Georgia On My Mind

Manifesto · Post Georgia On My Mind Posting as Rob Paige

When Dave picked me up in Atlanta, all I had with me was my carry-on bag. This was a couple of days ago, mind you, back when everything still made sense. He was parked right outside the terminal, the beat-up chase truck, loaded with tools and tanks in the bed, looking oddly out of place amongst the family cars and SUVs and taxis that swarmed through, but also looking like home. At 19 years of age, maybe I’m too young for nostalgia, but would you believe a 19-year-old can feel homesickness? These winter breaks helped me keep my sanity. I’m able to sometimes fit some time out with one of the crews in between summer classes and the start of fall classes, but usually not. Still, I haven’t missed a winter yet; winter break is too short for the kinds of classes I am taking, or, I’d be insane to try to fit something like EM Fields into a 3 week period, so instead, I go and try to do something productive with one of my dad’s work crews.

The sun blinded me momentarily as I left the dimly lit terminal, but Dave’s raucous cry of, “Eyy Doc!” and the throaty rumble of the diesel engine would have been enough even if my sight hadn’t come back as I shaded my eyes. I walked over, pulled open the passenger door and dropped my carry-on behind the seat. Dave popped the truck into gear, and we pulled out into Atlanta’s brutal traffic. Dave and I shot the breeze as we crawled out of the city. He’s been with the company most of my life, and I’ve worked with him from time to time over the last 4 years, and he was giving me good natured teasing about the Vikings while praising Tom Brady and the Patriots to the heavens, one dark brown elbow cocked out the window, looking for all the world like a man truly in his element, despite the weird sounding (to me, anyway) yankee drawl he’d picked up from a childhood in Maine and Vermont.

By the time we got to the motel, the sun had dipped down. It doesn’t get as dark in Georgia as early as it does in Minnesota, but no matter how you sliced it, it was late. Boone was in the parking lot, leaning against our drilling rig, cigarette tucked into one corner of his mouth and sending a thin ribbon of smoke mostly straight up, left eye closed against the smoke and his gaze locked on the phone in his hands. He looked up as he heard the diesel engine, and walked lazily over to us. He pitched the butt, the cherry spraying sparks as it burst against the asphalt of the motel parking lot. He leaned in, mussed my hair, and asked “What’s up, doc?”. Boone’s been with us 3 years, and is in his early 20s, so our relationship is more casual. I don’t think my dad would get pissed off if he saw stuff like that, but Boone was also smart enough to recognize that there’s a time and a place. I told him that it looked like he was finally growing into his face, and someday he wouldn’t be a completely hideous chud. He laughed, and looked at Dave, “I dunno about you guys, but I’m thinking it’s about time for dinner, huh?” Dave nodded, “Wanna hop in and we can drive into town, see what’s what? Or we can walk over to the barbecue place”, nodding at the brightly lit, rustic looking building on the far edge of the parking lot. He asked me what I wanted, and I opted for the rib joint. I’d either been sitting in airports or on planes all day, first from Portland to Minneapolis, then to Chicago and then to Georgia. I wanted to stretch my legs.

The restaurant was warm, the air redolent with the smell of maple and hickory and spice and pork. The waitress seated us, and didn’t bat an eye at our beer order. The place was about half full, a good sign as far as I could tell, given how empty the motel parking lot itself was. The conversations I caught snatches of all seemed to have variations of southern accent, which suggested to me that at least some of the clientele were locals; that’s usually a good sign when eating on the road. The menu was fairly straightforward, and when our beers arrived, we ordered. Mostly we talked about what the next couple of weeks would look like; we’d put in time on a short project not far from the motel in the morning, then a longer, multi-well project up further north, then into Alabama for a couple of other test boring projects, then home for Christmas. They’d come back after the new year, and onto whatever new projects awaited them, I’d head back to school. The food was good, but I stuck to the one beer. Dave gave me the key to my motel room, and after I ate, I walked back across the parking lot to my room. Dave and Boone were likely going to drink the bar dry, but I wasn’t much of a drinker, and would rather have the sleep. The bag that I had shipped, with my clothes and PPE, was on the bed. I dropped it over the side, and bedded down for the night.

