The rain was merciless. Small rivers of water streamed down the windshield of Mitch’s truck, completely blurring his view of the road. Interstate five stretched a short distance in front of him only to disappear into a sea of howling gray. The windshield wipers slapped out a feverish rhythm in attempt to clear the glass. Water and wind pierced the cab of the truck to steal Mitch’s senses from the road. Gusts of wind occasionally forced the truck sideways. He couldn’t remember driving through such weather before. Making his delivery on time wasn’t worth it. The storm had won, and Mitch decided not to take the risk of pushing on. He pulled the rig over onto the shoulder and powered everything down except for the central dash screen. Even the satellite feed was having a hard time getting through the storm. His screen flickered and skipped through intermittent images, trying to make sense of the sporadic data it was receiving. He was going to have wait it out.

            Mitch released a deep sigh and stared into the gray. He hated being late. Punctuality felt like such an easy character strength to master. He prided himself on getting things done and getting them done on time. He unclicked his seatbelt and continued to stare down the road, contemplating whether or not he should press on. He thought he saw shadows moving through the torrents of rainwater. Maybe he just wished he saw someone. The loneliness of his situation settled in his chest - sitting in a steel box on the side of an empty highway surrounded by an ocean of gray, stationary, making no progress. The sound of the storm was impressive. Small explosions of water pelting steel and glass filled his ears. It was going to be difficult to sleep.

            He logged the time and reason for stopping into the dash screen and powered the console down. The dark only added to his feeling of isolation. There was nothing else for him to do but sleep and wait it out. He rolled out of his seat and climbed into the back half of the cab which was set up like a miniature apartment. He settled into the small cot against the rear of the cab and propped himself up under a dim dome light. The cot was barely wide enough for Mitch to fit on. He had always hated sleeping in the truck. The size of it made him feel heavier than he really was. Heavy and clumsy. It was difficult to move in the crowded space without his elbows knocking into things. He opened a small drawer under the cot and thumbed through a variety of dry snacks. It seemed right to eat, but he wasn’t hungry. He settled on a bag of peanuts.

       He grabbed a discolored leather notebook out of the elastic pocket on the back of the driver’s seat and pulled a bottle of water out of the mini-fridge. As he flipped through the already spent pages of his journal his mind drifted with the storm. He always wrote down his thoughts before he slept. Short bits of poetic prose were is favorite. The sound of the rain working against the truck gave him plenty to think about. And of course he enjoyed writing about himself.

The mightiest men wage war and suffer loses at the feet of the slightest foes. On a desolate highway, a three-hundred pound trucker forfeits himself to raindrops and peanuts.

Mitch smiled and popped a peanut into his mouth. He slouched a little lower in the cot and let the storm fill his ears.

        When he awoke, the storm had passed. Even the wind had given up in its battle against the big rig. The cab of the truck was silent. Mitch tried to roll over and get more comfortable on the tiny cot, a bed built for men half his size. The cab was dimly lit. A faded pink hue filled the truck. Mitch sighed and pulled himself upright using one of the many handholds positioned throughout the truck for easy maneuvering. The sun was almost up. Mitch climbed back into the driver’s seat and tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. He continued to rub his face and neck, trying to wake himself. A stray peanut fell from his beard and into his lap. He flicked it to the floor. Mitch reached over to the center console to power everything back on, but then he noticed them, the signs.

            Two billboards, maybe a couple hundred yards apart, stared back at him from an otherwise bleak landscape. They were obviously made by the owners of the properties that neighbored the freeway. Separated by a fence and a mixture of burnt grass and star thistle, they stood, the only prominent structures for miles.
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            The first billboard depicted the right forearm of Jesus with a large iron nail through the palm. Blood poured from the fresh wound and the arm faded out just before the elbow. It was enormous. The hand almost seemed to be reaching towards the freeway as if grasping at an unsuspecting passersby. The bottom eighteen inches of the billboard were painted pure red as if Jesus’ hand was floating in a fish tank and slowly filling it with blood from the bottom up. Just above the puddle of blood the sign read “This blood was spilled for your sins” in harsh, black letters. The sign was ominous and lit with the faint pink tint of the rising sun.
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            The second billboard was just barely comprehensible from the cab of Mitch’s truck as it was further down the road and partially blocked from view by the severed arm of Jesus. It was poorly conceived and even more poorly painted. In a scattered, unsymmetrical design the sign contained a blue peace sign, a white dove, a redwood tree, and what appeared to be either two leafless palm trees leaning away from one another or a pair of knuckle-less fingers holding up the peace sign. Mitch figured it was the latter. Sprawled across the length of the sign in bubbly green letters read the words, “Peace on Earth.”  Mitch stared at the pair of signs for a length of time trying to capture in words the mixture of emotions the signs inflicted upon him. He knew that the signs were meant to inspire some sort of strong emotions, yet he felt nothing recognizable, nothing he could measure in meter or lyric. They were aggressive in their design. The signs assaulted him, burdened him with conflict he couldn’t articulate.

