Dead body, Bon Jovi, and a Gun

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Seven hours from Tucson to Vegas. Seven hours of sand and bullshit.

Kim’s hands melded with the steering wheel. He’d been driving for about three hours now, mostly due to the cold metal barrel that would make itself known every five minutes or so, and partly because of the dead body they have in the trunk. For three hours, all he had was an endless repetition of dirt, rocks, dead grass, and a casette tape of Bon Jovi’s Greatest Hits. All of this became so mindnumbing, he actually started to enjoy the sudden rush of excitement the gun’s barrel gave him from time to time. His balls would pucker up every time the car went over a bump, pinheads of sweat would form on his forehead whenever his right temple brushed cold steel, and his bladder whimpered and tightened as Jerry would jab the gun in his side.

“Jerry - buddy - I’m going to need to pee man.” Kim shifted in his seat “My dick’s going to fall off any minute now.”

“Nu-uh.” Jerry cocked the hammer, which Kim found puzzling considering he swore he had heard the click of the hammer several times now. At first it would send chills up to his nape, but after the fourth click, all it gave Kim was confusion, as he’d try to do the math in his head, trying to calculate if the hammer was actually pulled back or inert at this point.

“I’m just going to pee in the seat then.” Kim tried to scan Jerry’s face for any sign of shock by his periphery. “You really okay with the smell of piss for four hours Jerry?”

“I’ll just open the window jackass.”

“Look man, just give me a bottle. I told you I’ve done this before. I’m not going to crash you paranoid fuck.” Kim’s left leg was jumping up and down like he was on speed.

“Nope.” He cocked the gun again. “I ain’t taking that chance Kim.”

“Alright, just - Jesus - just let me pull over Jerry. I swear I won’t fucking run this time.”

Jerry replied with a quick jab of the gun on Kim’s temple.

“Shit.” Warm liquid slowly seeped through his jeans, he could feel his bladder untangling, and a shot of euphoria went curling up his dome, blooming the insides with fractals of feel good hormones that rebounded a chilling, shivering, wave throughout his body. “Fuck me.” He said under heavy breath. “You asshole.”

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The wind that ripped across the brown sheet of sand would sway their Subaru from one side of the lane to the other. From behind, the car looked like a ship you’d control in Space Invaders, strafing to and fro, trying to avoid alien fire, as Kim would try to correct the car, festering in his own piss and forcing, ever so slightly, to open his eyelids as fatigue had set in.

It had been five hours of endless road, desert, and Bon Jovi, so, naturally, his mind started to wander. The tour bus on the rearview mirror piqued his curiosity. Such a shit way to travel he thought. Only reason people are in that bus’s cause of their stuck-up job, wanting to unmoor themselves from the daily humdrums of life, tired of being told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. So they decided to get on a tourbus just so they can wind down, give their brain another image other than that of their dusty computer seared on the wrinkles of their brain, and that, sometimes, would pop in their sleep; they’d be in a beach somewhere, clear ocean-blue water seeming to meld with the clear ocean-blue sky, grains of sand in between their toes and digging underneath their nails, before, suddenly, the whine of a dusty CRT computer whizzes on and they’d wake up and see that it’s a Monday.

But they didn’t realize that it’s basically the same thing. Tour guide telling them what matters, what to look at, and why they should care; spouting facts and dates of years that they’ll never really need. At the end of the day, they didn’t make this happen. It’s just a trip they went on, something that just happened to them. No autonomy in it, no internal compass telling them to explore this or go over here; that insatiable wanderlust in all homonids being domesticated by linearity and “lunch before 12:30PM”.

As the tour bus stopped at a gas station they’d just passed, his attention shifted towards the land itself; the desert’s uncaring attitude, rocks in weird formations being bathed in the sun, alien plants that deserved to be in another alien planet - and not an hour away from Vegas. It was peculiar. On one hand, you had Vegas, gleaming in the night, an amalgam of cash and alcohol and vomit, where neon rainbows masks the exterior of every casino, and of every bar, and of every pawnshop, each of these establishments just a filter separating you from your money. And right up the bend, you had this careless desert, this sandy hostile wasteland blotted in hissing cacti and thorny plants, with insane rock formations that stood against time. Some fuckload years ago, Kim thought, this was submerged in water, and another or so years after, it was covered in black volcanic ash. Today, Vegas stands surrounded by dead grass, rocks, and sand. And in a million or so years after, it’ll be eaten up too.

“Right here.” Jerry said as he looked out the window.

“What?”

“Just take a right. Into the desert, c’mon.”

Kim nodded, turned the steering wheel right, and blazed into it, leaving behind concrete roads, and dead metal signs. Ahead, an endless sea of sand awaits with a mirage forming in the horizon.

Dead body, Bon Jovi, and a gun. What can go wrong?