Chapter 12
Revenge is a dish best served cold
Monday morning saw Nom driving to Michigan with a new car, new ID, plenty of cash, and a new debit card. He had a firm idea about what he wanted to do. The breakdown of Reverend Ater was the talk of the town. Nom gleefully ate it up over the news station he had playing. Ater was in the critical care ward, and his wife was calling a prayer service to heal him. Nom could not stop laughing.
The trucks that he had been driving had their speeds capped by a governor to sixty miles an hour. The Miata had no such limitation, and the miles seemed to fly by at an exceptional rate. That evening, Nom stopped to sleep in Texarkana. Tuesday, he was in Indianapolis. Wednesday, he arrived with the sunset in his native Detroit suburb of Pleasant Ridge. A few miles from his grandfather's house, Nom took a room at the local Hampton Inn under his assumed name. The prepaid debit card he had procured at the Texas Walmart worked like a charm. When he got to his room, he knew that it was time for a little "housekeeping" before he saw to the old business.
Nom used a Vonage account wired through TOR to check the voicemail on his old phone. The trucking company had left him a string of messages demanding to know what was going on. Using the improvised ghost phone, he called his former employer. The call was untraceable shy of the federal government's resources. Better yet, since he was calling through his own voicemail, it would look as if he was using his old phone to civilian caller ID.
Only an hour remained before the shift change at corporate, so he assumed that he would be on hold for five or ten minutes. The driver managers would prioritize clearing their business for the day first.
Ten minutes passed, and he was still listening to the recruiting adds that the company used for hold music. Nom was feeling irritated, but he decided to persist. The company could make quite a fuss, and shorten the amount of time he had before the police started hunting him. Ten minutes turned in to fifteen, into twenty, and so on.
Nom decided to try another path. He disconnected the call and tried to call HR directly. He was calling in to quit, so why speak to his immediate supervisor? It was now four-thirty in the afternoon back at headquarters. He had only a half an hour left. When he called HR, he was shocked to find a voicemail telling him that the department had closed at five o'clock. It said he should wait and call back the next business day.
The bastards checked out half an hour early! He thought.
Nom called the driver manager hot line again, and, thirty minutes later, a voice promptly interrupted the hold adds. It said the driver manager line was now closed for the night, and he needed to call the after-hours line. Nom was now becoming pissed, but he complied. Twenty minutes later he finally found himself speaking with a human being.
"What the hell is going on there?" He demanded. "I've been on hold for eighty minutes! HR even closed half an hour early. Don't you people ever work? What if a driver needed emergency help? What would they be expected to do? What if there was a claim or refused cargo? Would you expect them to sit for an hour? Perhaps miss their next load while they waited for you people?"
"I really am sorry, Nom." Todd his usual night driver manager said. "We were at a driver's appreciation barbeque. All the staff here in Salt Lake was invited. It was fantastic! Even the kids got to come. The boss went all out, and bought us three cows worth of steak."
Nom was speechless.
"Nom, are you there?" Todd asked.
"So non drivers, who sit on their asses in an office doing nothing, got a driver's appreciation barbeque? The real drivers were left to swing in the wind?" Nom asked in a cold voice.
"That's rather rude Nom." Todd said. "Now, where have you been? We heard back from the Dallas police this morning. Both your co-driver and his father are dead. The computer shows your truck hasn't moved in three days..."
"I quit." Nom said.
"What?" Todd asked.
"I quit." Nom said enunciating each word.
"Nom, don't take the barbeque personally." Todd chided. "If you had been here, you would have been invited too…"
Without raising his tone a single degree, Nom began his retort. "What a sad and pitiful place your unimaginative mind must be Todd. Or are you an idiot? Think, fuck nut! My truck hasn't moved, perhaps it was abandoned? God know that happens enough. You treat your drivers so badly you have an entire fleet dedicated to recovering trucks abandoned by pissed off ex-employees."
"My co-driver was found dead of natural causes. His father had a heart attack from what I saw, and you wonder why I didn't hang around? No 'Are you okay Nom?' or 'Are you in a safe place Nom?' or 'Are you seeking any professional help for that traumatizing experience Nom?' No, all I get is: Where are you, Nom? Why isn't your load on time? That is why I fucking quit. You'll find the truck parked at the company driving school in Dallas. RIGHT WHERE THE BODIES WERE FOUND! How exactly did no one at that school report an extra truck in the lot? Now, take this job, and shove it up your ass!"
Nom disconnected the call, it really was a shame that modern cell phones could not slam with that satisfying click the old land lines had. Still, his call had been recorded. Todd would tell the company he had split due to the trauma of watching two people drop dead. Truckers unfortunate enough to work for this company were known to be a fickle people. They actually had an entire division of drivers tasked with recovering abandoned loads, mostly from truckers who had snapped under the abuse and had simply walked away. In a rather colorful case, a lactose intolerant driver had eaten a gallon of ice cream and spent four rather painful hours redecorating the cab's interior. Nom would go down as a disgruntled ex and hopefully be under the radar for another few weeks.
Still, he needed to do something about that goddamned call center. It was inhumanly evil the way they treated drivers. He had learned that he could affect groups of people and he could affect people from some distance. Time for another experiment. His attempt to destroy Good Morning America had failed. Was it his lack of true hate that caused him to fail? True, he hated cheerful people in the morning, but then so did the rest of the world. The hate he felt for the driver managers and other call center staff was just about on par with his hatred for that church in Texas. He decided to try again.
"I wish that everyone who ate at the barbeque would develop Creutzfeldt Jakob. Make it an accelerated variety. I want all of them starting to be demented within three months, hospitalized within six, and dead within the year." He said in a whisper.
Mad cow will serve those morons right. He thought. They never think anyway! Leaving me on hold for eighty minutes!
He knew that it would take quite a while to get the results of this distance experiment, but he was more than willing to wait. Some deaths were simply too interesting to hyper accelerate them. Speeding them up from decades to months was more than enough.