Ride

That Friday night, for all that came later, was a blur until Samantha drunkenly slammed his door.

Taye watched her leave with her friends, then ended her ride in the app. She would tip nicely; sometimes he could just tell. He rated her the full five stars, as he did for all but the absolute worst riders. She’d been drunk and loud, but she’d kept her hands to herself and her dinner in her belly.

It was nearing 1 AM. Taye removed his glasses and rubbed his itchy, bloodshot eyes. It wasn’t much help. His eyelids still felt like sandpaper and it constituted a constant fight to keep them open at all. He knew if he closed them for more than a few seconds, he’d probably conk out. Wouldn’t be the first time.

He looked around at the street. Barhoppers and revelers strolled along the sidewalk and across the brick-paved street, laughing and stumbling, most at some stage or another of drunkenness. Many still clustered outside the Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark, far enough gone that Taye couldn’t tell whether the Dodgers had won or lost or if anyone even cared.

He locked his phone. Rides were slow; nobody got started so late and most drinking and clubbing at one stayed drinking and clubbing until two. He had time to kill - but how to kill it? Bricktown was only a few miles south of his apartment. He could drive there, rest for a bit, and get back out in time for the 2 AM rush. On the other hand, an hour’s sleep was usually worse than no sleep at all, and things would probably die down again by 3:30 anyway.

Coffee. A good, strong cup of coffee. There was a nice compromise. He shifted into drive.

Once on I-35, however, he began having doubts. Coffee would cost a few dollars, and it’d been a slow week for midsummer. Normally he’d get a cup at home, but he’d run out the week prior and hadn’t found time to get to the store. He ran the numbers in his head. His last paycheck from Best Buy had covered rent and utilities. Groceries…yeah, those were good…he still owed Atif, but he could put that off…savings. That was the problem. His family’s savings.

Right on cue, his mother called, his phone rattling on the retainer clipped to his AC vent. When had he last talked to her? Two weeks? A month? He couldn’t remember. Too many shifts followed by too many drives.

He only felt more exhausted as he regarded the screen and its two buttons, the red telephone and the green. He knew he should answer, but he also knew he didn’t have it in him to keep up the false smiles, to tell her he was working hard and saving lots. To skip around the truth that a cup of coffee was a hurdle and an illness could set them back months. That the money, better than anywhere in Ethiopia, might still only be enough to help them emigrate on that nebulous someday.

It was almost a relief when the call dropped, though he still felt the pang of guilt when the notification of a new voicemail appeared. He pretended to believe he’d listen to it later.

He exited at the next gas station, the shrill whine of his brakes reminding him to get the pads replaced as soon as he could afford it, and went inside. The AC felt nice on his sweaty forehead and he took his time meandering to the coffee machine, stopping by the soda fountain to splash some water into his hat, the rivulets wriggling down his back icy and refreshing.

The coffee machine’s smell, somewhere between “burned rubber” and “electrical fire”, didn’t exactly imply quality but he nonetheless poured himself a large cup. The cashier looked as ragged as Taye felt and said nothing as he rang him up. He didn’t have to. Taye could simply feel that they were kindred spirits.

The coffee was a little over two dollars. There was a ten in his wallet so he asked for a pack of cigarettes, immediately regretting it but not enough to take it back before the change was warming in his palm. He smiled at the cashier as he left but didn’t see if he smiled back.

Outside, he stood on the curb and lit a cigarette, the smoke curling against the clear night sky. The parking lot was empty but for his car and that of the cashier. Even the interstate seemed unusually quiet. He wanted little more than to sleep but knew he couldn’t, not yet. He took a long drag, the mental fog thinning as his blood pressure spiked. The habit had started as something to keep him awake and earning on late nights, but then almost every night was a late night and the jaundice-yellow stains on his fingertips never left.

His phone buzzed with a new ride request. He didn’t know whether to feel irritated at the interruption of his break or relief that he might make up for the indulgences. He swigged his battery-acid coffee and opened it.

The request was about as inconvenient as one could be at that moment. The rider (whose name, the app informed him, was Jim) wanted to be picked up on Newcastle Road in southwest Oklahoma City and driven to Lexington. The former was a questionable part of town and the latter was the sort of place that was only a town at all because everyone there agreed it was, but more troublesome to Taye was the fact that they were separated by precisely forty-one minutes.

Taye hesitated. It was 1:17 AM. The drive would take close to two hours total, precluding him from all but the dredges of the 2 o’clock rush. The payment was good, and with such a long drive he hoped for a nice tip, but it was a gamble; even with a tip, it might not make up for the time outside the city.

