The blue El Camino roared along swiftly, taking turn after turn. The driver was enticing Death with every rotation of the black Goodyears on the asphalt. No real reason for going that fast, nothing pursuing the man, nowhere he needed to be. Death was sitting in the back seat, his crooked, bony finger inches from the back of the driver’s neck. The El Camino slammed around a right turn at sixty-five miles an hour, kicking up dust and smoke, tires crying. Death was intrigued. He wanted to see how long this man, intoxicated with brandy and speed, could keep his vehicle on the road. Death sat back in his seat, humming a hymn that never was written. The car made too much noise for the driver to hear. They just kept going along the deserted mountain road. This was a new experience for Death. He had been at every battle of every war, picking and choosing those he would spare and those he would take. Death never just sat back trying to see what people enjoyed about risking their lives. Another hairpin turn sent the back of the El Camino within inches of the bare rock wall, but the ton of metal stuck to the road.

The driver, drawing a bottle of bargain-basement brandy from under the seat, finished it with a gasp of relaxation and disgust and heaved the bottle out the opened window. Death watched as the glass shattered, catching the light of the moon. It looked like a miniature big bang on the black asphalt. A million stars, born in a millisecond, settled in their respective places as the car kept on moving. It was a late night in northern Colorado and no one else was on the road. The driver reached into his breast pocket and removed a cardboard packet containing some cigarettes. He pulled one out and lit it with the dashboard lighter. Wisps of venomous smoke filled the driver’s lungs as he inhaled. A smile tiptoed across his sun-baked lips. Death thought to himself that perhaps this person had never seen someone dying of emphysema, or black lung. Perhaps he was unaware of how horrible cigarette smoke was. Death had seen millions of smokers, usually sitting in a hospital wheezing and coughing. Other animals don’t do things like this; they don’t recklessly risk their lives for kicks. Death remembered a time when he had seen a small mouse who was so hungry it tried to steal food from the bowl of some pet dog. The mouse, knowing quite well that the beast was lying there in wait, scampered to the bowl and was instantly snatched up by the dog. It did it for the food, not for the thrill. Animals will explore and play, but never with such risky behavior, or at least not without knowing the risk.

A minivan passed dangerously close to the El Camino. Both Death and the driver saw the pair of frightened faces at the wheel. The driver just quietly laughed as he tossed the butt of the cigarette and lit another almost as soon as the embers from the first hit the ground flying by. Death had had his fill of watching this man. Death had other people to “visit.” His cloaked arm, wrapped in the blackest cloth, rose. He drew the skeletal remains of an index finger from the sleeve and slowly inched towards the exposed skin of the driver’s neck. The slightest touch grazed the neck-hairs. The driver felt a tingle in his spine where Death met flesh. The right, front tire exploded with a mass of sound. The driver, so startled the lit cigarette fell into his lap, turned the wheel rapidly left, then right. The car impacted the metal guardrail first. Sparks flew from the point where the recently-painted metal of the El Camino ground its blue shine into the steel. What was going through the driver’s mind, Death couldn’t guess. Death just sat in the back seat, watching the predicament unfold in slow motion. (Death watched everything slowly; it was the only way he could make sure everything he planned worked out). The still-speeding vehicle swam from one extreme side of the road to the other, then into some large granite rocks perched on top of each other. The car that had been travelling about sixty miles an hour stopped suddenly, almost instantaneously, as it smashed head-on into the massive natural rock tower. Death thought that this specific rock formation looked a bit like the north tower of Briston Castle, long ago. The driver, who carelessly forgot to buckle his seatbelt, flew headfirst into the windshield. His left shoulder blade clipped the corner of the car frame as his body continued to travel through the shattered safety glass.

It really wasn’t different from any other car crash Death had witnessed before. They all were the same in Death’s mind, all blended together into one endless gruesome memory. Death could recall the smells of burnt rubber and gasoline, the sounds of soft people colliding with hard pavement, the feel of blood-soaked vinyl seat covers. The driver’s collarbone was smashed into bits and pieces. The impact on the solid metal sent his body into an awkward rotation, like a helicopter that had its tail removed by enemy gunfire. The driver’s body was parallel to the ground spinning head over heels. He had completed only one and a half rotations when the rock tower slowed him down. He bounced off the stone like a pinball. Death could faintly hear the sounds made by a game in the arcades and convenience stores when the last ball falls into the void near the paddles. The driver skidded into sloppy green grass. He was going to die. His vital functions began leisurely to slow to a halt. The liver, which was in bad condition anyway, stopped functioning immediately, but that wasn’t of too much concern. His heart, which would normally be pumping blood to his brain, decided to make a detour and send the blood to the pavement. A broken rib jutted through the right lung and halfway out the tissue of his back. What was left of his skin started to become flaky and blistered from the air leaking from the ruptured lung. His skin was like an old party balloon, growing crusty and as easy to tear as a wet cocktail napkin. His brain, although damaged beyond repair, still functioned in the sense that he could see his surroundings, but not react. His eyes were fixed in place. That’s something Death saw a lot. His body lay in the road, his neck trained at an impossible angle, facing the car. The headlights shone into his unblinking eyes. The driver could almost feel the warmth from the lights, like two miniature suns that bring life to all of earth’s creatures, staring right back at him. The ancient Egyptians believed that when the Pharaoh died, his soul would travel on a chariot of fire to the sun, where he would rest on high for all of eternity. Death didn’t know what happened to the people he took, he just did his job. The driver could only stare. He wanted to speak, to cry out for help, but he couldn’t, and even if he could have, no one was there to hear him. The headlights of the wrecked car began to attract moths and other insects. The driver watched the bugs flutter around casting, shadows onto his drained face. The illuminations emanating from the front end of the car began to fade for the driver. He hoped help would come soon. He thought that he had been lying there for hours. To Death it seemed like only a few minutes. The driver’s vision was slowly fading to lightlessness. Gloom crept across his field of vision like the shadow of a lunar eclipse. All that was left was the body, resting on the ground, bordered by the phosphorescent glow.

Ian Benjamin