If it wasn’t happening to him, the driver might have even thought it peculiar: the way hatred and murderous desire can link forces and take up residence in the body, like a parasite. Each one grows fat and ferocious by feeding off the other, until they intertwine and burn as a single entity. Parasitical vengeance has set the driver’s bowels aflame, and it threatens to consume him entirely.

Now, to breathe is to seek vengeance. Every step forward brings the driver another instant closer to the end. That thought, in itself, brings him a perverse sort of relief. It’s the fatal comfort that comes from knowing that each action, no matter how insignificant on its surface, joins a long –though not interminable- chain that will finally bring him to satisfaction, standing over the sludgy remains of that monster’s hacked-apart body.

The high beams from an oncoming truck break up into a kaleidoscope of swirling light. It’s not a truck, but the open-roof, square front of a jeep –like the type seen in the newsreels from Europe, all throughout the war- and there isn’t one, but many. They are accompanied by the riot of a mechanical roar that is usually associated with four-engine jetliners. Shhhhhhhhrooooooooom. The inside of the pickup is awash in the full floodlights of an entire convoy -more than that, it would seem- and the rumble of the passing camouflaged trailers is like an earthquake that threatens to throw the pickup clear off the road.

The train of covered flatbeds keeps coming: flapping conestogas of a militant fury. One dutifully coming on right behind another, the procession of four-wheel giants would seem to never end, when the highway is instantly sunk back into the silent glow of a premature dusk. There isn’t so much the fading tremble of motors as a low, gravelly ringing in the driver’s ears. It’s the night air outside that seems to be so quiet, hardly causing a rustle as it blows in through the window, that the driver has to ask if he actually witnessed what he just saw and felt. The afterimage of the headlights still dance across his retinas and causes the luminous specters of a convoy to permanently take up the road ahead; but is that proof enough?

“Wha’n hell juss happen’d?”