Unkind Engine

It was on the side of I-40 west of Albuquerque that the pickup rolled to a pathetic stop and let out a scream. It was a high-pitched scream, like the sound of a man crying out in horrible pain: altogether grating, horrifying were it not so commonplace, but relegated now to the obscurities of a general annoyance.

“What’s the problem now?”

Old and disheveled, the driver opened his door and, with a tiredness befitting his age, bitterly kicked the tire. “I was told this would last me another ten years, and here we are again on the side of the road. Newfangled monsters of cars,” he grumbled. “Should never have given up the internal combustion engine.”

It was summertime, hot, and the sun pierced the wide blue above in a way that the old man could only consider with contempt. Even when the truck claimed to be functioning, he sweat through the fabric of its interior that was cooler only by a few scant degrees than the dry New Mexico heat. It was the year 2070. He was too old for this.

Something under the hood smelled rotten. The thought occurred to him that these trucks may not have been designed with the desert heat in mind, and the memory of the last time he opened the hood hit him like a punch to the gut. Quelling the nausea, he did his best to dismiss the unease and hoisted himself back into the cab.

“Triple A.” The voice came through the surround sound.

“Hi, I’m on the side of I-40. This truck is a real piece of junk, you know that?”

“That’s very good sir, can we have your location?”

“Don’t these things have chips in them?” He said. “I’m on West I-40. The last exit was for route six, past Alb.”

“Roger that, mister. We’re dispatching someone now.” The old man rolled his eyes. “Would you like to stay on the line until they arrive?”

“No, that’s alright. I don’t feel like keeping company with a robot.” The connection terminated. “Not that this truck is any better alternative.”

It would take the service technician at least an hour to reach him, he reckoned, given the distance he was from civilization. He’d heard once that there was an Indian reservation not far from where he was now, but that was in the older days, back when I-40 was actually a traveled route by more than just the handful of sojourners it harbored now. That was also back when lanes and paint stripes meant anything on these frontier highways.

Above him, the sky crept a little further toward evening. The pitched glare of the sun scorched the macadam with all the glare of an eye disgusted with what it saw. The old man found himself waiting in the shade of his truck, legs splayed out into the roadway as he dozed in quiet contemplation of days long past. No one would stop to offer assistance on this desolate roadside. There had been no fellow travelers to notice the trouble.

The sick smell from the engine compartment was his only distraction. He tried to ignore it.

In the distance, a single car approached. The dust cloud trailing behind the vehicle was visible before the van itself, and still, another ten minutes ticked by before it finally arrived. The blue in the sky deepened a little more. The old man moved his legs to his chest as it rolled to a stop and the driver cut the engine. On the opposite side, a door opened and someone emerged.

“Just past route six, huh?” It was a young man, probably in his late twenties. The old man watched him move around to the rear of the van and open the doors with the well-practiced movements of a professional.

“You wouldn’t know it, junior, but these highways used to be packed with cars,” he said. “Something of a unique thing to be able to stop like that in the right of way.”

The reply came from inside. “The only ones who still pull off to the shoulder are old timers like you.”

“Thanks for that, kid.” The old man rolled his eyes.

Stepping out from the back of the van, the ‘kid’, surgical mask on his face, blue apron-donned, and a black medical bag in his hand, spread his arms and offered a short, sarcastic bow. “At your service, monsieur. Your neighborhood auto repair expert is on the case.”

A sigh. The old man picked himself up off the pavement with a grunt. “At least you’re not one of those uncanny skinjobs.”

“Who’s to say I’m not? Can you pop the hood for me, please?” The kid rolled up his sleeves at the front of the truck and pulled at something on the bumper that brought down a collapsible shelf. He stood on it like a stool.

The hood popped with a thump and a whine. “The new models are pretty good, but,” the old man trialed off. “I can tell. Older guys like me can tell. They don’t behave the right way. Very weird things.”

The old man hobbled out of the truck’s cab and leaned against the side of the cabin. To his left, the kid had started working. “Gross,” he said. “How long have you had this car?”

“Four years.”

A noise, followed by a low groan that came from the engine compartment. “No wonder you have a problem.” He grunted, and the old man heard the sound of fluids splattering across what must have been the technician’s apron. Not even birds flew in this heat. “These things don’t usually live much longer than two or three years.”

“The electric cars lasted longer than that. What a pathetic machine!” He let out a quiet expletive. “I was told I’d get a decade out of it, at least.”

The sound of the technician’s work ceased for a brief moment as he leaned around the hood to look at the old man. “You don’t look that gullible.”

