Traffic Stop

by Eric Fomley

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

I don’t know where else to put this, so I’m writing it here. Chief says I have to process what I saw before he’ll bring me back to work. My therapist says that sometimes writing things down can help the brain process certain experiences. Like putting it on paper will make it any more distant from my mind or any less terrifying.

Nothing gets it out of my head. I can’t sleep at night. Sometimes during the day, I see or hear it. Hearing it is worse.

I’m going to give this my best go, though I still think I’ll sound crazy. Bear with me, and maybe this will help me let go of some of what happened. Stress from work is what Chief calls it. I’d take stress over this any fucking day.

The yellow Chevy Cobalt blew a stop sign. I was sitting across the street at the gas station catching up on reports, and I happened to look up and see it.

I flicked on my lights and pulled out behind it.

The Chevy sped up at first, and I thought I might have a runner, but soon it slowed and pulled off the road in front of an old factory. I ran the plates, and nothing came back funny–everything was up to date. But when I got out of the car and went to the window, I saw a middle-aged-looking man staring straight ahead and what looked like a shit ton of sweat pouring down his face.

“Good afternoon, sir, can I see your license and registration?”

He jumped like he hadn’t known I was there. “Uh, yeah. Uh.” He reached for the glove compartment. His hands shook from what I thought might be more than nervousness.

“You alright there, buddy?” I asked. Inside I was groaning because I really didn’t want the situation to turn into a drug stop or some other bullshit. It was 1:32 in the afternoon, and shift end time was 2. I was hoping to be home on the couch catching SportsCenter with a beer, not dealing with a strung-out man who was too big for the car he was driving.

He fumbled with the papers in the glove compartment and handed me a crumpled registration. Then he snagged his license from his wallet in his back pocket and gave it to me.

The names matched, Robert Pierce, born in 1972, from here in Granville.

“You blew the stop sign back there. Did you mean to do that?”

He looked shocked at the suggestion and gave me a sort of half laugh. “Uh, sorry, didn’t mean to.”

I nodded. “Well, I’m going to check on something, and I’ll be right back.”

“How long is this going to take?” he stammered.

“Why, you got somewhere to be?”

He smiled but didn’t respond. I noticed the sweat again. It was odd, not like droplets of water because it had a hue, skin-colored. Almost like the dude was some kind of melting fucking wax figure. I figured he had to be on some seriously fucked-up shit.

“What the hell?” I mumbled.

He looked startled again.

“Sir, can you step outside the vehicle for me?”

I was going to have to do a sobriety test after all. Or at least figure out what the guy’s deal was. No part of me wanted to. It had already been a long day, and I’d already busted a meth ring earlier. Wasn’t going to get lucky on this one.

He acted like he didn’t hear what me.

“You need to step out of your vehicle, sir.”

He clenched his teeth and slowly opened the car door, acting super-sketchy like he’d been caught doing something naughty. God, if we could convict just based off of body language, I could have arrested this guy right there.

He slowly stood up out of the car, and his shirt and pants were soaked. Like he’d been sweating gallons all morning. It was July but only in the upper seventies. This guy was sweating like we were in Death Valley doing P90X.

“You seem awfully jumpy,” I said. “Have you taken anything this morning?”

He shook his head violently, like the harder he shook the more true it would be, but I didn’t believe him for a second.

“You can tell me. It’s not a big deal if you did. I just need to know.”

Another crazy head shake.

I decided it would probably be in my best interest to get another unit over to me before I went ahead and searched the guy. Drug addicts have an unpredictability that can go from zero to a hundred quick.

I grabbed my radio, put my mouth close to it to request backup, and the guy took off, and I mean took off like he was 2008 Usain Bolt in the hundred meter.

“Fuck,” I said.

I flung his license and registration into his car and took off after him, calling in backup while I pulled my taser out of its holster and tried to catch up to the guy I was quickly losing.

He ran to the factory, flung open its rusty blue metal door, and disappeared inside.

In my head, I was screaming about going in after the guy. Doing so alone was not a good choice, but until my backup arrived, I was solo. Not a lot of choice. I decided to do it and do it slow.

I opened the door. I was breathing heavily, my lungs and legs burned with the sudden effort, and I creeped inside. The entrance had a foyer space prior to the main factory floor. I glanced around, and my heart jumped into my throat.

Slumped over on the ground in the corner was the guy, unmoving. Well, I thought it was the guy.

“Show me your hands! Your hands, show me your hands!” I pointed the taser at him, but I saw no movement. Eerie stillness. Like he was dead.

I walked over and knelt beside him, putting my finger on his neck. Then, I really saw it. I looked into the eyes and could see the back of the skull. What I’d taken for a body was like a weird-ass rubber suit or wax mold. It was dripping and empty. The guy must have ditched the suit and taken off.

“What the hell?”

I looked but didn’t see the zipper. It still looked like a full body, but it was an empty husk. Some weird ass costume, probably a Comic-Con type thing.

My heart thundered, and I took deep breaths. I checked outside to see if any other squad cars had shown up, but I remained alone. Shift change was a shitty time to be asking for backup. I let the door creak closed and headed for the one that went into the factory. I was already somewhat convinced that I’d lost the guy. Not that I knew what the guy actually looked like without his wax outfit.