The timer below the ride request dwindled lower and lower, urging his choice, waving it in front of him with the promise of handing it off to another driver if he didn’t hurry. An X button and a check mark button, no in-between.

The timer was only a few pixels thick when he accepted. The GPS screen opened immediately.

Get on with it, it said. Time is money for the both of us.

He took one more pull from his cigarette, the nicotine tingling at the back of his throat, then stubbed it out and tossed it into the trash. He climbed back into his car and left, coffee in hand.

With any luck, the rider would be too drunk to notice just how high above the speed limit he intended to drive.

Newcastle Road was a sad, scary place.

The potholed street ran parallel to a railroad which separated it from the grime-encrusted workshops and skeletal cars intermittently visible between patchy, clumped trees, stubbornly dead despite the summer’s warmth. The whole street seemed stripped of color, even in the dark. There were few lights and even fewer which worked well; some flickered, while others were clouded by age and mounds of dead insects. The area simply reeked of gray and beige, excepted only by the blood-red Oklahoma dirt and the garish, sun-cracked signs of dollar stores, cheap restaurants, and mechanics’ shops. The place looked bled-out, and Taye felt as if it was trying to drain his color too, a vampire of cracked concrete seeking its sustenance.

He drove slowly, scanning for his rider. They were usually easy to spot: they’d stand on curbs or corners, glancing back and forth from their phones, looking somewhat disoriented even if they stood outside their own homes. Sometimes they’d even wander distractedly into traffic, as if blind to any cars but his.

This time was different. The rider had requested pickup outside Club Safari, a cheap nightclub decorated with a mural of leopards and scantily-clad jungle women stalked by rifle-toting hunters, a piece that in the dark went from bad to grotesque. Once there, however, Taye saw none of the usual signals. Nobody stared at their phones except a few drunken clubbers getting some air, nobody waited on the corners except a couple loping figures peddling some ware or another, and everywhere else shambled the ubiquitous hare-lean drifters who, unable to fit into America’s machinery, had fallen through its cracks.

Soon he’d passed the club and, according to his GPS, the rider. He made an illegal U-turn at the next intersection, frustration building as he mentally calculated just how much each extra minute might cost.

The second pass was also unsuccessful. As he turned around again, he decided that the third pass would be his last. If the guy didn’t want to show up, he wasn’t going to wait around.

Unfortunately for Taye, the third time was the charm.

Once he finally saw him, it was clear why he’d been missed. Where the clubbers wore the flashy colors of mate-attraction and where others stuck conspicuously to the shadows, the rider faded effortlessly into the background as if wearing camouflage. He stood beneath a dying streetlamp, outlined by its dim orange glow, his jutting brow drowning his eyes in shadow. His thin, graying hair was as unkempt as his clothes; he wore a suit that was clearly once very expensive but which was now dirty and frayed, the knees so threadbare as to be nearly translucent.

Taye pulled into the parking spot beside the lamp, his car making some rather disconcerting grinding noises as its bottom scraped over chunks of neglected, disintegrating asphalt. The rider didn’t move immediately; he just stood and stared, not at a phone or anything else but directly at Taye. He couldn’t see the rider’s eyes in their shadows but he thought he could feel them, a shiver crawling up his spine despite the heat. He got the distinct impression that he was somehow being measured. Sized up.

The impatience of lost revenue dissipated as he stared back at the rider, the stumbling vagabonds and flitting moths in his periphery blurring out, his view seeming to narrow into a tunnel ending in those two black pits where eyes should have been.

He would wonder later at the fact that he never thought of canceling the ride. Calling off rides that intuitively didn’t feel right was part and parcel of driving, something he’d done many times before. That Friday night, the idea didn’t even cross his mind.

Finally the man (Jim, Taye reminded himself) moved. First he nodded, a single jerking motion so fast it looked more like a tic than a deliberate gesture. Then he stepped toward the car. His movement was almost greasy, his overcoming of inertia so smooth he might as well have been already walking when Taye pulled up.

For a moment the man disappeared from view, melting into the surrounding darkness. In that moment Taye’s heart leaped in his chest in a single, weird instant of panic, but the door opened and shut and Jim was in the backseat, his breathing phlegmy as if with allergies.

Taye took a breath, assured himself all was fine. Just the caffeine, man, he thought. You need some real sleep.

Taye pressed the button confirming he’d picked Jim up. The ride had begun. It was 1:31 AM.

“How is it going?” asked Taye as he reversed.

Jim didn’t answer. He sat and stared straight ahead.

“Headed to Lexington? Do you live there?”

Still nothing, though when Taye glanced in the rearview he thought he saw the ghost of a smirk. He shrugged it off. Silent types weren’t especially rare and didn’t bother him. If anything, the quiet would be a nice break.

