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Modern Tech Role Play is centered on the planet of Siora, in the Sol System. It revolves around the relationships between the multitude of sovereign states as they attempt to ensure their survival and defend their interests the world over. Not to be ignored, however, are the lives of the men and women who drive those states, nor those of the everyman that inhabit them.

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Sal's Literary Dump; One-Shots and Musings
Topic Started: Jan 24 2016, 11:55 PM (227 Views)
Sal
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mostly just trees
Lag [1/3]

A mildly psychologically thrilling story I wrote back around Halloween when I was in the spirit of things. A touch of gore - be warned. It's also really long, so I'm breaking it up.




The first thing I noticed was the dryness of my mouth.

It was the kind of parched feeling so permeating, so intense that your taste buds become dulled. My tongue felt swollen and was plastered to the roof of my mouth. Opening my lips, I felt the dry skin flaking apart, bits of my top lip stuck to the bottom, and pieces of the bottom stuck to the top. The few drops of blood that welled up did little to wet my tongue, but I could finally taste the salty, metallic tang.

The next thing I noticed was the pounding of a headache in my forehead.

The pain was in my temples, too, I noticed as I became more alert. With my mouth so dry, I imagined it was very likely just the dehydration making my brain angry. Our bodies are something like two-thirds water – I remembered learning that in my freshman Biology course. “Always bring a full bottle of water to this class,” our professor would encourage us, “and be sure to have it finished by the time you leave. A wet brain is a happy brain.”

My brain didn’t feel so happy right now. It felt like I’d been doing extensive yard work on an afternoon in the heat of a South Carolinian August. One of those two o’clock p.m.s where the thunderheads grow huge and pregnant with rain overhead but refuse to let a single drop spill to relieve the stifling drought, instead just keeping the heat and humidity trapped below. Like wearing a quilt when you have a fever.

Licking the sticky blood from my lips with another quick swipe of that thing that felt like a piece of jerky growing out of my lower jaw, I sat up.

“Where the fuck…?”

This wasn’t my room.

The chill that washed over me seemed to instantly quell my migraine, but just for a moment, and then it came back stronger than ever.

This wasn’t my room. I’d never seen this place before. My eyes, dry as my mouth and brain, rolled side-to-side frantically in their sockets. Bed, side table, television set, armchair, door. This wasn’t my room. Where was I? How did I get here?

I couldn’t remember.

God, I couldn’t remember!

“It’s okay,” I told myself, trying to calm my heart that was pumping blood way too quickly. “Just remember what happened last night.” Hadn’t I been at a party? Yeah, that was it! I’d been at a party – with Brian and Todd. It was Brian’s girlfriend’s birthday. Maria; that was her name. We’d gone to Brian’s house around eight and had done birthday cake shots. I probably had too many; vodka isn’t my usual drink of choice. That explained the dehydration and the headache. I remember having checked the clock on my phone around one in the morning. So today—

No.

That party wasn’t last night. Below the digital numbers reading the time, in smaller font, the time had been Friday, March 13. I remembered it clear as day: a Friday the Thirteenth. Second one in a row for 2015. It had been funny at the time – too funny because of the alcohol. I’d announced it to Brian in a loud voice, and some kid from our Stats class – Tyler, I think – had told me to shut the fuck up, I was making him feel superstitious. I’d gone home around three and woken up late the next morning. I’d had two exams since then.

I’d taken that weekend trip to Atlanta.

Days had passed.

Weeks.

Fuck, it’s June. That party was in March.

It’s June now, but I can’t remember the day. I don’t remember anything about yesterday, and maybe the day before. I feel like I just watched the past few weeks play out in a movie; months have passed but I can only recall approximately ninety minutes’ worth of scenes.

“I’m sick,” I tell myself now, this time speaking more frantically and more convinced that I have the answer right. Not hungover, not dehydrated, I’m mentally ill. “Losing time is a symptom of,” I tried to remember what I’d learned in my classes. “Of stress. And schizophrenia?”

I pushed the idea aside; there will be time to diagnose myself later. For the time, I had to figure out where I was, and who I was with. After all, I seriously doubted that I came here on my own.

I patted down my pockets and looked around the bed. My phone was gone. Of course.

