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- [00:00]
Child
Mom, can you tell me a story?
- [00:02]
Mom
Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.
- [00:05]
Child
Was she brave?
- [00:05]
Mom
She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
- [00:12]
Child
Did she have to fight a dragon?
- [00:13]
Mom
Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
- [00:17]
Child
Was it scary?
- [00:18]
Mom
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
- [00:20]
Narrator
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [00:22]
Mom
It did, actually.
- [00:23]
Child
Okay, good story.
- [00:24]
Mom
Car buying you'll want to tell stories about Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
- [00:31]
Narrator
Welcome new and returning Hodgepodge listeners to our brand new original limited series. This one is unlike anything you've heard from us before. It's a bit more of an experiment in terms of both the format and the subject matter, and I am excited to see what you all think. So, just like the launch of Hymns for the Road, we are holding a T shirt giveaway. You can enter the giveaway by submitting a review to your favorite podcast platform and either emailing us a screenshot@findasalivepodcastmail.com or posting a screenshot on Blue sky and tagging Hodgepodgeaud. Submissions will end on July 1st, when we will choose two random winners to receive a free T shirt of their choice from our Find Us Alive merch store. Thank you for giving a new show a chance. I hope you enjoy. This horror podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Warnings are included in the show notes. Listener discretion is advised. Furthermore, this audio drama is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental.
- [02:06]
Child
Hey, buddy. Who is the most liquid businessman on the street? Zanette wasn't taking her chair to work today, even though her joints hurt from the moment she woke up. But the straining ache wasn't as bad as other days. And her neighbor was old, so he couldn't get the snow shoveled off his sidewalk more than once or twice a week. She tried for a while to get her building manager to take care of it, but he told her they were powerless to do anything about someone else's property. Oh well, her walker should be more or less fine. At least she wouldn't have to worry about getting salt into the machinery. She stopped before leaving, pausing to study the pastel illustration hanging from a hook on the inside of her front door. It was the latest in her collection. Thrifting art was hard, but when it paid off, it really paid off. This one was a parade of reds and oranges with deep violets around the edges, bright and warm as fire. She focused and found her shade for the day, a reddish pink salmon color hidden between the crimson and orange, the color of spring flower petals or the underside of a lover's tongue. Hues of strength and confidence. She needed both. After waiting for about seven minutes longer than the bus schedule suggested, Lynette began to regret not bringing her chair. Her arms and shoulders were getting sore from leaning on the frame of her walker, but if she eased up, the pain would transfer to her knees and hips. She blew out an anxious breath, fogging in the cold air. The bus was late. She might miss her transfer. She had already been late to work once this week, and she could tell her boss wasn't pleased. She needed this job. It wasn't the best, sure, but it was the only one that offered hours while the buses were running, was close enough to a stop that it kept foot travel to a minimum and was willing to hire undergraduate students. Tuition wasn't going to pay itself, and in spite of their initial show of understanding, their assurances that they were happy to hire disabled candidates and that they would work with her on her transit situation, the goodwill had clearly worn off by now. When Lynette started her position as an administrative assistant, they were lenient. Over time they had become less patient, even if their words were still gentle. The bus was filled with a rainbow of people. A thick set middle aged woman in a cleaning uniform reading a mass market paperback romance, a handful of other undergrad students on the way to their daytime classes, backpacks and textbooks in their laps. A woman in an extremely green jacket sat with her young daughter, who kept pointing out the window and asking loud, obnoxious questions. An old man wearing four coats and dragging a massively overstuffed suitcase sat slumped in a row by himself. He smelled like he hadn't bathed in a long time. He had a walker with him, too, just like hers. The walkway to the office wasn't shoveled either. They were usually better about keeping the ramp clear, but Lynette guessed nobody had been around to take care of it yet. She could tell something was wrong as she pushed through the door. There was something in the air that spoke of ill tidings. Twenty minutes later, Lynette sat on the front steps with a file box of her things, trying to read her phone through a wash of tears. Ryan Noel was going to change the world. In fact, he already had, although as he fiddled with the door of his self driving car, he wished he had changed things a little differently. Ryan Knoll was a rich man. A very rich man. He was just like the cool and successful men in the cartoons. He had everything that he wanted. A 