We were up early, Dave and Boone no worse for having tied one on the night before, and after a quick breakfast at a diner in town, we set off for the job site. Thinking about it, this was where things started to go wrong. Not that anything stood out as a red flag, but the GPS unit we carried couldn’t find the site address we were given. Neither Boone’s smartphone nor mine could find it, and I tried both apps I use. Dave was of the “I can kill a bear with this Nokia” school of cell phone ownership, so instead of using it, he pulled a well-worn road atlas out and paged through it. I ultimately won, though. The documentation we were sent contained GPS coordinates, so I punched those in as Dave put the book away.

The difficulty was justified. We ended up on the corner of an onion field just outside a village. I counted two whole stoplights as we swept in through the south end, and right out the north end. The onion field in question looked like the kind of place you’d want to put up a cell tower, at least, if you were a farmer. The plants were growing, but compared to fields I’d seen in the area, they weren’t doing all that well. Further confirmation was the new looking crew cab truck parked on the side of the road. I pulled the battered pickup in behind it, and Boone pulled the rig in behind me. The guy that got out of the crew cab looked every inch of what I was working towards becoming. New looking jeans, chambray work-shirt, pristine hi-vis vest, boots that lacked so much as a scuff. He tucked a thin roll of prints under one arm, and put on a gleaming white hard hat as he came over. He introduced himself as Peter, and I was a bit surprised to hear that he was an electrical engineer. Usually on construction projects, when we show up to drill test bores, we meet up with a contractor or a construction coordinator, or on the rare occasions when an engineer graces us with his presence, it’s usually a civil engineer. Still, Tophecom, our client, and the company Peter worked for, was a telecommunications company, so I wasn’t too surprised. We confirmed that the scope they had sent us was still the same, and got to work.

The downside to working with Dave is that he thinks I’m made of porcelain. We’re a union shop, and the unions would come down on my dad like a ton of bricks if word got back to them that I had been out working with these guys in one capacity or another since I was 15. That said, we’re a tight knit bunch, and no one has said much of anything. Nevertheless, Dave’s a little paranoid, worried that if something goes wrong OSHA or MSHA would land on him like a ton of bricks, so I get the easy stuff; recording data, hooking up hoses to pump water or bentonite slurry or filling the big diesel engine on the drilling rig, keeping the customer happy, while he and Boone run the drill, swap out auger bits, collect samples and so on. The pay is nice no matter what I’m doing, but other crews generally give me more lee-way. Still, Dave’s crew, Dave’s rules. Keeping the customer happy, in this case, meant that I spent most of the morning talking to Peter. We got along well right from the start. We swapped horror stories from school, he clued me in on what the graduate life held, I discussed my plans to take over the company when dad retired, and where I saw the company heading. He asked why Boone and Dave called me Doc instead of Greg, and I explained to him that my brother Mike was off doing things for the Army and the NSA, and my sister was actually practicing medicine, but I was the only one of the three of us who really had an interest in the family business, a business that my father had built from a small well-digging company to one of the leading boring and excavating companies in the country (you’ve seen those neon green construction vehicles we use at least once in your life, I guarantee it), and he had gotten that far over a 30 year period despite being a high school dropout. He asked why I went for electrical engineering instead of civil, and I told him that I thought the future of the company was going to be electrical infrastructure work. We have plenty of civils on the payroll, but the electrical stuff is more complicated, more fascinating. I don’t usually open up much, but like I said, we hit it off pretty well.

