Bobby woke up choking on ash.
It burned like diesel fumes, thick and gritty in his throat. He hacked hard, spat something black, and stared up at a sky that looked like someone poured molten gold into a blender full of blood and lightning.
"...This ain't Texas."
The comforting scent of diesel and old coffee was gone; the solid floor of the cab wasn't under his boots, no rain-slicked road stretching ahead through the windshield, no Betsy cradling him. The only thing beneath his hand are stones, hot and pulsing faintly, like the ground itself was breathing.
"Why the hell ain't I in my truck?" he muttered, staggering upright. His boots crunched across glassy rubble. The air stank of scorched meat. Off to the left, a toppled water tower leaked steam into the air like it was crying.
The town—or what was left of it—looked like it had been chewed on by something that hated buildings. Half the storefronts were flattened, walls melted or shattered. Craters gaped into the street like someone had been lobbing meteor-sized Molotov.
He didn't get long to look.
Because something screamed.
Low. Wet. And Close.
He whipped his head toward the sound, instincts kicking in too late.
The monster was already coming.
Thirty feet of nightmare and hate—leathery skin twitching with dozens of whip-like tendrils. Each one lined with red, blinking eyes. Its body moved like a centipede got frisky with a sack of wet rope. At the center of its face—if you could call it a face—was a vertical maw that split open with a slick shhhk, revealing layers of jagged teeth.
It turned toward him.
Its eyes—too many, all moving independently—locked onto Bobby like it recognized him.
And then it launched.
A tendril shot out like a bullwhip from hell.
"Sh—!"
It hit his leg mid-turn.
White-hot pain lanced up his side as he went down hard, thigh split open like someone tried to gut a deer. Blood soaked through his jeans fast.
He hit the dirt groaning, clutching his leg.
"Haven't hurt this bad since that IED back in Kandahar," he hissed through his teeth. "God damn it..."
The creature dragged itself closer, the air buzzing with some low-frequency hum. He could feel it in his teeth. His ears rang. The world tunneled in around that giant, glistening maw.
He grit his teeth and reached for the closest thing—just a broken plank. Useless. His hand tightened anyway.
Then the sky ruptured, punched through from beyond by something with immense, unnatural power.
[FOREIGN ANCHOR-BEARER: BOBBY JOE BUCKMAN]
[BINDING ANCHOR: 1977 WESTERN STAR 4800 – CODE NAME: BETSY]
[SYSTEM SYNC: 100%]
[WELCOME, BOBBY.]
Reality screamed.
With a shriek of tearing reality, the air above the square split open, spitting arcs of raw static and swirling blue-white glyphs.
Through the breach plunged something immense, a plummeting vision of red and chrome.
Struck the ground like a thunderclap wrapped in steel, an impact worthy of Valhalla's own artillery.
Betsy.
Except… not.
Now covered with glowing runes. Her headlights pulsed like eyes.
And then—her door popped open.
And she spoke.
"Well butter my bearings, you look like hammered crap, sugar."
Bobby stared.
"...Did my truck just sass me?"
"Damn right I did." Her voice had twang, confidence, and a layer of flirty threat, like a southern waitress with a torque wrench. "Surprise! I'm talkin' now. Don't panic, we hit a magical deer, you died a lil', and I got downloaded into some interdimensional hitchhiker relay system."
"The what now?"
"Doesn't matter. Short version: I'm sentient, and probably technically illegal in twelve dimensions according to the files. But I'm still your girl."
The monster shrieked and surged again.
Bobby groaned and dragged himself forward, leg still leaking red.
"Get in, Bobby," Betsy said. Her door swung wider. "We got a sumbitch to flatten."
Bobby pulled himself into the cab with one arm, wincing hard as his wounded leg dragged in behind him. The door slammed shut the second his boot cleared the frame.
Inside, it felt like the whole damn cab had been rebuilt with a shotgun and a UI manual.
Lights pulsed across the dash—some analog, most not. Runed overlays buzzed over gauges that had never seen magic in their lives. Buttons glowed like candy store specials: one blue, one yellow, one flashing bright red with a label that read:
[ENGAGE: MONSTER CRUSH MODE]
Bobby didn't need a user manual.
He punched it.
The engine howled like a warhorn on diesel steroids.
Betsy lit up beneath him—tires catching flame as they roared across the square, cracking stone with each spin.
Outside, the monster—still coiling, tendrils twitching in gleeful anticipation—froze.
Its body arched, confident. Dominant. It had waited days, weeks, maybe more. Hidden in the bones of this town. Bred corruption into its foundations. It had triggered a fracture, unseen, unstopped. It had already begun to thrive.
Nothing in this world had challenged it.
Until now.
Until her.
Until the thing barreling toward it with snarling chrome and glowing war-sigils, red and white like a nightmare firetruck with murder in its carburetor.
The Primordial hesitated.
Its instincts, honed on prey and ruin, screamed something it didn't fully understand.
Danger.
Too late.
Betsy hit full tilt.
The impact turned corrupted flesh into spray and bone into mulch. Her ram punched through the center of its vertical maw. Tendrils flailed—snapping wildly—then went limp. Bobby felt the wheels bump twice as they rolled over the rest of it.
