His hands gripped the steering wheel with only a touch of strain in the knuckles.
The leather was sun-warm against calloused palms. He was lucky; the road was mostly empty, with a breathtaking sun rising in the horizon as his beat-up Tacoma crested one mountainous hill after another. With extraneous traffic these roads could be a bitch, but with no one else around the mountains made for fun driving.
Johnnie felt his shoulders relax a fraction. It wasn't all bad. He had been driving for most of the night through barely lit twisting roads through the mountains into the next state, and he was at the tail end now. There was simply one thing.
He'd picked up a visitor.
Johnnie was no stranger to the warning signs and the stories his trucker mom and grandfather had bestowed in him. Even though these lived in his mind, Johnnie was also simply human---he'd found himself fading in the early morning hours, hours his grandfather huffingly called witchin' hours, and broke one of his cardinal rules. He had Stopped.
Stopping along a rest stop that seemed fairly lit, and opening his truck door to grab a drink from a vending machine that looked older than he did, Johnnie grabbed his Coke and left his change and hurried along back to his car. He refused to let his hands fumble the keys, gripping the handle and the wheel with equal strength, smoothly sliding the key home and roaring the lil blue truck to life. It couldn't have taken more than a minute.
He only noticed the eyes after he'd finished the can.
The truck must have looked a sight, swerving from the fast lane and burning rubber across four empty lanes only to settle back, albeit with some speed lost, in the mid lane. His mind was still going 110 miles per hour, because now: he couldn't stop. He didn't know what that was. The eyes were red. His hands were sweaty but he couldn't lose control of the wheel because who knows what would happen. He could not stop. The eyes were glowing. The rearview was completely black. Lights seemed to fade or fizzle out as he passed them. His heart was stuttering a mile a minute. His godsdamned radio would not turn on. And those eyes never left his own, even after he flicked his away. He felt as if he'd have two twin spots burrowed into his forehead at the end of this.
He didn't know what it wanted. Johnnie could barely pull himself together enough to scour his mind for anything that matched whatever the fuck had happened in only thirty seconds at that rest stop.
Was it really a rest stop?
Had he drank a Coke? A Dr. Pepper?
And why couldn't this thing ease up on the oppressive pressure?
It was true. Some sort of pressure almost like an airplane cabin mid-flight filled the entirety of his truck, weighing on him enormously and making his breath come in shallower pulls. His body, if he dared to make a move, felt like he was straining underwater. His ears pinpointed out to a uncomfortable, sticky muffle.
And so the last several of his hours had been spent.
Johnnie could feel the physical ache in his shoulders, his traps, his lower back. He had driven the last however many miles sitting ramrod straight in the driver's seat, barely moving a muscle except for to accelerate appropriately. His body was starting to protest the treatment now, but Johnnie could barely let himself squirm. That thing in his backseat was still there, unnervingly still for the last several hours. And it wasn't easing---though the beginning rays of the sun were starting to filter over the treeline, Johnnie's rearview mirror was still a harsh and unseeing black with two laser spots and a keen, animalistic sense behind them.
His arms were covered in a perma-gooseflesh. It was damn uncomfortable. And made his body uncomfortably sensitive even in the worn flannel of one of Johnnie's favorite shirts.
Zipping further into the horizon, Johnnie hoped the thing would tire of him soon and possibly take it's leave. He could spot his tank beginning to hover close to the E. He had no idea what another stop might bring.