“…Maybe it was wishful thinking.”

Work resumed. “Yeah, well,” the technician mumbled, “preaching to the choir, man. Take a look at the van, there. That’s an antique.” He gestured with one of his tools. “Been keeping it running using old manuals I got off the darkweb some years ago.”

The old man circled the van. “Go ahead and pop the hood if you don’t believe me,” the tech called out, adding with a mumble, “I’ll be here for a while yet.”

“Who am I to turn down a look at a real engine?” he asked himself. Popping the hood, he looked back down at the front of the van. Engine block, alternator, cylinders, belts: it was all there. Dipstick, oil cap, radiator. Silvered metal colored black with soot and oil. “How nostalgic,” he muttered. “I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid. Not in this condition, I mean.”

“Yeah, I had to restore most of it.”

“Where’d you find the parts?”

A short laugh, followed by a cough. “You can meet a lot of people online.” The old man looked over at the technician, apron reddened with fluids. The kid’s surgical bag lay open on the side of the engine compartment. He winced as another spray of red caught part of his face mask. “Gross. This car of yours is a mess, man.”

“It’s a truck.”

“Yeah, sure it is.” He winced again muttered something under his breath. “I think I found out what the problem is. You have organ failure here. I can’t fix this, but I think I can get you on the road. Should at least make it back to Albuquerque.”

The old man sighed. “Which organ?”

“One of the cloned ones.” The tech sighed. The old man cursed under his breath. “Sorry man, they just can’t compete with the rest. Cloning tech isn’t there yet.”

“They’ve been telling me that my entire life.”

The kid paused and looked up in thought. “Yeah, I guess so.” He shook his head. “I got into this business at the tail end of the electric car thing. These monstrosities were already on the market, but I figured the electric cars would hang on like the old engines did. Aficionados. Hobbyists. Collectors. I’d service them and not have to touch these abominations.”

The old man watched as the kid resumed his work. “That didn’t turn out, huh?”

“I’m not even totally sure why.”

“Battery technology got prohibitively expensive after the lithium mines became inaccessible.”

“That was before my time, man.”

The old man cracked his knuckles in order to ignore the sputtering coming from the tech’s direction. “I was in the industry back then. Battery tech was on its way out. They were never able to deliver on the lifespans they kept promising. Then there was the regulations. They ended up designating one site in the country to be the only safe dumping ground for the used rigs.” The old man looked out across the yellow-grey landscape dotted with bits of green and brown shrubs and cacti. “Of course, this was without the protective procedures that you see with stuff like radioactive material.”

The sun had gone down a little more. Shadows began to stretch along the road, anticipating the dusk to come in about an hour. “We ended up poisoning a whole section of desert and killing off everything within a something-odd mile radius. I can’t remember the specifics.” He was quiet for a moment. A light gust of wind touched his back to remind him of his sweat-soaked shirt. “It’s still a dead zone out there, though.”

“That’s not far from here, is it?”

“Nope.”

The tech pulled something out from beneath the hood and threw it over onto the side of the road. It bounced once like an under-filled water balloon. But it was red, sickly orange, partly green, and it pulsated a few times as if still alive before deflating. “What I can’t figure out is how these things came about.”

“Lobbyists.” Smells from the engine compartment prompted the old man to move a little further away with his dismissive grunt. “Medicine. Tech. It was the new cutting edge of science back then. Cloning especially. When that failed, well, reusable tissue from postmortem donations. There was a fad,” he said, “when I was a kid, where you could have your loved ones cremated and turned into diamonds. Little things, of course. No bigger than the head of a pin. Rich eccentrics would put them into rings. Didn’t catch on much, though.” The tech grunted behind him, partly in bemusement and partly in frustration. “The medical revolution changed that a little bit. ‘Have your old man become part of your house’s AI.’ Harvested optic nerves or neuron tissues could be spliced into your house’s circuitry. Vile stuff. Started off with that, though. I think. My memory’s not so good anymore.”

The tech winced and gagged as another spray of liquids hit the hood of the truck and released a horrible odor. “And now here we are,” he said. “I wanted to live a quiet, self-employed blue collar job fixing things. Instead, every job I get called out for means I have to cover myself in borax and bleach just to get the stench off of me.” He motioned to the old man. “Can you help me with this?”

“I only looked under the hood of this thing once,” he said, “and I promised myself I’d never do it again.”

“Well, don’t look then. I just need to suture this. Close your eyes and give me your hand. Apply pressure here.”

