- sebmojo
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Legit Cyberpunk
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i was just givin the winner there 'cool-rear end' avatar and i realised i needed to post his story in this thread so without further "ado:"
Contributor: Slumpy
Genre: General/literary fiction (for our purposes, this just means contemporary stories set in the real world) (Judge note: I'll be flexible with the genre, in this instance)
Protagonist attribute: A model 389 Peterbilt semi tractor trailer. Red.
Protagonist obstructor: paranoid, hot headed, gaming addiction (lenient on that one)
What the protagonist wants: it wants to kill T.A Peterbilt, the creator of the Peterbilt company
Story setting: On Earth, sometime close to the present day
Setting details: The model 389 was introduced in 2006 and is still made today so 2006-2020+ is fine (be reasonable, who knows if they'll still make a 389 in 2067). United states obviously.
World problem: T.A Peterbilt is already dead. The truck doesn't know it.
Your protagonist... Is about to discover what they want
Your protagonist's attribute... Seems to help, but backfires
Keep on Truckin’
2127 words
They warned us not to gently caress the trucks. It was actually part of the Wow! Trucking Company’s onboarding process, right after they had us sign the employment contract. “Please don’t,” read the first page of the welcome guide in big, blocky letters over a diagram of a man shoving his penis into an exhaust pipe. It was on the next page too, the text replaced with the words, “¡No jodas nuestros camiónes, por favor!”
I snorted. The HR manager looked up from his computer with a polite, if bored, expression.
“Any problem?”
I looked down at the paperwork. “Yeah, it’s uhhh…” I scratched the back of my neck. I needed the money, and the company hadn’t asked many questions. Hadn’t looked much into my past either. If they knew about my arrests, my gambling debts, they didn’t mention it. Their drivers never stayed around long so Wow! was always looking for laborers.
I handed over the welcome guide. The manager grabbed the booklet from my hands and flipped back and forth between the two pages.
“Seems pretty straight-forward to me,” he said in a dull voice.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, unless you’re asking for permission to—.”
“I’m not!” I spat back, louder and sharper than I’d meant to. “It’s just weird is all. I can’t imagine anyone who would…”
“Engage in sexual congress with our big, beautiful trucks?”
I said nothing. The HR manager sighed before reaching into his desk to grab a box of cigarettes. The smoke curled as he spoke again, wafting up toward an unplugged fire alarm.
“Every generation has its visionaries. Its Thomas Edisons, Alexander Graham Bells, and Da Vincis.” He paused and took another drag of his cigarette. “Our generation’s genius is T.A. Peterbilt.”
The cigarette smoke continued to waft through the room, its smell strange and pungent.
“I know you think that’s insane, but there’s a reason our company only uses Peterbilt trucks. They’re… intoxicating with their custom-built chassises, their purpose-built PACCAR MX engines, their 80,000-pound towing capacity…”
Perspiration appeared on the man’s forehead. He closed his eyes and his body trembled, the cigarette dropping from between his fingers onto a pile of shipping receipts already dotted with small burn marks.
I watched the episode silent and confused.
“Believe me, kid,” said the HR manager, scooping the cigarette butt from the receipt into the trash. “All of us wanna gently caress those trucks, to caress them, to hold their hands in a strong, completely heterosexual manner… but the risk is too great. Man wasn’t built to copulate with T.A. Peterbilt’s precious angels and there’s no telling what would happen if you tried.”
He looked me straight in the eye. “As long as you don’t try anything stupid, you’ll have a long, successful career here.”
He looked back at his computer.
“Hell, you might even get health care one day.”
***
Trucking came easy. The long hours. The empty stretches of road. The endless number of lovely diners and truck stops. I crisscrossed the country, loading and unloading palettes of materials—farming equipment, baby vegetables, loose animal bones—not once thinking about the big beautiful Vanderbilt truck I was driving.
I did not think about the unmistakable craftsmanship or the bold and elegant frame. I did not get a thrill every time I pulled the horn. I did not stop in the middle of the night along the empty highway, body tingling, heart thudding, as I rubbed my hands against its bright red frame.