The smell hit him just as he was sipping his cooling coffee. It wasn’t the salty musk of body odor, nor the sweetness of alcohol-laden breath; rather, it was similar to both, but not exactly like either - bubble soap and oil, or maybe aspartame and axle grease, something metallic and savory and sickly sweet. Not horrible, but so strong that the beginnings of a headache pulsed behind Taye’s eyes. He committed to breathing through his mouth.

Besides the smell, the drive wasn’t initially so bad. The silence beat listening to rowdy frat boys, and unlike most of his other riders that night, Taye wasn’t especially worried about him puking in the backseat. He got onto I-240, then cut onto I-35 South, Jim thankfully not appearing to mind they were going ninety in a sixty-five. The wind roared past as they left downtown behind, its lights glowing like artificial stars trying to replace the real ones they smothered out of the sky.

There were few other drivers so he hit the cruise control and stretched his sore legs, repeatedly curving and crossing them in his little anti-atrophy routine. Then he leaned back in his seat, drummed his fingers on the wheel, and let his mind wander.

For a while, at least. Almost immediately his thoughts drifted back to his family’s situation and anxiety, his constant companion, bloomed in his guts. The constantly-shifting wars with the myriad rebel groups were still far from his home, but they were consistent in that they were getting worse and they were getting closer. Before long, they would reach his family.

Taye straightened in his seat and forced his drooping eyelids open, shoving his thoughts into their usual little corner. They weren’t helping things. He was saving; slowly but surely, he was saving. Every cent brought them closer, even if it meant his shoes had holes and he sweated during summer nights to save on electricity. They would be fine. He was going to make sure of that.

He glanced back at Jim. He’d barely moved and still stared fixedly ahead, silent aside from his thick breathing. Taye thought of the club, the painted hunters with their frozen gazes. The motionlessness was beginning to give him the creeps. He wondered if he was on something, and it occurred to him then that Jim might not even be Jim - he had not actually seen a phone and his behavior was so strange that it was entirely possible someone else had ordered the ride for him. If that was the case, he could say goodbye to any tips.

He looked down at the outline of the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. Such a stupid, impulsive decision. So many rides, so many hours, and he still hadn’t learned. Now it seemed like he might not even make enough on the drive to cover it.

Thinking about the cigarettes made him crave one, especially as the white noise and rhythm of late night driving started to make him drowsy. But then his car would smell like cigarettes and he’d get bad reviews which would mar his perfect record, meaning fewer rides and even more lost revenue. So much damage from leaves wrapped in paper and tipped with plastic foam, to say nothing of what they were doing to his lungs.

Taye sighed and glanced in his rearview again. He jumped as he saw the rider staring right back at him in the mirror, his smirk twisted into something that might have been a wan smile. It was a weird expression, if anything a silly one, but something about it and the glint in his eyes made Taye nervous. He was about to ask if he was all right when a truck passed them, heading the opposite direction. Its headlights, obnoxiously bright LEDs, were cast through the windshield for only a second, but that was all it took to see it.

The rider’s eyes reflected the light. Not on the surface, but within, twin silver-gray mirrors flashing like a cat’s: a predator’s eyes.

Taye’s breath caught in his throat, his fatigue eradicated. He went rigid, arms locked out corpse-straight, his heart pounding hard and preparing him to run or to fight as if he could do either. As if he wasn’t stuck.

The smell went from cloying to oppressive and breathing through his mouth was no longer enough. He could taste it, tinny and oily and coating his tongue, his gag reflex lurching in the back of his throat. He didn’t dare move, didn’t dare make a sound. A carnivorous aura billowed from the rider like smoke, something hidden or perhaps unnoticed before but now filling the car to bursting. It wasn’t like a tiger or a wolf, not quite; no, Taye’s crackling senses told him that here was something smarter, something infinitely more cruel.

At that moment, he knew what it was to be prey.

He could feel the rider’s gaze as concretely as he could feel the wheel beneath his sweating palms. Gliding lazily over his temples, past his ears, down his neck, to his throat so vulnerable and tender, locking on the pulsing artery there, tensing, waiting, teeth bared, the strike even now coming, exploding from darkness, closing, going for the kill…

But it didn’t come. All that came was silence. Not comfortable silence, as it had been those precious few minutes before, but a silence pregnant with promise and expectation, an expectation Taye realized he’d held, deep down, since he’d laid eyes on the rider.

His instincts, gnawing and pleading, couldn’t seem to agree on whether to look or avoid looking at all costs. Eventually, though, he broke and looked into the mirror again. Just a peek, barely lifting his eyes but even that movement slow and careful, no sudden movements. He could barely think through the dread but he had to see.