More slowly this time, I looked around the room. It seemed to be a motel. One of those cheap, dodgy lodges under forty bucks a night where you might have to share the bed with a rat or a couple cockroaches for the convenience of a low price. The carpet was a rusty orange color with a dark brown honeycomb pattern running through it and, if touched, looks like it would have felt damp despite being dry. The walls had been an ivory white at one point, now stained a sickly yellow by years of tobacco smoke. The placard inside the door signified with a picture of a slashed-through-cigarette that this place was meant to be nonsmoking only, but the ruling was either recent or the decades’ worth of previous patrons hadn’t cared. There was an old late-1990s TV set with a built-in VHS tape player sitting on a rickety folding table and an armchair upholstered in a cracked burgundy pleather adjacent to it.

The window. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the blinds were drawn tight. Dim light was still coming through, but I didn’t know what the view was like outside. I couldn’t have been taken far; I would probably recognize the surroundings.

Sliding out of the queen-sized bed and away from its scratchy, worn sheets, I paced across that ugly carpet and reached the window. Using two fingers, I nudged apart the thin metal slats. Just enough to peep out.

It was almost nighttime outside; the lighting was that diluted blue-grey that made everything appear washed out just about the time the streetlights came on.

My heart nearly exploded; I did know this place. It was one of those nondescript, sleepy towns in the south Appalachian foothills, but I recognized it. I forgot the dryness of my mouth and the pain of my headache as I realized that this town neighbored my own.

My room faced onto a two-way street, and across from that, a hardware store. My dad had gone there once to rent a tiller. Steve’s Parts. It was out of the way from home, maybe a forty minute drive, but the prices were very competitive. Manmade rows of loblolly pines blocked the view beyond it, all except for the light of a distant house in the forest.

But I knew this place. I knew the owner’s son; we played against each other in varsity baseball back in high school before we graduated and he went out of state to college.

I was going to get help.

Acting with energy supplied fully by that last surge of adrenaline, my legs carried me the expanse of the hotel room, window to door in what felt like a single bound. My hand was on the doorknob.

Locked.

I tried again. It didn’t budge.

“It has to open from the inside,” I told myself, trying now to suppress the rising panic that had formed a lump in my already parched throat. “It has to open,” I repeated aloud this time.

But it didn’t. The knob didn’t even rattle, as if just there for decoration.

“Hey!” I yelled. I was pissed and scared, and didn’t know which I felt more strongly. I just knew I needed to escape and get across the street to Steve’s Parts. I needed to call my mom and dad and then laugh with Brian and his friends about how good they’d gotten me this time. “Can someone please call housekeeping and fix the lock on my doorknob? I think it’s stuck!” No reply. “I think someone’s pranking me, but I’m—I don’t feel so good!”

The artificially cooled air being pumped out from the vent above me sent chills down my sweaty neck and arms.

“Hey!” I bellowed this time, pounding both fists against the door. There was a peephole at eye level. I peered out and saw a disappointing nothing. Just a flickering light in the hallway and the door across from mine, the room numbers too small to make out well, although I thought it might have been 29.

I didn’t want to admit to myself that the yelling was futile, but the thought did eventually cross my mind.

“Didn’t you fucking hear me?!” I shouted, giving the door a hard kick. I was no weak guy; I frequented the gym on campus and took several physically-demanding leisure skills courses to boost my GPA. But that door – that was no regular flimsy plywood door. It was as if particle board had been wrapped around a solid sheet of metal. “Let me out!”

Looking for a new plan of escape, I moved back across the room to the window, my throat clicking in angry gulps the entire way. Looking down, I determined I was at least two stories up. I might be injured if I jumped, but it was better than dying in this hellhole.

I placed my hands against the window and heaved.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

Putting my entire body weight into getting the damn thing open, all I succeeded in doing was twisting my back in a way that sent warning twinges of pain along my spine. My body didn’t want to cooperate anymore without at least a drink of water. The strangled noise that escaped my mouth was a blend of frustration, anger and fear. The second was an exhausted harrumph as I turned and dropped against the floor, head in my hands and elbows on my knees.

