Hitcher Slut - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

I told you all that I can't just sit idle for very long. :P

So since I don't have any of my graphics programs, I sat down and did a little writing. Maybe I should do more of this. Maybe it would make me a better writer, though I feel like I need an editor. Lol!

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It was a dark night. The kind of utter blackness that you only found when the latest hours of the evening turned into the earliest hours of the morning: midnight! A deeper darkness that you discovered when you were in the middle of nowhere and there was no light of any kind to be found, besides your headlamps.

The sky was still overcast from the rain earlier that day, but at least the roads were no longer wet. There was no moon shining down on the blacktop, and even the stars were blotted out by the invisible cloud cover. The sky above looked like an endless void, indistinguishable from the miles and miles of forest that were just barely visible at the edge of his headlights.

In fact, the entire scene would be nothing but blackness if not for those headlights. The road ahead, out to about forty meters (roughly 130 feet), and a few feet of the car's hood were clearly illuminated. Everything beyond that was darkness, despite the high beams being on. That seemed to make the light brighter, but somehow didn't extend his vision any further down the highway like it should. It felt like there was something sinister, almost hungry, about a night like this, as if it was devouring the light before it could do its job.

In short, it was the kind of pitch-black night that left you feeling small and alone, especially when you were driving by yourself on ON-17 of the TransCanada Highway shortly after midnight.

He had left Sault Ste Maurie much later than he had intended, and now he was somewhere north of the Great Lakes, above Lake Superior, in a place that felt like there was nobody for a thousand miles in any direction. He knew that he wasn't really that remote, but it sure felt that way when you had not seen another car on this highway in over thirty minutes.

The speed limit was 90 km/h (55 miles/h) on this two lane stretch of road, and he was only doing 80 km/h (about 50 miles/h) because of the warning signs placed roughly every 20 km (12 miles) that glaringly announced there were moose in the area. The lowered speed limit was because of the wildlife, and there were bears and deer to consider even if the signs only showed a graphic of a moose, but also due to the occasional intersection with a rural road that connected to the highway. So there were clearly smaller settlements nearby, but he hadn't seen an actual town, or even a building, in a few hours.

His awareness was heightened as well from driving in the dark and keeping his head on a swivel. He had to watch the road, check down the embankments to either side, and also scan the edge of the trees in an effort to spot anything that might randomly decide to run across the highway.

The embankments were steep, raising the road a good six meters (20 feet) into the air. This was meant to help the rain run off, provide a place for water to collect other than the road, prevent flooding of the highway, and also to deter wildlife from climbing up to meander through traffic. But it also meant that he was painfully aware of the narrow road and the even smaller gravel shoulder. If you lost control for even a moment, you were going to go for a short flight that would end in a very hard landing just before smashing into the very thick evergreens.

The fact that this section of the TransCanada wasn't very well maintained didn't help any either. It wasn't the worst road he had traveled on, but it didn't even remotely compare to the better parts of the Interstates they had in the U.S. The American highways were just better maintained in general, though the stretch of the TransCanada that was back near Toronto had been very smooth.

He breathed a tired sigh. He was still approximately two hours away from Thunderbay, his next stop, and a motel where he could sleep. His eyes were already drooping a little, and he had the windows wide open to help with that. A local radio station blared some unfamiliar music through his speakers, but the signal was intermittent at best this far from civilization. He had, stupidly, packed his CDs away somewhere.

The white noise of the static, and his increasing exhaustion, made it difficult to focus on potholes that might damage the suspension of his silver Pontiac Sunfire, or cause him to swerve off of the road. They were just another thing to add to the list of dangers he needed to watch for.

He wasn't used to this kind of driving. He'd never worked as a long-haul trucker. It had been a good eight hours or more from New Brunswick to Quebec. The drive from Montreal to Toronto was a little shorter but he had left late in the day after exploring some of the city. Then it was another eight hours of driving or so from Toronto to Sault Ste Marie. He had slept at motels at the end of each leg of his trip, but he was a good six hours into this next hop and it was beginning to wear on him.

He glanced in the rear-view mirror. There weren't any headlights behind him. He would almost welcome the bright lights of an 18-wheeler blinding him from behind if it meant he knew he wasn't alone out here. He would even be happy to let a big rig like that pass, so that he could quietly drive along in its wake - a silent shadow skulking behind the behemoth.

That strange thought made him chuckle and momentarily shift his gaze to the computer that was nearly hidden under a pile of paraphernalia in the back seat: jackets, bedsheets, pillows, two suitcases, a couple of boxes, and his golf clubs in the trunk.

He had stuffed everything he could into the little sports coupe, leaving only the passenger seat empty and a tunnel to the back window so that the rear-view could still be used. Anything that couldn't fit into the car, which wasn't much, was donated to the Red Cross or left for his land lord to do with as she pleased.

He wondered again at his out-of-character bravery. There was a serious lack of jobs in the Information Technology field in New Brunswick. You could count on one hand the number of jobs in the entire province. There were certainly far more jobs in Alberta, hundreds of them in cities like Edmonton or Calgary. Yet it still surprised him that he had decided to drive himself 4,500 km (3,000 miles) across the country, almost from coast to coast, in hopes of finding a better paying job and a better life.

But that kind of fanciful reminiscing, while perfectly natural, was the kind of thing he shouldn't really be doing in such a remote area. That was the kind of distraction that could get you in trouble. It was also the reason that he almost missed the figure standing in the road, before slamming on the brakes and snapping back to reality.