Roadside Assistance
After getting a dashboard GPS device for Christmas and arguing with that snide voice that arrogantly assumed her way was the only way, I came up with this little bit of nastiness. My goal was to make readers think about shutting off technology now and then and returning to the good old days of crumpled paper maps, tiny-print indexes and out-of-date route descriptions. Good times. Roadside Assistance was published in Horrorworld in 2009.
After the crash, after his brand new silver Lexus completed its third roll off the highway embankment and slammed into a knotty spruce tree, shattering the rest of the passenger-side windows, Montgomery Ellison kept his eyes shut. Partly to keep out any more falling glass, but also …
Don’t open them, don’t want to see, can’t face it … Just a little longer, keep reality at bay.
The darkness, so welcome, comforting. Stay here, it whispered, here where it’s safe. If you open your eyes, it’ll all be Real.
Montgomery opened his eyes. At first, he couldn’t make sense of anything. It was all wrong: symbols on the dashboard looked like some ancient Druidic alphabet; blinking warning lights flashed the wrong colors; and the Asterion-2000’s five-inch screen flickered while the GPS still displayed the map of Route 5 just past Burbank—but the streets, cities and numbers were wrong somehow, as if some malicious kids had scrambled all the markings and then smeared over their treachery with red finger-paint.
Shit, he thought, I’m upside down. He grimaced, pain shooting up his left side. Can’t turn, can’t see …
“Maria?”
Nothing, no sound. Straining his eyes, he looked as far as he could to his right. There were her legs, bloodied, peeking out from under the bright green dress. Just the one arm in sight, laced with deep horizontal cuts, bits of glass embedded in her wrist like broken-off shark’s teeth. Her wedding ring … where was it? Did she have it on at the party or had she taken it off? He couldn’t remember, couldn’t recall anything after the fight outside the restroom. Nothing except dragging her outside, pushing her into the car, slamming on the pedal and racing out of Los Angeles.
Maria. So much blood, still pumping out, but turning thicker and thicker.
“Maria …?”
He closed his eyes, willing himself back just a few minutes, to the time before they opened, back to the comforting darkness.
“Hello?” A cheery voice, professional. Female, angelic almost, spilling out from the surround-sound speakers on the doors, under the dashboard, on the ceiling and in the back. “Asterion Roadside Assistance, we’ve registered that you’ve experienced a crash. Can you talk, are you hurt?”
Montgomery blinked as blood dripped into his eyes from a cut on his cheek. “Unngh—” was all he could manage.
“Sir? Is this Mr. Ellison?”
“Yes …” he managed, barely a whisper.
“What? Speak up please.”
“Yes!”
“Thank you, Mr. Ellison. Are you hurt?”
Swallowing, he gagged on the acidic taste of his own blood. He tried to turn his neck again, nearly howling in agony. “God, yes.”
He reached for his seat belt—what he thought was the only thing holding him against gravity, but then he realized it must have extended, or broke. His head was on the roof, neck bent at a crooked angle.
“Just stay calm, try not to move.”
He put his hands on the roof and pushed, freeing his head for a moment; he shifted, relieved the pressure, and slid partly down onto his shoulder, with the belt still cutting into his neck and trapping him in place. Glass shards dug into his side, grinding and thrusting deeper, all the way to the bone, and then he did scream, a shamefully piercing scream. Even louder when he saw his right leg—and the two white bones sticking out through the torn pants like sharpened elephant tusks.
He shrieked, howled, then dropped his cries to the level of pathetic whimpers.
“No, no no, this isn’t happening.”
“Mr. Ellison? I thought I told you not to move.”
“Sorry, my neck—was pinned.”
“Okay, don’t do it again.”
He coughed. “Please …”
“Help is on the way. Just sit tight. But in the meantime, are you alone?”
The scene past his fractured leg swam in and out of focus. Maria … He had a moment of hope. The seat belt had kept her in place and the side air bag had deployed; but it was wrapped around her now, deflated and covering her like a shroud. Punctured when the windshield had exploded—the same glass shards that had torn through her throat, slicing through tendons and cartilage, nearly decapitating her.
