Bride On The Road Part I

Author: C.C.

The Nevada desert had that smell of gasoline, dust, dead animals, and nuclear radiation that I could only describe as authentically American.

The sun was frying me alive, which was ironic considering I am Death, but there I was, hitchhiking down Highway 95 like some hippie teenager who ran away from home on her way to a Manson family orgy.

In the distance, I saw a truck so customized that it looked like an emissary of the apocalypse, it even had stickers from the ruling political party, which was an excellent sign because, as everyone knows, conservatives are weak to underage women…

Or at least, in my case, women who look underage.

I adjusted the cleavage of my blouse, put myself in a Playboy-cover pose, leaned forward slightly, arching my back, and started sucking on my index finger while giving the hitchhiking signal with my other hand.

The driver saw me through his thick sunglasses.

I polished my finger with my mouth like it was the finest and most sensual tool in the world.

The driver…

Drove past me.

“Fuck you!” I screamed, showing him my completely slobbered-on finger like it was some kind of Olympic trophy. “I hope you crash into a suicidal driver, faggot!”

A cloud of dust answered by spitting itself right into my face.

I sighed.

I snapped my fingers.

Nothing.

That’s the bad thing about coming down to Earth in human form: I have no powers, and I am as human as anyone else.

Then I heard her.

A muscle car, purring like a tiger on catnip, like something straight out of a disco music video enhanced with LSD.

The car stopped in front of me with a sharp and sexy brake.

And there she was.

The most badass woman in the entire Southwest, and probably the world: olive-green skin with scars that looked like ancient stitches, black eyes behind enormous sunglasses, black and gray hair covered by a red babushka like a Russian grandmother who escaped from the KGB, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from her mouth, a worn denim vest, and boots that could probably kill a Hells Angel with one kick.

Oh, and her skin had little creatures attached between the stitches, like tiny Jiminy Crickets, but much cooler: tiny leeches, little worms going in and out of her flesh, even an eye that I swear blinked at me.

Pure glamour.

The woman lowered her sunglasses a little and looked at me.

“Where are you going?” she asked, with an accent that sounded like a mixture between Scottish and “I’m going to kill you if you don’t answer quickly.”

I rested one elbow on the car door, arched my back in a way that was not anatomically possible, and put my eyes on her.

“Wherever Death takes me, darling.”

She raised an eyebrow, exhaled the smoke toward the sky, and didn’t make another move.

“Fine,” she said “Get in.”

And just like that, without any kind of drama or delirium crossing the forbidden threshold between science, the supernatural, life, and death, I got into the car of the only woman who could have abandoned the most persistent monster in the world and still look like she was on vacation while doing it.

The Bride of the Modern Prometheus.

The wind hit my face while the Bride drove with the same calmness as a grandmother knitting a scarf for her grandson.

“Nice car,” I said, trying to break the ice.

“Not mine,” she answered without taking her eyes off the road.

“Stolen?”

“Borrowed.”

“Borrowed borrowed, or… borrowed by force?”

“The owner is still alive, I think.” She shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t turn around to check.”

That made me laugh so hard I almost flew out of my seat.

“And what are you running from?” she asked as if we were talking about the weather.

“Why do you assume I’m running from something?”

“Because only people running from something hitchhike in the middle of the desert and look so…”

She looked me up and down.

“…disastrously good.”

“Touché, I’m working.”

“Let me guess: Model? Adult actress? Serial killer?”

“Something like that,” I said with a crooked smile. “I’m Death.”

The Bride didn’t blink or look impressed, she just took another drag from her cigarette and threw the smoke upward.

“Uh-huh,” she said without emotion.

“‘Uh-huh’? That’s all you’re going to say?” I asked. “I usually get screams, prayers, people shitting themselves… Oh, and once I broke Dionysus and Pan’s hearts, you know them?”

“I’ve had worse boyfriends.”

“Well, technically I’m here in this shithole of a country and planet for work, you know, people who have been decades, sometimes even centuries, late to die, cosmic paperwork.”

“Hmm… so you came for me?” she asked, still looking at the road.

“What? No! I mean… as far as I remember, you’re not on my list. Wait a second.”

I started flipping through my Deadly Doodle.

“Let’s see… Elvis, Morrison, McCartney, JFK, Kaufman, Jackson…”

Nope.

“You’re not on the list.”

The Bride let out a dry laugh, I think it was the first time I had seen her laugh since I got into the car.

“Just asking, I already have experience with people wanting to kill me.”

“Wow, that’s a problem we have in common, except in my case I’m usually the one who kills.”

“Healthy social dynamic.”

We stayed silent for a few seconds.