The rider still looked back at him, but his expression had changed: now he grinned. He grinned so very wide.

Taye was surprised to find he didn’t have sharp teeth. The one constant of all the frightful images his mind had conjured was sharp teeth. The lack thereof was small comfort. His teeth were still very far from normal. They were square, almost as they should have been, but tiny and far too numerous, the grayish gums barely visible between the multitudinous teeth protruding at every conceivable angle.

But that was not the worst part of the grin. The worst part was that in its mocking expanse Taye could read the rider’s thoughts as clearly as if he’d written them.

The rider knew Taye had seen. He’d been meant to see from the very beginning.

It’d all been decided the moment he’d chanced to be his driver.

An odd, tense calm settled over him. It was almost freeing, except that he knew it for what it was: giving up. An admission of defeat. He tried to fight it off, but he couldn’t. He was spent, too run-down to keep going. There were no longer any illusions of control to be had. The cards were all on the table and they both knew it.

When he bit the bullet and looked again, the shadows in the backseat seemed deeper than the shadows elsewhere, the rider’s pale face hovering in the darkness with its expression of naked glee. Even with the bright lights illuminating I-35 Taye could barely see the rest of the rider’s body, just the vaguest suggestions of it swimming in blackness. The shadows themselves did something to his vision, warping and spinning it in a way that squeezed his stomach.

He whirled around to keep himself from puking and barely succeeded. But in doing so, he spotted something that shattered his resignation, his pulse quickening anew. The chase was back on.

It was an exit.

Suddenly he had his bearings again, and in that he found his salvation: the exit was only three miles from 110B, the one he knew would take him to the Norman police station.

He felt like crying. He thanked God and chased away the nagging thought that the police might not know how to deal with the demon in his backseat either. He thought of other things instead. His mother, the smell of her apron with the years crammed between its threads. His home, the long nights with no electricity but with the candlelight he’d always preferred. His sisters and the horrendous screeches they’d made as babies, sheer torment to the boy made to watch them while his mother was out. He thought of the pack of cigarettes in his pocket.

From the backseat there came a crunching as of crushing bones, then a visceral ripping, as of something soft and moist. Taye kept his eyes locked on the road ahead. It was now or never.

He deactivated cruise control.

Two miles to go.

Someone was in his lane. Taye held his breath and switched, letting it out when his rider made no indication of having noticed. He wasn’t yet in the exit lane, but he was getting closer. A flash of motion on his right made his stomach drop but no, no motion, just a trick of his straining eyes.

The relief evaporated as the crunching grew louder and something dropped to the floor with a squelch. Something else - a limb, maybe - pressed against his seat. Taye gritted his teeth so hard he thought they’d crack.

One mile to go.

His nerves were a rubber band stretched to the brink but he didn’t dare let them snap, not when he was so close. Slowly, achingly slowly, he crossed into the next lane. Exit Only. He felt primal and raw, all his senses screeching at once. He clenched his teeth still harder and tasted blood and his heart skipped as he raced to the exit ramp, knowing the turn was going to be tough at the ninety miles per hour he refused to come down from but knowing he could make it, that the police station was just down Robinson Street, that safety was right there, that he was in the final sprint and he just had to hold out for a few more minutes, just keep running and it would all be over and he could call his mother and tell her that everything was going to be fine…

Something club-like and misshapen gripped his neck. It was corpse-cold against his trembling flesh and tipped with something sharp and prickly resting precisely beside his jugular.

Taye slouched in his seat, his heart sinking. His mouth hung dully open as the fight left him once more. The car began to slow as he took his foot off the gas and pulled away from the exit. Only then did he see that another car had been behind him. He watched as it exited and then as the exit faded entirely from view.

That was it. It was over.

An old memory of his father suddenly came to him. They’d been sitting under the awning during the rainy season, wordlessly watching the downpour. Without prompting, his father had turned to him and told him that sometimes it was okay to accept failure, so long as you knew you’d given it your all. Taye had smiled at him and nodded and they’d lapsed back into their reveries, listening to the rain fall.

Speeding down a highway half a world away with death in the backseat, he thought he’d given it his all but knew that he’d failed. He accepted it, if only because he had no choice, but it didn’t feel okay. It didn’t feel okay at all.

The crunching ceased with a final wet snap and the sound of fluid spilling, like rainwater gushing from a gutter. The rider’s appendage released its grasp as it sounded a shuddering moan. The shadows, all the shadows, deepened and writhed and something moved to his right. No longer a trick of the eye, the rider’s face floated into his periphery, suspended over the center console as if it was leaning forward in its seat. From the corner of his eye Taye could see that it was different, all blotchy purple and seeming to crawl over itself.

