7: Enter Billy Vogt
Billy groaned harshly as he finally came to. It was late into the afternoon and he had been resting for the past however many hours on his deployed airbag. At first he didn't understand where he was, then he remembered.
He pushed the door of his blue Taurus open and collapsed onto the black, hot tar of the strangely empty highway. Usually the place would be buzzing by this time. So that meant this time fell under the category "unusual". He groaned again. He brushed back his greasy, brown hair and his hand came away wet and red. "Fuck," he muttered under his breath. He wiped the blood off on his blue jeans, leaving a big, maroon stain. Then he pulled the piece of glass causing the blood flow out of his head with a cry of pain. He had heard once that dark-eyed people had a higher threshold for pain than light-eyed people. He was quite grateful that he had brown eyes at that moment.
It
had been about ten in the morning when he had been traveling down the
highway. His destination was Wilmington City just three miles down a
stretch of highway from his hometown. There he was going to visit his
mother for the first time in three months; an inter-family feud had
just ended and he wanted her to know that he had forgiven her for past
sins.
Unfortunately while on this trip he wound up slamming into an
impossible eight-foot tall minotaur while traveling at sixty miles an
hour. Had he not been wearing his seat belt he would have been killed.
Had the minotaur been hit by the center of the car rather than the
passenger side, he would be dead.
Billy looked mournfully at his wreckedand obviously totaledcar before looking around for the minotaur, trying to convince himself that it had just been his imagination. Alas such a comfort was forbidden to him. The dead, mangled body of the red minotaur laid thirty feet away from where his car had eventually come to a stop close to being off the road.
It hurt to move, so Billy ceased to do so and allowed himself to fall to the ground. He longed for unconsciousness to take hold once again. His mind began to race. Without realizing it he had drifted into a very shallow sleep filled to the brim with terrifying creatures and eternally raging flames.
The cellophane wrap of the dream was torn off as a big glob of bird shit splattered on his forehead. He sat up, frightened by the images he had just escaped, and screamed as his back cracked rather loudly. He had been enclosed by sleep for another two hours at least. Billy wiped the shit off with the sleeve of his white, fleece jacket. Then he took it off and shredded the unhygienic sleeve into strips. The strips that had no defecation on them he then wrapped around his wounds. This caused the transition of the white material to red. He groaned at the pain in his neck and back. He had been in multiple car accidents in his past so the pain was not new to him, but none of those accidents had been this severe and the pain had never been this long-lasting. He wished he had some sort of sanitary liquid to disinfect the wounds with.
He looked at the minotaur again and decided it was best not to ponder the creature's existence, but his mind betrayed him by doing so nonetheless. Was this creature an alien? Was it a creature that had not been seen since the long ago time of Greek mythology? Was it a demon?
The last question adhered to his mind more so than the other two. Billy had always considered himself agnostic. Since he believed that God's existence could not be fully disproved, he believed that Hell and the unholy creature entitled Satan that governed it could not be disproved either. He had always been paranoid about this, not wanting to take a rather long detour to Hell upon his expiration date. If this creature was indeed the spawn of Lucifer, Billy realized he'd seriously need to reconsider his religion. That is, if he didn't expire on this stretch of highway one way or another.
A gust of wind chilled Billy and caused goose bumps to form all up and down his now uncovered arms. He threw the fleece jacket back over himself and began to rub the sleeveless arm.
Slowly and painfully Billy got to his feet. He stared down the highway in the direction he had been headed. The nearest populated area was five miles off. However, to go back the way he had come would lead him to a rest station within two. There most likely wouldn't be people there, but there would be a payphone at least. From there he could call up the emergency operator and get an ambulance to come get him and transport him to the hospital where kindly Dr. So-and-So would evaluate and heal him. The back of his mind wondered what the world's response would be to the eight foot monstrosity he had hit. After that brief moment of contemplation Billy walked back the way he had come.
A mile down the road Billy saw a big sign proclaiming that drivers should look out for deer for the next three miles.
