As We Know It (II)

A quick stop leads to bad outcomes . . .

If I ever thought the whole world was going to implode that day, I’d’ve stayed home in bed. We never really know when the end is near, do we? Every bad day starts out as ‘just a day’. That is, until we get the news - Mom was in an accident, grandpa had a heart attack. Or, you are the bad news - you didn’t see that bus coming, or you had one too many, and killed a man. In this case, it was a trip to the bathroom of a Pilot truck stop that set off the chain reaction. Six months later, nothing was the same. In short, I brought about the end of the world because I ate the wrong thing from Arby’s the night before.

I was driving to Charlotte in a Peterbilt I’d put in almost three-quarters-of-a-million miles on. The outside was smashed and scratched and looked like hell, and half the lights flickered whenever the switch was on. And at some point, I just stopped washing it. No use in trying to hose down a pig if it’ll just get dirty again.

I was headed in for the night to drop the trailer so I could go home, twenty minutes from clocking out. Twenty damn minutes. The traffic was light for how it usually was in the late afternoon, but I wasn’t going to complain too much, having sat in my fair share of gridlock. Ted Nugent was playing through the radio. It was a song I had heard about a thousand times in my life, and I started to sing. I pulled off the highway and into the Pilot truck stop for a quick bite, no fuel. I hated the pumps at that particular station. The damn things were slow - real slow. Thirty minutes to fill a tank is too long.

I swung by Arby’s attached to the station and grabbed myself a chicken sandwich, large fries, and a milkshake. I’m not sure which of those things did my stomach in. Maybe it was all of them.Or maybe it was the cashier I watched scratch his ass as I came up to the counter to order. Whatever it was, within five minutes, I needed to take a dump something fierce. So fierce that I nearly went in my pants while running into the bathroom. I threw the first stall doo open so violently that I am surprised it didn’t fall off. If it had, I still would have plopped down on the seat and exploded my guts in the toilet bowl. When a man’s got to go, he’s got to go. And I sat on the John for a long damn while.

Then I hitched up my belt and headed out to my truck. As I got to the lobby, I saw a big white mass roll past the pumps and across the lot. My senses tingled. Something had been off when I hopped out of the cab, but I couldn’t place my finger on it. Had I remembered to set the brake? A simple question, and I already knew the answer. There it was, a forty-thousand pound rolling giant.

The truck gained speed, but missed every single bystander. By the time it reached the other side of the lot, it must’ve been doing at least twenty. Then it smashed into the side of a red truck and trailer with enough force to push the thing over.

My heart dropped. I ran out of the store and into the crowd that was gathering. The driver of the parked truck was stuck in his seat and struggled to unbuckle. He flailed his arms and grabbed at the air between himself and the handle, trying to get out. Finally someone climbed up on the side of the cab, opened the door, and freed the man.

My truck rolled off the edge of the embankment at the back of the lot and fell into the ditch that sat at the bottom. I thought about how screwed I was about to be. I could have dealt with the consequences of the white truck finding its way into that ditch, if the situation was just that. But it wasn’t. The reality was that there was something important in the back of that trailer. Inside that trailer sat a hidden command center, and in that command center just so happened to be one of those mythical buttons that launches nuclear missiles. And when my white truck tipped the trailer over, that buttons got pushed.

“What the hell have you done?!” The driver shouted at me, just as a soldier ran from the back of the trailer, screaming something about a missile launch.

I was lost for words - all I could muster was a simple, “Sorry.”

Out of the trailer rushed a few more soldiers, all dashing for the nearest phone in the gas station. Then, the sirens came. I ran inside the gas station and hunkered down in the bathroom. I was one of forty or so people crammed in the men’s bathroom. We waited there for the end. A few people cried. Some held their loved ones tightly. I just sat in the corner and thought about the mess I had made. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t think.

Then came the low rumble, then a deafening roar, then you couldn’t hear a damn thing. The blast was faint and flashed through the bottom of the door. There was an eerie feeling - it was like every skin cell was dancing, and my hair stood on end. I figure it was the radiation. Or maybe it was the terror of knowing you were going to die. I wanted it to be over quick.

After a while in the corner of that bathroom, I got up and pushed my way past all the people. They were quiet, and shaking. One grabbed my coat as I tried to open the door, but I shook them loose. They probably thought I was going to let something in. But that door wasn’t doing a whole lot to stop the fallout, anyway.

The door swung open into the station’s lobby, which was covered in shattered glass and burned potato chip wrappers. Outside the horizon was bright orange and a large mushroom cloud poked about above it in the distance. In the parking lot there were melted cars, and a couple had bodies still in them. The pumps were destroyed, along with everything else that was out front of the building. I don’t know how the fuel didn’t ignite during the explosion. It could have been some divine intervention, or at the very least, some station attendant who shut off the supply of fuel before the fireball hit.

Twenty four days - that’s what it took for everything to fall apart. Really, the world fell apart right when the missiles hit. But it did take several weeks for the damage to be seen entirely. Every major city from D.C. to Tehran was leveled - most of them, anyway. And those that weren’t hit directly either felt the explosion or after-effects carried by the wind. Destroyed buildings, burning forests, and vaporized citizens. There was nothing that could have been done to stop it once those missiles left the ground.

And I was responsible for all of it. I had killed more people than Adolf Hitler, Pol Pott, and Joseph Stalin, combined, because I didn’t remember to set a goddamn parking brake. But I will say, who the hell puts the nuclear fate of the world in the parking lot of some dumpy truck stop in Charlotte, North Carolina? You’d think there would have been a better security force than a handful of army guys in a semi-trailer.

And no one has any idea that it was me that did it. At least, not anymore. Those soldiers in the back of the truck died when the blast came. And now I’m the only one who knows who is to blame.

I’ve wandered this parking lot for a long time, thinking. I’ll probably wander it until my feet fall off, or a gang of bandits shoots me and turns me into a stew.

-The Red Diamond

I XXI XXVI