Yellow

Written for my son's challenge, topic: yellow.


He caught the first glimpse of it as he came out of the last hairpin curve and began the short straight stretch leading to the next cluster of curves and dips. Because of the relatively straight road at this point, he could spare a few glances toward the brilliant yellow patches leaping out of the breaks in the trees ahead.

He couldn't figure out what it was. It was much bigger than, say, a school bus, and it wasn't moving. It seemed to be on or near the road ahead, well into the middle of the next few curves. He thought fleetingly of slowing down, but before could really think about it, he was distracted by a flock of black birds taking flight from the fence running along the road. They were probably startled by his approach, but they flew right in front of him, which kept him busy trying to avoid them without going off the road.

Then he was into the next curve, skillfully applying the brake and the accelerator at the right moments to maximize his speed (and therefore his exhilaration) without losing control of the sleek little sports car. He was definitely unprepared for the sight that greeted him as he came out of the third curve.

Even while he was stopping the car as urgently as he could, mental flashes of skidding off the road and flipping end over end down the hill competed with huge yellow shapes scattered over the road, thoroughly blocking it. When his car finally stopped moving, he sat and stared. They were Hummers! Big yellow Hummers! There were at least a dozen. They were skewed all over the road, facing in different directions. Some looked like they had collided, others like they had almost gone off the road to avoid the ones colliding. One had demolished the roadside fence.

The longer he sat there looking them over, the stranger it seemed. There was something very wrong with a dozen yellow Hummers sitting on a road in the middle of a forest, facing every which direction. Then he realized there were no people. Not a single one. No dead people, no injured ones, nobody calling 911 on a cell phone. That was when he should have left. He should have just turned right around and high-tailed it out of there and never looked back. Of course, it was probably already too late for that.

He heard the sound of his engine change from the smooth purring it normally made at idle to a high-pitched humming that hurt his ears. He felt his car moving slowly, closer to the nearest Hummer, until it was touching it. He tried to reach for the gear shift, to shift into reverse, but his hand wasn't cooperating. He looked down at it. It looked strange. It seemed to shimmer like metal, not flesh. Then he realized his whole body was melting and stretching out to blend in with the body of his car, which was turning from red to yellow. He and his car were becoming another yellow Hummer in the middle of the road!

Some time later he sensed it was getting dark. He must have blacked out for a while, because the sun had set. He and his car were now completely transformed into a yellow Hummer, but his mind was still working. He couldn't exactly see, but he sensed the other Hummers. He could even tell that many of them used to be cars, with people in them. He knew they had all been caught that day just like he had, and they were all waking up. But the other ones ... they had never been human.

He tried to struggle. If he had still had legs, he would have been running as fast as he could, but he couldn't move at all. Mentally he felt as though he was clawing at a cage, shrieking and kicking. Then he sensed that one of the not human Hummers was watching him. Even though he felt no trace of compassion from it, he cried out to it from inside his mind. What are you doing to me? Let me go home! What are you going to do with us tonight?

The same thing we do every night, Yellow - try to take over the world!