u/giant_gummy_squid

Something In Your Eye?

I work as a field technician out of Phoenix for a microwave communications company. If you haven't heard of that before, it basically means I spend a lot of time driving. Cell towers, radio sites, mountaintop relays. If something stopped talking to something else, there's a decent chance I'm getting in a truck and heading out to look at it.

Most days are pretty boring. Five or six hours of work wrapped around four or five hours of driving. You get used to it. In fact, after a while you get a little too used to it.

The Arizona desert has a way of disappearing once you've driven through it enough times. The scenery doesn't change much. Everything becomes tan dirt, scrub brush, distant mountains, and highway. I'd usually just throw on the radio and let my brain idle until I got where I was going.

This happened in June. I was heading south on Interstate 17 after finishing a domestic install near Flagstaff. I got done later than expected and didn't leave until about an hour before sunset.

The station I usually listened to was KUPD out of Phoenix. If you've spent much time driving around central Arizona, you can practically use it as a distance marker. The farther you get from Phoenix, the more static.

That evening I noticed something strange. The signal was getting worse as I drove toward Phoenix, gradually, until I could hardly hear it. At the time I figured maybe my antenna connection was acting up. It wasn't unusual to have a bit of trouble with my radio from time to time. I remember reaching over to fiddle with the radio when I noticed something ahead on the shoulder.

Smoke. A lot of it. Thick black smoke rolling upward against the evening sky. I immediately looked back at the road, trying to figure out where it was coming from. At first I thought it was a brush fire, but as I got closer, I could see it was a car. A brown sedan of some kind, flipped into the ditch and smoldering. The shoulder was torn up where it had apparently left the roadway. Fresh gouges cut through the gravel. A section of fencing was flattened. The dirt around the vehicle looked churned up like it had cartwheeled several times before coming to rest.

I looked around on the interstate, and there wasn't another vehicle in sight, so I started to slow down to give myself a better look at the wreck. The sun was low enough that the whole desert had taken on that orange glow you only get for a few minutes before dark.

As I got closer, the wreck started feeling a bit... off. Not enough to alarm me, just enough to recall. The car looked... simplified. That's the best word I can come up with. It looked like a car the same way a Hot Wheels car looks like a car. The shape was right, the proportions were right, but details seemed missing. The mirrors seemed oddly concave, the door seams stuck out very prominently, and even upside down, it looked strangely clean for a car that gets driven through the Arizonian desert, and I couldn't see any panel damage despite that it had just rolled into a ditch.

The smoke bothered me too. It wasn't pouring from the engine compartment, and it wasn't coming from underneath, It seemed to be rising from the entire vehicle at once. I'm no car guy but I know enough to know that's not how that works. I had nearly stopped beside it when a man emerged from behind the wreck. "Hey!" He waved both arms. "Hey! Please!" he yelled, and started quickly jogging toward me.

"My wife!" His voice cracked. "She's trapped inside! Please help me!" So I pulled onto the shoulder. He was maybe fifty feet away, close enough that as I put the car in park, I could just start to see his face, still yelling in panic. I looked past him toward the overturned vehicle. Part of me was already mentally preparing to crawl through broken glass and help drag somebody out. Then I noticed something else. The smoke wasn't leaving residue anywhere. No scorch marks. No flames. No heat shimmer. Just black smoke billowing in light of the sunset.

The man reached my door. "Please," he said. "I can't get her out." His voice was pained and panicked. I looked away from the odd vehicle and back to the man himself, and that's when I realized something was off about the man, as well. His voice sounded terrified, but his face did not, well, not exactly anyway. The expression was there, the pieces were all present, raised eyebrows, wide eyes, tense mouth. But they weren't working together. It looked less like panic and more like somebody attempting to arrange their face into panic, like a mannequin in perpetual fear.

I sat there with my hand on the door handle, running through my options. It's easy to think in retrospect that I had enough of a bad feeling to just leave, but I don't know these people. This man could have plastic surgery. They could have a foreign car. The woman could still be alive over there in a smoldering car, and I can't just let her die because I was paranoid or sleep-deprived.

The car was still smoking. The man was still begging for help. Yet every instinct I had was telling me something wasn't right. "Sir," he said, with the same panicked tone and urgency, only now a little quieter since he now stood just outside my car. "Please."

Then the wind shifted. A hard gust came across the highway. Dust skittered across the pavement, and the black smoke bent sideways. And I immediately noticed two things.

First, the smoke wasn't behaving like smoke. It didn't thin or break apart when the wind hit it. The entire plume simply leaned with the wind while staying dense and intact. Like a flag.

Second, some of the dust from the road hit the man directly in the eyes. He turned his head, flinched, and blinked. For a second my brain refused to process what I'd seen. I actually remember staring at him trying to replay it, trying to force it into something normal. But I couldn't. I knew what I saw.

The upper lids hadn't moved, but his lower ones did. His eyes had closed from the bottom upward. Like a reptile.

His eyes snapped back open in the same, unnatural manner, and we stared at each other. Neither of us moved. Then something changed. The pleading, the panic, it vanished, melted off his face. He relaxed into a look of almost... curiosity. The way somebody would look at a dog that figured out how to unlock a door.

He tilted his head slightly, almost amused, and slowly walked in front of my truck, watching me the entire time. When he spoke again, the desperation was gone.

"Get out of the vehicle." His voice was calm now. Polite, even. "Now, please."

Movement caught my eye. The passenger door of the overturned car had opened. Something was climbing out. At first it looked like a body that had been through a wreck. Bent wrong, broken, and dragging itself out of the car and up into an awkward gait on broken legs.

Then, with every step, it seemed less injured. The limp straightened, and it stood up properly. The thing began walking normally, with its hair in a mess that completely covered its face.

I looked back at the man. He was smiling now. Not broadly, just enough to tell that's what it was. A tight smile stretched across an otherwise expressionless face. I put the truck in gear.

He looked toward the other creature walking toward my car, and the smile widened with glee. He took a step toward my truck. I floored it.

The man's face remained in that sick grin as I overtook him, and he disappeared under my hood.. There was a heavy impact across the bottom of the truck and some jostling as I ran him over. Then nothing. I never touched the brakes.

When I looked in the rearview, he was standing in the middle of the highway, perfectly upright. Watching me leave, as if I'd never hit him at all.

The next morning I drove the same route. I stopped at the exact spot. There was nothing there. No overturned vehicle, no broken fence. No torn-up gravel, and no tracks.

Nothing.

I still take the I-17 for work, and I still work in microwave. But since that night, I've started paying for Spotify.

Because sometimes, if I started to get some static on the radio, I felt like I could almost hear its shriek, panicked voice.

"Help me. Please."