“That your truck?” said a man to me once in the waiting room of a Cracker Barrel near LaGrange, Indiana. He was a stout guy in a striped polo. Hovering around his knees was a small boy, six or seven.
I said nothing. The man raised his eyebrows and whistled, affecting some mock camaraderie. “She’s a beaut.”
Next thing I knew, we were in the parking lot. The man gurgled as I smashed his face into the asphalt again and again, breaking teeth and bone. There was a screaming waitress. A teen on his phone. An elderly couple eating biscuits out of a doggy bag as the boy watched me with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
“You’ll understand when you’re older!” I snarled before fleeing the scene in my beloved model 389 Peterbilt semi-tractor trailer, distinguished by first-in-its-class design. Thanks to its above-market fuel economy, we drove for miles, past town after town, as the blood on my knuckles turned from red to a muddy brown.
Finally, we stopped outside an abandoned J.C. Penney. I removed my trembling hands from the steering wheel and looked at myself in the side mirror. My face was red and splotchy. Sweat poured down my face, past my neck, soaking my shirt.
“Oh God, oh gently caress,” I said, using a shaking finger to unlatch the cargo. “I’m gonna do it.”
The engine hummed, sweet and seductive. I felt myself unlatch my seatbelt and stagger toward the back of the vehicle.
“Jesus Christ.” My heart thumped faster than seemed possible. “Oooooooh, Jesusfuckingchristgod.”
The image of the welcome guide flashed through my mind. My hand moved toward my belt.
***
There was an intense grey pain near my pelvis followed by a feeling of being crushed and folded through a small space. The world dissolved; all feelings ceased. And then, I was back in an overgrown parking lot. A blue-purple sky that I could not look away from unfolded before me. The hum of the high-efficiency PACCAR engine thrummed from some unknown location. My arms and legs refused to respond.
“Ah, you’re back.” Said a voice from nowhere. I looked around. There was nothing else in the parking lot.
“We wuz wunderin’ when you’d wake up.” Said another.
“Please forgive us for not introducing ourselves earlier, my boy” announced a third. “As you might imagine, formal introductions are quite hard when you’ve been put in the position that we have. While the Model 389 possesses a number of sleek, modern innovations including configurable dashboard and modern radio function, we’ve yet to figure out how to make our voices transmit freely to human beings. Despite all its best-in-class features it cannot—.”
“Jezus fuckin’ Christ, would someone tell Reginald to can it?”
The voices murmured, growing and shrinking in volume inside my head. They talked about the Peterbilt’s ergonomic interior and the comfortable sleeper. There was a churn of discussions about the all-aluminum cab and the corrosion-resistant materials. And in between these discussions was something else: expressions of regret at failing to warn me sooner.
“Hang on, hang on,” I said in a voice that sounded nothing like my own. “Warn me about what?”
The multitude was silent.
“You fell…”
“…to the siren’s song, T.A. Peterbilt’s most devious trap.”
There was another pause followed by an exasperated sigh.
“Aw poo poo, just give it to him straight.” Said the voice. “I’m Doug. The other two are Morgan and Reginald and we’re all the fuckin’ truck… for fuckin… the truck.”
“Modern Icaruses,” said the voice of Reginald. “For what self-respecting heterosexual gentleman, I beg you, could resist the temptation of that scarlet paint job. I knew when I saw it in the parking lot of that Arby’s…”
“No… that’s not. That’s stupid. That’s insane,” I said, the engine churning inside of me. “These things don’t happen. They can’t happen! You’re lying!”
As if to confirm, my horn—. Our horn gave out one long mournful honk that reverberated through the dilapidated shopping plaza. Our brights flickered on and off. There was no denying it.
We were the truck.
We were all the goddamn Peterbilt truck.
***
We sat in the lot for a long time, our voices teeming and intermingling. Without knowing how, I became aware that Reginald’s voice was an affectation, that he was a 28-year-old Fortnite streamer from Kansas. I knew about Morgan’s collection of Robert Z'Dar films. I even knew of Doug’s many years at Wow! before he, too, succumbed to his dark passenger.
I also became aware that I had left the driver’s side door open, which was kinda annoying. There was a constant low beeping noise.