The good kind of silence, the kind that smells like gasoline, cigarette smoke, and hot air.

I played with one of the leeches attached to her shoulder.

“Does that hurt?” I asked.

“It itches.”

She grabbed the creature with her fingertips and threw it onto the road.

“Gift from a very intense guy.”

“Oh, an ex?” I smiled, teasing her. “Let me guess your type… Tall, muscular, long hair, maybe some tattoos but not too many…”

I stopped.

“Oh my God. Your ex is Peter Steele!”

The Bride tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

“What? No! He’s not an ex, he’s a mistake,” she corrected. “Technically, I was created to be with him, and technically I told him to go fuck himself, he’s been chasing me ever since.”

“Can I stay and watch?” I asked.

The Bride looked at me from the corner of her eye.

“You want to watch? And what do you get out of it?”

“A good story,” I answered. “I’m writing a book, half gonzo, half biographical, half existential disaster.”

“That’s three halves.”

“I was never good at math.”

The Bride gave me a little smile and threw her cigarette onto the road.

“I suppose I can let you come with me for a while.”

“Only for a while?”

“Yes, only for a while.”

“Darling, you just picked up Death.”

“Why do you think I said only for a while?”

“Touché.”

The roar of the engine mixed with the music coming from the speakers. The sun was disappearing over the horizon, and just when it seemed like we were actually enjoying the ride…

Something huge and heavy started rumbling behind us.

The Bride saw it first.

Her cigarette fell from her mouth.

“Oh, shit,” she whispered.

“Is it him?”

“Yes, third time today.”

“Persistent.”

“Too much.”

In the distance, the silhouette of a monster truck more than four meters tall covered the mountains behind it. The roar of the monster truck made the ground shake like it was announcing the next great earthquake of the San Andreas Fault.

Behind the wheel was something huge, like it had come straight out of Mary Shelley’s wettest fantasies: long, dark, greasy hair, open stitches, one eye hanging from its socket, a chest like a brick wall, and arms as big as tree trunks resting on the steering wheel like it was chasing the only reason it had for existing.

“I knew it! He has long hair!” I told the Bride.

“Don’t look back, don’t talk and hold on tight, this is going to get ugly.”

I smiled while writing everything happening in my Deadly Doodle.

“Perfect, I was getting bored, this is going to be a good chapter.”

The Bride turned around and looked at the monster truck.

In a maneuver that did not fully respect traffic safety laws or the laws of physics, the Bride downshifted once, then twice, then did something I didn’t understand and probably destroyed the transmission, but it made the car jump forward with enough force to slam my ass against the seat.

“Do you always drive like this?” I asked while trying to keep my eyes open against the wind hitting my face.

“Only when I’m scared,” she answered.

“This is you being scared?”

The Bride pointed her thumb backward toward the monster truck.

“That bastard has gone through a Napoleonic invasion, an Opium War, two world wars, and God knows how many other historical events just to keep chasing me.”

“How romantic!”

“It’s fucking sick!”

The Bride looked at me from the corner of her eye while accelerating like a lunatic.

“Do me a favor and put your hands on the wheel.”

“What?”

She pulled a revolver from one of the car compartments like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat and raised it like she was holding the Sword of Excalibur or the Spear of Longinus.

“Wow… that’s big.”

“You can admire it later, do what I said.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

I leaned toward the steering wheel and drove.

Not very well.

It is very difficult to keep your coordination from an uncomfortable position, especially when you have a Victorian scientific abomination chasing you, you know?

The Bride kept shooting at the monster truck, but the bullets only bounced off, like when you throw a rock at a baby’s head and it bounces off, except without the blood or crying.

“Just out of curiosity… where did he get a monster truck?” I asked.

“Are you seriously asking me that?” the Bride answered.

“I’m just pointing out that it’s kind of ironic that out of all the cars he could be driving, he happens to be driving a monster truck.”

“Who the fuck cares? Keep driving!”

The Bride kept shooting at the windshield and tires of the monster truck, hoping the bullets would go through or at least make the monster lose the little coordination he had left.

“Nice shot, girl, maybe the next one will be the one.”

“Do you have a button to turn your volume down?”

The monster was hanging half his body outside the monster truck, his tongue hanging out like a giant dog breathing through the window. One eye hung from its socket like it was about to fall out at any moment.

Its jaw and mouth were shaped into a twisted smile that seemed to reach both ends of its cheeks.

“She will be for him… the light… the sun… the life,” the Creature said.

“Just to be clear,” I said. “This is love?”

“This is obsession.”

“Well, technically love is socially accepted obsession.”

“Can you stop philosophizing and look to see if he’s getting closer?”

