No Vacancy Rest Stop

Bryan had been driving all day, 14 hours in the comfy cab of his big rig truck, hauling whatever goods and junk people buy cheap from China and sell expensive in the States. He was well ahead of schedule & approaching that time of night he needed to pull over & record his necessary 6 hours of rest. He spotted a highway rest stop 1.3 miles down the road. He slowed to a green sign reading ‘Vacancy’ in bright, bulbed neon green letters.

Bryan eagerly parks his truck in a line of other big rigs, all dark for the night, the middle of four spots all to himself. He’s used to the comforting hotel of rigs in highway rest stops. Something about the quiet and transitional liminal space feels like an unspoken community between truckers.

Lot of truckers like the work because of the solitude. Often the only conversations outside of radio chatter are the cordial one-word greeting at the doors of late-night convenience stores, and a curt nod between others. So the late night meetings of isolationists in such a place feel special. Sacred in a way. A silent agreement of safety with one another.

Bryan steps out of his cab and stretches his 38-year-old old-man back like a paw stretches after a noon nap in his recliner chair, & saunters wearily to the bright fluorescent lights of the 24hr convenient store across the lot. The door chimes Welcome!

The store radio sings popular rock songs to the plastic packaged food & humming refrigeration systems. He bounces along with the lyrics as he peruses the aisles, looking for his go-to long-haul snacks: cheddar Chex Mix, lime sunflower seeds, and a Rockstar energy, both to end the night & start the morning 6 hours in the future. Satisfied with his comfort meal, he wanders to the front of the store to check out.

The man behind the bar tickles his nerves. There’s nothing outwardly untoward about the solitary man. There’s just… something about his face… The skin is stretched oddly over his mouth, like it’s too tight… Like when someone eats a sour candy and puckers their lips. The dead eyes of the man suggest he hasn’t been eating any sour candies. He’s a big man, not quite six foot, but burly. His beard hides what imperfections the man has likely been born with.

Bryan feels a tinge of chagrin at himself for feeling so uncomfortable by this man’s deformities. He kicks himself for being so rude, even if his thoughts never left his mind. He shakes off the feeling of unease the man gives, and sets his snacks on the counter.

“Good evening,” he grins charmingly at the clerk.

The clerk glares back apathetically.

Bryan’s smile falls to a purse, not out of annoyance, but unease and embarrassment.

His eyes lower as he taps his wallet on the counter, then asks the man, “May I get a pack of smokes?”

The man keeps staring. Bryan feels his throat tighten and dry. He swallows, he doesn’t know why.

“Which one,” asks the man in a thick southern accent. Something about his words are hot, like wet breath against skin.

Bryan tries not to shutter. He points to the pack, staying cordial. The man, barely taking his eyes off Bryan for more than a second, slowly obliges. He feels vulnerable under the glare.

He pays the man in cash, foregoing the change, and skips outside into the cold night air. The door chimes behind him, much less welcoming and more of a sound that echoes, in his mind, as ‘good riddance.’

Bryan shivers. The night is cool, but it’s only the beginning of autumn in the desert. He pulls his jacket close and walks off to the left of the lot, passing the gas station accompanying the convenient store. His keys jingle against his jeans and his boots crunch in the gravel.

He stops just at the outskirts of the dim buzzing lights, far away from the gasoline dispensers. The drip, drip, drip of unused hoses & the rumbling of the waiting ice machine now far in the distance. He clicks his lighter, the color of orange flame a comfort against his cold cheeks. His cigarette ignites and he drags slow & full, enjoying the taste of tobacco he has been dreaming of reuniting with since his last smoke break this afternoon. Some people enjoy an afternoon tea, some people take an afternoon nap. Bryan, he enjoyed an afternoon smoke.

In the pale of the waning crescent moon, Bryan listens happily to the chirping & trilling of desert crickets & other insects making music in the roadside underbrush. It’s a pleasant noise you can’t hear in the cities, and a favorite pastime to Bryan. He raises his face to the faint shine of the moon and imagines the insects playing tiny instruments. Their notes a lifetime of practice, every night the concert of their lives. Then, discordant to the musical talents of the bugs, he hears an odd gurgling noise.

Bryan chalks it up to his imagination, maybe it was his own throat, but the sound persists. Like a reflection in a darkened mirror, he strains to make out the images of the source in his mind. He thinks:

Could it be… a frog? or a toad? It’s greatly unlikely for such a critter to be out in the desert roads, so far from water. But what else could it be, but a groaning toad, twisting water at the back of his throat like a demonic amphibian. It was the closest image he could think of.

