Traffic.


There was more than a hint of rage when you were looking at him. It was more than a suggestion. It was full fledged. A road-raged, dickhead driver to the core, Phil was positioned in a personal hell of a traffic jam. Both hands gripped the wheel so hard his knuckles were becoming a strained white, much like the white-yellow of his tobacco stained teeth that were clenched and grinding. His dentist, a tall, lanky skin-and-bones man, told him he had to stop grinding his teeth. His dentist could go fuck himself. He knew nothing of the troubles of the traffic jam. Probably one of those rich child-molesting sons of bitches with a Mercedes, or at least one of those stupid SUV's. And air conditioning. He'd give his left nut for a little cool air right about now. But no, Phil was confined to his Japanese hunk of Kabuki dung. Fuck. The day was too hot. May wasn't supposed to be this hot. He didn't even want to imagine what it'd be like in July. He could, he just didn't want to, with the wife next to him chewing some horrid vegetable concoction with her mouth open, and the kids diddling around in the back, whining about who has who's what, and who was on who's side of the car and where are we and I have to go and and and and...

And that was when he spotted what he did in the rear view mirror.

It didn't dawn on him at first what exactly the whole thing meant. During the whole time he had been sitting there, almost nothing had passed him by on the opposite side of the highway. Only a large multi-purpose construction machine had really caught his attention, because of the dirt hit strummed up and the blue smoke it was belching out made him roll up his window for a short period of time, as he swore and cursed the good Cat name. Since then it had disappeared off over the next hill, and as well disappeared from memory leaving him more discontent and less informed as to why he felt that way. Now the piss-yellow machine, with a bulldozing scoop and a crane arm, was back, going the wrong way on the highway. This part of the road was single lane for some stupid reason, with a steep hill on Phil's right that was carefully shielded from incompetent drivers by a large concrete barrier. The construction machine sidled up right beside the car in front of him, then did a series of oddly acrobatic maneuvers to place it perpendicular to Phil's car. There was something unsettling about staring out his window into the dirty bulldoze scoop. There were teeth, rectangular, blunt teeth on the bottom of the scoop. The driver of the beast cut the engine and jumped down to the pavement. Did the idiot realize that this behemoth was going to block all the traffic on the other side of the road? Back to the rear-view mirror, another great rumbling yellow monster cam the wrong way up the opposite side of the highway. This one stopped parallel to the car behind Phil, and two dirty men gout out. One went up to the window of the blue Chevy Blazer behind Phil, and another trotted down to the car behind that one, something red and vagrant-y with generous sprinklings of rust in strategic places. Phil watched the whole thing in his mirror. The man in the car looked confused and shook his head a few times. The last time he did it it was quite furious, and the construction worker looked displeased... right before he punched the man in the jaw and knocked him out. The dirty worker who looked like his name might be Hank or Merl opened the driver door, shoved the driver into the passengers seat and got behind the wheel. He looked forward and shot a smile forward that sent more than a chill up his spine. This felt like a three foot long icicle was behind shoved up his ass. Something was wrong here. The HankMerl reversed the car and pulled out onto the wrong side of the highway behind the second Cat machine. The vehicle behind the HankMerl car-jacked one was backed up rather far now, and Phil was about to find out why. And now ANOTHER golden-yellow vehicle was just climbing over the horizon on the other side of the highway, going in the proper direction. It looked like a cement mixer, yup, it was a cement mixer all right. What the hell? A bolt of fear struck Phil for a moment and he still wasn't sure why. It just... wasn't right. This whole thing just wasn't right. The bulldozer pulled in behind Phil, belching smoke like a brick chimney. What the fuck was going on? The mouth of the bulldozer to his left was becoming more and more unsettling, like it was ready to swallow him and his terribly humid car in one big mechanical gulp. Phil witnessed the same scene happen all over again with the cement mixer as he had with the machine of mass destruction behind him. The diesel engine of the beast was stuttering unpleasantly. A man jumped out of the passenger side of the mixer, and walked to the car two places in front of him. That car pulled out of it's spot onto the highway. The same with the car directly in front of Phil. The dirt-caked teeth of the bulldozer on his left seemed bigger, closer all the time. Finally, the worker stepped back up into the cement truck and backed into the spot in front of Phil, beep beep beep beep. It stopped dangerously close to Phil's sweat-mobile. Phil figured he might have an inch to move forward now, possibly a foot backwards. Now the cement mixer stopped and kept it's engine idling. The man in the passenger seat hopped back out and came around to the back of the truck. He climbed up onto it, to where the trough hinged at the top to prevent it from dragging on the road when the vehicle was in motion. The man looked too pale, too white. Road workers are supposed to be deeply tanned, aren't they? From being out in the hot sun all day without shirts? They are, yes, they are. This man was not. He was strangely clean as well, though he wore the a-typical white shirt and jeans combo that was all the rave of Today's Construction Worker magazine. Beside him he was sure someone sat atop the bulldozer, with it's deep gorge of a scoop, but he couldn't see him. Behind him, HankMerl was piloting the second big Cat, and in front of him this ghastly white shadow of a man
nodded
back to HankMerl behind Phil who glanced in the rear-view in time to watch as he
nodded
to whatever was the brains of the bulldozer and then with final realization, Phil himself
nodded
to himself, eyes large, skin coated in a thin layer of sweat with his shirt and pants sticking to him.