“This isn’t funny,” I groaned to no one in particular as I rubbed the bridge of my nose, trying my best to stave off the taunting of the migraine. Who the fuck would build a hotel room where the door couldn’t be opened from the inside? Once the health department heard about this fire hazard….

There had been a second door near the entrance. I approached it, doing my best to keep my gaze averted from the taunting unyieldingness of the thing on unbudging hinges that was currently keeping me from leaving. This door was thinner, as if made from a cheap particle board, and hung from a track rather than resting on hinges.

Just a bathroom. No tub, just a toilet, a sink, a mirror, a tiny shower, walls covered in ugly cigar brown tileboard.

And water.

“Ah, thank God.” I turned the faucet until the tap spat out some ugly brown water. Old pipes. I gave it a few minutes, and it began to flow crystal clear. Finally, something that evening worked in my favor. I cupped my hands under the flow and drank and drank and drank.

Worry of death by means of thirst now having abated, I collapsed back onto the bed.

Why me?

I scoffed at myself for being so cliche - what a dumbass thing to ask - but it was one of those inevitable things my freshly hydrated brain couldn’t let go of. Why me? Whoever had brought me here, and for whatever reason - why did they choose me? I was desperately clinging to the idea of it having been Brian and Todd pulling some sick joke, but staying convinced was a battle that I was quickly losing. How would they have gotten me here without me remembering? Roofies in my drink? No, we hadn’t been together last night. In fact, I’m pretty sure Todd is on a study abroad trip to Costa Rica and Brian went up north to Pennsylvania to visit Maria’s family. I didn’t really know anyone else well enough to have them pull this elaborate a prank on me with the knowledge that I wouldn’t hate them forever for it or get their asses thrown in jail afterwards.

Tears started to collect on my lower eyelid when I realized that there was malicious intent in bringing me here. I wanted to stave off that fear for as long as possible, but if this wasn’t some prank, what could it be but a kidnapping?

Why me?

My parents aren’t rich. We were comfortably middle class, both of my parents having college degrees and working white collar jobs. I’d always had some kind of gaming console, there had always been two or three TVs in the house, FAFSA just laughed at our application for help with my tuition, and we took yearly vacations to Florida to see Disney and Universal Studios, but we weren’t rich. We didn’t have the kind of money or clout that someone would be looking for in an ransom scenario. No one in my family was involved in politics. My mom had been pretty outspoken when the city had tried to shut down our rec center, going so far as to organize a jump-roping marathon to raise money and awareness to keep it open, but none of us had ever really been involved with anything that would have gotten us a bad rep amongst the untouchables. There was no reason for anyone to want to hurt us. We were transplants in the town; we moved in when I was maybe four or five. We’d been there for a while, but not long enough to have developed any kind of Hatfield-McCoy family feud beefs.

So why me?

I felt like an idiot for crying, and probably looked even more stupid as I began to wipe the tears from my cheeks and lick them from my fingers. Hey, liquid was liquid. It did very little to help. But who was going to see me?

There was a TV. Maybe I would be on the news. Maybe if I could just remember where I was and what I was doing when I was abducted, I could figure a way out of this situation.
Karjelinnan Vapavoimussa Democratic Republic of Karjelinn
Motutemekameka te Rangatirawahime'o Luahu 🌺 Archipelagic Queendom of Luah'u
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Sal
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mostly just trees
Lag [2/3]



Scanning the bedside table and rummaging through the drawers, I realized there was no remote.

“Your generation’s never even had to get off the couch to turn on the tube,” my dad’s voice jested like reverb off my migraine as I padded across that disgusting carpet once more to do just that. “Bet kids your age wouldn’t even know how to work a TV with dials.”

The set was old, and the sounds it made as it woke up worried me for a moment, but it did eventually come on. The picture faded from black into a yellowish black and white, like everything else in the room. As the sun sunk fully outside the window, the picture came to life in full clarity - or as full as possible. A jittering, constantly scrolling picture of some local news station barely came in behind an overlay of salt and pepper static. WYFQ’s News at Night flickered silently like a dying candle flame. The news anchor was talking with a stern look on her face as the screen digitally cast beside her seemed to flip through several photos. I couldn’t make any of it out.

