Little White Pills

The Outer Highway is the least-known transitory realm. Many cultures have myths around the Green Realm, some of the Mirror Realm. A few scholars believe the World Machine is a transitory realm, most do not.

The Outer Highway could be the most recent transitory realm that human beings have encountered. It may simply be that no one ever returned before the advent of the automobile. 

There are many paths in, very few ways out. A person might enter from any place in the world where there are roads and vehicles. They could be deposited anywhere else in the world should they return, never in the same place.

The greatest concentration of disappearances is in the Heliconian Hills region north of Noosecliff, the famed deepwater port through which coffee beans and industrial chemicals transit to the grand conurbations of Barratum.

Noosecliff’s waters are harried by pirates. They have a religion of love, sagas in which no princess deigns to marry anyone but a pirate, where the wives of gouty mayors spin the lock-gauges at night to let the ships in, joining their beloved while the wharves burn and riot.

Defenses are better now but all merchantmen must be men o' war in these seas.

The coffee and chemicals are offloaded. Friendships are renewed and bribes paid by the supercargoes while locals fight crewmen in spew-alleys caked in throw-up and kens where shit-stained men sleep under chairs to awaken miraculously unrobbed sometimes.

The cargo is carried to ready trucks in sacks and pails. Engine drovers wait, arms crossed and big and hairy or thin and weathered. Tattoos and scars. Knuckles bulbous, eyes hard and wild. Veterans whose friends were spent. Boys raised in corrugated shacks, the only quality metal the chains their fathers beat them with. Men from dusty hills a thousand miles away where decrepit temples host deadfire ashes to ancient heroes whose true brutality and true divinity are forgotten, to whom the rhythm of the cosmos devolved into a tuber’s skin until the bloodrime came. 

A truck is loaded, it roars to life and trundles forward like a landship headed for the killing fields. All witnesses understand its destination, Barratum, where the coffee and chemicals will be sold for vast profits, but no one knows the engine drover’s path through the wild Heliconian gnarlpines. This is his lore, his luck, his wager, his life his stake, his fortune. 

He may need to bribe before he even leaves the city. He may need to kill once he leaves the gate, but the path is not won by violence. It is won by unceasing progression. Unceasing, for the hills are crawling with wolves. Wolves to a man. 

Town militias, servants in rapine to robber baron notables. If their cars are on you, keep running like a wildebeest beset by hounds until you pass the most bloodthirsty city, town, or tribe you can think of. They are likely to hate your pursuers more than they want to stop you. You have not robbed and killed them for generations.

Some robbers are so formal they have toll booths unconnected to any government; here you can be issued a safe conduct with suitable stamps in exchange for cash, drugs, or a cut of your cargo. This safe conduct stands only among their associates.

There are cults to luck, cults to the apocalypse. Some sacrifice, more simply shoot. Steal to fund the movement. One in ten thousand tiny creeds, that’s what your death serves.

Your cargo is legal in Noosecliff and all Barratum, but the sage-lords sent from Noosecliff, Barratum, Hemostill, and Tavernbend to tame the Heliconian Hills now prey upon everyone they encounter there. They won their appointments at great peril and are crushed by their patrons, crushed by the bribes and tribute they must pay.

At first they ripped up the fabric of civilization in the Heliconians to starve out the robbers. There are ruins from the first days of this policy, fields of ash speckled with skulls and ribs, infernoed homesteads, cements burnt to gum like candles, wood walls eaten black by elemental giants.

At length they realized that the patchwork Heliconian polities were too lucrative to destroy, their defenselessness against state predation was a temptation so relieving as to be erotic to the sage-lords. A saying of the sneering office-giver: “If you can’t come up with a gratuity despite your flock, I know of a few very competent hopefuls…”

The sagemen will peel you for bribes at best, or impound your rig and make you into a human torch at their niece’s funeral (the only time this is permitted; otherwise it’s beheading or boiling or riveting or firing squad).

Perhaps these crimes will be investigated once the sage-marshal has perished from his Alzheimer's. Perhaps the kleptocrats will be purged, as all among them know they should be. Perhaps. The sagemilitias tread the high paths, watching for telltale fumes. 

Yet the mountains are vast, their roads uncounted. Their steepness, and the possibility of paying a bribe and moving on, means that the engine drovers don’t armor their rigs or bring hosts of gunmen. Your best bet is not to sleep. Not to stop, except but once. 

There are shadowed gravel roads in the deep woods, horrible for big rigs except that the journey could not be made without them without incredible luck, which the engine drovers cultivate but do not wholly rely on. There are families there connected to no tribe, no clan, no village.

They have underground tanks of fuel. Gasoline? It runs the vehicles. Big boys drag out the hose. Cousins watch with shotguns.

Things for sale; crisped pork skin, vinegared intestine, dick and ball soup purported to ensure lust. Oral sex from grown daughters, more from wandering devotees of the little white pill, the hierodules of hidden anchorages to transcendent speed.