As soon as I opened the second door, I saw movement. I pulled out my flashlight and shined it into the dark hallway. The third door on the left slammed shut. “I need you to come out. We can still fix this.”

I shined my light farther down the hallway. Office after office, left and right all the way down, maybe thirty doors between the two sides. I tried to remember what this place produced but drew a blank. It had been shut down for several years.

I made my way toward the door, grabbing my radio in the process to reach out to dispatch.

The static voice on the other end was Dena: “Two units are almost there.”

“Copy.”

I held the taser in my right hand up to the crack of the door while I managed to open it with my left, which was also holding my flashlight.

Inside the office was dark.

I shone my light around the room until I settled on him in the corner. He was huddled on the floor, knees tucked up to his chest, breathing in heavily. Only, it wasn’t him. The wax suit was gone, replaced by what looked an anatomy textbook’s picture of what someone looks like under their flesh. His skin was translucent, and blood splashed around his muscles and organs.

He didn’t have a face, but his skull looked up at me, eyeless.

I tried not to panic, tried to keep the bile inside of me down, and tried to convince myself that this was another suit, another costume that this freak was wearing. But was too lifelike for me to convince myself.

“I need to see your hands,” I said. My voice trembled. My light shook, too, in my jittery hand.

The thing slowly rose to its feet.

I tightened my sweaty grip on the taser. “Slowly.”

It rushed me, lunging right at me.

I pulled the trigger and deployed the taser, which shot out and hit nothing.

The guy disappeared. One moment he was almost on top of me, and the next, he vanished.

I heard something in the hallway behind me. Had I missed him somehow? Had he gotten around me, and my mind was just playing tricks? I felt sure I was losing it. I turned around and made my way to the hallway. I gathered up my deployed taser and put it away, pulling out my Glock instead.

Alarm bells went off in my head about what I’d just seen. This guy was dangerous. Costumes or not, he was aggressive, and I wasn’t willing to put myself in the line of fire.

I swept both sides of the hallway before going further down. I opened one door only for him to open a door several doors down and run across the hall.

“Freeze!”

He leapt into a room, not bothering to open the door. He passed right through like a fucking ghost.

Now I was seeing things. I moved for the room. Opened the door and looked inside.

Empty. Completely empty.

I clamped my eyes shut and reopened them. What was wrong with me? I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing. I heard another commotion down the hallway, and he was standing all the way at the end, back turned to me.

I walked towards him, looking at his exposed vertebrae.

He faced the wall at the end of the hallway, slowly raising a hand and pressing it against the drywall.

“Listen buddy, I don’t want to have to use this. Please turn around slowly.”

He didn’t respond. One of the bony, translucent hands dragged downward along the wall’s surface. I took a moment to realize what was happening. He unzipped the wall; that’s the best way I can describe it. Like the wall was some sort of flesh that tore as he slid his hand down it.

The gap opened, and instead of more of the factory on the other side, I saw something else.

He turned, looked at me with the eyeless skull that was his face, and nodded his head one time, before he ran into the hole he’d ripped into the wall.

I’m not proud to admit that I fired my service weapon at him three times. If the bullets made any impact, it didn’t show.

“Stop!” I screamed. I ran to the opening in the wall and froze.

I can’t describe what I saw the right way. It wasn’t anywhere on the planet Earth. The hole opened into a space like the inside of a stomach. The walls were made of flesh. Organic material like plants with razor teeth jutted out of the ground, which was like some sort of pinkish tongue, designed to eat. The structure of the ceiling looked like the inside of a ribcage. Whatever creature was there might have been swallowing the Earth itself. The air that wafted out was moist and hot and had the strongest odor of animal rot I’d ever smelled. It turned my stomach, and I gagged.

But above all else were the screams. Oh god, the screams. A cacophony of screams came from beings of flesh and blood, some that sounded human, some that might not have been. They sounded like the whole universe was crying out at the abomination I saw through the tear in the wall. They begged for reprieve.

I dropped my gun and fell to my knees. The sights and sounds were enough to drive me mad. Tears blurred my eyes as I took in the sensations. I gasped, choked, and couldn’t catch my breath.

Then the hole started to stitch itself closed, from the floor to the ceiling, like a suture knitting the wound that connected our world to the hellish place in front of me.

Soon I was in front of blank drywall, in an abandoned factory in Granville, alone.

That’s when my backup showed.

They said they found me murmuring, but I don’t remember that. I do remember the tears that wouldn’t stop streaming down my face and the inability to tell them what exactly happened, what I saw, and where the suspect had gone. I sat in silence until they brought the Chief out.

He relieved me of duty.

I’ll have to stop talking about it after I put this here. I’ve been trying to convince myself for a month that none of it happened. That I didn’t see, feel, or truly experience all of it. Lying to yourself is an art, I’m finding. Because no matter what I say to convince myself otherwise, I know what I saw. I see it throughout the day and every night when I close my eyes.

I’ll have to pretend because I need my job. I’ll have to keep it to myself, because people don’t like their comfortable reality being fucked with by things they don’t think are possible.

But what I’m telling this piece of paper here, in my therapist’s office, is that I know what lives on the other side of this reality. The things over there have ways to come over here, and all I can do, night and day from this day forward, is pray that the zipper dividing out worlds stays shut.