“Shit,” I whispered to myself. She could very well have been talking about my disappearance, or it could have been an asinine report on a middle school football team. One mattered just about as much as the other when I couldn’t see any of it.

Finger on the old analogue buttons on the front of the TV, I flipped through the channels. This room didn’t seem to get cable, not that that revelation surprised me. Frustratingly, though, no local channels were coming across, either. Just static, static, static. My heart lurched at the suddenly different display, then sank when I realized there was only a blank blue screen. I flipped down one more channel. Static.

“Shit!” I cursed loudly this time. Not like I would disturb the guests next door, anyway.

I was down to the third channel. There was never anything on the first two - why bother? But, for lack of a better option, I did.

Channel two was very different.

At first, I thought the screen was blank. It seemed pitch black, to be filled with pure dead space, but I realized that there was a faint picture there. Like a photograph, almost, time stamp down in the bottom corner and everything. The barely noticeable silhouette of rows and rows of spindly pines against the dark blue-black of the night sky became clearer to me as I strained my eyes to focus.

Was this the motel’s station? Some of the nicer hotels I’d stayed in would have their own channel dedicated to running a slideshow of photos of attractions from the local area. This was probably the case, but why this photo? A barely discernable shot taken at 8:58 p.m.--

No. 8:59 p.m. The time stamp in the lower corner changed.

Had the slideshow panned in on the next photo in the sequence? Another nighttime shot taken just a minute after the first really didn’t seem to make sense.

No. Not a photo.

A faint glimmer of light on the left side of the screen twinkled on and off at irregular intervals. A porchlight. A porchlight being covered up and uncovered by leaves that were blowing in the wind. It was unmistakable. This wasn’t a photograph; this was a video. Some kind of closed circuit thing, or a traffic cam.

A cold rush washed over me once again. That light - that was the light from outside. The house in the woods behind Steve’s place.

I stumbled through the near dark of the hotel room over to the window, roughly thrusting the blinds out of my way and ignoring the metallic clatter they made against the panes of glass. Sure enough. That was definitely it. This camera must have been mounted just below my window because it and I had nearly identical views of the scene outside. The only difference was that the slight fisheye effect on the lens gave the camera a slightly more sweeping view than I had, magnifying everything proximal to my location just a bit more.

It didn’t make sense, really. Did security accidentally set up their security cameras to be broadcast to the whole motel?

My stomach was nagging at me again to drink, and not having found anything on television worth watching, I was all too happy to oblige. I had just turned with my back to the window when something caught my attention on the TV. A blur of lights, first yellow-white and then red, zoomed by. A car.

Instantly, I wheeled back around to look through the window. Nothing.

It didn’t make sense; although the camera’s peripheral vision included a little more than I could see, there was nothing obstructing my view of the road for quite some distance. I could see a single tail light on the car go bright as the driver put on the brakes to slow for a four-way intersection further down the road on the TV, but I couldn’t find it outside.

What was going on?

This scene was definitely the one outside my window, no doubt about it. Dehydration and darkness be damned, I knew this was the view outside the window. A recording from last night? Maybe, but why? That made even less sense than the theory that this was a live feed being broadcast accidentally from a security camera.

Whatever. What did it matter, anyway? It wasn’t as if a camera reflecting what I could already see out the window was going to help me any.

I returned to the bathroom, drank and washed my face from the tap, and relieved myself in the toilet that thankfully worked. All the creature comforts of home, I suppose. I left the dim light on as I turned to head back into the main part of the room, just in case I’d need to get up in the middle of the night. My stomach twisted into a pretzel at the thought of having to spend the night here, but I was beginning to realize that that would be the case, and I was forcing myself to accept it like a man. Save for a few palmetto bugs that I’m sure were residing in there, it was just a motel; it couldn’t be that bad.

I probably wouldn’t get any sleep anyway.

In the faint glow of the flickering bathroom light, I realized I’d left the blinds askew from where I’d assaulted them before. Considering the situation, I found sleep even less likely knowing someone could see into my room. I’d fix the blinds, and then I’d at least lie down and try to think of a way out of this situation if I couldn’t sleep.