These are for sale too, these pills. Wakefulness, nightlessness, visions of curves and corners to come. The aura of the law and the reverberating teeth of spike-strip wreckers, cavern-hidden hijackers whose patrilineal progenitors robbed muleteers 3000 years ago.

These exoplanet families understand the engine drovers’ strategy and they sell the pills to support it.

They trade with the drovers for precursors. No one knows their recipes, their witches brews. Surely there are many. Their effects are real, witness the empty gleaming eyes of engine drovers arriving after 72 or 96 hours with no more than a refueling stop.

All too real. Some drive at breakneck speed, sliding around gravel downslopes or curling, piney river roads cackling, bellies heaving, eyes bleeding, victorious.

A few end up in gulches filled with fire. 

Some are lost in highway manticism. The straightening and darkening of turns to come. The reticulating road like the axle arm of a great machine, an infinite expanse, road rebuilding itself before you, past cannibalized, a model highway in the empty dark. 

 

You may forget where you are and what you’re doing, except for its necessity, and that you must keep the vessel on the road and the machine in homeostasis until perhaps there will be sense again. 

Time and space may be blown away by silver speed, the joy of the launch obliterating everything but blistering cascading freedom. Ecstasy in splitting the sky. Escaping the suns, the orbs, all-seeing, untouchable.

A reality returns slowly. Silently, subtly, soft colors to your sides or far ahead. You may emerge from a tunnel, or the sun may rise and obliterate a lightless realm, or the clouds may clear around you. 

A landscape of shadows transitions to red-orange dirt, crisscrossed at wide intervals by curving paths of black asphalt. Or dune seas, powder-pillow moonscapes, bone-blue expanses of pebble, each wound about with the craggy black asphalt.

A smell of tar and sand. An infinitude of silence, incredible distance, unmarked and unmoving sky a dull pale gray-blue nothingness or black-orange gradient of sunless sunset. 

You bake on the black creosote, gasoline fumes swimming around you like a cascade of hot engine eels. Thirst impending like a skyscraper sandstorm. So dry that the raisin-wood feeling of the driest mouth begins to develop in your eye sockets and inside your ears.

If you travel on you might see the waste of past travelers. Empty rigs slackening in the sun. Bones blown to half-dust along mile-long paths from the vehicles.

Some sped here through slick barriers in our realm; hearts racing, horizons dilating, sky and sand bending around to touch behind, speed spreading and flattening all sensation into sick headache split white light.

Others passed out on roads and drugs and awakened here.

Those few in the know recognize a death sentence. Yet they return more often than the unaware, but it is always a postponement of trial. 

The roads branch to infinite distance, gradually curving. If you depart one you will never reach the other. If you wander off the black into the trackless expanse, you may begin to hear voices calling from dirty rocks, calling out in breath and song, dreamy and inward. Beware stars descending in the sky, animals skittering away in the dark, a sudden balm in the air. Illusory. 

Sapience echoes in the stones, an alien coldness or blood-warmth aching to touch you, to know you, for connection. Oracle or vampire.

Blood welling between corpse-crevices. Beasts half-corporeal wandered here before man, reverently making their graves, waiting in repose. Come close, you may become one with them. Drown beneath the earth, join with their bodies.

Yet they may be your trail back to humanity. Not will be. May be. There are other forms of departure, but the trailing voices may speak to the wanderer, open him, interrogate him, coax him, and, in time, may speak him towards a dark place that only a lucky few others find in their desperation. 

Those who return from the Outer Highway never do so at their point of departure. They are deposited to a road far from home, often so insensate from fatigue and thirst that they don't at first feel the transition.

You will thereafter love spring water, filling staton soda, or the falling rain in your open mouth, whichever you drink first. A few die before tasting these. “Where could he have come from?”

Some return with no charge, no charter, no fetter. Their passing was a fluke, their return mere Yaldabaoth's providence. 

Others are bound and marked by the things that helped them home, alien revenants trapped in stone and soil, a mutual hem of orthogonal realms, twisting to accommodate and accumulate their arteries.

The Outer Highway that we know is traced by black creosote asphalt; perhaps in impossible distances its conduits are stranger, half-shadows of alien thoroughfares, perhaps looking nothing like a desert to the poison beasts trapped in its nether. 

When you return, you may be monitored, approached, coerced by aides of the beast or the beast itself, reaching across the cosmic littoral. They may compel you to work a deed on earth, or they may compel your return to the Outer Highway, shades driving your recursion to nothingness, to unearth beasts of blood and song, a rescue mission from which you will never return. Hurled after the tiniest chance, cast into null space to dry and bleed into the asphalt creosote. 

Perhaps you have transitioned back into your only trade of engine drover. You return from six days upon the road and on your nightstand, next to a freezing cold beer, is a cap full of little white pills. 

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