I was staring at a five-hundred-pound gourd when the mobility scooter crashed through the frost-heavy brush.
The delivery app timer flashed red against my dashboard mount. Forty-two seconds until my rating dropped from a precarious 4.71 to a terminal 4.69. The screen was cracked straight down the middle, splitting the digital map into two jagged tectonic plates. My heater was broken. The cold air inside the hatchback felt like biting into aluminum foil.
I gripped the faux-leather steering wheel, my knuckles turning the color of skim milk. The frost on the windshield was a crystalline crust, catching the harsh, manic glare of the October sun. It was that specific kind of autumn afternoon where the light feels glitchy and too bright, illuminating every pothole and dead leaf with a hyper-realistic sharpness. I pressed the accelerator. The engine of my 2011 hatchback whined, a high-pitched mechanical protest. I needed to deliver four large pepperoni pizzas to a cul-de-sac that didn't exist on standard GPS. The cardboard boxes sat on my passenger seat, radiating a dull, greasy heat against my thigh.
I took the corner at thirty-five miles per hour. The tires lost their grip on a patch of frost-heaved asphalt. The steering wheel jerked violently. I overcorrected, my elbows locking.
That was when I saw the pickup truck.
It was crawling down the center of the narrow backroad at maybe ten miles per hour. An ancient, rust-eaten Ford. But the speed wasn't the problem. The problem was the payload.
Taking up the entire bed of the truck was a pumpkin.
It was a grotesque, bulbous mass of bright orange vegetation. It looked like a tumor grown in a radioactive garden. It sat heavy on the truck's rear suspension, bowing the metal bumper toward the road. I slammed both feet onto the brake pedal. The anti-lock brakes stuttered, a violent, percussive thudding up through my shins.
"Move!" I screamed at the windshield.
The hatchback skidded sideways. The gravel shoulder caught the right tires. The car tilted, gravity shifting sickeningly, and then we were going down.
We hit the bottom of the ditch with a crunch of fiberglass and a spray of icy mud. My seatbelt locked, snapping my collarbone against the strap. The pizza boxes launched forward, striking the dashboard and exploding. Slices of heavy, cheese-laden dough slapped against the inside of the windshield and slid down the glass, leaving thick, greasy trails.
The engine choked and died.
Silence.
Just the ticking of the cooling radiator and the harsh, bright glare of the sun cutting through the bare branches above. I unclipped my seatbelt. My hands were shaking. I kicked my door open. The hinges screamed. I stepped out into shin-deep, freezing mud. The cold seeped instantly through my canvas sneakers, numbing my toes.
I looked up at the road. The pickup truck had stopped.
Two men leaped out of the cab. They were wearing dark hoodies and cheap plastic Halloween masks—one a generic skull, the other a melting ghost. They didn't even look at me. They scrambled down the opposite side of the embankment, tearing through the dry, dead brush, their boots snapping twigs with loud, sharp cracks.
A police siren wailed in the distance. The sound was thin and synthetic, echoing off the distant tree line.
I stood in the mud, staring at the abandoned truck. The massive pumpkin sat in the bed, unbothered. It was ridged and scarred, covered in pale dirt and thick, fibrous veins. It looked alien. My phone buzzed in my pocket. A notification. My delivery was officially late. My rating dropped.
I kicked the front tire of my ruined car.
"Are you kidding me?" I yelled at the empty road.
A mechanical grinding noise answered me. It was coming from the woods behind the ditch. It sounded like an electric wheelchair mixed with a chainsaw. The brush parted violently.
An elderly man burst through the frost-heavy branches riding a heavily modified mobility scooter. The machine was bolted with steel plates, thick off-road tires, and what looked like a homemade winch mounted to the front basket. The man wore a heavy wool coat, welding goggles pushed up onto his forehead, and a frantic, wild expression.
He slammed on the scooter's brakes. It skidded to a halt at the edge of the ditch, showering me with a fresh layer of freezing dirt.
He pointed a trembling, leather-gloved finger at the giant pumpkin in the truck bed.
"Goliath!" he shouted.
I wiped a clump of mud off my cheek.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"They attempted to pilfer my champion!" he bellowed, ignoring me entirely. He dismounted the scooter with surprising agility, his boots sinking into the mud. He marched past my wrecked car, not even glancing at the pizza slices sliding down my windshield.
"You ran me off the road," I said, stepping in front of him.
"I did no such thing. Those miscreants in the Ford are the architects of this chaos!" he snapped, his voice booming with theatrical authority. "I tracked them. I planted a tracking beacon deep within Goliath's stem. They thought they could abscond with the county blue ribbon. Fools!"
"I do not care about your pumpkin. My car is in a ditch. I have pizzas rotting on my dashboard. I have a gig-economy overlord algorithm currently terminating my employment."
"Your petty grievances mean nothing in the face of agricultural history!" he shouted.