When you’re boring, and you’ve done it for a while, you learn the sounds. Boring through clay doesn’t make much noise beyond the diesel engine. Cobbles make a chunking, thunking sound, and the vibration has a rhythm to it you can feel in your boots. Solid rock makes a high-pitched squeal. The sound that broke our conversation was none of the usual sounds. It sounded like a high, keening wail, a woman dying in agony, or a mountain lion mating. There was a solid thud, the wail cut off, and the sound of the diesel engine revving. Dave reached over, pulled a lever, and the auger bits started backing out. It didn’t take long, and by the time Peter and I walked over, I could see that the drill head had hit something. The teeth were broken off. Dave took the drill head off the auger bit, and started prying something out of it. He tossed it to me, I saw the flash of grey, and flicked out a hand. I was expecting stone, and that’s what this was, but it looked like some weird sedimentary stone. The top layer was comprised of thin parallel lines grooved into the stone, there were a couple of slightly differing, thin grey layers under that, and a thick grey layer beneath that, each slightly different in hue, and the thick layer put me in mind of cells or fibrous material. I passed it to Peter. He shrugged, I shrugged. Dave sent down a coring bit and got a sample to send to the lab, and we paused for a moment. Dave said, “We haven’t hit refusal, so let’s break out ‘The Brute’ and see if we can’t punch through. Maybe we’ll do lunch first?” When Dave said, “The Brute” you could hear the emphasis, the capital letters. It’s a special drilling head, and another part of why the company grew so fast. Dad had designed it, had a couple of prototypes built, and found that they perform very well even under the worst of circumstances. He holds three patents related to it, and has licensed it to a handful of companies. I’ve yet to see anything break one, but they do wear out, and given the expense, we try to limit their use.

Peter said that lunch sounded like a great idea, and recommended a burger joint back in the small town. Orders sorted out, he handed me his company credit card. The weight of it was what made me actually look at it. It was heavy, the same size as a credit card, but dense. The side facing me was a glossy black, with only a bright crimson “Tophecom” in the lower left-hand corner. I flipped it over. The same glossy black, but no text, no signature, nothing. “Peter, what is this?” I asked, thinking maybe he gave me the wrong thing. “It’s a prototype. We’re testing out some stuff in town, and the cell tower supports it. That,” he said, pointing, “is a dedicated tap-to-pay device. Just about every business has been equipped with a reader”. I took the photocopied menu, and the hastily scribbled order notes, and shoved them in my vest pocket with the payment device. I threw my hard hat, safety glasses and earplugs on the passenger seat of the truck, and U-turned off back in the direction of the small village we had driven through earlier.

I got another reminder of how far out of the way we were during the drive. I punched the scan button on the radio, hoping to find some music, and saw the numbers flip through the dial twice before I punched the radio off. A quick glance at my phone showed me that streaming music services were entirely out of the question, and not wanting to cycle through the songs on my phone, I opted for silence. The town was still, quiet,  and kind of beaten looking. With the temps in the mid 60s, and this close to Christmas, I would have expected to see kids out and about, but the weathered buildings dozed listlessly with only the occasional pedestrian to lend a semblance of life. The burger place  looked absolutely packed, by comparison, with a half-full parking lot, and a couple of cars in the drive through. Still, it didn’t take me long to place the order, and when I pulled up to the window, I saw the reader Peter mentioned. It was a glossy black panel as well, about the size of a paperback book, mounted just below the window. I tapped the card against it, half expecting that I would probably screw it up and have to ask the guy working the window, but it beeped twice, and he thrust a bag of food out the window, grease already starting to turn the white paper translucent, into my hands. I drove back quickly, being careful to maintain the speed limit, not wanting to run into a small town speed trap, but eager to have a hot lunch while it was still hot.