He knew what it wanted. He could feel it. It wanted him to look once more. It had something to show him.

Things will change, it whispered. Trust me.

He checked the time. It was 1:52 AM.

Tears spilled down his cheeks as he pressed the brake and pulled over, the worn-thin brake pads screaming for him, hazard lights left off in the idle hope a drunk driver would smash into him and make everything easier.

He silently said goodbye to his family as he reached into his pocket and pulled out the pack of cigarettes. He shook so badly he dropped three before he managed to clench one between his fingers. Lighting it took even longer. The rider waited patiently. It was in no rush, no rush at all.

After several tries he got it lit. He held it with both hands and took a long, deep pull. It tasted like nothing.

He looked.

The back door slammed shut.

Taye blinked and looked around.

It was dark enough outside that he could only make out the blurry outlines of near-distant trees. The passenger seat was empty.

He steeled himself before turning around and looking in the backseat. There was the briefest flash of memory then, of something devouring and stabbing and utterly without mercy in its crimson delight, of a silent scream and blood bubbling over his teeth. Taye flinched, but the impression was gone as quickly as it’d arrived.

The backseat was empty.

It was then that he felt the headache, so breathtakingly sharp it was as if a knife was being driven into his skull. He leaned over, head on his knees, and sat for a few minutes waiting for the pain to go away. It didn’t.

His phone buzzed, muffled enough that he barely caught it. Its clip was empty, the phone having been knocked off somehow. He groped for it, head still down in the vain hope that the ache would dissipate, and eventually found it on the passenger-side floor. He checked it, his head splitting with pain at the brightness.

A notification asking him to rate his trip with Jim sat beneath the one regarding his mother’s voicemail.

He opened the app. The trip was marked as complete, the GPS informing him he was on a Lexington backroad. It was 3:09 AM.

Back in OKC, the bar-close rush would be winding down, the last of the carousers shuffling from their rideshares and collapsing into bed.

He stumbled out of his car and into the night. The air was stagnant and sticky. He stood on a gravel road running between two overgrown fields alive with the chirping of insects and frogs. The fields were hedged in by dense treelines, and just before the treeline of the field on his right was an old farmhouse. It was dilapidated and rotting, its roof mostly collapsed, the entire structure leaning to one side. This would have been unremarkable for the area had the moonlight not also illuminated a wide swathe of tamped-down grass leading from his car to the house.

Clouds again drifted before the moon. All at once, Taye was standing in a void, only his headlights and the blinking of fireflies carving meaning from the static dark.

Really, he hadn’t needed to see the farmhouse at all. He simply understood, as deep and sure as his bones, that he was standing before its home; not the ruins so much as the fields and the trees, the places cities entomb beneath cement.

That’d been enough to keep them back for a long time. But no longer - they were learning now, at long last, that places of concrete and structure have as many shadows, as much fear and pain, as the woods ever did. That was, after all, what they sought. Meat and blood were easy; it was the terror, the hate, the suffering they craved.

He knew he should’ve felt afraid then, but he didn’t. He didn’t feel anything at all.

He got in the car and looked in the sunshade mirror. One of his eyes looked like it had been punched, the white blooming red with blood. His face looked off but he couldn’t figure out how, not even when he grinned so very wide and stared at his teeth, somehow expecting them to be different or to change though they weren’t and didn’t.

He closed his lips. Something had changed but he didn’t know what nor could he quite work up the energy to care. The headache still pulsed with his heartbeat but his soul had been injected with lidocaine.

With nothing else to be done he drove home, traveling at precisely the speed limit. Nary a thought crossed his mind; finally, he knew perfect silence.

As he stepped into his apartment, his phone buzzed twice more in quick succession. The first notification informed him he’d been tipped $50. The other was a text from an unknown number.

Thanks for the ride, it said. See you again soon!

After that Taye went to bed. He had to be up in a few hours for work, and after that he would drive again. He had no choice. He couldn’t afford to take any breaks when his family depended on him. He had to keep grinding.

And every night thereafter, in the few hours’ silence between one shift and another, he would have to pretend that he couldn’t still see those glowing, hungry eyes peering from the dark.

As he drifted into a dreamless sleep, his gums began to itch.

About the Author

Joe Struvallo is a lifelong resident of Oklahoma City. Bestowed with a love of the strange and the macabre from a young age by his equally-strange guardians, he has only allowed his fascinations to deepen and fester with time. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Freedom Fiction Journal and Roi Fainéant, and he can be found at joethevallo.wordpress.com.