Monty threw up—a vile mixture of blood, bile, vodka and half-digested prime rib from their awards dinner earlier this evening. Just two hours ago he had been toasting the other members of his wife’s talent firm, offering tired smiles as she accepted their praise and her award. It was her night; her client that had just rocked into the spotlight, the star of the hottest movie of the season. Monty was only along for the ride, for support, although she obviously didn’t need any more of that. The publicity tours, the all night parties with Jeremy Bane, the young hot-shot actor …
He tried to inch away from the foul puddle he’d just made on the roof, but wound up inhaling the noxious smell, and heaved again.
“Mr. Ellison? I can’t hear you, what are you saying?”
He finished choking, pulled his eyes away from his wife, and turned his chin just enough to suck in deep breaths from the cool breeze blowing through the broken car windows.
“Mr. Ellison?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Sorry.”
Where was everyone? Someone must’ve seen him go off the road.
“How’s your wife?”
He started to answer, started to grope for an appropriate response, when a creeping feeling tugged at his spine, then danced up his back, bringing shivers of dread along with it.
“Wait … What did you say?”
“Your wife. How is she?”
He blinked, turned now to the little screen, flickering white and red, the words staring back at him. Blinked again. “How did you know—?”
“Is she dead, Monty?”
The screen flashed bright red behind the blood spatters, angry crimson. “Is she dead?”
“What—?”
“IS SHE DEAD?”
“Yes! Yes, I … think so.”
“She is or she isn’t, Monty. Do her eyes look glassy?”
“What? Yes, I think—”
“Half-empty or half-full?”
“What?”
“Just a joke, Monty, trying to lighten the mood. So, is the blood still gushing out of her veins, spurting from her aorta, or is it slowing down?”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Is she almost decapitated, Monty? Can you tell me that, or is it too much effort to look at your own wife?”
“What the fuck! Who is this?”
“Roadside Assistance, please stay calm. Help is on the way.”
He tried to inch away from the screen, the upside-down dashboard. Only then did he realize what else was incredibly, desperately wrong—the little thing nagging at his brain, muddling his sense of place, making him deliriously dizzy.
From his vantage point, his neck twisted at such an angle, everything in the car appeared upside down, but on the screen—the words ‘Asterion Roadside Assistance’ were legible, as if they’d turned around themselves, matching his orientation.
“How did you know about Maria?” he asked, choking on the bile-coated words.
“Remain calm. Help is coming.”
“Why did you call me Monty?”
Silence.
The screen flickered. A wheezing gasp escaped from his wife and Monty’s eyes ripped sideways to follow the sound. Her head lolled, tipped, straining against the last few sinews; her torso shifted, bent at an impossible angle, slipping free from the air bag.
The car groaned in sympathy, slid a few more feet down the embankment.
“It’s your name, isn’t it Monty? What you like to be called. Montgomery is so … Fifties, isn’t that right?”
He gulped. Montgomery is so … Fifties. Something Maria said to him—once and only once. Fifteen years ago. The night they’d met.
This couldn’t be happening. “What the hell is going on here?”
“You tell me, Monty. What were you doing driving so fast?”
“What?”
“Excessive speeds. We track that sort of thing, you know.”
“No, I don’t …”
“Weren’t drinking were you?”
“No!”
“Don’t lie, Monty. It was your wife’s celebration; you were supposed to watch out for her, let her blow off a little steam. Get the recognition for once, instead of you, instead of standing in your shadow all these years. You and your firm, your prestigious cases, your grand settlements. You let her try agenting just as a hobby, something to do, and then look what happened.”
“How did you—?”
“What’s the matter, can’t handle a night where it’s not all about you? Can’t handle your wife having a little fun of her own for a change?”
“Shut up!” Monty reached for the seat belt, pushed the button, tried pulling out the buckle, but it wouldn’t budge. “Who the hell is this?”
“Asterion Roadside Assistance. What seems to be the problem?”
“What seems—? Who the fuck is this! How do you know all about me? About my wife?”