I noticed the light reflecting off the shimmers of glass in the asphalt of the road as I stood at the window untangling the cords in the blinds. A car was coming around the bend on past the woods house.

I had to get them to notice me.

“Hey!” I said, and then repeated in an almost shrill scream. “HEY!” At any other moment, it would have been a completely embarrassing and unmanly tone, but right now, I didn’t give a fuck. The shriller the better, as long as it got them to notice me. “Hey hey hey!” I banged my fists on the glass in time to my screams, but the car didn’t hear. It barreled past the motel and towards the intersection.

I yelled out a frustrated “fuck you” and gave a final pound on the glass, but it was pointless. The driver applied the brakes way too far away for my voice to reach them.

The car had a taillight out.

I’d always considered myself a pretty brave guy, but at that moment - and thank God I’d just used the toilet a few seconds ago - I would have pissed myself. That was the car from the TV. Not a similar car, but the car. That single red light on the back of the car was the one in the video.

I turned and looked at the TV. Nothing. Just nighttime and that house in the woods.

Frantically, I turned back to the window and began pounding like a madman screaming “please” over and over, my pleading interspersed with every expletive I knew. I already knew, though. Like in the video, the car would keep going, off into the night and out of my line of sight.

I was right.

“Coincidence,” I muttered, totally unconvinced, and fixed the blinds quietly and returned to the bed. I waited for something else - a car on the television or a car outside. A knock on the door. Voices through those famously thin motel walls. Of course I got nothing.

I guess I must have fallen asleep at some point that night, because I woke up what felt like several hours later. Asleep or not, my brain hadn’t rested at all. Whether I was endlessly contemplating in a state of wakefulness or suffering hellishly realistic nightmares, a seemingly unending reel of thoughts and fears filled up the entire night swirling around in my head for hours and hours nonstop. I felt worse than I had when I woke up in this grungy prison last evening: body more dehydrated, joints more stiff, guts more knotted.

At least the mindnumbing panic kept what would have by this point been pretty severe hunger away.

My attention returned to the television set. Its rounded screen gave a soft blue glow to the pre-dawn interior of the hotel and its furnishings. The time stamp announced that it was 6:03. I looked to the window. With the blinds drawn, I couldn’t see the deep pinks and blues the sky was being painted by the rising sun like I could on the television set. As a passive participant, my legs lifted me up and carried me over to the window. I pulled the slats of the blinds aside and peeked out the window. It was noticeably darker outside than the screen displayed, but with the light, I was more certain than ever that the scene on the set was definitely the one outside. I could see the wooden titling of Steve’s Parts mounted above the store’s glass doors and the fenced and padlocked area that housed several larger machines for rent. The light from the house in the woods was still glowing, but was less noticeable as the surroundings grew lighter and the ambient daylight swallowed up the little glimmer.

There was no doubt now; there was a camera showing me what I could already see. It made no sense, but it was the situation at hand.

I spent the next several minutes in a futile attempt to try to escape using any means I’d forgotten before: pushing on the window, jiggling the doorknob, pounding on the walls and doors and calling out for help. The results were the same as last night’s; nothing.

I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face and get a drink.

Then I returned to the main room.

My heart fluttered when I saw a car parked outside of the shop. On the television, anyway. There was nothing outside the window. When I realized, the color drained from my face. The difference in daylight earlier I’d chalked up to settings on the ancient television set, but no color or brightness setting could be adjusted to create a car that didn’t really exist.

So then it was a video taken from some previous time. Even yesterday.

But it wasn’t. Something nagged me from inside my mind to tell me that, no, everything I was seeing on the screen - everything from the placement of fallen pine needles to the shape of the wispy stratus clouds - was just too exact, too undisturbed to have been from another time.

So I stood in front of the window, waiting.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…

After seven hundred twenty Mississippis, a car pulled up outside of Steve’s. The same car as the one on the television: a grey four-door Ford. I watched as a man, Steve I guess, got out and headed to the door of the shop and seemed to fumble with some keys.