It all happened very quickly after that.

With a great burst of steam, Phil's car was efficiently compacted from both the rear and the left. A great metallic crunch accompanied the sounds of shearing metal against concrete guard wall. The cars paint left great smears along the concrete wall as bright twinkling sparks were born and died in the second that the car scraped forward into the back of the mixer. Phil screamed Oh shit-- in sudden lunacy as his overweight form somehow avoided death from the great metal teeth attacking from the left window. The security glass on all sides crumpled and burst, especially in the front and back, and at the points where the great rectangular teeth encroached on Phil's private sweltering hell. In the snap second where everything stopped Phil found the time to empty his bladder and colon, effectively making his earlier "Oh shit" thought a reality. Phil found it in himself to tear at the door and window. Yanking the fucking handle off the passenger door was the only thing his feeble flailings actually accomplished. Ripping up the upholstery didn't do too much either, but Phil did it anyhow. His disgusting uncut nails, rich with under-the-cuticle dirt and grime Mr Clean wouldn't touch, tore at everything around him in the natural urge towards self- preservation. A glance out the dashboard-windshield combination-monster now recognized what Phil hadn't recognized before. The white-demon figure on the back of the mixer had made him queasy not because of the colour of his skin... at least not for that alone.
It was the look on his face,
the look in his eyes.
It was rage and rage alone this man felt.

The trough swept down upon the smashed windshield and cut a ragged hole through it. It tore a great part of Phil's nose directly off his face and into his lap where it lay stupidly, some lost, bloodied tourist from a far away continent. Phil screamed the best he could and when his hands flew to his face he found one of his arms to be hanging at an irregular angle. Only shock had kept him from feeling it before, when the bulldozer had snapped his forearm in half. So only one hand found his face, but then jerked back because the hand crashing onto his face caused even more pain. A thick and gooey flow of grey mix followed the trough's descent into Phil's car. Mounds of it splashed across his lap which held the delinquent nose and a whole fucking lot of gushing blood. It buried the nose and slurped onto the floor. It kept coming and coming, soon drenching the entire floor, front and back. A little less mobile now, a substantially messier Phil still jerked around in the mosaic of wet cement and body fluids that ranged from piss to blood. But he moved towards the opening in his windshield, the opening in his face leading the way. He clawed desperately at the bowling ball sized hole, attempting to widen it when a boot-clad foot kicked his head back into the car. The agony in him was terrible, fragments of his face exploring new dimensions of pain while all the while a steady stream of rich red fluid poured from him. The levels of cold cement just got higher and higher, surrounding his knees, waist, chest... It was becoming harder and harder to move around in the destroyed metal slop bucket that was Phil's air- conditioning-impaired car. It rose to his shoulder and his chin. The blood pouring out mixed strangely with the cement below, making a small pool and then being swallowed up by the merciless march of grey. It rose to his mouth and he took in a mouthful and choked on the grit which seemed to home in on the back of his throat. He sputtered and coughed, but the cement was closing in so fast he only took in another mouthful of great grey grit. It sucessfully filled the hole left in his face by the trough's entry to his car, much to his painful shagrin. His eyes. With his last breath in his lungs, and some cement forcing it's way in through sheer pressure, his eyes spied their last sight. His hands under the cement still clawed at the hole in the windshield, and his eyes saw that sickening face once more, only this time the pallid man looked different. This time, that rage, that sickening, heartless face of rage
was smiling.
The workers lifeless face was swimming in evil as it watched the right hand of Phil reach into the windshield for the last time, and drop back lifeless into the rich, grey pond of cement that would soon harden under the hot sun, and be his prison always.

Back

This page hosted by Yahoo! GeoCities Get your own Free Home Page