20,000 square foot mansion on the coast. A yacht, of course, all the women he could ask for. All the underage girls he could ask for, too. But he wasn't always a rich man. At one point in his life, he was also a rich boy. A rich white boy living in an estate in Johannesburg, South Africa. His father was a miner, and the one with the hardest job, too. The job of delegating all the smaller jobs to the best people. It was grueling work mentally managing all those laborers, finding the best people to find the best people, to tally the numbers and tell the miners, the ones in the actual mine, what to do and how to do it faster. Many nights, Ryan's father came home with wrinkles in his suit in between his eyebrows, working long after the servants had cleared away the dinnerware. But what his father failed to provide in time, he provided in heaps of gifts and mountains of opportunity. It was clear from his childhood that Ryan was destined to lead the same way his father had led the workers of the mine, in the same way his great grandfather had led several dozen enslaved Africans. He wondered, though, if he could lead this car's deadbolt lock out of its socket. Young Ryan Knoll had a difficult childhood. He was mistreated by the other children at his private school. One boy even beat him up when all he did was make a joke about said boy being a bastard child. It wasn't Ryan's fault that the boy's father had died of cancer a few days earlier. He didn't control the whims of the universe. And that boy's mother was a real whore. Besides, his middling grades were only proof that he was too smart for even his exclusive elite schools. Evidence that his foolish teachers and stupid classmates were trying to keep him cowed. But no matter. Ryan Noel was the smartest boy who ever lived, and he made sure to remind them regularly. Some days it was the only thing that kept him going. The worst, though, were the buses. Ryan's father, in an attempt to introduce him to the realities of the world and force him from his comfort zone, sometimes made his son ride the bus to school. The only other children who rode the bus to school were the scholarship kids, the freedloaters of poor breeding who were allowed into such exclusive institutions by skimming off the contributions of families like the Knolls just because they scored highly on their entrance exams. He hated the bus. He hated the children who rode the bus. Loud, poor creatures with the audacity to belittle him just because he knew he was above them. Some of them even said terrible things about his family, especially the black kids. They hated his father for being successful, and they hated him for it too. Ryan Knoll didn't belong on the bus. And so Ryan Knoll dedicated himself to saving humanity from the horrors of public transportation. After graduating from his exclusive private secondary school and then from an even more exclusive private university with a degree in engineering, he purchased an electric car company from a man who was admittedly smart, having invented an electric car, but not as smart as Ryan, who knew that owning things was much more profitable than making them. The previous owner was easy enough to erase from history because he was a modest and introverted fellow who didn't care to be seen by the media. And Ryan loved attention. That poor engineer faded into obscurity. As Ryan told everyone as often as he could that his own hand guided the creation of every Knoll Co. Vehicle. He was sort of telling the truth. He did hire the people who hired the people who designed the cars, so he may as well have built them all himself. And with this shining beacon of progress under his belt, he began his mission in earnest. Politicians were cheap. Competing companies were cheaper. The thing he could never seem to buy was the universal approval of the broad, stupid public who seemed paradoxically angry with his campaign against those horrid rattling snakes of piss and poverty, the subways and trains, expo after expo. He showed them that he was their savior, their guiding light out of the darkness of collective movement and into the isolated heaven of individual vehicle ownership. Those who couldn't drive or couldn't afford it would be left in the dust where they belonged. Ryan's crowning achievement was the reconstruction of the Knoll Metro tunnel. The old subway line was converted into a sleek shaft of smooth concrete wide enough to fit a beautiful chain of his high tech self driving cars. A cool million in fines for workplace safety violations and dumping waste into the city sewer system was a small price to pay for a tunnel that looked like something straight out of an 80s science fiction movie. Honestly, those chemical burned workers should thank him for giving them the true experience of living in a futuristic utopia, because the scars would probably look pretty cool. Sure, the Knoll Metro tunnel could only serve about 1,100 passengers an hour compared to 4,000 on the old subway. But the experience was far superior. A single clean autonomous vehicle all to oneself. No more stinking, crowded cars packed full of stinking ugly people. Ryan Knoll would never again be forced into one of those horrible sardine cars alongside all those NPCs of inferior race and status. Thank God this was where Ryan Knoll sat now. Actually, he was looking at his phone, waiting for his self driving car to ferry