks, she’d drugged the bird with painkillers, and did her best to patch the wound. A quick flicker of XP, and the sound of a leveled stat told her the action succeeded. The bird hopped up, swayed a little, then examined her with a few tilts of its head. With a running start, it took flight and soared off into the distance. She chuckled, continued along the road.

It wasn’t long before she found the NPC she’d been tailing. More accurately, he found her. He’d hidden in the bushes a mile or so down from the bird. Five minutes of walking were interrupted by him leaping from the bushes. He held a big revolver like hers, trained for her head. A flicker of her HUD said he had a head-shot trained on her.

His shouts affirmed it with the addition of a demand, “Gimme all yer guns, clothes, and cash.” She remained silent, wondering how best to play it. He started shouting again, demanding, “Quit wastin’ time, there ain’t no other way out!”

A shiver shot along her spine as he cocked the hammer on his revolver. It was too real.

“Yeh, you best be shakin’,” he shouted from the beyond the revolver’s business end.

The revolver barked. A bullet whizzed past her ear. She felt it slice the air, buzz in her head. Her stomach dropped. Hairs on her neck stood on end. It was too real.

“I ain’t gonna ask again.” She hit the hotkey to drop her gun. He took a few steps forward, both hands on his gun. “Good. Now the rest.”

Her inventory menu appeared, and emptied at the “drop all” command. A moment later she was standing stark-naked in the middle of a desert road. He approached, licked his lips, chuckled to himself, then knelt to collect the gear in an arm. It disappeared into his hidden inventory as he stepped back again.

“Thank ye, kindly,” he said with a roaring laugh.

Something black flashed past, left him stunned. He growled, swirled around. She stepped back, terrified. Another flicker of black. Then again. More now. A shroud of black encircled him as he swatted at it. The revolver barked until it was empty. The NPC began to scream, flee. Sonia stood, petrified and dumbfounded.

It took a moment for her mind to comprehend the Murder of Crows attacking the NPC. It was almost a full minute before she could move again. By then, they’d brought the NPC down, had him in pieces on the ground. He let out a blood-curdling scream that upturned her stomach, then went silent, still.

A lone crow hopped over, its abdomen recently bandaged. It dropped something on the ground. She picked up a note that read; The crows will remember your kindness. She shivered.

Out of game her breath trembled, “Jesus christ, this is too real.” She stared at the crow, muttered, “Thank you.”

In-game the crow squawked. Sonia’s eyes bulged. It immediately took flight. The Murder followed in sync.

Whatever the hell had just happened, she was certain that bird had spoken to her. More importantly, even if she couldn’t understand how, it heard her. How? She collected her clothes and swallowed the ill feeling in her gut. She redressed, began to follow the road aimlessly, hoping to make sense of what the hell’d just happened.