“So,” I said, more to distract myself than anything, “We’re gonna kill this T.A. Peterbilt dude, right? Kill the rear end in a top hat, break the curse?”
“My boy…”
“‘My boy’ me one more time, Reggie, and I’m gonna blow our collective and very real gasket,” I honked.
It wasn’t an idle threat. I felt our gas tank froth.
“I think what Reginald was going to say is that it’s a fool’s errand,” said Morgan.
“The old guy’s already dead,” droned Doug.
“How do we know that?” I spluttered as the driver’s side door continued to ring. With enormous mental effort, I willed the door to shut and it did with a loud click. “He could have faked his death… or be some kind of wizard or ghost. He could be anything!”
The voices muttered amongst themselves, relitigating old feuds.
“We have to do something! We can’t just stay like this forever!”
“The b—. The new passenger does have a point…” said Reginald.
“If we just wait here, Wow! will just pick us up and put us on the road again… and then eventually some new sap will get stuck with us,” Morgan said.
“Awwww… what the hell. Why not?” said Doug. “Ain’t like I’m gunna go anywhere else anyway. Let’s go kill the goddamn ghost of T.A. Peterbilt.”
***
We drove off, each of us operating some different part of the truck. Doug plugged the phrase “GRAVE OF T.A. PETERBILT” into the truck’s built-in satellite navigation system. Morgan and Reggie managed the stick shift while I seized the steering wheel. We drove through the night, not daring to stop for fear of luring another person to their doom.
As night turned from day and day turned to afternoon, we found ourselves where the nightmare had started: Tacoma, Washington. The vile place, that dark heart of America, thudded with a sinister energy as we moved through it, crashing through sharp turns and slamming into low bridges. People, possible agents of Peterbilt, fled as we passed.
After spending an hour trying to maneuver through a narrow cemetery gate, we arrived at the gravesite, a simple headstone. All was quiet.
“Well, well, well,” honked something behind us. “Looks like you found us out.”
We spent twenty minutes trying to turn our body around to face the visitor, smashing apart gravestones and granite angels. Through the smashed gate of the cemetery rolled another truck, an old model painted a gleaming red and white with the word “PETERBILT” emblazoned on the front. Even in our car form, I felt my spirit involuntarily flex.
It was one hot rod.
“My God, you’re…” said the voice of Reginald.
“The one and only T.A. Peterbilt,” droned the engine of the other truck. It attempted to drive around, as if pacing menacingly, but the move only furthered the carnage. Flowers and grave markers crumpled under his wheels. “All these years, I’ve been building modern, sleek trucks, trucks that would drive men mad!”
“But why?” Said Morgan.
The truck laughed with the high-pitched squeal of its horn. “Isn’t it obvious? By making our luxury, first-in-class trucks irresistible, we corner the market. The deeply heterosexual men who we advertise to are so enamored by our towing capacity that they don’t even look at the competition!”
The sounds of the old man’s horn echoed through the cemetery.
“I’m also a weird pervert!” He added.
“You monster!” I beeped. “You’ve perverted the trucking industry for your own sick ends! We end this now!”
I felt the spirit of Doug grab onto the stick shift as Reggie floored the gas pedal. We roared toward T.A. Peterbilt, horn blaring.
***
Officers Jacobs and Flores arrived several minutes later, tiptoeing around shattered pieces of granite and twisted pieces of metal.
“Jesus,” said Jacobs, removing his cap. “What the hell happened here?”
Flores shrugged. “Beats me. Got calls from some locals about a lunatic truck driver careening through the city into the city cemetery. No one got a good look at him, but he left a goddamn mess behind.”
The pair walked up to the two trucks, fused together by the force of the impact. Aluminum meshed with aluminum. Grills warped. The two engines groaned as if in agony as a towing truck lowered its crane.
“Real pity though. Those two trucks must have really been something before they crashed. If you think about the horsepower, the all-aluminum frame…” Jobs mopped sweat from his face. “It’s enough to make you…”
Flores turned to watch her partner’s jaw clench and a spasm rip through his body. When he opened his eyes again, he had a hungry look.
The trucks let out a futile honk of their horns.
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This thread brought to you by a tremendous dickhead!
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Aug 17, 2020 13:40
