Four Quarters

An original work of weird fiction by yours truly, owned by myself and leased out for special occasions. Enjoy!

Four Quarters

By Plot Roach

Sunlight slipped through the windshield of his pickup truck, waking Miles from his not so deep slumber. He learned how to sleep anywhere while on business trips with his father. But life on the road had taught him that it was far more important to sleep lightly and with one eye open for trouble.

He stretched, cat like and curled up once again into a ball. The chill of the morning air had permeated the cab of the truck and he did not yet have the inner strength necessary to fight the demon of laziness and embrace the new day. Soon the sunlight began to warm the truck, and in turn, he began to thaw. The cobwebs of last night’s dream fading from memory as the dew evaporated on the truck’s windshield. Miles pulled himself into a sitting position, pushing away the paper napkins, hamburger wrappers and other assorted refuse leftover from his meal the night before. He shifted the seat back into its driving position and started the engine which coughed in a fit that reminded him of his liver spotted grandfather. He pulled out of the parking lot of a derelict building that had once housed a discount fabric store and headed off down the road a bit, stopping when he came to yet another fast food establishment which boasted the “best breakfast for your buck.” He pulled into the parking lot and headed for the main counter, ordering a 'croissant special' with coffee, then headed into the restroom to see if he could resurrect some semblance of humanity as the pimple faced teenagers running the place fixed his prepackaged morning meal.

A quick look in the mirror had him hiss in embarrassment, his hair a disarray and bruises fading from his left eye and across his forehead made him look and feel like some extra from a horror movie. He stretched his arms out before him and mimed an impersonation of Frankenstein’s monster whispering “Yesh Mashter” before climbing into one of the unused cubicles the restaurant called a toilet.

After ten minutes and more bathroom grooming, Mile emerged from the restroom a little more civilized than when he had entered the place. His food was ready and waiting for him. He chose a chair with a view of his truck and devoured the greasy meal in several large bites, gulping down the bitter brown coffee which he found was only a hair above room temperature. He pulled the map out of his front pants pocket and the bandanna from his right breast pocket. Unfolding the faded red paisley material, he collected the four quarters which had been stashed there. N, S, E, W each had been labeled., for the four directions. When no one was looking, he threw them high into the air above his table, caught them without sound and laid them out before him. Like a soothsayer reading the entrails of a sacrifice before him, Miles checked the results of the quarters, only N and E had landed heads up. “North East it is.” Miles said, looking at the map and picking the nearest road that would take him in that direction. He folded the map up and put it back into his pocket, gathered his silver colored oracle away into his bandanna and headed for the truck.

He took the road the map had shown him, stopping by instinct at an area just off the paved road, where the shoulder of the street dropped off into a ditch. He pulled a ways away from it and waited. Pulling out an old paperback novel which he had picked up at a truck stop earlier in the week, he passed the time with an old detective story. It was about a man who followed his instincts and got the job done, even when others around him had their doubts. Miles instinctively liked the man, since it reminded him of himself. He put the book down and headed to the side of the truck, away from the view of the traffic in order to relieve himself when it happened.

A bright red car came crashing through the road, taking a dive off of the edge and into the ditch, rolling before it stopped. The man inside was partially thrown from the wreck, yet still pinned under the wreckage of the car.

Miles felt the heat from the car and knew that it would burst into flames soon. Immediately he went to check on the man pinned beneath his car, he appeared to have been its only occupant. By all account the man should have bled to death from his wounds, but the weight from the car itself had kept him from dying for the moment.

“What can I do?” Miles asked. He had been trained in CPR as a kid in order to get a summer job as a lifeguard, but this was quite a bit beyond his expertise.

“You have to take it now, and hide it.” The man said, he was weary with pain and shock.

“Take what?” Miles asked. “And how the hell do I get you out of here?”

“You can’t move me.” the man said. “And it doesn’t matter, I’m already dead -my body just doesn’t want to admit it yet.” The man took a long breath and pulled a small wooden box from his jacket pocket. “You have to take this” he said. “It chose you to care of it next. I was tempted to sell it and it felt the treason in my heart. It chose you, calling you here to protect it. Let’s hope you can do a better job than I did.”

The two men regarded one another in the light of the setting sun. The car still ticking and creaking, the smell of gasoline getting stronger.

“All I want is for you to tell me what is really going on” Miles pleaded with the dying man.

“You’ll find out in time” the man said. “It’s called the Lathyrus, and you must keep it moving and out of the hands of those that would abuse its power.”

“What does it do?” Miles asked.

“It moves the universe.”

“’It moves the universe’ how?” Miles asked, handling the small wooden box with a gentleness one would show to a wounded bird.

But the man died, and Miles was left in the coming darkness holding a box for which there was no apparent purpose. He walked back to the truck, climbed into the driver’s seat and started his truck. He drove to the nearest call box and alerted them to the accident and the dead man at the site. He decided not to leave his name or any other information, but kept driving. He stopped at a truck stop a few minutes later, watching the police, fire department and an ambulance go by. You’re too late, he thought. He pulled out his map and four quarters, flipping them and watching for the next path to be revealed. North West was the next direction, and Miles plotted a path across and old road listed on the map. He dug through his pockets, and cursed his ill luck, he was low on cash and he would need more gas soon if he wanted to keep on the road. While cleaning up in the washroom, he felt a heaviness in his pocket, as if the box had grown twice in size. He took it out, turning it over in his hands. It had no discernable opening that he could find and appeared only to be a block of wood, though the grain of the wood reminded him of malachite. Shaking the item proved fruitless as to its contents and he was tempted to throw it into the garbage for fear that the police would somehow link him to the death of the man on the road behind him. But as he held it over the refuse bin he found that he could not let go of it, as if by relinquishing the box it would somehow end the world as he knew it.

This is crazy, he told himself. He tucked the box back into his shirt pocket along with the bandanna that held his four quarters. When he left the truck stop to trudged back to his truck he saw a man drop his wallet. He called out to the man, but he was already in his car and off onto the freeway -going in the direction of the dead man and his ruined car. Miles retrieved the wallet from the ground, he would return it to the truck stop, he told himself. Someone there would find identification in the man’s wallet and find a way to return it. But as he rifled though the contents of the brown leather wallet, he found it stuffed with cash. No identification, no pictures, not even so much as a ‘club card’ from a nearby grocery store.  Nothing but cash, five hundred dollars of it. If he left it for the truck stop clerk, he knew that the money would find hands other than the original owner’s. He sighed, at a moral crossroad. Miles knew that taking it was wrong, but he also felt that he needed to keep moving, as the dead man had told him. By staying on the road he would be safe and so would the box. And it takes money to buy gas, he thought. He thought he felt the box grow lighter in his pocket and shook his head. It makes the universe, the man said. He would find out enough in time. He took some of the money and bought some gas before traveling on the ancient desert road and into his new destiny.