Thirty Nine

The truck slowly chugged along the gravel road. It was dark, the driver was tired and haggard. All around it were beautiful hills, lush green, but in the darkest part of the day, they could not be seen, not the lushness of them, just the sparkling dew caught in the headlights. The road was bumpy. The air conditioner was throbbing in his head painfully, his body shivering, yet somehow also uncomfortably warm. He kept scratching himself, scratching his hands. In the dark, he could not see it, but they were rubbed red and raw, and soon would have pores on them, pores that he had scratched open with dirty yellow nails.

Dawn was coming soon. He was almost at his destination. His stomach was turning, his eyes were brimming with tears. He had no choice. If he did not do this, they would kill him. He had heard the stories about his employer. They all had. He had believed them too, or so he had thought. Not until tonight though, not until tonight had he actually seen it for himself, and he realized seeing really was believing. Not until tonight had he actually believed them.

He scratched his hand over the wheel with his other one. He came to a turn, saw it too late, turned the wheel too fast, the truck careened around the sharp edge. He shivered, warm to the tips of his fingers, his core hot. He could hear the heavy thuds as his cargo tumbled. He winced. His eyes hurt, and felt red.

The darkness around him was threatening to overwhelm him. The truck hummed along like always, oblivious to the precarious. He thought he could almost smell the cargo, he shook his head vigorously. He had not smelled it before he had opened the doors. He did not smell it now. It was all in his head. He closed his eyes tight, opening them again, trying to fight back the burning in them, trying to fight away the tears that were threatening to break through the dam doors he had built up.

A car honked loudly, he startled, almost lost control of the wheel. His fingers vibrated as the road became bumpier, his spine tingled with fear and anticipation. Who was it? His boss, someone that had been sent to keep an eye on him, the police? It swerved around and ahead of him, and slowly the lights became smaller and smaller. It was then that he let go of the air that he had been holding in his mouth. His head throbbed with pain, his eyes with watery tears. The tip of his nose was warm, his heart was throbbing in his ears.

It had been in their eyes. The people who had loaded the cargo, he had run into them as he returned from his piss, their eyes were blank, cold, unflinching. They were burly Easterners. Cold, unmoving, sturdy. Rocks. That had made him curious. His job was just to transport it. Not to look. He wished he never had. He had resisted his urges on the first half of his trip. Twenty four hours. But they just kept getting stronger. And two hours ago, three hours before dawn, on an empty highway road, he had grabbed a flashlight from the glovebox in the truck, and gone to look. His flashlight had careened around bodies, packed on top of one another, morbidly dead. The tears began to flood.