A surge of energy washed over me and I began wailing on the window pane again. “Hey! Help! Please, I’m stuck in this room! Hey, please hear me!” But he didn’t. Of course; I was a few stories up, across the street, and inside a room that probably had tinted windows. Steve, and no one else, really, was going to notice me up here. “Damn it! I’m up here, damn it, please help me!” I watched his back disappear inside the store, probably to get ready for a normal day of helping customers find the right appliance for their big landscaping project. My voice cracked as a choked out a final, “Please, man!”

I turned and released my disappointment in the form of several full-body punches into the mattress, each one accentuated with a raw scream. When I’d tired myself out with my explosive reaction, I dropped to my knees and sobbed into the musty comforter for a while.

When I was completely exhausted, I picked myself up, turned, and perched on the edge of the bed. I was going to die up here. I stared blankly at the television and waited for a new development. My mind was blank, and my emotions even more so.

For a long while, nothing interesting happened. I watched a few cars go by on the television, followed by identical cars seven hundred twenty seconds later each time. I was too empty to make sense of it. Even if I had been in any state to care, I’m not sure that I could find a logical explanation, anyway. How could one explain that a camera was showing events that had not yet happened in real life? It was like some kind of technological glitch, but it was impossible.

Should have been impossible, anyway.

I only really began paying attention when I watched a rabbit lose in a fight against the four tires of an old pickup. Thanks to a misjudgment in timing, it hopped into the path of an oncoming first-generation Dodge Ram and got chewed up, bouncing around like a pinball between the tires and finally getting spat out behind the automobile. Its legs twitched a few times, but I could tell by the big skinless patches on its sides that it wasn’t going to survive for very long.

Like a zombie, I stood and walked to the window. I began to count.

I saw the rabbit emerge from the edge of the woods around six hundred Mississippis. It sat in silent contemplation, nose twitching, until about six hundred eighty Mississippis. It hopped out and then back a few times, unsure of the asphalt expanse between it and its destination. Its final mistake began at seven hundred six Mississippis as it began across the road, taking long pauses after each hop. I saw the truck at seven hundred thirteen Mississippis. It was all over by seven hundred twenty Mississippis.
Twelve minutes, on the dot, again.

‘Idiot,’ I chided silently in my brain. ‘Didn’t you know this was going to happen? Didn’t you see the video? Why the fuck did you try to cross in front of the car?

But it occurred to me that no, actually, even if rabbits were smart enough to interpret premonitions, I was the only one right now who could see them. It was my fault the rabbit had died. Even if people couldn’t hear me, an animal’s ears were probably sensitive enough that they would notice me pounding on the window above them. I should have pounded and yelled to scare it off, but I hadn’t.

What must have been two, two and a half hours passed with my brain weaving in and out of consciousness. I was alive, awake even, but I was not in my body. What was going on was far too overwhelming. I sat on the edge of the bed staring into the television, waiting for something to happen. When it did, I would go to the window and wait twelve minutes for a replay.

For the most part, the goings on outside were uneventful. Steve got a few customers. I’d see him leave the store from time to time to help people load up heavy pressure washers and riding lawnmowers and tether them into the bed of their trucks. They’d shake hands, and then the customers would leave, usually eastbound towards my hometown. Sometimes, I’d bang on the windows and yell, but I could never get their attention.

I wondered if this room was stuck in an event horizon. I’d read about them once in my Modern Lit class my freshman year. Some weird sci-fi shit that I couldn’t understand then, but was beginning to grasp now. The people outside the motel couldn’t hear me because I was an outside observer. Everything that I did was happening in the present, but everyone outside was operating in the past. Or maybe they were in the present and I was in the future. Either way, they weren’t going to notice me. We were operating in two separate realities.

What a fucking perfect time to contemplate science fiction.
Karjelinnan Vapavoimussa Democratic Republic of Karjelinn
Motutemekameka te Rangatirawahime'o Luahu 🌺 Archipelagic Queendom of Luah'u
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Sal
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mostly just trees
Lag [3/3]



The timestamp on the television read 12:16 pm before anything major happened. I’d given up with the yelling long before, my voice having gone hoarse and fists sore from pounding on what must have been shatterproof glass.

Steve had taken off for lunch maybe twenty minutes ago. A woman was jogging on the narrow shoulder of the road outside. It was fairly rare to see, as this was one of those backwoods villages where the neighboring towns were too far away to be walkable and sidewalks weren’t a concept that city planners had apparently grasped.

