Ford

A hint of navy blue, seen for an instant and just as quickly vanished.

The owner of the junkyard snorted at the tourists who wasted good daylight hours gawking at the "haunted truck". Anything that brought in potential customers was fine by him. He'd even let a magazine guy take a shot of the truck once. What did he care if a bunch of rich ladies wanted to read nonsense in a glossy magazine? The money he earned from the story paid his rent for three months.

What he never admitted to anyone, not even his own wife, was that he'd seen the creature once as a young man. He had a tradition of leaving a can of cheap dog food out every night.

It was always licked clean by morning.

He hadn't always been a hideous creature. He'd even had a name once.

Who am I?

His memories of the past were disjointed. Incomplete.

There had been an underground bunker. Concrete walls and the gentle whisper of air being channeled through vents by hidden fans. Doctors walked the halls at all hours of the day and night, their white coats almost painful to look at in surroundings that were void of color.

There had been pain. Illness. Constant fear of death.

There was no sympathy from the white coats. They weren't selected for this task for their compassion. They were trying to win a war by any means necessary. They got paid for results.

He'd been oblivious to all the champagne being consumed two doors down the hall when the transformation took place. He'd been too busy howling with a voice bigger than all the wolves of the world. His skin bubbled and discolored until it was a uniform navy blue. His thick brown hair fell like so many autumn leaves. Clear blue eyes shrank to pinpoints of purest white that then multiplied until he saw the world through not two, but six lenses.

Confused and frightened, he hurled himself at where he thought the door should be.

Three concrete walls were reduced to so much powder.

He was the ultimate soldier...but his animal brain had overridden reason, if only temporarily. Bullets bounced off his flanks like pieces of gravel flung at the side of a tank. He took no notice. He could sense the sunlight rapidly shrinking in the west.

He had to follow the sun. He couldn't lose its light. Some primal instinct drove him. Darkness was fear. He could not be alone in the dark.

He burst through the exterior wall in time to see the last few golden rays slowly melting over the edge of the world. He ran blindly for the security fence, oblivious to the massive iron cage that sprang up like a giant Venus flytrap to stop him in his tracks. Not even his considerable strength could overcome an alloy blended from meteor dust.

Not yet.

He would lie on the truck's hood only when he was sure there were no humans in the yard.

The warmth on his belly took the edge off the fear that always plagued him. It allowed him occasional moments of clarity. Memories would surface.

The ones about driving were the best.

Eating up the miles with windows cranked down and tinny music on the radio. His pale fingers would slip through the air as if the hand he didn't keep on the wheel were a bird just waiting for the right moment to take flight. He'd looked for quiet highways where fear of other drivers was minimal. The occasional semi added an element of thrill. He liked to wait until he could see the widened eyes of the other driver before snatching his fingers out of the way of danger. He got a lot of blaring horns but the sound only made him want more.

He'd been driving the night his life changed. He remembered that much. It was an unfamiliar turn, one he thought would lead to some cheap roadside hotel. The chain-link fence was ominous. A warning.

One he did not heed.

It was just his luck that as he came to a dead end stop, he ran out of gas.

Strangers approached, though he cannot remember their faces now. They promised him a plate of hot food, a full tank of gas. Maybe he asked too many questions. Maybe they just needed someone without family, the kind of person no one would miss. He hadn't put up a fight. Had they made him a spectacular offer? Or had they tricked him? He was no soldier, he was sure of that much. They tried to convince him later that he had volunteered. He'd been too far gone to doubt their words.

Sleep had come. Lovely, peaceful sleep, such as he hadn't had since he was a child. His mind was foggy on waking. They fed him a breakfast spread worthy of the King. He didn't think to question this grand hospitality. They never asked him to pay. They simply took care of him, the parents he'd never known. When they began to worry for his health, he swallowed their medicine and considered himself fortunate. He was too trusting to consider it was the medicine making him sick.

He dreamed of the past.

He'd been fending for himself as long as he could remember. Childhood was a blur of moving from one unnamed town to another.