“He’s getting closer.”

“How close?”

“Close enough that I can smell your perfume, let me guess, ‘L’Essence du Monstrum, with notes of rotten wood.’”

The monster truck rammed into the back of the convertible and the whole world jumped with us.

The Bride cursed in a dialect that had probably been extinct for centuries and got back on the steering wheel.

“Buckle up!”

“Technically I’m immortal, so…”

I didn’t even have time to finish.

The Bride made a sharp turn to the left, then to the right, then into a third one that has no name and makes no sense in traditional geometry.

My stomach felt like it was somewhere between life and death, about to throw up whatever miserable food I had managed to put into it a few hours earlier.

“What are you doing?” I screamed.

“Trying to get him to stop following me!”

The Bride eased her foot off the accelerator and slowed down, bringing us closer to the monster truck.

“Listen, Death, if you and I survive this, we’re going to have a long conversation about what you said about my ‘rotten wood’ notes.”

“If we survive this, I’ll buy you a new perfume.”

The monster truck pushed the convertible forward, closer than ever, taking up all the space in the universe.

The Creature screamed and punched through the windshield, getting ready to jump into the convertible.

“She… is… my… wife…”

“I am NOT your fucking wife!”

I closed my Deadly Doodle and looked at the Bride.

“Distract him!” the Bride shouted.

“How the fuck am I supposed to distract a hopeless romantic made of corpses? Should I talk philosophy?”

“Do whatever you do best.”

Do whatever you do best.

The Bride’s words entered my head like an ice pick lobotomizing my brain.

Okay.

My specialty:

Drama.

Spectacle.

Visual impact.

I blinked a couple of times and looked at the Bride.

So, yeah…

I climbed onto the hot hood of the car like it was a Las Vegas strip club stage after a shooting.

The wind hit my face, strands of my hair getting into my eyes and mouth like two snakes trying to hatch their eggs inside me, while the blessed half-hidden sun illuminated my breasts like they were two actors with a guaranteed contract to make a cameo in the movie.

It wasn’t pornography.

It was art.

It was Milo Desmond cinema.

It was seventies exploitation in its purest form in the middle of the twenty-first century.

I grabbed my blouse and lifted it with a theatrical gesture, almost operatic.

My breasts were exposed to the Creature like two cursed traffic lights illuminating the road to Hell.

And yes, they were as natural as a cosmic entity older than the universe itself could possibly allow.

“My body was faithful to her, but my eyes were not!” the Creature screamed, covering its eyes.

At that exact moment, I heard the sound.

That glorious sound.

REEEEEEEEEE—KRAK—KA—THOOOONK!

The monster truck rammed into us again so hard that I could almost imagine the Bride and me flying straight onto the asphalt.

The Creature stuck its head out the window, its single hanging eye swinging like a hypnotic pendulum while drool poured from its mouth.

The Bride looked through the rearview mirror and only raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, wow.”

I winked at her and then at the Creature.

“I didn’t touch her… but when I saw her naked… I knew she had already been unfaithful to you,” the Creature said.

“As if I fucking cared!” the Bride yelled.

“Yes, they’re real, and no, you can’t touch,” I said, pressing my breasts together.

The Creature growled, a weird mixture of rabid dog, gorilla, and frustrated orgasm.

And right there, when it was completely focused on my two precious girls…

BANG!

The Bride shot the Creature directly in the head with the revolver like a professional sniper.

The Creature fell from the monster truck onto the pavement, the bullet hole in its forehead pouring fresh blood.

The Bride stepped on the accelerator and quickly drove away, leaving the Creature behind.

“Did you see the way he looked at me? I think he liked me,” I told the Bride.

“All yours.”

I laughed and sat back down in the passenger seat.

“See?” I said while holding my breasts. “My girls can handle anything.”

The Bride let out a dry laugh without taking her eyes off the road.

“Meh. I’ve seen better.”

“Oh, really? Name one.”

“Mary Shelley, 1818.”

“The writer of Mathilda?”

“Yeah, and if you’re wondering, Percy liked to watch.”

“I wasn’t wondering, actually, but I’ll treasure the image you just put in my head.”

Behind us, the figure of the monster truck finally disappeared into the desert.

The Bride finally decided to look at me after what felt like a thousand years.

“I’m hungry, you?”

“I’m Death, I don’t need to eat…”

My stomach growled like the engine of the monster truck, mixing with the roar of the convertible.

“Okay… maybe I do need to eat.”

The Bride rolled her eyes and laughed.

“My treat, I have money.”

“Let me guess, borrowed?”

“Nah, that one I actually stole.”

“Cool.”