The Man Who Hated Little Cars, Conclusion

Don throttled up further, not seeing the exterior panels of the building warping and caving, creaking agonizingly and threatening to buckle. The entire structure leaned slightly inward, yielding to the hellacious thrust.

Over the deafening roar, he was clawing at the controls, pulling levers and twisting dials and yelling down to Virgil, who could hear nothing over the engine’s scream, though he was doing his best to keep eye contact with his now-terrified pilot.

Huge billows of fire now flew from the back of the engine, a massive, hot-rodded turbine unit originally intended for a 747. Reporters at this point openly fled, notebooks and tape recorders in hand, seeking cover under trucks and trees, diving beneath anything that seemed hidden from Virgil’s immense monstrosity.

A photographer was found hours later, still reluctant to come out from under a Volkswagen.

Most now peeked out from their refuge, horrifically enraptured by the frenzied destruction being wrought just feet from where they’d been standing moments earlier.

Virgil, until now frozen on his crate, jumped down and sprinted through the haze of the intense heat, the ground shaking below his feet with each step. He ran straight to the purple car, pulling Jerry over the windowsill and dragging him around behind a concrete supply building.

Each looked over his shoulder as he ran, glancing just in time to see the most terrible image either would ever know, a sight each would describe time and time again in years to follow: the line, the tow-cable connecting the purple car to the frame of the Behemoth, going slack.

What happened next, eyewitness accounts would later confirm, came slowly, but with the horrific inevitability of glacial shift, and doubly awful to behold – as all in attendance would not only have to watch the destruction taking place there that morning, but would be forced to stand by helplessly as the car, now known only “The Purple Car,” so heartbreakingly beautiful to all fortunate enough to have witnessed it, was achingly, brutally crushed beneath the towering, snorting, fire-breathing Behemoth – the very vehicle it was designed to usher into the world.

Its expertly formed fenders and trunk were mercilessly flattened beneath the building-sized machine, its tires exploding, wheels deforming, then the interior being squashed, the creamy leather upholstery twisted and stained by the relentless rubber onslaught.

By the time the windshield shattered, most of them had looked away, unable to watch any more.

In fact, when, seconds later, the Behemoth finally came to a rest atop the once-pristine wreckage, having at last run out of fuel, there was only one man who saw it, and it wasn’t Virgil, or Jerry, or even Don in the cockpit, who was finishing up wetting his pants.

It was another man – a quiet, unshaven man whose identity is still not known, but who leaned against a wall and took in all the chaos.

“That was… amazing,” he thought silently to himself. “No one’s ever seen anything like that.”

“You know, maybe I recreate that, indoors, except with giant trucks instead of cars. Giant trucks that crush everything in sight. Yeah. Folks will line up.” His dark eyes glimmered in the smoke drifting Eastward from the disaster. “Yeah. We’ll do it on weekends, on Sunday,” he concluded, waving a gray billow away from his face.

“Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.”