Six bikers were run off road by a semi. A man and a woman were dead, their motorcycles in ruins. There were still four bikers alive. One of those four was unconscious and badly hurt, her bike had been clipped by another thrown forward by the truck. The other three drive to the side of the road and stop, unharmed, except that some fragments of glass and debris had been thrown forward from the wrecks and one of the men had been cut on his face, and another deep into his arm. The three men survey the wreck, while the trucker gets out of his cabin. The healthy biker runs to the road in order to look for help
“Why did you do that!” screeches the driver.
He yells in a fit of shock and blame, “you just murdered them, you just ran them off the road!” sobs the man whose arm has been cut. His mind begins to collapse in upon itself at the dreadfulness of that which had just occurred. The man looked through denial, grief, sorrow, sickness, anger, hatred, but never pity or forgiveness, for in this scene there is no forgiveness, only what passes.
“No I didn’t,” the truck driver, “you punks drove into me.”
“You did! You just did!” cries the cut-faced man.
“NO I DIDNT” yells the truck driver, grabbing a baseball bat from his cabin.
The cut-faced man is ruthlessly relentless. He is the leader of this group of bikers and has seen some terrible scenes on the road, but he has never had a situation like this. The newness of the graphics, in which two of his friends are dead, with another clinging to life, was hard to assemble inside his head, yet he was able to react in his usual slow, calculating manner, despite feeling disassembled from the inside by the tragedy of the scene.
The cut-faced man grabbed his own baseball bat from the back of his motorcycle but kept it hidden. “This would be easy” he thought. “This trucker is an amateur.”
“Dude, are you fucking drunk?” says the Man whose arm is still bleeding. He had spotted a whiskey bottle in the cab of the truck.
The corpses on the ground gleamed back at the truck driver and for a second he shivered.
A trace of hesitation and the man whose arm was dripping switches his motorcycle into gear. The bike throws the trucker into confusion while he runs straight at the trucker who falls down, but is unharmed. But the driver doesn’t see that it has rained the night before and suddenly he cannot control his bike. He slips on the ground’s curvature and starts to slide. He trips and crashes and his bike starts to catch fire, he begins to burn. He’s smouldering, but already dead.
The cut-faced man, aware of the imminent implications upon his soul, which was bound to start a trek and to be driven further into the mind’s depths of pathos, and to eventually come to represent nothing but the horror of life, makes his move, in lieu of idleness, he grabs his baseball bat and strikes the trucker in the hand, causing him to drop his own baseball bat. Without a weapon, and at least 3 broken fingers, the trucker was helpless. He yelled in pain.
“Why did you do that, I’ll kill you” he screams as he yells and starts to run to his truck.
“He’s going for a gun! He’s reaching for a gun” the biker imagines to his sheer terror; He has a mortal fear of guns.
The trucker reaches for his door but the cut-faced man is on him. It is now the two of them alone. The trucker tries to block but cannot. He is punched hard in the gut by a bat. The biker slaps the bat again, this time considerably harder. The hit sends the trucker to the ground with the violent impact of force.
“Get the fuck down” in exasperation calls the violent attacker. “I don’t want to keep hurting you.”
But the trucker wasn’t having any of it. He was wasted and out of control, he had run these people off the road on purpose. He wanted the biker to keep hurting him; he wanted the biker to kill him.
He was at once a trucker and at last a nihilist. He had begun his journey with the knowledge that he had killed his wife and kids by accident, carrying in with him from a trip to South America a deadly pathogen that had slaughtered his lover and his baby girl. There was no god any longer for this man.
The South American trip was well paid and took him a few weeks out on the road but was enough to feed his family for the rest of the year. He returned home with a slight cough but it was nothing major. However, the cough had infected his family, and a week after he had returned they were dead.
“What world is this,” he long thought, “what world is this that can do such damage to such innocents for the sins of the guilty? Perhaps the guilty were meant to live in this hell and to continually suffer. Perhaps these men like I must walk through hell. Perhaps there is no salvation, and there is no god. For, he has killed my babies. There is no hope. All hope is dead. God has killed himself in front of me, just as I have killed myself in front of me, and I have killed my babies.”
“What god is this!” he shouted in agony at his controller, as he slowly backed away from the biker.
This man had spent the last month on a road trip, trying to control his pain. It had not worked, but only served to make him furious internally, for out on the road for hours alone is no consolation for pain. Being alone is not the solution to pain, for it is from being alone that pain is caused.
He drove at speeds far exceeding the speed limit, yet he had never even seen a cop. He drove, and sped. Swerved, took crazy turns, and did whatever he felt like, for he had no mind left for himself to defend against the jarring rupture within him caused by the disjoining of the chords that were threaded and braided to build his heart; his wife and child were dead. It was his fault. He would let his shame, guilt, regret, and self-hatred destroy him from the inside because that was the only way in which life could balance itself out again. He was to be destroyed, he figured, physically and mentally, figuratively and literally; how else could there ever be peace without such a memory as mine dying.
For the past week he had gradually grown moodier and moodier, and could barely stand his surroundings, which were always changing. The people he saw were reminders of the joys that others can feel yet that he himself would never feel again.
“They must never know of my pain,” he thought “for the world is too corruptible, and the blackness brought forth by such events decreases our humanity.” He had once thought the opposite and that tragedy was a core component of human life, yet now he believed that some tales just aren’t meant to be told.