In the midground of his mind, he pushes down the primal understanding that the sound resembles what a human may make if drinking their own blood.

He hears a moan among the sounds of gurgling and his heart drops. The smoke from his cigarette spins in the air, drifting along the constellations in the sky. No light pollution for miles. No help for miles more.

He stands stalk still like a rabbit in denial. He strains his ears and imagination even more, trying to rationalize what he heard into something normal and totally explainable. He tries.

Involuntarily, he takes a step forward, toward the desert brush, further into the gloom. He peers past the sagey shrubs & weedy yellow grass and sees a faintly illuminated mess in silver lines. Like a dog eating the carnage of deer, or some other sinew fresh kill, but it’s so hard to see, and much harder to imagine…

It stops. And it looks at him.

Huge silver eyes, the same color as a full moon, stare at him. A predator interrupted. It’s pale & has black liquid running down its mouth, down its throat, down its chest into the black night that enshrouds the rest of the scene like an oil painting swallowing its subject.

Bryan can see what it was eating. It was not a deer. It’s a woman, barely conscious. He can see the silver highlight in her glazing eyes. He can’t see, but he can imagine her crying, throat ripped open, the light animating her blood slowly, steadily oozing out of her colding body.

He raises himself upright. He drops the butt of his half-smoked cigarette and turns on his heel, walking quickly to his rig. The gravel crunches loudly under his soles.

He strides past the watchful lights of the gas station.

He jogs past the glaring lights of the convenient store.

He breaks into a sprint as he hears the unwelcoming chime of the convenient store door open. He hears heavy breathing & the hard, running tread of the burly man from behind the counter.

Bryan skids to his truck, small rocks spraying under the wheel as he stops. He swings open the door and hops in faster than any safe-zone game of tag & slams the door shut. He locks it and fusses for his keys, struggling to unlatch them from his hip. His breath is ragged & pluming from the temperature difference. His hands shake with adrenaline and he curses the chemical for making it so much harder to save his life.

He glances up and out the passenger window. He watches human bodies with silver and yellow eyes crawl out from under the other big rigs, hunch upon cargo boxes, and leap from vehicle hood to vehicle hood. He notices then how lifeless the entire rest stop had been.

The trucks hadn’t been rooms for sleeping drivers. The rest stop hotel was abandoned and something evil lurked in the darkened corners where silent promises were supposed to be kept. He wasn’t safe in the company of fellow isolationists, he was isolated, he was alone and completely vulnerable to the midnight predators of empty highway roads and convenient store ghosts.

The demons crawl and run like hellhounds toward him. His hand catches the key to start the truck and shivers it into the ignition. He revs his engine.

SLAM!

Bryan screams! The bearded clerk had thrown his hands on the driverside window. His hands alone nearly cracked the glass.

The cab was not close to the ground. Anyone had to climb to get to the door, and he was stood there like it was nothing. Like he was… flying. It’s so stupid, but that was the first thing Bryan thought of.

The bearded man slams his head into the glass, blood staining the spiderwebbed window and trickling down his face. He bears his teeth. The beard that had been hiding his deformity was not hiding the tight skin anymore. It made sense now: The skin that seemed way too stretched over his mouth showed alien - no, spiderlike fangs on the top and bottom rows of his teeth, all incisors slightly pointed, like the carnivorous maw of a wild predator.

He slams his head again and again. Bryan reverses the haul, not giving a shit about what he hits, or what damage he does to the load.

He speeds out of that highway stop feeling like a bat outta Hell. The clerk holds on till he’s flung off, Bryan swerving a hard right onto the highway road. The load at the back tips dangerously to the left before righting itself with three trembling metal thuds! It shakes Bryan and the whole cabin. Then he hears thunder overhead and within 15 seconds, rain patters heavily on his windshield. He flips on the wipers and pants heavily as he speeds down the highway road.

The radio blasts the last queue still on his bluetooth: a podcast horror story about vampires. Bryan slams the radio off fast as a frog catches a mosquito. The rest of the drive was gonna be in silence, and he felt really glad he bought an energy drink at the store, because there was no way he was gonna get any sleep tonight.

13.12

Sept. 11, 2026

🌑 New Moon