Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

A two-lane highway ran along the top of the bank. He followed it south along a sweeping curve and came in view of an old bridge where the river was crossed by another such road. Around their intersection, half a mile farther along, was a small town built on a generous stretch of flat territory. The shoulder of the road broadened and flowed without any clear dividing line into the gravel parking lots of a few roadside bars, diners, and convenience stores. Laks’s ride was idling in one of those. It was a semi-trailer rig carrying a forty-foot shipping container. They hadn’t told Laks anything he didn’t actually need to know, but it was easy enough to guess that the container had arrived recently at Tacoma or Seattle and been collected by this driver. Laks walked right past it without looking very closely. But there was nothing to see. It looked like a million other trucks.

Half a minute later he heard it revving up, now a couple of blocks behind him. It pulled out onto the road, which doubled as the town’s main street. Laks turned around and stuck out his thumb. The truck slowed.

It could be inferred that the driver—who looked Indian—had been instructed to talk to him as little as possible. When asked his name, he simply glanced up at the dome light and then looked pityingly back at Laks. Thanks to Uncle Dharmender, the meaning was clear. “You can sleep back there” was the extent of his conversation. Oh, and he held up a certain kind of widemouthed plastic container that Laks well recognized. During the months he’d spent bedbound from vertigo, he had made frequent use of them. “For urination, please!”

Running athwart the semi-tractor behind the seats was a foam mattress. Tucked into clever built-in cabinets around that were a tiny fridge, a microwave, and some other conveniences. An overhead rail supported a blackout curtain that could divide the cabin in two. It looked tempting to Laks. On the other hand, it was a beautiful morning in eastern Washington. So he sat there and gazed out the windshield for an hour or so as the driver silently, patiently, and at no point exceeding the posted speed limit, maneuvered the rig along a country road that wound through rocky, rolling ranch territory, going brown in the heat of summer, framed by hills carpeted with dark evergreens. It was evident from the sun and from road signs that they were headed generally south, toward Spokane. They passed through a couple of small towns and a reservation for the other kind of Indians. In due time they verged on the outer fringes of the city, with the same lineup of big-box stores and fast-food places as everywhere else, and sleepiness overtook Laks. He took off his shoes, crawled into the back, and pulled the curtain.

He was awakened by the unaccustomed stillness of the truck. Its engine was still idling but it had ceased moving. He pulled the curtain back and was surprised to see that dusk had fallen. He must have slept for something like ten hours. They were just off an interstate highway, in the vast parking lot of some kind of commercial truck stop. The highway ran north-south and was bracketed between ranges of rugged hills. The last light of a gaudy sunset was silhouetting the ones to the west and reddening the scrub-covered slopes of those to the east. The truck driver was nowhere to be seen.

When Laks leaned forward to look around, he was able to get a better view of the plaza’s main building, a flat-roofed, mostly windowless corrugated-steel slab. This was surrounded by a branching system of walkways protected by roofs on high steel stilts and feeding out to a vast array of gas pumps and electric vehicle charging stations. At least a hundred of them, with special affordances in some areas for trucks, RVs, and other rigs that needed a lot of room to turn around. Signage on the main building announced that restaurants and other amenities were to be found there. The driver must have gone in for a well-deserved meal.

Laks was glad of the truck driver’s absence; this was the first moment he’d had to himself in a long time, unless you counted snorkeling down the river, which had not exactly been relaxing. He peed in the urinal and screwed the lid on carefully. But this somehow caused his bowels to start moving and he realized he was going to have to go inside that huge building and find a proper toilet.

He opened up his bag and found basic toiletries, including a small wooden comb. Traditionally this would have been tucked into his hair, but the circumstances of the wet suit and so on had not allowed it. He used this to comb out the hair that was still long and to remove strands that had naturally broken or fallen out. Behind his ears the areas that had been shaved by the medics were still growing back in, but the hair was still short enough that scars and ports could be seen in his scalp. He’d have wanted to cover that up even if it had not been part of his identity to wear a turban.

In the bottom of his duffel was a bolt of black fabric neatly folded. After he had put his hair up into a knot and covered that and the little comb with his bandanna, he unfolded the black fabric and tied one end of it to the rim of the steering wheel with a slipknot. This enabled him to stretch it back across the cab into the sleeping area. That in turn made it possible to get it pleated lengthwise in the correct way, making sure that its raw edges were neatly folded inward. Which was half the battle. That done, he untied it from the steering wheel and clamped the end between his teeth temporarily while he began to wind it around his head. A few minutes’ wrapping and tucking later, he had a reasonably presentable turban that covered the scars and so on left over from the surgery. It passed high across his forehead, allowing a neat triangle of the bandanna under-turban to show—a touch he hoped would be noticed and appreciated by the locals. For he had no idea where he was, other than the western United States. Cowboy country for sure.