               He didn’t feel guilty or hopeful, which appeared the intended emotions to be conveyed. He immediately thought about those two emotions, they came to mind, but he didn’t feel them. He felt nothing at first. Both signs looked as if they were there just in spite of the other. Mitch somehow knew that one neighbor had only put up his sign to piss off the other neighbor. Who put up their sign first was a mystery. Neither really seemed interested in what it was they were advertising but both were devout in contradicting the other. Mitch, in response, felt terribly uneasy. There was so much anger and contempt in these two signs. They were screaming at one another. It must have been the hatred between them that burnt the grass.

             Mitch stared at the two signs for a great length of time, his eyes switching back and forth, reading and rereading the words. Blood, peace, your sins, earth, peace, blood was spilled, peace on earth, blood peace, blood earth, sins on earth, blood for peace, the signs slowly melted together, the heat of their hatred warmed Mitch’s face to a crimson red. Finally, he realized that he could not imagine one existing without the other standing in stark contrast. Each defined the other. Mitch grew furious. He hated those signs. They filled him with a rage he could not explain. He was gritting his teeth, and his breathing had quickened. The true weight of his work came crashing down on him. His chest tightened and his eyes grew heavy.
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            He was hesitant when his uncle first told him that the company was going to start accepting Decon contracts. The incentives were just too good, and jobs weren’t exactly pouring in. For the first time, Mitch began to think of all that he was doing and what he had been doing since Seattle. Driving debris up and down the coast to recycle pieces of a once great American city. Chunks of Seattle were strapped to back of Mitch’s truck – scraps deemed valuable enough to be shipped to a recycling plant outside of Sacramento. He didn’t know what the parts were or where they came from exactly – a school, a hospital, somebody’s home.

            Everything was being recycled with painstaking care; asphalt, steel, copper, glass, and anything synthetic, which was practically everything, were recycled. Old cities and broken neighborhoods were bought out, liquidated, and recycled to fund newer, nicer living districts. Huge sections of Seattle were no longer inhabitable, and the parts that were inhabitable were undesirable and riddled with memories of hatred and destruction. The remaining city stood as yet another victim to fanatical extremism. Other cities could benefit from her loss. Why leave her skeleton standing in memorial to abhorrence, to war and terrorism? Mitch always felt it was a depressing job. But necessary. Recycling was a good thing after all. Before, he had never felt complicit in this grave undertaking to reinvent a struggling world power – a once unquestionable nation. But now, Mitch felt guilty. Looking at these two billboards screaming violence at each other against an otherwise meaningless rural setting felt more than symbolic. A storm stopped him for this very purpose, he concluded. He needed to see these signs, truly see them.
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            Mitch sat in silence and watched taillights disappear into the distance. Every seventh vehicle or so was another big rig carrying fragments of Seattle. Mitch tapped a sequence of buttons on the main console and a loud mechanical sound reverberated throughout the cab. He climbed down out of the cab and worked the couplings to the trailer loose. He disengaged the cab entirely and climbed back inside. His uncle was going to be disappointed.

His progress was slow but certain. Each step brought Mitch only a few more inches above the valley floor. The ground was mostly frozen with large patches of snow speckling the mountainside – the wind unbearably cold. Each inch was a victory – an inch of distance between himself and the hum of the machine. The snow conquered more of the landscape the higher Mitch climbed. The air was becoming noticeably thinner. He had to stop periodically to catch his breath. The drone mimicked his movements, resting when he did, moving when he did. It seemed to strain itself to keep up now, its whirring became more defined the higher they ascended. Occasionally it would stutter in its flight and click a few times – making some mysterious internal adjustment, before pressing on. Every time a flat surface presented itself, the drone would land and wait for Mitch to continue. Whenever the machine stopped within a short distance of him, he would hurl a rock or chunk of ice at it. He figured it had to run out of power eventually. It can’t last forever if it has to expend power dodging rocks. Like trying to knock a dragonfly off a stalk of grass, every time Mitch threw at the boxy metallic miscreant, it would quickly buzz about in a semicircle and land carefully back on its perch. The two of them would repeat this dance a few times. Mitch was always the first to tire, his aim weakening with every throw.

Mitch was determined to beat it, to outlive the little machine so hell-bent in its purpose to stalk him. He found himself desperately wanting the drone to do something new – to spontaneously combust – to speak or transform, or unsuspectingly shoot him in the face with a laser, anything but just follow him. But no, it was content with its aggressive observing.