The woman’s age was hard for me to gauge. Obesity ran rampant in our neck of the woods, as with most small southern towns, and an extra hundred pounds or so tended to age people a good twenty years. If I had to guess, I would have put her somewhere between mid-thirties to mid-forties. She was your standard white trash trailer park dweller: stringy, thin brown hair pulled into a too-tight ponytail, stained unisex tee shirt probably purchased from a thrift store, sweatpants, brandless Walmart sneakers. She came from the west, from whatever valley town lay on the opposite side of Steve’s from my own town. Her gait was that stereotypical diabetic limp, the fat on her thighs making her knees buckle under the weight, but what really grabbed my attention was the way she maintained a fast jog, sometimes looking back over her shoulder and then breaking into a sprint.

She was scared. Terrified. She was being chased by something.

When she was maybe twenty or thirty meters from Steve’s, a pickup approached quickly from behind her. Too quickly. And then they drifted away from the center line and crossed into the shoulder. I jumped as I saw her body get flung what must have been ten feet vertically and fifteen horizontally. She rolled a few times before coming to a stop in front of the fence to Steve’s rental paddock, the clay soil beneath her head becoming an even more vibrant shade of red.

My stomach lurched and for a moment I thought I’d be sick, but the lack of food kept all but a mouthful of stomach acid down, which I managed to swallow.

The driver of the truck had slammed on the brakes almost as soon as they’d made contact, a now damning dent in the hood of their automobile. The driver’s side door opened and I could see someone step out, but the angle of the dusty blue truck and door kept them mostly hidden from my view. I could only see a sliver of the top of their head as they stood obviously surveying the damage that had been done. I kept waiting for them to run over to check the woman’s vitals or try CPR, or to at least see if someone was inside the store, but after what must have been thirty seconds, they strolled towards the body at a calm pace. It sent chills up and down my spine. Why was this person so calm? Why had they hit her? She hadn’t been on a blind curve, and the way she’d been looking back over her shoulder - had they run her down on purpose?

I leaned in to the screen to get a close look at the man’s face, but doing so only got me a closer look at the red-blue-green dots of light making up the picture. He was nondescript from what I could make out - Caucasian, brown or black hair, average build. His face was away from me, looking down at the pile of woman on the ground. I could see her chest heaving and arms weakly moving, as if she was trying to get up. The driver of the truck watched her for a moment, shifting his weight to one leg as if he was listening to someone tell a story.

Then, just as slowly as he’d approached her, he turned and left for his truck. I thought he would get in and leave, a hit-and-run, but he didn’t. From what I could see, he was getting something from the bed of the truck. I squinted.

A crowbar, or something like that.

He was approaching her again, closing in on her as she did her best to pull herself across the dirt by her arms.

I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing that what was about to happen was not something I was prepared to watch.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi….

When I’d counted to ten, the woman had gone completely still, facedown in the dirt. The man was nearly back to his truck. He stopped just in front of his bumper, bloody crowbar in hand, and seemed to just freeze in place like a goddamn statue.

It occurred to me as I stared with eyes glued to the horrors onscreen that this was the truck that had run over the rabbit earlier. Who the fuck was this guy?

And then he turned, and he looked at me. He must have been looking into the camera, but the way my blood ran cold at the blurry face on the screen told me that he saw more than just the black lens mounted on the wall. He saw me. He was just staring, expressionless. Staring at me.

“Jesus Christ, why don't you just fucking leave?!” I demanded.

And then he was in the truck and tearing away from the scene.

The timestamp read 12:19 pm. What felt like an hour had only taken three minutes.

And I knew what would happen now. In nine more minutes, I would look out my window and see the scene unfold anew, like some terrible recurring nightmare. I would watch that woman’s body bounce solidly off the bumper of that powder blue pickup truck. I would watch the man coolly contemplate what to do about his victim knowing that she’d survived, and then I’d watch him take out his tool of choice to finish her off.

I didn’t want to see it. I felt sick enough that I couldn’t even manage to swallow my own spit.

