Miller / Garton / Howison 18 Wheels of Horror

A Trailer Full of Trucking Terrors
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9906866-3-7
Verlag: Big Time Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Psychotic killers, devious ghosts, alien monsters, howling storms, undead creatures, and other dark forces haunt the highways and the truckers who drive them in these 18 chilling tales.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Miller, Eric

Garton, Ray

Howison, Del

Palisano, John

Bodner, Hal

Leseproben

With over sixty books to his credit, including the trucking horror classic Lot Lizards, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Live Girls, and The Loveliest Dead, Ray Garton is indeed a Grand Master of Horror, the award given to him at the 2006 World Horror Convention. He has also written thrillers such as Sex and Violence in Hollywood and Murder Was My Alibi, movie and TV novelizations for shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and A Nightmare on Elm Street, several short story collections, and a series of young adult novels under the pseudonym Joseph Locke. He and his wife live in Northern California. A DARK ROAD
Ray Garton SPENCE HAD ALWAYS FOUND that passing through the long stretches of nothingness in Nevada was much easier to handle at night. His schedules did not always permit him that luxury, of course, but that, whenever possible, was his preference. During the day, the desert was nothing but empty space stretching in every direction, interrupted only by some hills and the occasional rocky butte, all beneath a sky that went on forever. He’d never liked driving his rig through Nevada during the day for that reason. The night concealed all that emptiness under a blanket of darkness. Now, it hardly seemed to matter because his whole life had become one long drive through an empty desert. He saw no other lights on the road ahead or behind him and hadn’t passed another vehicle in at least twenty minutes, maybe longer. He turned on the radio and made his way up and down the AM dial twice. On such a clear night in the desert, he picked up radio stations from all over the country, but there was nothing to choose from but a call-in show about the paranormal that was simultaneously carried on most stations at that hour, hellfire-and-damnation religion, and sports. He left it on a sports station for a while to banish the deadly silence, but he couldn’t take it for long. It was a call-in show. Lots of yelling. Spence often wondered why men always sounded so stupid when they talked about sports. Judging by their comments and the way they talked, the men who called the show probably should never be allowed to operate heavy machinery or work with the general public in any way. He was sure they were, for the most part, fully functional and responsible adults, but they didn’t sound like it on that radio show. Was it the sports jargon? Was it the hyperbolic passion they showed for something so inconsequential? Was it their encyclopedic knowledge of a particular sport or player? He wasn’t sure. But he couldn’t take it for very long. Spence enjoyed a good game as much as the next guy, but he had other interests. He tuned to another station and listened for a while as a woman described what it had been like to be impregnated by the aliens who’d abducted her. None of the callers expressed a hint of skepticism because on this radio show, everything was real—ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot, government conspiracies to poison and/or enslave the human race, and even the “natural” miracle cures and freeze-dried food to eat after the collapse of civilization that were offered during the commercial breaks. Who needed that shit? He turned off the radio. He had plenty of music and audiobooks to choose from, but he wasn’t in the mood for either. He was in the mood for conversation, the interaction of voices. Yelling was fine, but only if people were yelling about something interesting. He was too tired for music, too tired to be read to, and he’d been left alone with his own thoughts too long. He needed some voices from out there to drown out the voices in his head. Voices he would never hear again but could not stop remembering. Among them was his own voice speaking those last bitter words exchanged with his wife Nan and teenage daughter Jillian. The last words he’d spoken to them before they were killed. Sometimes—like right now, in all that lonely darkness—all he could hear were Nan’s and Jillian’s screams for help deep inside his head. He did something he did not do often: He turned on his CB radio. It was handy for truckers. It allowed them to communicate with other truckers, avoid cops, check the conditions ahead. Like anything else, though, it was, for the most part, a gathering of loud idiots who talked and talked and said absolutely nothing. Spence normally didn’t turn it on unless he had a good reason because his tolerance for most of what passed for dialogue on CB radio, like his tolerance for sports talk and alien abductions, was limited. Spence talked on the radio even less than he listened to it. He had never been able to use CB jargon without feeling self-conscious, as if he were doing a Burt Reynolds impression in front of an audience of strangers. He’d been driving so long that he knew the jargon well, and he wincingly used it—he had to or nobody would talk to him—but, as he liked to say, he didn’t inhale. He moved through the channels slowly but heard little activity. A few staticky voices faded in and out, distant and ghostly, but nothing close. “…the chicken choker on the backstroke and I got me a fierce case of beaver fever ‘cause I been gone for…” “…lookin’ for Pattycakes, you got your ears on? Pattycakes, come in, this is…” “…heard they’s a beer bust over at the creek…” He let the radio scan the channels for a while. Voices rose from the static now and then before sinking away again. It wasn’t what he was hoping for, but it would do for now. The yellow shafts painted down the center of the road raced toward him like missiles in the glow of his Freightliner’s headlights. The darkness hugged that glow, surrounded him, moved down the interstate with him, waiting for an opportunity to rush in and join him, maybe take the wheel from his hands. “…got three kids already, what the hell’s he want with…” He and Nan were going to have three kids. That had been the plan, anyway. But Jillian’s birth had been complicated by a severe case of endometritis. Damage to Nan’s fallopian tubes prevented any future children. They had been perfectly happy with one, an angelic baby and a well-behaved child. But in the two years before she’d been killed, Spence had noticed that Jillian was becoming somewhat morose. The change was not abrupt but gradual enough to sneak up on him. He and Nan had discussed it in some of their last conversations but had been unable to decide how to address the problem. Now it was no longer a problem. But Spence thought about it as if it were still a problem. He fantasized about how they might have handled it had things turned out differently, how they would have brought it up with Jillian and tried to find out what was really going on in her life. They did not like the idea of snooping on her and tried to give Jillian her privacy as she got older. But sometimes it was difficult not to take advantage of some of the many snooping options available to modern parents. They kept it to a minimum, but they made sure she wasn’t spending her limited time online visiting any dangerous places or having private conversations with strangers, and a couple of times they’d used GPS to make sure she was where she claimed to be. Earlier that night, Spence had been torn from a deep sleep and sat up in his sleeper dripping with sweat and filled with a strangling fear that Nan and Jillian were in danger and needed his help. He’d started to get dressed before realizing he was dreaming. Before remembering that the danger was over and they were already gone. He couldn’t get back to sleep because, after remembering they were gone, he started remembering how they were killed. He’d gotten up and hit the road. “How many truckers we got out there in the desert, come back?” The voice boomed out of the radio so suddenly and loudly that Spence jumped at the wheel. He reached over and turned down the volume a bit. The man sounded like he was shouting from the passenger seat. Spence listened but there was no response at first. The silence went on so long that he frowned at the radio. He knew he wasn’t the only trucker on this road because he’d seen others. Not in a while, but they were out there. “C’mon, truckers,” the voice said. “I know you’re there. Traveling the highways like blood flowing through veins and arteries. That’s what you are, you know, you’re the blood in America’s veins, you truckers. Somebody’s gotta have their ears on out there somewhere. Come on back!” Spence waited and listened. Another long silence followed. Nothing. The man lowered his voice the next time he spoke and sounded more relaxed. “I know most of you are alone out there with nothing but voices to keep you company. You’ve left your families at home, maybe haven’t seen ‘em for quite a while. You long-haul truckers know what I’m talkin’ ‘bout, right? You don’t see the family for weeks sometimes. All alone out there on the road. You can’t wait to get home and see them. Or maybe…maybe…” There was another silence, but he did not release the call button. “…maybe you got no family to go home to. That’d be worse, I think. Missing them...