It was late at night and George was coming up on the home stretch in his long journey back home. He’d been out of town for the holidays, visiting family down south and enjoying some time away from the rigors of his schoolwork and his working life. He went to school far away from his home in Los Angeles, in a small and charming college town that George had come to enjoy, despite the remoteness and the lack of the usual activities to be found in a big city. He was actually eager to get back, and was speeding a little bit more than he probably should, but oh well. Only seventy-four more miles to go before he was home, according to the last sign, and he hadn’t seen the CHP in hours. George was feeling groggy, so he rolled down his window to let the cool air blow over his clean-shaven face. He could hear his tires hiss as they sped over the slick, wet asphalt.
George could tell it had rained a lot while he was away, as was to be expected of the Pacific Northwest. The road reflected the light from his highbeams, so he turned them off, and the air was misty. He flicked on his windshield wipers and was finding it difficult to see as he followed the twisting, reflective yellow lines that guided him through the darkness. As he came upon a bridge, the mist turned into a fine drizzle which became a steady rain when he reached the other side. George turned up his wipers and his defrosters. He took a tight turn on a slow-rated curve as he came off the bridge; the car shimmied a bit, making George’s stomach lurch. A light flashed on the instrument panel. He gripped the steering wheel with both and chuckled to himself shakily. Eyes on the road, Georgie, he thought to himself. He turned on the radio, grinning when he found he was in range to hear some of the local stations he’d come to enjoy.
The road ran straight and even for a few more miles before George encountered another series of hairpin turns through a corridor of wizened redwood trees, and the rain-patter on his windshield dampened. He weaved his way between stands of giants, his headlights illuminating moss-covered trunks as wide as his car. The stand cleared a bit, enough for the rain to resume pounding at the roof. George increased the speed of his wipers and leaned forward to try and see better as he continued to follow the serpentine road. The rain increased in force until it became hard for him to see anything at all beyond the mist and spray, including the pair of headlights approaching him on the next turn.
George still hadn’t slowed down by much; not by enough to make it around the turns without hydroplaning. Not with his bald tires. He couldn’t tell the reflecting light of his own headlights for the ones that were oncoming. Not until he took his last curve, and his front tires practically slid out from under him. The car spun, causing the tail end to slam into the broad side of the oncoming vehicle so hard it made George’s skull smack hard against the interior of the car. He barely registered that he had collided with the other car as his own spun from the rebound of impact. The other car had lost its footing as well, spinning around in place before coming to a screeching stop.
For just a moment, George could see through his streaming windshield, across the darkness, and into the very eyes of the man in the car he’d just struck. In that moment, a terrible feeling of dread, of desperate and animalistic fear. He knew he was going to die, has he felt the car collide with the guard rail and flip over. George felt gravity take him as the car lifted over the guard rail to tumble down the slope beyond it. No, he thought, his very soul raging against this seemingly all-consuming fear. He wasn’t going to die today, he realized, clinging to that last moment of eye contact with the stranger as if with his very being. He felt a lurch, and thought for one second that it was the force of his car impacting the ground as it rolled down the hill, but he wasn’t being pulled down. He was being drawn forward, watching the light of his car’s headlamps disappear behind him as he flew through the darkness. He felt like nothing, weightless and without thought or reason or even emotion to guide him. Just instinct telling him to go forward, until he felt the presence of something warm and inviting close to him. He urged himself to move forward toward the source, a pair of wide, terrified blue eyes staring back at him through the darkness. George dove towards them and seized upon the body of the man they belonged to, without even knowing what he was doing. The last thing he saw were those blue eyes, looming closer and closer until they collided, and then everything went to darkness.
George didn’t know if he had died or not. Everything around him felt stormy and chaotic, as if an unseen force were raging against him. He was without senses and yet the force seemed to deafen him without words. “GET OUT OF MY HEAD” it raged; he could feel the sentiment. George cowered from it, that same horrifying, dreadful sensation creeping upon him, before he couldn’t take it any longer. “ENOUGH!” he shouted back at the voice, with as much power and force as he could possibly muster, and then suddenly the storm vanished, and with it the darkness. George was still sitting in his car seat, staring through the streaming window, past his flapping wind-shield wipers and into the blackness that lay beyond the other side of the road. The guard rail was dented and warped; something heavy had smashed against it, but there were no other cars on the scene.
“Holy shit!” George said aloud, but he was even more shocked when he heard himself. His tone was deep, lively, rumbling from within his upper chest. He looked down at his hands, gripping the steering wheel; they were rough, calloused, lined with wrinkles and scars from years of use and abuse. George noticed the logo on the steering wheel; he drove a Japanese model, not an American one. Looking around himself, he found he was in the cab of a big truck, the kind one would see rolling around a farm or a construction yard. It was a little scuffed, but still it was much cleaner and more organized than the car George had been driving. He looked down upon himself; a beige, unmarked jacket, flannel shirt, scuffed up jeans and heavy workboots. His legs were long, thick, and flexing them George could feel strong muscle there. His chest was likewise broader and meatier, his abdomen bulging with a bit of a belly against his zippered jacket. Lifting his arms they felt heavy and corded with muscle. George blinked his eyes, taking it all in and not believing what he was seeing. He wiped his face with a big hand but pulled it away in shock when he felt a thick mustache and coarse stubble on his cheeks and jaw. He reached for the car door and stepped out, stumbling as he felt his increased weight and height. He stumbled around the car, not bothering to look as he pounded across the road through the pouring rain and came up to the guard rail. He gripped it with his strong hands and looked over the edge. If it weren’t for the pair of lights shining in the darkness at the bottom of the valley, George would not have been able to tell how far down the car had rolled. It looked to be maybe sixty or so yards down, though he could barely make out the lights through the undergrowth and the rain. His head whipped around as he heard the sound of a diesel engine approaching. Another big truck, like his but white, had stopped alongside the road, a man in a poncho stepping out of it.
“Are you okay!” the man shouted through the rain, checking the road before he crossed over to where George was standing. “Was there an accident?” he yelled as he got closer.
George said the only thing he could think of. “I think someone flipped their car down the hill!” he yelled as the man approached him.