The box truck cut them off, jockeying for preferential access to the freeway ramp. Then it stopped at a red light, giving Rebecca and her daughter, Clare, the opportunity to catch up to it and give the truck driver the look that drivers give to other drivers who zip past only to end up stuck at the same red light anyway. That knowing ‘well, we meet again’ look.
The truck was painted white with a single word written in very large Courier font on its clean metallic side: Internment.
“That looks ominous,” Rebecca nodded towards the truck.
“Why?” Clare, fifteen years old and squarely in the season of knowing everything, asked. “Internment,” Rebecca pointed out. “ No contact phone number. No company address. No permit numbers. The cab windows are tinted. I wonder if it’s transporting bodies.”
“Mom!” Clare exclaimed. “That’s awful! It’s just a truck.”
“What else could ‘internment’ mean? Sounds like being interred to me. You know, interred – being placed in a grave. They’re probably carrying a thousand urns of ashes and a hundred body-bagged corpses.”
“Please never take one of those word association tests, Mom.. ‘Internment’ probably means something innocuous.”
“It looks abnormally clean,” Rebecca continued. “Just like you would expect a body-moving truck to be. And it’s night time . What better time to move bodies? Perhaps they have a bunch of bodies in there right now. Sitting next to us at this traffic light.”
Clare was shaking her head. “No, Mom.” Although her mother’s point was well taken; the truck was almost spotless. Clare had the odd realization that she had never seen a totally clean commercial truck. Or a dirty hearse.
“Imagine if that truck got into an accident?” Rebecca suggested, making up a mock-headline: “Box truck and car collide. Drivers of both vehicles okay. Fifty-seven dead at scene. They’d have no idea where all the bodies came from..”
“That is so bad. You are so bad.”
“Why doesn’t it say anything else? Like what the business does? Or a phone number?”
“I don’t know,” Clare pulled out her phone and typed in the name on the side of the truck.
“It’s a furniture company,” she proclaimed “‘Inter’ for interior furniture and ‘ment’ for entertainment systems. The ‘n’ is shorthand for the word ‘and.’”
The light turned green. The truck began to move.
“It’s still a creepy name,” Rebecca muttered as the truck started to veer towards the freeway entrance ramp. “Perhaps it’s some sort of secret government program masquerading as a furniture company. I’ve never driven by one of their locations. And you believe everything they put on the Internet? I taught you better than that.”
“It’s just a furniture company, Mom.” Clare was looking for closure. “Stop being so extra.” Rebecca smiled and glanced at Clare, giving her a wink. “I bet it sells a lot of mysteriously shaped vases.”
“Mom, sometimes you’re impossible.”
The truck sped up as it entered the entrance ramp, then, seemed to slow down. Clare saw (or Rebecca saw) the driver’s head reflected in the side-mirror of the truck, as if he was looking back and assessing the two women. Then he sped up and merged onto the freeway.
Had the driver been assessing them? Noting their car and license plate number? Clare watched the truck disappear, curious what was inside.
‘Internment’ was a weird name for a furniture company. She found herself wondering if they really might sell a lot of purposefully shaped urns.
Clare erased her search history from her phone, feeling oddly exposed for researching the company name.
The next moment, another truck pulled beside them on the freeway, bearing another single word on the side: “Fish”.
“Nothing fishy about that one,” Rebecca offered. “I bet its sole purpose is delivering seafood. Get it? Sole… like the fish.”
“Your humor is a little orange roughy tonight,” Clare replied. She was feigning lightness; in the back of her mind the clean box truck disconcerted her.
“Are my bad puns krilling you?” Rebecca asked playfully.
“Uggg. If you can think of any better fish puns, just let minnow. Emphasis on ‘better.’”
Far in the distance, Clare could still see the white truck, now speeding away.
The Fish truck passed them and Clare noted it was dirty and smelled like a long day at the beach. It also displayed a telephone number and a company street address, along with numerous Department of Transportation permit numbers. And the purpose of the truck was clearly labeled.
“Its purported porpoise,” Mom would say, continuing the fish theme.
Clare was relieved that the driver of the Fish truck did not check his side-view mirror as he passed. But her mind was filled with unresolved questions. Her curiosity got the better of her and she re-entered the word ‘Internment’ on her phone.
This time, the search term could not be found.
She exited the search, deleted her browsing history again, and turned her phone off, hoping she had jumped off the Web quickly enough.
Laura J. Campbell lives and writes in Houston, Texas, USA. She won the 2007 James B. Baker Award for short story for her science fiction tale, 416175. Over fifty of her short stories have appeared in Pressure Suite: Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3, Under the Full Moon’s Light, Gods & Services, Page & Spine, Breath and Shadow, A Collection of Storytelling, and other publications. Her two novels, “Blue Team One” and “Five Houses,” are currently available online. Many of Mrs. Campbell’s more recent works are available through Amazon.