Soul-Whip

At midnight, I woke up in a strange place.

Someone knocked on my truck window and said they were holding a celebration tonight, and asked me to join them.

Still groggy, I got out of the truck.

The village before me was decked out in lanterns and colored streamers.

“Is it a wedding?” I asked the villager. The villager didn’t answer.

Instead, a hazy thought came to me: I seemed to have come here to escort the bride.

I turned back to look at the heavy truck I’d driven here.

It was empty. But why did I remember it being packed full of things when I arrived?

What had I been carrying? For a moment, I couldn’t recall.

When I turned back again, the villager who had come to call me was gone.

I went out northwest to haul coal in a big rig.

That morning, we were lined up waiting to load our trucks.

All of a sudden, we heard someone shouting.

“Oh no! There’s someone buried under the coal pile!”

A bunch of us ran over to help.

But even after we dug all the way to the bottom of that mountain of coal, we didn’t find so much as a shadow of a person.

The worker who had shouted was starting to panic.

Stammering, he tried to explain, “That’s not right. I saw it clear as day.

There was a pair of wrinkled human hands sticking out from under the coal pile!”

“If you pass the scene of a car accident, don’t stare.”

“If someone tries to hitch a ride at midnight, don’t stop unless you have to.”

“And don’t think driving a big rig makes you so intimidating that trouble won’t come looking for you.”

Those were the warnings my Master gave me.

For more than ten years, I kept them close to heart.

But tonight, I made an exception.

At midnight, I came across a family of four trying to flag me down.

The moment the husband saw my headlights, he dropped to his knees at the roadside and kept kowtowing.

Their black sedan was sitting crookedly off to the side, as if it had broken down.

All four of them looked badly shaken. I let them climb into my truck.

Pale with fear, the husband told me that a strange red sports car had been chasing them along the mountain road just moments ago.

I told him not to worry. I was driving a heavy truck; no car would dare mess with me.

Just then, the radio began reporting a traffic accident. On the very stretch of mountain road we were driving along, a red sports car and a black sedan had been involved in a serious crash.

The driver of the red sports car had died at the scene.

In my first few years driving rigs, my master used to tell me that the main road could hold back evil.

So unless you absolutely had to, you should never leave the proper road, and you should never pay any attention to the “things” that stood outside the guardrails.

Lately, though, whenever I’m out on the road, I keep seeing my childhood friend-the one who’s already dead.

At first, he only stood beyond the guardrail, one leg raised stiffly.

But little by little, he managed to get that leg up onto the rail. Now half his body is leaning out over the highway.

At a construction site, five coffins were dug up-four with something inside, one empty. Strange things kept happening at the site.

In less than three days, two workers had already been sent to the hospital.

Someone had asked me to go there and haul the coffins away.

But the expert the site had hired kept blocking me at every turn, refusing to let me move them.

With a dark, sinister look, he told me: “These five coffins can’t be moved by anyone within seven days. Whoever moves them will be the one buried inside.”