None of the machines had tried to interact with him since the border. They just watched. The constant surveillance was maddening. Mitch’s mind raced in search of answers. What was it waiting for? Surely it had the ability to kill him whenever it wanted but it did nothing. It just followed him. What benefit could possibly be gained by flying a piece of advanced military machinery to the top of a mountain to follow him? Mitch. Mitch the truck driver. Mitch the amateur poet. Mitch, an objectively underwhelming and average man. An American citizen without a dangerous bone in his body. There had to be someone behind the drone. Mitch figured it had to have an operator. Someone, somewhere had a reason to follow him. To follow him and not kill him. Maybe they wanted to question him. But what did he know? What could he say about the community that they hadn’t already dug up?

To continue up the mountain without going through the snow was now impossible. The patches of hardened ice had all but come together in a mosaic of barren moonscape. Hiking on top of the snow patches, Mitch struggled to stay upright. The snow wasn’t very fresh and mostly frozen on top, and Mitch’s boots would slide around on the surface. He found that if he stomped his feet down he could break through the surface of the snow and secure his footing. He looked over his shoulder and smiled. The drone seemed to be struggling to keep up. Between the freezing temperatures and the thin air, the drone had difficulty staying airborne. Whatever magic kept if afloat had its own vulnerabilities. The slope was becoming less and less hospitable. Few flat surfaces were present for him or the drone to rest on. It kept its distance and he continued on. The clouds seemed close enough now, as if he could reach out and touch them. The gloomy landscape had a unique beauty in its whites, and grays, and browns. The metallic body of the drone and Mitch’s own dingy clothes blended neatly with the environment. 

Exhaustion began to sink in and Mitch decided to rest. He turned his back to the slop and plopped down, breaking through the thin frozen surface of the snow and creating a small seat for himself. He dug the heels of his boots in and looked out on the valley. The clouds didn’t permit him the best of views, but he could – at moments – see a great distance. Small flurries of snow began to pelt the side of his face. It was difficult to tell if it was actually snowing or if the wind was simply sweeping up patches of dry snow and throwing it across the mountainside. The clouds briefly parted and Mitch could see the beauty of Northern California stretched out before him. The valley below was parted by a slick grey line cutting through the fields and hillsides. Interstate five, the bloodline of the west coast, was vibrant with life. Rivers of pulsing light cut through pine stands and green fields.

The sun pierced through the clouds and hit the side of the mountain where both Mitch and the drone were resting. The light reflecting off the snow was nearly blinding, but the slight rise in warmth was welcoming. The drone immediately flipped open some panels to capture whatever solar energy it could take in. Mitch glanced around quickly, looking for something to hurl at the obnoxious little war machine. He plowed his bare hands into the half frozen snow and started throwing chunks of ice down the mountain, but the drone was too far away. The ice broke apart mid-air and shattered into pieces on the ground before reaching the blasted thing. The machine didn’t even flinch. Mitch stood and started patting down his pockets looking for something to throw. Nothing. Furious, Mitch took to unlacing his shoe and ripped it off his foot. He regained his balance and took careful aim. He pitched the boot down-slope at the drone. It fell short but took a fortunate bounce and cartwheeled directly toward it. With what seemed like impossible speed, the drone retracted its panels and zipped straight up into the air. Mitch’s shoe continued bouncing down the mountain.

The drone settled itself silently into a comfortable hover in front of Mitch, just out of reach. With fierce unadulterated contempt, Mitch stared into the contraption. His breathing grew more forceful. Without breaking eye contact with what Mitch could only guess was a camera in the front of the machine, Mitch reached to remove his other shoe. The drone zipped backwards a dozen feet in anticipation. Mitch dropped the shoe at his side. He forcefully removed his coat and dropped it behind him. The wind lashing against his sweat-soaked clothes was excruciating. He loosened his belt and whipped it out from his waist. The drone flinched. He continued to undress, dropping all of his clothes into a small pile in the snow where he was just sitting. Apprehensively the drone approached, humming, and returned to its place just in front of Mitch.

As if life itself was escaping his pale, pink body, Mitch drew in all the air his lungs could manage, and released the most animalistic howl. Words could not satisfy his intentions; sound alone was all he could produce. The scream surrounded the drone and bounded down the mountainside. A sound beyond lungs and blood and flesh – it was the sound of surrender, of a man reluctantly releasing his will to fight. His final resignation to the cruel reality hovering in front of him. His scream temporarily changed the direction of the wind and forced the windswept trees to stand upright. Flakes of snow swirled and danced in front of his face, moved by his contempt, they too refused to fall and took to the sky. He sat heavily in the snow, naked, atop his pile of clothes. He crossed his legs and stared beyond the machine and into the valley below.

“Your move, you little piece of shit.”