In six short months of adulthood, life was all about making enough cash to keep something in his belly and have a place to sleep. His truck was his only love, a dark blue beauty bought new in 1958. One-of-a-kind. All-American. It was his ticket to a better life.

The scientists kept him in a room studded with bits of metal that were painful to the touch. An alloy made of broken chunks of meteorite, stronger even than diamond. Every test of strength they could put before him was child's play. He treated state-of-the-art military equipment with contempt. Awesome weapons could not give him a paper cut. He was truly invincible, but for the elements of space.

He would cower away from the men who entered the room. Though he was 10 times their size, they carried electrified sticks that inspired fear, though the bolts did little more than tickle his skin. A useless bit of evolution left to him by ancestors that had for so long dreaded the elements of nature. The rumble of thunder that could shake the walls of even the most secure cave. The bolt of lightning that could strike the mightiest tree, reducing it to a black husk.

He might've been left in that room until the day the facility was shut down, then left to rot, if not for one scientist who had a change of heart. He was lured from his hiding place with charred chunks of meat that were bloody on the inside. As before, he went berserk when he smelled the night air. This time no clever booby-trap was in place to stop his progress. He cut through the chain-link security fence as if it were butter and tore across the desert landscape, never looking back.

She came into his life on a day when it was pouring rain. She did something no other person had yet dared to do.

She opened the door of the truck and sat in the driver's seat.

"I know you're in here. I've read all of his notes about you. How you came to that bunker for help and left a monster. I won't try to justify what he did...but maybe I can fix it."

He was intrigued. She had the sun-kissed skin of someone who had seen the ocean often. She was beautiful, yet there was something haunted. Something she had done so well to hide from the many people who claimed to know her. A dark family secret her own mother had chosen to simply ignore.

"He wasn't a bad man, not really. He did what he thought he had to do. That doesn't make it right, but if not for him, I wouldn't be here. You have to understand that if I'm going to help you."

He didn't want to leave the safety of his hiding place, yet her words were like a long-forgotten song. A flash of blue out of the corner of her eye. A ray of hope.

When she left, there was a package of white paper sitting on the driver's seat. It was full of raw hamburger, a better meal than he'd had in years.

She came every day, always leaving a treat directly from the butcher's shop. She told her story in bits and pieces. How her flighty mother had forced her into foster care at a young age. How the other children had teased her for the rumors surrounding her family. How her grandfather had taken her out of that miserable place and given her a real education, a real chance at life. He'd been so careful not to talk about his own past, though she asked so many questions. When he died, a letter directed to her. Dark secrets of the past written by a shaky hand. She hadn't wanted to believe. The ugly accusations of her peers...they'd all been true. Not only was her grandfather a true monster.

He had created one.

For 12 years, she had sought that abandoned facility where nightmares came true. She had studied his research and come to understand the process by which his life's work had reached its conclusion.

Now she sought to right a wrong that had not been of her doing but that only she could fix.

Six milky eyes peered at her in the driver's side mirror. It would be weeks before he would trust her enough to let her approach, to lay one of those silky soft hands on his smooth flank.

The messes she fed him were not always pleasant, but she would stay by his side weeping over him and promising that she would not give up until she had the solution. He trembled but did not make a sound when waves of pain washed over him, crashing and receding until merciful sleep found him at last.

Then came the day when the pain was gone.

He thought for a moment that he had gone blind. The world resolved into the limited input of two orbs that saw the world with such limitations, it was almost as if he was viewing it with his eyes closed.

Yet this worldview was in full, glorious color.

He marveled at his pale hands, his scarecrow frame and the way he could wiggle his individual toes. He began to weep, not merely sounds of animal frustration but true tears that dripped off the end of his elongated nose.

She'd fallen into a deep sleep in one of the chairs of her lab. The sound of a stranger brought her awake.

She wept too at the sight of him.

He stood at the edge of the junkyard, eating an ice cream cone and looking fondly on the truck that had been both his safe place and his prison for sixty lost years.

A small salute, a secret smile and a single tear were his farewell. She was waiting for him in a shiny new car of her own.

A Ford, of course.