“Just doing our job here, Monty. Looking out for our clients. What you pay your nineteen-ninety-five a month for. Now listen, if you’d just look out your broken window, you should be able to see the approaching sirens.”
“Oh thank God.”
“You’re welcome. Sit tight, they’re almost there.”
I’ll sit tight, Monty thought. And when this is all over, I’m coming after you, you fuck, and suing you for eavesdropping, criminal trespass, emotional abuse and everything else I can dig up on your crazy fucking company. I’ll bring a class action so large you won’t ever recover.
Sirens loomed through the thickening mist, blue and red, enlarging. Two cars, coming to a stop. Hurry.
Doors slamming.
“Do you see them, Monty?”
“Yes … two officers, they’re …” Monty squinted, peering through his blood-caked eyes. “… just standing there. At the road. HELP! Down here!”
“Don’t exert yourself, Monty. They’re coming.”
“No they’re not, they’re just standing there. What the hell?” He looked closer. Silhouetted in the bright headlights, the officers looked strange, like featureless cardboard cutouts, with capped heads tilted one to the left, the other to the right. Both with their hands on their hips.
“What the hell’s wrong with them? HELP ME!”
“Not just yet, Monty. We’re not done talking.”
He stared at the screen, anger surging. “I am,” he whispered as he slid his hand along the molded faux-wood console and found the power switch. Smiling, he clicked it off and the screen went blank.
“Goodbye, bitch.” He turned his attention out the window. “Hey! Over here, I need help!” He was about to shout again when he realized the cops had moved. They were closer, about half the distance, but still in the same poses, as if they were on a moving track, like targets at a shooting range.
“Monty. That wasn’t nice.”
His eyes widened. Turned his head, slowly, painfully, to look at the console. But the screen was still dark. He blinked, shook his head, then looked outside again.
The police were closer, within twenty feet now. Faces still just black shadows, he could only make out the glint of silver badges on their shirts and hats.
“Monty …”
His head whipped around, too fast, and he almost blacked out from the searing pain in his neck—but then he saw her. His wife, smiling, grinning a broken, bloodied grin with a shattered front tooth.
Her lips, barely moving, like a second-rate ventriloquist’s. “Monty, we need to talk.”
Blinking furiously, he tried to will away the impossible, to retreat into the darkness where nothing else was real. This isn’t happening, it’s not happening.
“It’s happening, Monty.”
A red light caught his eye—the Asterion screen booting up again. A gasp escaped Maria’s lips as her eyes again lost focus and filmed over. Then the wind blew the edge of the tattered air bag over her face.
Monty struggled with the seat belt, twisting it, pulling it, trying to gain some slack. A glance out the window—the cops were now within five feet, but their tilted heads were angled the other way now, as if they’d switched places.
“Christ!” The belt still stuck, Monty fumbled along the roof by his head until his fingers closed around a thick shard of glass. He brought it down and started cutting, hearing the satisfying rip of the belt’s material, even as the glass edges tore into his fingers, shredding his flesh to the bone. Another slice and he was finally free. Adrenaline surging, he rolled onto the roof, and then dragged himself out the broken front windshield.
—Until his protruding leg bones caught against the wheel.
The pain was intense, white-hot spearing agony. He blacked out for a moment, only seconds maybe, then looked up and saw he had somehow made it out onto the cold earth, into a pile of glass. He dragged himself across the shards, slicing and cutting through his suit pants, into his thighs, his knees. Beyond screaming now, beyond pain, and then he was up onto his good knee.
Ahead lay the road, a solid refuge just through the sifting mist where the four headlights hung like heavy curtain rods. A peek over his left shoulder: the policemen, right behind him, arms out, only a foot away. Faces—their faces still blacked out, even though they were directly in the path of the headlights. They were two-dimensional and somehow completely wrong, so wrong he couldn’t get his mind around what his eyes were seeing, and if not for the fact that they were right there—right fucking there, reaching for him—he might have been able to ignore them altogether.