The old man grimaced. Beneath his fingers was a fleshy mound slick with fluids that varied in viscosity. It pulsed in sync to a slow heartbeat, expanding and contracting to some invisible set of lungs that sat deep in the cavern of the truck’s engine compartment. He could feel, even with his elderly fingers, vessels pulse with blood that leaked around the wound he had pressed his palm against.

“That’s it, thanks.”

“Disgusting,” the old man breathed, shaken.

“You’re telling me.” The tech motioned to the back of his van. “I have a water tank in the van. You can use the faucet on the side to rinse your hand off. If you look around you should see some soap over there.”

“Thanks.” He did his best not to look at the bloodied mess that came away with his hand, dripping with shades as diverse as red, yellow and green. The phlegm-like like consistency drew into focus memories of sinus infections as a child.

“I should have listened to my dad,” the tech complained behind him. “‘Go into wind’, he said. ‘That’s a scam that will never go away.’ And he’s right.”

The spigot hissed out water with more force than the old man had expected. “They still make wind turbines?” In only a brief moment, the slop had disappeared, and his palm came away red from the force of the water. He used the available soap anyway.

“Western Canada still uses them. Imports them from a few factories across the border, even.” The tech placed his scalpel into one of the trays perched precariously on the side of the engine compartment. “It’s a trillion-dollar industry up there. I’d be making enough to afford a home doing for turbines what I do for these horrible cars here. Then again,” he paused, “I’d be traveling so much I wouldn’t be home enough to enjoy it.”

Confused, the old man lumbered over to the side of the truck and slid back down into a crouch. His stomach was upset. The heat beat down a little more, but his sweat was cold against his skin. “Wind energy’s been discredited for what, fifty years? They don’t even make the turbines anymore.”

“They do, actually, but, well. You know how Canadians are. They never know when the joke is over.” He coughed. “They were still drilling oil in 2040, if you remember.”

With measured movements, he pulled out a plastic bag from the black medical sack next to him and placed his soiled tools inside. “That should do it,” he said. “I guess.”

“Have more confidence in your work, kid.”

He zipped it all up and hopped off the bumper, resetting the collapsible shelf. “Hard to have confidence in a machine that defies explanation.” He dropped the hood with a slam and returned to the rear of his van. “Try kicking it over. It should run fine, but I wouldn’t push this thing over forty. Better get a new car or take it to a hospital for a more thorough diagnosis.”

“Thanks, kid. You’re a lifesaver.” The old man picked himself up off the broken macadam and dusted himself off. “Especially out here.”

Removing his blood- and bile-soaked apron, the tech asked, “what were you doing out here, anyway? Traveling to the next state?”

“No, I was out here trying to check on some things.” The old man grumbled as he watched the tech put his things away. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Well, that’s fine with me,” he said. His medical bag clanged against the inside of the van, and with the same well-practiced motions that opened them, his hands swung shut the doors. They closed with the sort of metallic percussions that cars were supposed to have. It was a nostalgia that both of them shared.

As they moved to leave, something stirred off to the side of the road that caught their combined attention. “Wildlife?” the kid asked.

“Well, not unheard of.”

The sun was nearing dusk now: red patterns cascading across the sky in sheets of orange and pink. Not a cloud in sight. The temperature had dropped, and was dropping still, but not quickly enough to make the old man’s clothes cool in the impending dark. From beneath a pale green bush, a small furred body emerged.

“A rabbit!” With a bemused grin, the technician stooped low to get a better look. “Well, look at that. Don’t see that every day.”

But as it emerged, the kid’s face darkened.

“An extra leg. A pair of extra eyes,” The old man observed. “Son, that’s a rabbit from the periphery of the dead zone. We should get going.”

Another emerged. And another.

“I thank you, stranger, and I hope I don’t have to see you again,” the old man called as he clambered into the cab of his truck.

“Don’t mention it,” the tech replied, the same urgency fueling his movements. “And don’t go over forty,” he shouted.

With a horrible smell, and a worse screech, the old man’s vehicle roared to life. He locked the doors and signaled for the tech to take off. The sun was lower now. The shadows longer. The side of the road had seemed to transform from pale sand and green brush and twig into an indistinct sea of fur and eyes. And it began to chirp. A horrible sound of consonant chirps more like crickets or frogs than rodents, but with a loudness and intensity that indicated something more terrible.

The truck started to move. “Keep it below forty,” he reminded himself. “Good thing they can’t run that fast.” It was an unkind engine, but he was in an unkind region. It was time to leave.