It was the earplugs, I think, that saved my life. We have boxes of the squeezable foam type, but I had opted to buy a set of soft rubber ones. They were reusable, and much more comfortable than the foam ones. I clipped them in place, put on my hardhat and safety glasses, and walked back to the rig. I could hear the thumping, grinding and growling that said that Dave had apparently decided to forge ahead while I was out. I was about halfway to them when everything went wrong, and when it did, it went all wrong all at once. There was a crunch and then that keening wail started up again, louder, and with it, a smell. In my time, we’ve encountered some nasty things...abandoned sewers, unmarked cesspits, once a slew of dead pigs a farmer had buried  and capped under a bentonite cover. This put them all in the shade, smelling roughly like rancid gear oil being used to extinguish a tire fire in a sewage treatment plant. The force of it was a physical thing. I doubled over, seeing the guys doing so as well, the food falling from my hands. I retched, knowing that if I could just vomit, I’d be okay, but the contractions that came, hard as they were, brought up nothing, and all that came forth from my mouth were a few curdy runnels of sour drool. I kept trying to puke, trying and failing, and I noticed the noise change. It began to ripple discordantly through notes, creating what I can only think of as anti-music. The strength went out of my legs, and I went from being doubled over to being on my knees. The pain in my guts was joined by sharp, stabbing pains in my head. Unbidden, the image of crude hands shuffling roughly through a pile of cards came to mind, and suddenly every petty, vile thing I had ever done in my life began to cycle through my thoughts, weaving in and around (but never replacing, oh no, not replacing) the pain. The kid I had punched when I was little, the times I stole, the exams where I had used a crib sheet, the girl I had cheated on in high school, the lies I told.

Taken in context, I know I’m not a bad guy. I haven’t been 100% pure, but then again, nobody has, and I can conceptualize my sins. I think we all do, it’s how we live with ourselves. Still, as I knelt in that field, with the stink and the wail assailing me, I knew it was the weight of my sins that was going to kill me. The stabbing had been joined by an awful squeezing sensation, which only increased the nausea as the slideshow of my failings whipped around and around. I was going to die, and I deserved to die, and with death was going to come a surcease from the agony. I think maybe it was the earplugs, blocking just enough of that noise, that made it possible to find that thin sliver of hope. I built on it. If I could die, the pain would end. If I could get up, I could get away from the noise and the stink, and find a place to die. If I could get up, I could get at the tools in the truck, and I could end this. Forcing myself to my feet hurt more than anything I’ve ever felt. My guts finally let go, as did my bowels, and I soiled myself completely, but I did get to my feet. I could see Dave, Pete and Boone, fetal, writhing, faces contorted in agony, but they’d have to kill themselves. I couldn’t do it for them. I needed the pain to stop too badly. There was a massive crunching sound, shockingly loud in the sudden silence left behind by the wail’s abrupt end, and all three of their heads burst. I staggered away, blackly jealous of them in my own continued agony. Sanity, or some semblance of it, reasserted itself as I made my way away from the horror and towards the truck. The pain receded as well, not entirely, but enough thoughts of escape blotted out that need to kill myself. I flopped behind the wheel, and drove towards the village.

I had decided to call for help. I was trying to pull into the gas station, where a payphone was, and managed to hit a bollard. I wasn’t going very fast, but I was thrown against the steering wheel hard enough to hurt anyway. I put the truck in park, and when I got out, the clerk got one look at me and dialed 911. After that, it’s mostly a blur. State patrol guys asking me questions, me telling them how to get to the site, trying to tell them what happened, telling them to wear earplugs, telling them about the need to die. It’s that last part that landed me here in the hospital. An EMT shot me up with liquid sleep, and when I woke up, I was clean and clad in one of these paper gowns. Nobody thinks I killed the guys or anything like that; there’s no evidence to support it, but I am being held here pending a psych eval. When I woke up, I was coherent enough to convince them that I should be allowed to have my laptop. They relented, “knowing” that I couldn’t get on WiFi, and buying my logic that I had to work on my homework lest I fall behind. Thankfully, their approach to network security is a joke, and I was able to brute force my way onto their network. I need to get out of here. I need to find out what happened out there.

 

Post settings Labels creepypasta, fiction, horror, nosleep Published on 12/13/17, 12:26 PM Pacific Standard Time Permalink Location Options

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