He shoved past me, scrambling up the embankment toward the truck. He reached the tailgate and placed both hands flat against the massive orange rind, petting it like a frightened horse. The siren in the distance grew louder, a sharp, piercing whine that cut through the bright, cold air.
"The authorities approach," he said, looking down at me. "We have precious little time. The rival farmers will return with reinforcements. I require your physical assistance."
"I am not helping you," I said.
"I will compensate you handsomely."
"With what?" I asked. "Squash?"
"One thousand dollars in legal, untraceable American currency," he said.
I stopped. The cold mud clinging to my shins suddenly felt very distant. One thousand dollars was three months of car insurance. It was rent. It was a new windshield.
"Cash?" I asked.
"Cash upon delivery to the fairgrounds weigh-in," he stated, his eyes wide and unblinking. "But we must extract Goliath from this cursed vessel and place him into yours."
I looked at my tiny, crumpled hatchback. I looked at the five-hundred-pound pumpkin.
"You are completely insane," I said.
"Perhaps," he replied. "Do we have a binding accord?"
I looked at the pizza grease on my window. I looked at the siren flashing red and blue through the distant tree line.
"Get the winch," I said.
His name was Arthur. He told me this while unspooling a thick steel cable from the front of his heavily modified scooter. The metal wire rasped against the rusted spool, a harsh, scraping sound that set my teeth on edge. The bright autumn sun beat down on the ditch, casting long, sharp shadows across the mud. The temperature was dropping fast.
"Secure the perimeter!" Arthur commanded, throwing a heavy iron hook into the mud at my feet.
"This is a ditch, Arthur. There is no perimeter," I said, picking up the hook. It was freezing, the iron biting through my thin gloves.
"They are the Jenkins brothers," Arthur said, his breath pluming in white clouds. "Despicable men. They employ sabotage. They utilize chemical fertilizers. They have no respect for the old ways of the soil."
"How exactly does a mobility scooter winch pull a five-hundred-pound pumpkin out of a truck bed?" I asked.
"Physics, my dear girl! Physics and leverage!" he shouted. "Take that hook and affix it to the undercarriage of the Ford. We must create a stable anchor point."
I waded through the mud, my sneakers making gross, sucking sounds with every step. The water was icy, seeping through the canvas and turning my socks into frozen weights. I crawled under the back of the pickup truck. The metal chassis was coated in rust and thick, black grease. I jammed the iron hook through a hole in the frame.
"Hooked!" I yelled, sliding back out.
Arthur was busy pulling a set of heavy-duty jumper cables from the storage compartment of his scooter.
"What are those for?" I asked.
"We lack a proper pulley wheel," he explained, marching toward my hatchback. "We shall use the structural integrity of your vehicle's roof rack to redirect the tension. We will loop the cables to create a friction harness around Goliath."
"You are going to rip the roof off my car," I said.
"Sacrifices must be made for glory!" he declared.
He tossed me the jumper cables. The heavy copper clamps clattered against my chest. I scrambled up the embankment, slipping twice in the wet clay, my knees slamming into the frozen dirt. I reached the bed of the truck. The pumpkin was massive. Up close, the rind was thick and heavily textured, covered in deep vertical ridges that felt like rough, cured leather.
"Loop the black cable beneath his equatorial bulge!" Arthur instructed from below.
"His equatorial bulge?"
"Do not question the terminology! Just secure the webbing!"
I wrestled the thick jumper cables under the heavy curve of the pumpkin. The sheer mass of the object was terrifying. It didn't budge. I had to dig my fingers into the rotting debris at the bottom of the truck bed to force the thick rubber wire underneath the gourd. My fingernails filled with dark, freezing dirt.
"I need more slack!" I yelled down.
Arthur hit a switch on his scooter. The electric motor whined, and the steel cable went taut, vibrating like a guitar string. He had attached the other end of the cable to the jumper cable harness.
"Stand clear!" Arthur yelled. "The tension is mounting!"
I jumped down into the ditch, landing hard in the mud. The shock traveled up my spine. I stood next to Arthur. We both stared at the truck bed.
The scooter's motor ground louder, a painful, high-pitched mechanical shriek. The steel cable snapped tight. The roof rack on my hatchback groaned, the metal bending slightly under the immense strain.
Up in the truck bed, Goliath shifted.
It was a slow, grinding movement. The massive orange sphere scraped against the rusted metal floor of the truck.
"It is moving!" Arthur cheered, raising both fists into the air. "The leviathan awakens!"
"It's going to fall straight down," I pointed out, watching the pumpkin slide toward the edge of the tailgate. "It's going to smash into a thousand pieces."
Arthur froze. His fists slowly lowered. He looked at the vertical drop from the tailgate to the ditch.
"Ah," he said. "A minor miscalculation in trajectory."
"We need a ramp," I said.
"We have no materials!"
