Carl the Death Driver
Chapter.3: Love’s Lasting Ride • Part.7
Introduction: Buckle up for the seventeenth installment of “Carl the Death Driver”. After emerging from a local liquor store, Victor Porter found himself at the center of a parking lot standoff, with irate motorists demanding he move an abandoned vehicle. Despite his impaired judgment and a baseline instinct to flee, Victor succumbed to the pressure of the crowd and climbed into the oddly sterile cockpit of a vintage sedan. With no way to interface with the vehicle, he panicked and started to scream commands in the hopes that he was dealing with an automated machine. The crowd grew more aggressive and Victor was surrounded. Now, the vehicle is about to tear loose and take Victor on a high speed reckless joy ride.
So Far: Following the private death of a reclusive engineer named Carl, his namesake vehicle emerged to conduct property destruction and bring about mayhem in the local neighborhood. The sociopathic actions of this inexplicable vehicle may be connected to Carl’s death. A brief backstory told of Carl’s bioengineering career and his life with Annette, a research scientist whose battle with infertility and stage III cancer eventually left Carl in a state of severe isolation. Recently, the narrative shifted to Victor Porter, a bank employee hiding a substance use disorder and a suspended driver’s license. After becoming intoxicated with his friend Bingo, Porter encounters a vintage car in the parking lot of a strip mall. The vehicle is odd and impossible to operate. LUVCARL is about to ignite.
The vehicle lurched forward with such force that Porter was slammed back into his seat. LUVCARL banked hard through the strip mall parking lot and blew through the exit with a bounce onto the boulevard. Porter was lifted from the driver’s seat, knocking his head against the roof. His body was thrown forward and his chest whacked the horn while landing back in place. As LUVCARL accelerated up Polk Boulevard, Porter’s attempts to gain control proved futile. His hands gripped the wheel, but its movements seemed automated. LUVCARL headed to the freeway on-ramp three miles straight ahead. Porter reached for the seat belt as he was tossed about within the violently weaving vehicle zigzagging through traffic. He was becoming overrun with fear and low moans escaped his throat with each near miss. Porter alternated between calling out to see if someone was listening and yelling commands in a desperate hope to understand how to gain control over the car.
Porter was well aware of the other drivers sharing the road and bearing witness to the reckless behavior of his host vehicle. They became ensnared in the chaos and minor collisions left in LUVCARL’s trail of turmoil. They could only catch a shadowy glimpse of Porter and weighed heavy judgement on him and the violent style of driving he had no say in. Porter was the faux driver strapped in for a reckless ride with no chance to get out.
LUVCARL hit the on ramp to the southbound San Diego Freeway moving a good 20mph over the speed limit. Porter pulled the seatbelt strap tighter. Five lanes of freeway landscape rushed into view. Under his breath Porter begged for the car to slow down. He regripped the wheel in case whatever was controlling this ride succumbed to his pleas. He could feel the strained tendons in his fingers each time he tried to tighten his hold a tiny bit more. Porter resisted the unpredictable movements. Flashes of acceleration followed by stuttered braking, faking left and then cutting right. Porter’s body locked into survival mode. His shoulder blades mashed against the seat back, his arms pushed away from the steering wheel, and his feet instinctively pressed down on a slippery and fraying floor mat. He held his breath in anticipation of each collision and exhaled in the moment after a near miss.
The middle lane was clear up ahead as LUVCARL maintained excessive speed. Tense and exhausted, Porter tried to calm himself believing the car was making more streamlined maneuvers and had no intention to crash. He regained some composure and trained his thoughts on an escape while held captive at over 80mph. The configuration of the dashboard before him offered nothing to interface with except the wheel. Porter was still convinced that someone was watching, listening, and remotely driving the vehicle. “Can I give you a destination? Can you at least slow down? I don’t have a driver’s license.”