him through the narrow tunnel, when the vehicle hummed to a complete stop. Computer, he said authoritatively. Restart engine. Ryan Knoll's autonomous electric vehicles were the first ever to feature voice recognition software and a digital interface that didn't always work. Computer. He tried again, louder. The car showed no indication that it understood him. What an inconvenience. Voice controls were the only way to reboot the vehicle. Ryan Knoll ignored his engineers when they told him that relying so much on electronics and software could cause problems in situations like these. Instead, Ryan had argued that the driver of the future didn't have time for obsolete mechanics like buttons and levers, because those weren't cool at all. He tried a few more key phrases, but none of those worked either. Ridiculous. He was the CEO of Knoll Company, King of the future. He knew all the phrases, or at least most of them. He knew some of them. But his engineers should have planned around this. They never should have allowed him into this kind of position in the first place. His inventions that he paid other people to create should work perfectly. It didn't matter if his factories had poor safety ratings or his lowliest workers were barely paid at all. If any of them wanted better factory conditions or higher pay, they would simply have to work harder or get a different job that met their absurd demands. It was their fault. Ryan Knoll tapped the vehicle's flat touchscreen. Nothing happened. Fine. Whatever. He would walk back the way he came. He was only a five minutes drive into the tunnel. It shouldn't take that long. To retrace his steps, he pressed the backlit open door button. Nothing happened then, either. With a loud, exasperated groan, he shifted in his seat to locate the emergency door lever the government forced him to install. To reach it, he only had to pry up a panel of the plastic interior and jimmy it opened to reveal the handle underneath. He found the panel, dug his fingernail into the seam, and Ryan Knoll howled as the sharp edge of the plastic cover bit under the nail bed and pried keratin from flesh. His finger was bleeding fluid, spurting from under the rapidly purpling nail. He tried to bend the fingernail back into place but only succeeded in cracking it further so he clutched it in his fist like he might hold it on manually. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes. Surely nobody else would come speeding around the gentle bend and slam into his bumper. What happens when a car crashes into another car? Venerating those classic vehicles of the early 20th century, Ryan Knoll had his electric cars manufactured using rugged steel, rigid and unforgiving. You could spray one of his creations with a semi automatic weapon at 30 yards and barely make a dent in the siding. Some people bellyached about the lack of crumple zones, but what good was a crumpled car? He wanted his cars to be indestructible, to pulverize any other vehicles that dared to rear end them in traffic. Besides, the ones in this tunnel ran no risk of being hit at all, considering they were self driving in a long row. But he did wonder what would happen if another steel juggernaut rammed into his back bumper. What with the line of red tail lights in front of him, There hadn't been tail lights in front of him before. The tunnel was empty a moment ago. Now, before him stretched an infinite centipede of cars. Bars of blinding red lined up for miles. The vehicle had no horn to honk. The rear windows were so small that Ryan couldn't see if any of the cars in front of him even had passengers. He had packed himself into a sardine car. Totally alone. He was dashboard met his uniform white veneers. His vision lit up in a white flash and then bloomed dark like burning paper. Dazed, he tongued at his plasticky front teeth. They felt loose and tasted metallic. His gums prickling with adrenaline, Ryan shook his head, trying to focus, then craned over his shoulder to look out the back window. The sharp white of LED headlights beaming through the glass made it impossible to see any farther than the vehicle immediately behind him. Why were those lights so bright? The tunnel cars didn't even need lights. The shine grew brighter. Another car was coming. Ryan fumbled with the open door button again. It didn't respond. He tried the window. The electronics seemed quite dead. For the first time ever, Ryan longed for one of those old cranks that wheel down the glass manually, or even just a button made of higher quality plastic. He tugged down the seatbelt, clicked it into place, braced for impact. He received all of it. His dream car had no crumple zones. The collision pinned his car between the vehicle up front and the cold steel bumper behind. Ryan felt his brain rattle against his skull. His neck twinged once, then flooded with the pain, like boiling water pouring down his back. The seatbelt mostly worked. He didn't knock any more teeth out, but he barely had time to take a breath before a third car rammed the pile up. This time his vehicle finally started to crumble. The dashboard folded back on him, his seat pitched forward. Ryan Knoll found his rib cage pinched between the two. Another vehicle careened into the back of the pileup. The empty space containing Ryan Null's legs collapsed. His ribs buckled, forcing rounded fingers of bone into his heart and