Monty still gripped the glass shard. Screaming, he stabbed—right into the chest of the nearest officer. It was like punching an empty cardboard box. The man—if it was a man—simply went down without a sound.
Blinking, Monty stared at the shard in his hand. A little blackness, like thick smoke, spilled from its tip.
The other officer had somehow moved closer, silently creeping within reach. Don’t let him touch you, Monty thought, almost bursting with an insane chuckle. One touch, and I think it’s all over, buddy. Game, set, match.
Without hesitation, Monty sliced across the man’s blacked-out face, and the officer went down just as fast as his partner. Both bodies lay inert, face-up until the mist moved in, hungrily swallowing them up.
“Monty?” called the voice from inside his car. At first, he thought it was Maria’s. So close in tone and pitch, but not exactly. Definitely sounding more and more like her—or is it just your imagination? Your guilt?
“It seems you’re refusing help, Monty. Perhaps you suffered a blow to the head and aren’t thinking clearly?”
“Shut up!” He gaped at the mist massing around him, obscuring the hills, even the lights from the valley below. The headlights on the ridge flickered like dying suns. The air seemed twenty degrees colder, almost all at once, and above, the stars were winking out of sight.
The voice again, carried on the shoulders of the mist:
“Post-traumatic stress. Your body’s gone into shock. Your mind is likely imagining some pretty bizarre things right now. You might be seeing things that are impossible. Hearing things that can’t be. Imagining, even, perhaps—that you’re dead.”
Monty crawled closer to the car, limping almost, on one knee. “Yes. Yes, that has to be it.” He paused. “Am I?”
“Are you what, Monty? Dead?”
He glanced around, shivered again as the mist closed in tighter. “Yes, am I …?”
“Wandering the other side? Lost in Limbo, pondering your sins, your guilt, your worldly errors, wondering if you’re being judged but knowing really, honestly, the outcome isn’t even in question?”
Monty swallowed.
“Don’t be silly,” the voice said. “I’m still talking to you, still doing my job—and what would be the point of me talking to a dead man?”
“I don’t know.”
“Good, then we’re agreed. Listen, I’m glad at least you’re keeping an open mind. Now the important thing is to try to remain calm. Help is on the way.”
“You said that already,” Monty pointed out. “You said they were here. Are they?” He looked back to the road—the dark road, now without any police cars—unless the mist had swallowed them up too. No sirens. “There were … there were sirens, and two officers, and you told me to wait for them, and my wife spoke …”
“I doubt that, Monty. She is, after all, just about decapitated. No functional larynx, you understand. Quite impossible.”
Marty froze. The light of the Asterion device filled the Lexus’s cab. Now it flickered, and it seemed Maria shifted, her head turning almost completely sideways to look at him. Glossy almost-white eyes locked on his.
Eyes that suddenly blinked.
Monty screamed and hauled himself up on his good leg, pushed off from the car and started hopping. One, two steps before banging the wrong foot on a rock and sending a jolt of fiery agony up his leg. He collapsed, howling like a wolf caught in a bear trap. Dragged himself forward, then pulled himself up again, scraping, tugging at the earth, scrambling toward the road.
A glance back and now he saw a shadow, a silhouette with a police cap, rising up again like a shooting-range target, a dummy on a spring, bouncing back up after being struck. A short distance away, the other one popped out of the mist.
From farther back, volume diminished but just as forceful: “Monty, please don’t attempt to leave the scene of an accident.”
He clawed his way up to the gravel-covered edge, then onto the hard concrete. The mist seemed to thin out up here, clearing a way for him. Ahead was the ridge, a curving bend in Route 5, and down in the valley he could see the lights of Burbank, simmering in quiet repose. He scooped up gravel in both hands, grinding the little stones into his flesh, feeling their abject normalcy, the earthiness of it all, bringing his mind something tangible to wrap itself around like a comfortable wool blanket.
Don’t look back, he thought.
And then of course, he looked—and of course, they were closer. Half the distance. Not moving, but still they had managed to gain on him. He leaned to one side, gasping, looking both ways down the empty, darkened road and the unsympathetic hilly ridge, then up to the cold, heartless constellations. Against his brain’s warnings, he glanced back. The officers were now within ten feet.