There was no response and the car was still flying down the freeway. Porter’s feelings of fear and distress subsided a bit more as he realized they were stable in their lane and the car’s pace was now steady. He returned to audible commands. If no one was virtually operating the car, maybe there was a way to communicate with an internal system gone awry. Porter was desperately grasping for solutions to a problem he knew he didn’t understand. If there was no one listening or watching, he could only guess that there was a pre-programmed vocabulary to make it all work. Porter was searching for the right keyword or recognizable phrase. “Slow down. Reduce speed. Decelerate!” An exotic muscle car rocketed past on the right and LUVCARL picked up the pace a tick. “Decelerate vehicle! Set speed to sixty-five miles per hour. Drive within speed limit!“ LUVCARL maintained his high speed in the center lane. Porter’s short-lived experiment had failed and any ounce of optimism he felt moments earlier had now vanished. Fear and distress returned and rapidly transformed into frustration and rage. Porter shook the steering wheel and lashed out at his imaginary captor. “Take me home. Who the fuck is doing this? I want out. Stop the car!”
LUVCARL reduced speed. Porter’s skin tingled and the tension of every muscle throughout his body released. Something finally triggered the vehicle to react. He felt overwhelmed with a moment of euphoria. Then, in the time it took to travel 500 feet of road, that moment past. The car came to a complete stop in the middle of the freeway. Hazard lights automatically came on and the repeated clicking in the cabin transported Porter back to a heightened state of horrific shock. He had avoided the fatal impact of a high speed crash only to be plowed over on concrete open road.
Cars swerved around him with whining horns as they whizzed by. A deep rumbling blast from an air horn approached from the rear. The steady boom zeroed in on Porter. He bowed forward with his chin tucked into his chest, expecting to be consumed by a fast moving massive object. He told himself that in a second he’d feel nothing. Then, an immense class 8 truck pulling a double deck car hauler blanketed the driver’s side in darkness. LUVCARL’s chassis swayed and rocked. Porter and the vehicle were still intact. Lights filled the rearview mirrors and then cut to the left. A white four door sedan skidded over into the diamond lane and side swiped a small SUV moving at speed. Porter could hear the impact followed by screeching of sheet metal against concrete. In quick succession, three more cars rammed into the first two. More headlights lit up the cabin and moved off to the right.
Desperate and disoriented with the speed of everything moving around him, Porter implored the vehicle to get him out of this spot. “New destination. Drive! Move forward!” He was embarrassed by the circumstances of his own death before actually dying. Why did someone ditch this car? Who were those crazy screaming people in the parking lot? Why get in the car in the first place? Who stops their car in the middle of a freeway?
A light duty truck with blinking yellow hazard lights slowed and stopped about two car lengths behind LUVCARL. Porter paused his attempts to will the car to do something other than sit there waiting for an assured collision. Studying the truck he felt a sliver of solace, as there was a buffer at his back. He started quizzing himself for an explanation. If asked, his predicament was a mystery. And who was in the truck — a law enforcement officer, someone from Caltrans, some crazy good Samaritan? If it was the law, Porter was certain he’d find himself in deeper shit than his DUI. Meanwhile, with the wreckage in the carpool lane to his left and other motorists skidding into an open field to his right, the evening traffic was unrelenting. Unwilling to slow down, cars and trucks dodged the growing obstacles and shot through the gaps.
Porter was trying to see if anyone stepped out of the stopped truck behind him when his attention was drawn to another car honking and rapidly reducing speed two lanes to his right. An older man wearing a baseball cap had slowed to a crawl in order to express an irate statement that was impossible to hear. Shouting something through his half-open window, the man’s head snapped back as he was rear-ended. The baseball cap flew and his car bounced forward and became a blur as multiple cars whizzed by in the lane between them. The growing volume of wreckage and injuries was weighing on Porter. Before internal blame could take hold, he redirected all fault to the assholes back in the parking lot who bullied him into this sociopathic vehicle.
Teaser: The silence of a dead stop in the heart of a freeway is a prelude to disaster. As the world splinters into a high-velocity nightmare of screeching metal and inevitable impact, Porter is forced into a final, desperate gamble for survival. He is no longer just a passenger; he is a man pleading with a machine for a second chance. Will a raw instinct to escape be enough to trigger a miracle, or is he simply waiting for the darkness to close in?
New to Carl’s story? My monthly newsletter provides easy access to recent installments and keeps you in the loop.