But still, I began to count: one Mississippi, two Mississippi…

When the time came, some five hundred Mississippis later, I couldn’t keep myself away from the window. I watched helplessly from my cell as the woman, just like the rabbit, got mowed down by that maniac in the old pickup. I watched him get out, contemplate his actions, and decide on the next. I watched him stroll up to her, and… Goddamn it, this time I watched him swing the crowbar and dig it into the back of her skull. I turned away from the window and threw up this time, staining the ugly burnt orange carpet with sickly green stomach acid. Mucus and tears were streaming down my face and I was sobbing helplessly.

I forced myself to my feet. I had to see it through to the end.

By the time I turned back around, the man was looking up at me. I could barely see him through the blur of the tears that had collected on my eyelashes. But I knew what would happen: he would leave in a few more seconds. It would be over soon.

Except I was wrong. On the television, he had stood staring into the camera maybe ten seconds at most. But now, he had been standing there, frozen, for at least fifteen. And then twenty.

And then he smiled. A wide grin revealed what I could tell were yellowed teeth. He was laughing. He was looking right into my eyes and laughing.

I almost threw up a second time. This hadn’t happened. The TV had always shown exactly what was going to happen in real life. It had never deviated before. Not like this. He hadn’t laughed before. He wasn’t supposed to laugh! Why was he laughing?!

“Leave me alone!” I demanded, banging my fists against the glass. My voice was unsteady and cracking, but it didn’t matter. He could maybe read my lips, but he couldn’t hear me. He just laughed and laughed, idly swinging the bloody crowbar at his side, and then he stopped, his mouth closing around those teeth until he was just barely smirking. He climbed into his truck, stowed the crowbar, and left.

I don’t remember much of what happened the rest of that day. I remember Steve coming back from his lunch break around what must have been 1:00 or 1:15. The police came some time later, and the media followed like flies after horse shit. The body was collected and the whole area was roped off as a crime scene. A road block was set up to warn drivers to detour around the area. Steve’s closed early that day.

I got to see it all happen twice: as on the television, so in real life. There were no more deviations.

My head was pounding by evening. My stomach was cramping from nausea, from fear, from anger, and from hunger. I was curled onto my side on the bed, staring blankly at the softly glowing screen as the sun set outside. The images of the rabbit and the woman and the truck swirled around in my mind like a whirlpool. They became jumbled; I saw a rabbit being killed with a crowbar and a woman rolling around between the tires of a pickup truck. I kept thinking about that monster’s yellow teeth, and his thin lips curled back in a deranged grin.

Around dusk, 8:42 according to the television, I saw the lights of a vehicle approaching out of the west. A few other cars had come upon the scene, having ignored the roadblocks posted further back. This one would do the same: roll up to the scene, see that the detour signs had been serious, make a three-point turn, and leave.

Except they didn’t.

I watched on the screen as this one pulled up as close as possible to the secured area and eased to a halt. The headlights cut out.

I felt a rush of adrenaline; it was an old pickup, a large and familiar dent in the hood.

For a few seconds, I held as still as possible in my fetal position on the bed. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. My heart was the only thing giving me away as being alive. It was pounding so hard, so fast.

The truck sat just as still. I could see nothing through the windows.

And then the door opened. A nondescript man eased open the driver’s side door and slid out. He moved around to the front of the truck. There was something long in his hand - a crowbar. He looked up at the camera and stared blankly.

I broke my motionlessness with a gulp and my mouth opened in a silent scream.

And then he grinned, lips pulled back into a giant, toothy smile. He tipped his head back. He was laughing. He saw me. He was seeing me now. And then, crowbar slung over his shoulder like a kid carrying a baseball bat, he approached the motel. The last thing I saw on the TV was the glint of a glass door, what must have been the entrance to this fucking hell of a motel, swing open.

My whole body was trembling and I could barely force my eyes to roll towards the window, but I did. And I saw nothing. But I knew I would. Just like every time before, I would see it all happen. And I would find out what would happen out of the view of the camera.

There was nothing I could do. I began counting.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi...
Karjelinnan Vapavoimussa Democratic Republic of Karjelinn
Motutemekameka te Rangatirawahime'o Luahu 🌺 Archipelagic Queendom of Luah'u
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