Excerpt: It's Raining In Chicago

Pueblo, Colorado. 00.15.

Zach stared blankly out Eliza's wind shield, smoke curling in transparent swirls from the cigarette in his mouth. The bright eyes of a car passed slowly through the dark, disappearing down Santa Fe Avenue like a lonely shark. The door of the truck was open, the window winched down, and his booted feet rested on the lower edge of the window frame, his body twisted in a way that would leave a contortionist wincing a little, but he couldn't summon up the effort to care. The sounds of the city filtered in in strange bursts and trills, swinging wildly from mute to blaring like a saxophonist doing handstands, and the noise went in one of his ears and out the other, barely ruffling his thoughts on its way past.

Forty-two. A random burst of laughter pierced the night, dissolving in a gurgling of sobs and the noise of someone shouting. No - forty-seven. He counted absently on his fingers, trying to calculate how many hours it had been since Louisville, Kentucky, but his thoughts kept drifting away in lopsided circles. His eyes tracked the cars passing up and down the street, tracing their way through the dark by their headlights and the dull red eyes of their tail lights, thinking Honda, BMW, tiny Japanese hatchback, Volvo, Land Rover in an endless rondo but all he could really see was the vague shapes of the vehicles and the backlit interiors with a long line of people with their hands on the wheels.

Schools of fish. He blinked, taking a long drag of his cigarette and letting the smoke spiral out the window to dissolve into the sky. They're all schools of fish. A woman alone in a mini-van passed him by, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel and staring at the street ahead with eyes so big and blank that they seemed to be made entirely of whites, her pupils narrowed into pinheads. Shark. A Volkswagen, four teenagers in clothes no decent human being would be caught dead in, windows down and singing along to the radio blaring some repetitive bass-line. Cods. A tiny man in a tiny hatchback, the lids of his eyes sunk so low down he looked like he was sleeping, the smile on his face so wide it nearly split his head in half, both hands steady at the wheel. ... Whale.

The noisy ocean of midnight spread out around him, stretching endlessly on from the parking lot in the back of the truck rental shop he'd taken refuge in, and it seemed like he was the only stillness in a watery world. Zach ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting the slowly souring remains of the pizza he'd had for dinner, picking out the hints of ham and mushrooms and mozzarella. The waitress had had eyes like a dog, all big and wide and brown and never biting the hand that fed her, and he could still taste the stale coffee in the back of his mouth.

Forty-nine? He was dead-heading now, hauling an empty load with all the equipment for United Rental gone and signed for, and the great swell of emptiness inside his trailer crept into his head by way of his ear, clawing out all thoughts and replacing them with the peculiar noise empty places made. Not silence - just a textured sort of quiet, a sound of things-should-be-here, and things-have-been - and the sound raised its pitch until his ears buzzed. He rested his head against the back of the driver's seat, absolutely still, because whenever he moved his head, it took his sight a few moments to catch up.

.... God, I'm tired.