lungs. Blood and vomit and soft lumps of flesh bubbled into his throat like old food out of a backed up kitchen sink. Entombed 40ft underground in the tunnel that bore his name, Ryan Null found himself pinched inside a death trap of his own devising itself, pinched between a thousand more. When he screamed, or at least when he tried, bits of his lungs and stomach extruded between his vocal folds and splattered onto the flat futuristic windshield, lit up reddish pink by the taillights ahead. He felt his spinal cord strain, then creak, and then the wet pop of vertebrae separating, wrenched loose from their moorings like raw emeralds from stone. Brian Knoll was worth billions upon billions of dollars, more than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes. He had sycophants and underlings and celebrity girlfriends. He had the whole world bending to his individual whim, a world of colorful lights and colorless people, everyone in their own individual pods spread out across a beautiful expanse of flat gray. Now his internal organs were spread out across the cabin of his self driving car. Blood pooled in his shoes. Ryan Knoll could feel part of his intestines slide thickly out of a hole where his anus used to be, and he wondered more sharply than he should have why he was still alive. Or how. Then an acrid metallic smell warmed past the scent of blood, and Ryan knew that something had caught on fire. He couldn't struggle. He couldn't move anything below his armpits. His left arm was free, his right flattened and crushed to a thick slurry with the rest of him. But even with a free hand, he could do nothing about his situation. Skimping out on the fire suppression within the bowels of the vehicle had saved him money. Not much, but some. And with those meager savings tucked safely away in his stocks and property holdings, Ryan Knoll began to burn. The flames copped from the floor, wicking up through his pulverized legs like candle wax. He could still feel how wet it was down there, drenched with shit and viscera. The moisture shouldn't have caught, but somehow it did. He was incendiary. Brian Null felt the flames slick into the fissures in his bones, liquefying his marrow into molten oil that scalded rivulets through shredded muscle. The fire melted what it couldn't char, and Ryan felt every drip as he boiled in his bulletproof cauldron. As the heat met with the air in the open pocket where his upper body wasn't quite folded flat, it billowed up again into living fingers of flame pawing softly under his clothes, scorching his skin into brittle black wisps. His veneers softened in his boiling mouth, turning to molten plastic over the whittled down stubs of his teeth, slowly oozing in through his gums and searing holes in his jaw. Ryan caught one last glimpse of the infinite line of tail lights before his eyeballs were burst and dribbled down his cheeks past the hurricane of agony. The smell of his own roasting flesh was vaguely pleasant, like meat on a barbecue before it charred. Desot, the last brilliant genius thought in Ryan Null's brilliant genius head was a rising terror that when they recovered his corpse, he wouldn't look cool at all. Six months ago, Lynette sat on her kitchen floor, her entire body alight with pain and stress, sobbing over a $31 rideshare charge that she knew would cut into her grocery budget but that she couldn't get her things home without. She wept the rest of that night until there wasn't any strength or moisture left in her to cry. That evening, she glanced carelessly at a news headline on her phone, which announced the untimely death of electric vehicle tycoon Ryan Knoll in a tragic but not entirely unpredictable car accident. But that was then and this is now, and Lynette was waiting for a text that the carpool had arrived to take her to the first day of her new job with the city's transit authority. The death of Knoll, company CEO, had thrown his empire into disarray. Their stock price crashed. Vehicle production stalled. Most importantly, it brought their war against public transit to a screeching halt. Without Ryan Noll, there is nobody left to fund opposition to the city's planned commuter rail line, which would extend from the city center to a terminal the next town over. Public support skyrocketed, and the project was approved. Lynette's job, paid for by the boosted public transportation budget, was to assist the head graphic designer with the branding. Not her dream role, but at least she got to work with shapes and colors, and her boss understood the difficulties a bus commute could present. They had even thrown in free paratransit coverage to sweeten the deal. The thrifted arts on the front door had a lovely shade of green. It reminded Lynette of of mint ice cream and iris leaves. A good color, fresh and cool and bright as spring. As she rolled outside, she saw it all around her, even growing from the cracks where the earth was paved over. Hey, buddy, who's the most liquid businessman on the street?
- [26:42]
Narrator
Killianaire Episode 1 is written and produced by Anna McGuire and narrated by W. Blake Kimber. Original Music by Jackson McMurray. Script editing by Sarah Schell. Visit hodgepodgeaudio.com for merch, transcripts, information, and more. Great audio fiction. If you like this show and want to support us, visit our patreon@patreon.com hodgepodgeaudio thank you for listening.