[System Prompt: Are you sure you want to end your shift early? You currently have 4 active deliveries. Incomplete orders will be recorded on your reliability profile.]
"Go to hell..." Arthur hissed through his teeth.
He didn't care about his profile anymore. His thumb hovered over the 'Confirm' button, ready to end this insane night for good.
But just as he was about to press down, his peripheral vision caught the queue list behind the warning box.
His hand froze.
At the very top of the list, order #409 now bore a glaring icon in its status bar: [ ❗ PRIORITY ]
Arthur frowned. Subconsciously, he hit 'Cancel' to close the warning box and tapped on the order.
The details expanded.
[Destination: St. Jude's Old Apartments]
[Status Change: Extreme Priority]
[Updated: 12:01 AM]
[Additional Bounty: $800.00]
Eight hundred dollars.
Arthur's breath hitched. He opened his banking app without thinking. The screen displayed his debit card balance: $142.50. This bounty was more than five times what he had to his name. With this money, next Monday's rent, the van's commercial insurance, and his overdue utility bills would all be wiped clean.
Fear paralyzes.
But poverty turns a man into a machine utterly indifferent to death.
"Eight hundred bucks." Arthur glared at the number, grinding his teeth. He could still taste the blood.
He looked up at the rainy night outside the window. Whether it was a micro-sleep hallucination or something else entirely, when the sun rose on Monday, his landlord would still knock on his door demanding money.
Arthur extended his index finger—the nail cracked and still oozing a bit of blood—and slammed it down hard on the terminal's "Resume Deliveries" button.
"Finish this last run, take the money, and sleep for three days straight."
He threw the gearshift into Drive and stepped on the gas. The box van splashed through the puddles, pulling back onto the desolate streets.
The wipers swept tirelessly back and forth across the glass. The radio remained off; the cabin was filled only with the hum of the engine and the muffled drumming of rain against the metal roof.
The van drove about two miles down the coastal highway.
Arthur lit a cigarette, using the nicotine to suppress the tremors in his hands.
Slowly, he began to realize something was off.
There was something new in the soundscape of the cabin.
At first, he thought it was just loose gravel kicking up against the undercarriage. But the sound grew denser, sharper. It was a faint click-clack, click-clack.
Like hundreds of hard-shelled beetles clinging to the chassis of the van, using razor-sharp mandibles to slowly gnaw through the metal and rubber.
Cigarette hanging from his lips, Arthur glanced down at the gas pedal. The chewing sound was coming from the steel plate right beneath his feet. He could even feel a relentless vibration buzzing through the soles of his boots.
He didn't hit the brakes. Detective Morgan's warning surfaced in his mind: "Don't try to figure out why. Don't go checking to see where a sound came from." He forced his eyes back onto the road ahead.
But that was just the beginning.
The van entered an unlit tunnel in an older neighborhood. The cabin immediately went pitch black.
To the right of Arthur's steering wheel was the empty passenger seat, holding nothing but the terminal and a few leftover fast-food bags.
But right as the van rolled over a speed bump, Arthur clearly heard the squeak of compressed leather.
Out of his peripheral vision, he saw the center of the old leather passenger seat slowly, steadily indenting. As if an adult weighing at least a hundred and fifty pounds had just silently sat down.
The foam inside the seat deformed under the weight.
Immediately, a bone-piercing chill pressed against his right side.
The hairs on the right side of Arthur's neck stood straight up. He didn't feel the airflow of breathing, but he could clearly sense a pocket of freezing air hovering less than four inches from his right cheek. His breath began to fog in the cabin.
Bzzzt... bzzzz... The powered-off car radio suddenly lit up with a yellow backlight. The frequency numbers on the screen began to cycle frantically, and the speakers spat out a burst of white static.
Arthur bit down on his lower lip until he tasted fresh blood. Both hands gripped the steering wheel in a death grip, his knuckles devoid of color.
He didn't turn his head. He refused to look to his right.
"Turn right at the next intersection."
He forced himself to stare straight at the road.
The torrential rain had formed numerous puddles on the asphalt. The van's headlights swept over them, and normally, they would reflect a muddy yellow glare.
But in the split second the wiper cleared the water film from his windshield, Arthur saw the reflections in the puddles.
They didn't reflect the sky. They didn't reflect the streetlamps.
Beneath less than an inch of water lay a pitch-black void. Worse, the raindrops hammering the puddles caused no ripples. The moment they touched the surface, they were simply "swallowed" by the blackness, vanishing without a single sound.
Vrooom— The van's tires plowed straight through the puddle, spraying water.
Arthur blinked hard. When he checked his rearview mirror, the puddle was just a puddle. The chewing sounds under the chassis had stopped. The passenger seat had popped back to normal. The radio screen was flat black again.
Everything seemed to have snapped back into a normal rainy night.
But Arthur's chest was heaving raggedly. Hands clamped on the wheel, veins bulging on his skin, he muttered neurotically, "Micro-sleep... just another waking hallucination from micro-sleep... It's all hallucinations..."
"Bzzzt—In... three hundred feet... you will reach... your destination."
The electronic navigation voice crackled from the terminal, laced with distorted static, sounding as if something was lodged in the throat of the speaker unit.
Arthur hit the brakes. The van rolled to a stop in front of an old, blocky apartment building that seemed to bleed right into the darkness. This was the end of the line for his eight-hundred-dollar bounty.
The terminal screen flickered twice. At the very bottom of the order details, a bolded note popped up:
"Must knock and wait. Must hand-deliver to customer." He stared out the window at the rusted iron security gate of the apartment building, his palms slick with cold sweat.