Betsy slid to a halt, tires spitting gravel. Then silence. A long, ringing silence, broken only by the soft hiss of steam from her hood and the faint, alien hum of the glowing runes now etched across her dash. Bobby stared at the lights pulsing where his familiar analog gauges should be his heart hammering against his ribs.
How did he end up here...? The pulsing light seemed to pull at a thread in his memory, unwinding back hours earlier, back when the only light was the lightning...
***
The rain wasn't just falling. It had been attacking—sideways, slapping the windshield like it had a grudge. Wipers shrieked back and forth like they were fighting for their lives. Lightning carved a raw scar down the black sky ahead, close enough to make the old dash lights flicker. Thunder rolled after, deep enough to rattle the pine tree air freshener still dangling, miraculously, from the rearview mirror now.
Inside the cab, Bobby Joe Buckman hadn't so much as twitched.
He'd seen worse. Kansas hailstorm back in '99—that one cracked his side mirror and took out a raccoon mid-sprint. Or that Nevada whiteout where the ice peeled his tire treads like a banana. That felt like a lifetime ago. This storm, though... this had just been a Tuesday with extra sauce.
He remembered the mouthful of gas station coffee, scalding, stale, and somehow still better than army rations. Adjusting his hat, rolling his shoulder. His back popping like bubble wrap left out in the sun.
"You and me, Betsy," he'd said, patting the dash – the real dash, worn smooth in places, solid under his palm like it always was. Not this humming, glowing interface. "Five more counties to cross before sunrise."
The truck—his 1977 Western Star 4800, red and white with chrome trim and a hood ornament shaped like a bull on steroids—had grumbled contentedly beneath him. That sound wasn't just the engine. It was her. Always was. Betsy ran deeper than fuel lines. She was loyal steel, southern sass, and two tons of American spite on wheels. Or she had been. Now... now she was talking.
The road had stretched on, slick and dark and mean. The kind of highway that swallowed headlights whole and made you question if you'd passed that same exit sign three times. Somewhere between mile marker "Almost There" and "Definitely Lost," the storm eased just enough for Bobby to spot a sign flash past.
Mile Marker 0.
He blinked. That wasn't right.
They hadn't crossed a state line. Hell, they hadn't even passed the world's sketchiest truck stop—the one with the animatronic moose that sold bootleg beef jerky that tasted like rubber.
"Did I take a wrong turn?" Bobby had muttered, just before the world lit up.
It was not lightning. The source felt a lot closer, intense, and profoundly unnatural.
The road ahead bloomed in a white-blue glare, like someone set off a stadium light mid-air. It didn't flicker. It hummed. A low, penetrating hum, almost like the thrumming he could feel now through Betsy's chassis. And from the center of that humming light—
A shape.
A deer. Except not.
It stood dead center in the road just past the bend. Tall. Too tall. Its body jittered like an old VHS tape on a broken screen. Antlers stretched up and up, jagged branches of lightning crackling from tip to tip. Its legs didn't move. It just hovered. Its eyes—no, screens—glitched between static and color bars.
"The hell is this, Animal Planet in 4K?" Bobby remembered easing off the gas.
Betsy made a noise. Low, warning. Like she was growling with transmission fluid. Even then, she knew.
Then the world stopped.
Rain. Gone.
Thunder. Gone.
The only sound left was the drum in Bobby's chest and the hiss of his own breath. A silence almost as profound as the one hanging over the ruined square now.
The deer's head turned. Slowly.
Right at him.
[ECHO DETECTED]
The voice hadn't come from outside. It rang inside his skull. Cold. Clinical. Like a GPS trying to sell you snake oil. A voice that somehow felt related to the text scrolling across Betsy's new displays.
[SUMMONING LAYER SYNCHRONIZATION: 67%…]
The deer took a step forward.
"Hell no," Bobby whispered again, the memory visceral.
His foot slammed the gas.
Betsy screamed.
The deer didn't move.
There was light. Pure and hot and blinding.
Then
impact.
***
Bobby staring through the windshield at the pulped remains of the monster, the hiss of steam from Betsy's hood loud in the sudden quiet. He took a shaky breath, the phantom smell of ozone mixing with the real stink of the ruined town.
He exhaled slowly, heart still trying to beat its way out of his chest.
"…That felt illegal in several states."
"That felt good, sugar," Betsy purred, her voice snapping him fully back. "You see how it looked at me? Like a fat tick seeing the boot."
[THREAT NEUTRALIZED: CLASS-3 PRIMORDIAL – GOREMAW]
[ECHO LAYER STREAM: ACTIVE]
[FOREIGN ANCHOR-BEARER: BOBBY JOE BUCKMAN – REGISTERED]
[CURRENT VIEWERS: 3]
Viewer01: what is this garbage
Viewer02: HOLY HELL he ran it over
Viewer03: finally a protagonist with taste
[NEW TITLE UNLOCKED: MONSTER TRUCK HERO]
Bobby leaned back in the seat, chest heaving.
His blood was drying on his jeans. His cigarette, forgotten during the fight, was crooked behind his ear. And a roach the size of a thumb crawled across the windshield, stopped halfway, took one look at Betsy's still-glowing grill, and bailed.
"…I need a smoke. And a beer. In that order."
"Make it a case, sugar," Betsy replied. "Town's gonna be real curious what just parked in their square."