But they were glowing, catching a light coming from—
Monty turned, rolled several times into the middle of the road and then raised up a hand in a weak waving motion just as the headlights approached, going almost too fast.
Don’t hit me, please don’t hit me.
Brakes squealed, tires dug in, screeching, and finally stopping.
No sirens, that’s a good sign.
Door opening, a man’s voice. “Hey, you ok?”
Monty laughed, letting out a wheezing cry of relief. “No, definitely not.” He pointed back to the swirling mist. “Accident, need … help.”
“Are those police?”
“No.” He scrambled, caught the edge of the door, dragged himself up, gagging on the pain, then swung his legs inside the car.
“Jesus,” said the man. Long dark hair, penetrating, boyishly good looks. “Monty? Ellison, is that you? Jesus, your leg!”
“Go!” Monty hissed, unable to process this coincidence. Jeremy Bane. His wife’s client—her lover … Coming to his rescue. Irony didn’t even begin to cover it.
Outside his window—two silhouettes, bending, lurching forward.
“Monty?”
“GO!”
The car launched ahead, tires spitting, careening back into the lane, climbing the ridge.
Monty let out a great sigh. Leaned back. “Holy Christ.”
“What the hell happened down there? Is Maria ok?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Just get me somewhere, somewhere safe.”
“I’m getting you to the hospital, pal. You might want to buckle up, though, I tend to drive fast.”
Monty fumbled for the seat belt, locked it in place. “Thanks, I …”
“Turn right at the next exit,” said a voice. Female, professional.
Familiar.
Monty sat up. “What … was that?”
“Oh,” said Bane, patting the little device next to the steering wheel. “Don’t worry. That’s just my route guide. I named her Emma because she reminds me of this babe I met on a shoot in Malibu last spring. Programmed my trip this morning since I’m not that great driving at night. But now I’ll reset it since I’ll take you right to the hospital outside of San Fernando. That’s closest and—”
“Sixty feet, next right,” came Emma’s voice.
Monty blinked, staring at the little screen: the bright white background, the little red line for Route 5. He felt disassociated, detached from his body, from reality. His lips moved, forming words he couldn’t remember making. “Is that an Asterion?”
“Yeah, man. Just got this baby last month, and …”
Suddenly, time slowed. His hands seemed to move on their own, reaching across the car, grabbing the wheel. Turning it.
Just like he had turned the wheel of the Lexus.
Maria was screaming at him, slapping him. Insulting him. Admitting her affair, coming right out and describing the acts she had performed with her client, in graphic detail. Right at the bend of the curve, with the Asterion flashing red, hypnotically pulsing, blinding him, filling his heart with murderous rage as she continued to talk, talk, talk …
Bane screamed. The cab filled with light, and Bane pulled back. “What the fuck—?”
But Monty was stronger.
An eighteen-wheeler, tearing around the bend, veered too far into the center lane. White hot, burning glare from the headlights. Monty steered toward it. A scream, then another, mingling together in a cacophony of shattered glass and crunching metal.
Sometime later, the darkness imploring him not to open his eyes, Monty blinked, opened them, and took in the scene almost passively. Engine block through the dashboard, impossibly close, just flush with his chest, which meant his legs … his legs, couldn’t feel his legs. Arms pinned, feeling like something biting them, sharks maybe, gnawing through his bones, savoring the marrow.
Jeremy Bane—his head smashed in by the steering wheel, a pulpy pink mass oozing down the front of his shirt, all caught in the flickering red and white light from the screen.
“Asterion Roadside Assistance.” That voice, so coy, so familiar. Funny, it sounded just like Maria’s. No difference really, except now he sensed an edgy, smug quality to the tone. “We’ve registered that you’ve experienced a crash, and … oh, it’s you Mr. Ellison. What are we, accident-prone?”
He groaned, tried to speak but could only make a sound like a fish choking on a worm-entangled hook.
“This time, please just sit tight, Monty. Help is on the way.”
***