Well Done With Hitchhikers

By Sean Monaghan

Isaac loves his Chevy Impala. Loves crisscrossing the country behind the wheel. Sometimes he picks up a hitchhiker. Sometimes he just makes his delivery.

When he stops for a man named Dale Xerxes, Isaac just wants the company. But Xerxes proves more unusual than his name.

And more than Isaac knows depends on his discretion.

Because this job might just end up as Isaac's last one. Ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Triple V Publishing
• Release date: Apr 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224141487

Sean Monaghan

Sean Monaghan is the author of more than one hundred stories, in print, online, on broadcast radio and podcast. His stories include "Concentration" in Landfall, and "The Molenstraat Music Festival" in Asimovs. He was the Grand Prize winner in the 2014 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest for his story "Low Arc"

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Picked this guy up on the freeway ramp and now I know it was dumb as anything, on account of the body in the guitar case in the trunk.

Need to think these things through.

Outside of Flagstaff. Past the end of town, between the mall and the little exit for Walnut Canyon. The rain was bricking down I tell you. You know Arizona, right? Like one big desert. A quarter of a million square miles or something—a hundred thousand?—of bone-dry desert. Every postcard you ever see is like woo-hoo look how freaking dry we are. Grand Canyon. Cactuses. Phoenix like this baked-hard clump of a city with irrigated lawns and golf courses surrounded by this solid tan expanse of deadlands like something from an apocalypse movie.

Dump a body by the side of the road it's mummified within a couple of days.

Not that I was counting on that.

So how come the rain?

I guess all those trees gotta grow from something. That surprised me when I came through. I wound the windows down and that extraordinary scent of the ponderosa pines just flooded the car. Those people who make those little cardboard Christmas trees must take the air and somehow imprint it. Stuff it into the fibers. They must make a killing.

Not from me though. Didn't need one hanging from my rearview.

I was driving a 1986 Chevy Impala. What a ride. The engine has real power. Guy before me had owned it from new and he'd put in a fresh block, and bored that out. Six point five liters of fury I got to tell you. Nuts.

Remember that story of the kid who got hold of a JATO unit and strapped it to his car? I love that. This bolt-on jet engine that the military use to jack heavy prop-aircraft into the air and this guy uses the same bolts to put it onto the roof of his Taurus or something. Dead now. Teeth embedded in the steering wheel which was embedded in some rock three miles