Possessions
By James A. Moore

Chapter One

Eileen Corin shifted gears and slid into the left hand lane effortlessly. One of the rare advantages of working the graveyard shift was dealing with less traffic, and while she hated the hours, she loved the traffic flow. Still, her son was right; it stank that she had to work on his birthday. But the bills, as she often told her kids, didn't believe in paying themselves, and just of late they'd been piling up. She should have learned her lesson a long time ago about using credit cards. Some lessons just refused to be learned.

The night was cooler than she'd expected, and she rolled down the window a crack as she sped down the interstate. The only music she could find on the radio was more along the lines of the bubble gum Brittany listened to, and she hit on a talk station where a man with a deep, resonant voice was talking about terrorism. It was a subject she could have done without but his voice was pleasant. In her mind she drew the picture of a handsome man who matched the voice, tall and lean and attractive, but in a nice, slightly rough way. A man whose face had character and strength. If he had a nice ass too, that would just be a plus.

She needed something pleasant to hear, something pleasant to think about. Just of late the only subject that wanted to stay in her head was the one she wanted to avoid the most: her mother had been calling her at work, and that was something she didn't want to deal with. Any and every thing about her mother was something she didn't want to deal with. Her hand slid up to finger the necklace she always wore, only to find a void where it should have been. She cursed herself under her breath and remembered setting it down on the bathroom counter just before she took her shower earlier in the afternoon.

Not good, she decided, but not really a reason to panic. Just stay calm and everything will be fine. It'll still be there when I get home, and that's only a few hours from now. Hardly enough time for anything to happen.

The wind outside the car was pleasant, a soft cool breeze that just plain felt good. It hardly ever seemed to be the right temperature out in the real world these days, without at least the benefit of the air conditioner. Maybe she'd break down and open the window in her little office when she got to work. She felt her mind drifting, imagining what it would be like to hit the beach in a few weeks when the weather finally permitted, the soft warm breeze, the scent of the ocean and the sweet feeling of the sun on her skin, warming her and relaxing her muscles...

She was still enjoying the weather when the winds suddenly shifted. The force of the gale strong enough to shake the car and almost force her into the next lane. She snapped out of her light daze and looked around, shocked to see that she was no longer the only one on the road. There were two SUVs and tractor-trailer near her now. She'd barely been aware that she was so tired and now she'd damn near gone to sleep behind the wheel. What the hell was wrong with her?

She was almost willing to put it off to depression at the thought that her baby boy was eighteen today. How had the years gone by so damned fast? But there was that nagging voice in the back of her head, the one that had kept her free from her mother's influences for all of these years. That voice told her the sleepiness she felt might not be completely natural.

She shook her head and sucked in a deep breath, trying to make herself come more fully awake. Damn, but she hated those thoughts. Almost twenty years away from her mother and still the woman could pull her into a dark it of fear. But that very fear had kept her alive and free for a long time, and she intended to stay that way.

Something out there in the darkness had different ideas. She heard it, first as a faint flapping noise and then soon enough as the sound of thundering wings, cutting through the air with hellish intensity. Eileen's eyes scanned everywhere, seeing nothing and almost desperate to find the source of the noise.

"Jesus, please, not now...Please let me just be jumpy..."

The voice on the radio laughed good naturedly at someone's joke, the handsome voice that she wanted to hear again and again softly chuckling at some witticism or another. All she could think was how badly she wanted to be back at home with Brittany and Chris and away from the noises that were growing louder but not showing her anything that could let her know where they were coming from. The fantasy voice she'd been halfway to falling in love with was now just another source of distraction when she desperately needed to have her eyes on the road and her hands firmly on the wheel.

On her right the eighteen-wheeler suddenly shifted roughly in her direction, tilting awkwardly and surely ready to jackknife. She yanked the wheel hard to the left and looked at the mountainous bulk as it teetered, plainly able to see that wheels on her side were taking too much weight, bulging and threatening to explode under the pressure. Her eyes looked upward toward the top of the Trans-State Delivery Services trailer and saw that the metal roof of the thing was actually visible. And beyond that, a hulking blackness that shifted and pushed and rammed itself against the side of the truck, its wings pounding the air, its thick legs flexing in an effort to keep its balance as it sailed along next to the truck, traveling at over sixty miles per hour.

And knew that she was right to be afraid, right to worry over the loss of the necklace. Her mother had found her again.

Fear can save and fear can kill. Under the right circumstances the raw emotion will kick in with a heady dose of adrenaline and allow for the fight to flight instincts to do their thing. It's seldom possible to use it to your advantage when a truck is falling toward you on the interstate. True, Eileen's car swerved away from the truck and that could have saved her, but she was already in the far left lane and instead of getting clear of the massive truck and its terrified drivershe could see his grizzled, wide face, his mouth open in a scream that showed too well the color of his teethshe slammed into the solid concrete barrier and felt the world tip her toward the very vehicle she tried to get away from.

Her seatbelt held her firmly in place as the road was suddenly over her head. Her hair caught by the breeze she'd been admiring, pulled out against the hood of the car, her shoulders yanked violently as the hair was torn from the roots in her scalp, and she let out a small, inconsequential yelp as she saw the truck rolling toward her through the pain she felt in her last seconds of life.

Eileen was killed by the impact of the fully loaded tractor falling onto her car and collapsing the structure around her. She never even felt the airbags that deployed in a vain effort to save her from impact. She never felt the asphalt that shredded the hood and windshield along with those safety bladders as both vehicles continued their slide down the road and through the concrete barrier that separated them from oncoming traffic. She never saw the oncoming Exxon tanker that never had a chance to stop before it was ramming into the entire twisted sliding mass. She never felt the explosion as the gasoline spilled and ignited and bloomed into a fireball large enough to rattle windows for several blocks around the road, waking people and sending dogs into a frenzy of barking. She didn't hear the trucker who hit her screaming as he slowly roasted alive, trapped in the cab of his company truck.

She died quickly. It was a small blessing, but a blessing nonetheless.

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