Charlie Sees the Light
The back roads were never really an option for Charlie before tonight. He was never angry enough to need to take an extra hour to get back to the farm. Darkness everywhere. On every winding section of the forest and field filled country route, nothing but shadow and a few forlorn fences.
Like the fence he nearly kicked over when Linda-Sue slammed the door shut in his face no more than twenty minutes ago. She had already tried calling five times since he peeled off, almost taking her mailbox with him. When he caught the gleam in his rear-view, he mistook it for a text message notification. He had turned his phone down to face the seat to keep the light from distracting him suddenly, but had left the vibration on. It was dim, and at the start of the road about a half mile behind him and to the right. It lingered in his mirror briefly and then a short hill quickly stifled it.
Charlie never did like her attitude about his need to leave town and pursue his rodeo talent, lest he should miss the precious window of time his body would be in its prime to do so. After the calls wouldn’t stop, he tired of having his favorite songs interrupted every minute or so, and decided to go to the radio, endless commercials and all. As he went over another raised curve the light from before came back into view, now a soft glow, helping him find his station as he clicked through the settings and channels. It looked like a shrunken and dulled sun had started to come up, but there was no way he was drunk enough to buy that.
By the time he found a song he could stomach that was less than halfway to being over, the light became briefly brighter, then seemed to itself descend back into one of the hillsides along the road he had driven through shortly before. A blanket of darkness that seemed to enshroud even his music. The station was all static for a few seconds and then a rough broadcast seemed to follow a series of harsh, repeated sounds. A call of attention, some kind of military news. The words “beam” and “desolation”; “Washington” and “space”. The transmission cut off into static, and then there was only silence. Back to his own playlist it was.
Nothing but anger, Bryan Adams, and the deepening dark for a moment before, in its place, popped a pair of headlights from the black of the midnight countryside. They were unsteady and moved in a kind of figure-eight before a sharp curve took them from his mirror and brought his focus to controlling his oversized truck. By the time his song had ended the lights had once again appeared behind him but were this time full high-beams.
Only briefly did they blind him before becoming extinguished. Swallowed up into the background. They reminded him that he had left the lights on at the farm since the night before, all of them. If he had left them on a day longer, they, too, would be extinguished. For good. As he thought about his electric bill, the soft light that had previously danced into the hills seemed to manifest again as he drove over the river road connecting the two counties. From his right side it seemed to become a rising wall of orange and gold, as tall as the trees and growing brighter from bellow.
The sudden twang of a banjo coming from his phone made him jerk at it and plug it in. It was his parents calling, asking how the proposal went. Having hedged their bets with him, the only one of six sons who had a stable enough relationship to let them entertain hopes of grandchildren some day, their sole concern was his chance at marriage. He could only listen for so long before yelling over them, as usual, while trying to stay on the road, which grew clearer as the light, now behind him once again, seemed to roar at the landscape and even the sky.
But the roaring, it quickly became evident, was raging from the horn of another truck, racing behind him in the wrong lane. He honked back angrily and ended the call he was no longer even on, not having heard his parents hang up on the other end. The next curve opened up into the long, flat stretch before the county line and as he sped into it he saw a brilliant flash and blinked at a loud bang as the truck coming up on him was transformed into a ball of smoke and light and streaming metal as if, making the same turn he had, the last row of pines and birches had stepped out into the road in front of it.
By now the endless field of wheat on all sides of the road was a golden glow and, as he turned to face the source of the light, at last, it rose, like the morning sun, directly behind his truck at the edge of the water he was speeding away from. The lone light now morphed into several, then almost a hundred smaller lights, moving up and down and swaying, growing taller as a tree suddenly enchanted to reach toward the clouds. Two long, silver trunks extended below the starry orb that now spun rapidly and continued to propel it upward to sweep the land with its rays.
The clanking and screech of gears and joints of metal drowned his struggling engine, choking and wailing to try to outrun the mechanized demon behind it. He could see the light of his farm in the distance growing brighter, but not nearly bright enough to challenge the shining Goliath of terror that was galloping toward him now. He thought of Linda-Sue as the heat enveloped the truck and the smoke clouded his vision more than the past excuses he would convince himself of. Everything was a scorching red all about him. The fields were alight, his motor was howling, the farm blazing, and even his skin boiling. In his head he could hear the voices of others, calling out, crying, and wailing in desperation. Before his eyes danced visions of other worlds, incomprehensible beings, a kaleidoscopic ladder of pure energy, the birth of the cosmos, and millions of orbs and spheres of rotating lightning, hurling themselves down upon the Earth as a crowd of voices laughed in uproarious merriment.
In the final blurring moment before his brain and eyes and voice and soul burst, out into the infinite horrors of the beyond, after which he knew they would evaporate in the electric light that seared all that it touched, leaving no traces of the mistakes and ignorance and love that he wished he felt, Charlie knew. Knew for certain. That Linda-Sue would miss the truck. And miss him too.