He resolved to end his story. He drove for the past fifteen hours, loaded on whiskey. The intoxicant coursed through his veins and pierced his thoughts. They were dulled further and further, and he grew more resolute, more secured of his absolution in death. Not his peace through religious absolution, no, for him there would be no peace. But in absolution, he would be abolished. “This is what must be;” he thought “the ending that comes forth is of necessity.”
A few minutes before the start of this scene, he drove at a fast speed, drunk. He was looking for a way to die. He spotted the bikers up a few kilometres away. He drove fast to catch them.
"They will kill me if I disturb them,” he thought.
He barrelled forward, as if in a stagecoach, or hansom cab pulled by a large team of powerful horses that once finished their journey, died. He flew along the highway; he was pushed forward by a sense of urgency, an internally created pressure to create chaos and havoc upon himself.
“How do I get them to kill me?” he asked, to himself. He was slightly dreary due to his deadly combination of sleep depravity, his alcohol intake, his exhaustion, and the pain of his internal thoughts. He sped up trying to cut them off through the middle, to cause them to go off to the side of the road where he could then aggravate them enough to kill him. He had planned to go up, yet, when his foot slipped, he clipped the back two riders and through one of those two into another.
They tumbled, the front three stopped. He stopped and got out of his vehicle.
"Kill me. Do it. End me or I will kill you like I kill anything that comes near me.“ speaks the beaten trucker, a little while later. He had a broken hand but crawled pitifully away, clutching at dirt. He was dragging himself to the other side of the truck. He ran round but was too slow. The cut-faced man hit him in the shoulder again. There was a loud crack and the trucker screamed in pain. He had run to the truck door to make the remaining biker think that he was trying to escape. Instead, the biker thought it was a much more serious problem, a gun.
“So,” he thought “this is how I will die. One man alone with a baseball bat will kill me. Good. I’m glad he thinks I’m a killer. I am a killer. I have now killed four people, and my sins will die with me. I am assured to go to hell now and I will. I must. I have to. I should. I will. For, the fires of hell are all that can purify me now.”
The trucker continued towards the cab door. “I will kill you, like I killed the rest of them” he shouted.
“Do not talk about the others. All three of them did not deserve to die.”
“I claim no responsibility for your dare-devil friend, what he did was his choice and I will not pay for that sin as well.”
“He was trying to stop you, you disgrace” screamed the biker and he bashed the trucker’s kneecap.
“I killed them” screamed the man who would never walk again. “I killed them all and I do not apologize. I deserve no forgiveness. Oh god, if you were so great as to allow this to happen to me, I will pay for my sins in hell, rather than follow your word any longer, for your greatness is unacceptable to me any longer. If you had only stepped in, I would still be faithful. But you refuse, and for that, I have doomed myself.”
“Stop your fucking madness you fucking murdering piece of shit” contemptuously and insolently roared the cut-faced biker with a darkening expression and the hint of the beginnings of moral disease in his eyes.
He swung the bat down again, and hit the man in the face.
The trucker’s nose exploded and, losing consciousness, he falls hard to the cement. His last thoughts were blank, as if no man existed at all to see his life story pass before his eyes in the last moments before his death. Perhaps there had never been these thoughts, or perhaps, more likely, they had been played long ago when he had really died.
The man swung the bat again, and a cracking of skull signified death. Another bash and another crack, and this time larger, more devastating, splitting of the skull revealed the horrors within the depths of the human brain. He hit, and hit, and cracked the trucker’s face and skull into a paste. Nobody was there to stop him until suddenly he is thrown backwards with a tackle by the uninjured man. He has returned. There are three cops, a medical team, and other helpers running to the scene but they are too far behind. The uninjured man had driven to the nearest town to fetch them and they had returned just in time to see the biker killing the trucker. Oh but what their angle of perception must have shown them.
The uninjured man jumped atop the cut-faced man. “Why did you do that!” interrogated the uninjured man, “he should be in jail, not dead.” He grasped the cut-faced man tight, in a position resembling a hug.
“He deserved to die, and he was going for his gun” grunted the man on the bottom, who, pulling the uninjured man, a large biker, over in a rolling motion, they tumbled. He was an even larger biker, and had the strength to begin a roll. They rolled, and rolled, until they were clasped in a deep, deep hug. The two men were close friends, and the death of three of their friends would not be repressed, sublimated, or normalized, and neither will be able to disassociate themselves with this moment the rest of their lives. They rolled and rolled, and as the onlookers viewed the scene the men were rolling, tumbling, and gliding gracefully down a hill towards a cliff.
“Stop, Stop!” cried the growing crowd running forward.
“Never” yelled the two in unison, as they balled forward, like tumbleweed, dry and empty on the inside yet held together by the external superstructure in order to continue to function. “We are empty after that which we have seen and must die,” sadly thought the two men as they rolled.
These two will never function again after seeing what they had seen, and, out of necessity, both metaphorically, and physically, tumbled off the cliff into the sea.
That which has passed hence is to be remembered by none but those who were disengaged from the tale, because this sorrow is deeper than anything that can be read. For, seven people died that day, the last being a woman knocked unconscious during the beginning of this tale. She died alone that day, without notice, and without avail. All who die die for no avail.
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