By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
The rest of the conversation kind of unraveled from there. What I had been hoping would be a nice conversation, a way to unwind, maybe even something more, turned into a tense and awkward confrontation. By the end, Colander touched the back of my quivering hand and said she hoped I could find peace in this situation but told me not to blame someone else for my pain.
And really that just made me hurt more. Because I had been blaming myself all this time. And as I sat in the Molten Java Café, the events of that day erupted through my mind once again.
April 22, 2015. I was traveling with my parents across the country. We were going to attend my older sister’s wedding in Chicago, but at the time we didn’t have enough money to buy plane tickets. I was the one driving in my new pickup truck I had purchased for my electrician business.
I was proud of that truck. Because I thought it was big, tough. Safe.
I don’t know what happened, really, and the more I thought about it, the less I understood it. We were going down the highway through Iowa, highway 35. Seventy miles an hour. My mom and dad were riding next to me, bickering about whether or not they had turned out the lights in the bathrooms—they were forever forgetting. I was laughing, teasing them that I could install a clapper. It was 4:36 in the afternoon. I remember there were a lot of cars out on the road, and we had hit quite a few grasshoppers bouncing through the crisp spring air. I still remember the little popping sounds as they hit the windshield
Because that sound was one of the last I heard before it happened. The splat of a grasshopper, then something burning in my leg. Pain. So much pain. Just suddenly, consuming me. And blood, streaming, staining my pant leg.
In that moment, in my panic, I lost control of the big, tough truck I was driving. We jerked, skidded, flew off the road, into the ditch, flipped, spun. Everything whirled around me, screams swirling into my ears, then impact, cracking, silence.
And when the doctors tried to figure out what had happened, when they took a look at my leg, parts of the skin and muscle and even bits of the bone were just missing. Not broken off, not in pieces in the car, just gone. Patches had vanished from other parts of my body as well. The medics had a terrible time trying to stop the blood loss, but they managed it.
The doctors said it was a miracle that I survived.
But no one else in the truck had a miracle that day.
And I wasn’t the only person who suddenly, inexplicably lost parts of their body at that moment. Many across the nation experienced something similar. Bits and pieces of peoples’ bodies—sometimes muscle, sometimes bone, sometimes most of an internal organ—just disappeared, causing pain, confusion, death. Colander lost her sight in one eye, but luckily didn’t lose anything else.
That wasn’t the last time it happened, or even the first time really. There were other incidents as well, sometimes involving people from Final Pumpkin, though not always. Of course Murdock was just the latest, but there were many other incidents around the country and around the globe. But the doctors couldn’t figure out how these occurrences came about, and the theories became wilder and crazier every day.
Flesh-eating viruses.
Radiation.
Body-melting invisible death rays.
Miniature momentary black holes.
Of course I wanted to know what had caused the incidents (dubbed the “disappearing death virus” by excitable journalists). But much more than that, I was just shocked, stunned, terrified it would happen again.
My insurance honored their contract and gave me a new truck not long after my life was totaled.
For some reason, I don’t drive it very much.