Chapter 7: The Old Gods of the Road

Chapter 7: The Old Gods of the Road

The bus ride was a special kind of purgatory. Trapped in a vibrating metal tube with a dozen strangers, Jack felt more exposed than he had in the deep woods. Every time the bus slowed, he expected to see a state trooper’s car pulling alongside. Every passenger who glanced his way seemed to hold a flicker of unnatural recognition in their eyes. The totem in his pocket was a lump of radiating warmth against his leg, a constant physical reminder of his new, terrifying reality. The whispers were his travel companions, a ceaseless, sibilant murmur just below the threshold of hearing, like the rustle of a thousand dead leaves caught in a phantom wind. Closer now... the soil remembers...

He got off at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, hours before his ticket's final destination. The stop was nothing more than a gravel patch and a leaning signpost, but across the two-lane blacktop, a beacon of greasy light cut through the deepening twilight: "The Iron Skillet Diner & Truck Stop." Its neon sign, a frying pan with a flickering sausage, was the kind of landmark that only existed for people who measured their lives in miles and gallons. It was a place where stories, like diesel fumes, hung heavy and unseen in the air. If anyone knew about the dark things that haunted the roads, it would be here.

The bell above the door chimed a weary welcome. The air inside was thick with the holy trinity of truck-stop smells: stale coffee, frying bacon, and worn-out vinyl. A handful of drivers were scattered among the booths, hunched over plates of food, their faces illuminated by the glow of their phones. They were islands of solitude, together in their shared exhaustion. Jack slid into a cracked red booth in the far corner, a spot that gave him a clear view of the entire room and the parking lot outside. A waitress with a tired smile took his order for coffee, black, and left him alone.

He wasn't sure what he was looking for. A sign, a clue, another person with the same haunted look in their eyes. The whispers in his head seemed to quiet slightly in the diner's low hum, retreating into the background noise. He scanned the faces again. Road-weary, bored, lonely. Nothing.

Then his eyes landed on a man sitting alone at the counter. He was old, maybe seventy, with a face so deeply lined it looked like a topographical map of every bad road in North America. A mesh-backed cap, stained with decades of oil and sweat, sat low on his brow, shadowing eyes that seemed to see more than the menu in front of them. His hands, wrapped around a steaming mug, were gnarled and scarred, the knuckles like knots on an old oak branch. He wasn't just a driver; he was a lifer. A man who had become part of the road itself.

Jack’s instincts, the same ones that had screamed at him to run from his truck, told him this was the man.

He waited, nursing his coffee, his heart hammering a nervous rhythm against his ribs. He couldn't just walk up and ask about wooden monsters. He needed an opening. He reached into his pocket, his fingers closing around the unsettling warmth of the totem. He pulled it out and placed it on the table beside his coffee cup, partially covering it with his hand, but leaving one of the disturbing, spiraling edges visible. It was bait.

Minutes stretched into an eternity. The old man finished his coffee, paid his bill, and stood up, stretching his back with a groan. He started for the door, and Jack’s stomach sank. It was a foolish, desperate idea. But as the old trucker passed his booth, he stopped. His gaze wasn't on Jack, but on the small piece of dark wood on the table.

"You find that on the road?" the old man asked, his voice a low rumble, like gravel being poured into a drum.

Jack looked up, meeting his gaze. The old trucker's eyes weren't just tired; they were ancient. "Something like that," Jack said, his own voice tight.

The man grunted, sliding into the opposite side of the booth without an invitation. He leaned forward, the smell of cheap cigars and engine grease clinging to his worn jacket. "You ought to throw it in the deepest lake you can find," he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Some things are better left lost."

Hope, sharp and painful, pierced through Jack's paranoia. "You know what it is." It wasn't a question.

The old man stared at the totem for a long moment. "I know what it's made of. And I've seen 'em before. Saw one in a fella's cab, a kid from outta Des Moines, back in '98. Found him two weeks later, parked on a logging road up near the Boundary Waters. Truck was empty. He was just sittin' in the driver's seat, smilin'. Except he'd started to... sprout."

The word hung in the air between them, grotesque and chilling. Jack felt the blood drain from his face. "Sprout?"

"Little green shoots," the old man said, his eyes distant. "Comin' out of his fingernails. His skin had gone all hard and grey, like bark. The coroner called it a rare fungal infection. I knew better."

"Tappers," Jack breathed, the word he'd read on the forum feeling real on his tongue for the first time. "I heard them called Tappers."

The old trucker gave a short, humorless laugh. "That's a new name. We used to have other words for them. Hitchers in the Wood. The Silent Grove. Things that get into shipments when you haul out of the wrong parts of the world, cursed forests where the trees have bad dreams. They look like the wood, they feel like the wood. Until they don't." He leaned in closer, his voice barely audible over the clatter of plates from the kitchen. "They get in your head, don't they? Little whispers. Like leaves in the wind."

It was a statement, not a question. Jack could only nod, his throat tight. He was looking at the only other person on Earth who knew his nightmare was real. His sanity, which had been fraying for two days, suddenly felt solid again, anchored by this old man's terrifying confirmation.

"Then you're marked, son," Silas said, his expression grim. "That thing," he gestured to the totem, "it's their brand. They've knocked on your door, and they're gonna keep knocking until you let 'em in. They don't want to kill you. They want you to join them. To put down roots and forget the road."

"The shipment was from Blackwood Logging," Jack said, the name feeling like a curse.

The effect of the name on the old man was immediate and profound. All the weary wisdom in his face collapsed into pure, raw fear. He physically recoiled, his eyes widening. "Jesus Christ," he whispered, looking around the diner as if assassins might be lurking in the other booths. "You didn't just haul a bad load, boy. You rang the Devil's own doorbell."

"What is Blackwood?" Jack pressed, sensing he was on the edge of a much deeper truth.

"Blackwood ain't a company," the old trucker hissed, his voice trembling with a genuine terror that chilled Jack to the bone. "That's just the name on the papers for the taxman. Blackwood is older than any corporation, older than the logging saws and the diesel engines. They're not loggers. They're keepers. Wardens for that prison of a forest. The things you saw? That's their 'stock.' And they don't like it when the inventory gets loose."

The world tilted on its axis. Harris on the phone, the state troopers, the sanitized site—it wasn't a corporate cover-up. It was the ancient, practiced containment protocol of a secret society of zookeepers whose zoo was full of wooden monsters.

The old man pushed himself out of the booth, his movements sudden and jerky. "I've said too much. You need to get away from here. You need to get away from that thing." He threw a ten-dollar bill on the table. "For your coffee. And some advice. They don't like fire. And they hate running water. Never forget that."

He turned and walked away, not looking back, a ghost disappearing back into the night, leaving Jack alone in the booth with the warm, dark totem and the terrible, liberating weight of the truth. He was no longer just a trucker who saw something awful. He was a man marked by an ancient evil, hunted by a conspiracy as old as the roads themselves. And his only allies were the old gods of the road: fire, water, and the grim determination to keep driving.