I looked at my hatchback. I looked at the trunk lid.
"Pop the hatch," I said.
"What?"
"Pop the hatch on my car. Open it all the way. Back your scooter up. We drag the pumpkin off the tailgate, let it slide down the open hatch door, and guide it into the back seat."
Arthur stared at me. His eyes behind the welding goggles were wide with manic respect.
"You are a tactical genius," he whispered.
I waded back to my car, yanked the handle, and threw the hatchback door open. I cleared out the remaining, unexploded pizza boxes, tossing them into the mud. The heat of the cardboard immediately dissipated into the freezing air.
"Align the scooter!" I yelled.
Arthur threw the machine into reverse, the tires spinning and spitting mud. He lined up the winch cable perfectly with the open trunk.
"Commence extraction!" he yelled, slamming the winch lever forward.
The steel cable pulled tight. The jumper cables bit deep into the orange rind. Goliath slid to the edge of the tailgate. It teetered there for a second, a massive, impossible weight suspended against the bright, glaring sky.
Then, the weather turned.
It didn't just start raining. The sky seemed to fracture, dropping a solid sheet of freezing, needle-sharp water directly onto us. The temperature plummeted instantly. The bright, glitchy sun vanished behind a sudden, bruised wall of dark gray clouds.
The rain hit the mud and turned the ditch into a frictionless slide of wet clay.
"Hold the line!" Arthur screamed over the roar of the rain.
The pumpkin tipped over the edge of the tailgate. It fell. It hit the open hatch door of my car with a sound like a bomb detonating. The metal of my car shrieked, the rear suspension bottoming out violently. The tires sank two inches deeper into the mud.
"Guide it!" Arthur yelled.
I jumped onto the back bumper of my car, my wet sneakers fighting for traction. I grabbed the thick, rough rind of the pumpkin. It was freezing cold and incredibly heavy. The jumper cables were slipping.
"It's turning!" I yelled. "The cables are slipping!"
"Maintain physical dominance over the gourd!" Arthur commanded, gunning the scooter's winch.
The pumpkin slid down the hatch door, but the angle was wrong. It was rolling toward the side, threatening to crush the rear taillight and roll out into the ditch. I planted my shoulder against the bright orange mass and pushed.
The sheer weight of it was staggering. It felt like trying to hold back a rolling boulder. My boots slipped on the wet plastic of the bumper. My left leg gave out.
I went down.
I fell backward, sliding off the bumper and crashing into the mud. The freezing water splashed into my mouth and eyes. I scrambled backward, but the mud was too slick.
Above me, Goliath slipped off the hatch door.
The five-hundred-pound mass of dense, fibrous vegetation plummeted toward my chest.
"Megan!" Arthur screamed.
I closed my eyes and threw my arms up, bracing for the crushing impact.
A violent jerk on my collar snapped my neck back. Arthur had thrown himself off his scooter, plunging into the mud beside me. He grabbed the thick canvas collar of my winter coat with both hands and heaved backward with a sudden, desperate strength.
He dragged me two feet through the mud just as Goliath slammed into the ground where my ribs had been a second before.
The impact sent a shockwave through the clay. A massive wave of freezing mud washed over us, coating my face and hair. The pumpkin rocked back and forth, settling deep into the sludge.
I lay there, breathing hard. The cold rain hammered against my face. My chest heaved. I looked at Arthur. He was covered in mud, his welding goggles askew, his breathing ragged.
"Are you intact?" he gasped.
I nodded slowly. "Yeah. Yes. You just saved my life."
"A commander never abandons his troops," he wheezed, sitting up in the mud. "Especially not to be flattened by a squash."
We sat in the freezing mud for a long moment, the rain beating down on us. The absurdity of it settled into my bones. My car was destroyed. I was covered in freezing clay. I had just almost been killed by a prize-winning pumpkin.
I started to laugh. It was a harsh, broken sound, bubbling up from my chest. Arthur looked at me, blinked, and then began to laugh too. It was a deep, theatrical rumble.
"This is a catastrophe," I said, wiping mud out of my eyes.
"It is an epic!" Arthur corrected, slapping the side of the giant pumpkin. "But we are losing time. We must elevate Goliath into your vehicle."
I stood up, my muscles aching, shivering violently. We couldn't use the hatch door as a ramp anymore. The pumpkin was on the ground.
"We need leverage," I said. I looked at the scooter. "Drive the scooter into the ditch. Right up against the bumper of my car. We roll the pumpkin onto the seat of the scooter, then use the hydraulic lift of the seat to raise it to the level of the trunk."
Arthur stared at his beloved machine. "You ask me to subject my steed to such indignity?"
"Do you want the blue ribbon or not?"
He gritted his teeth. "Repositioning!"
We wrestled the scooter through the thick, sucking mud, wedging it between the giant pumpkin and the back of my hatchback. The rain was unrelenting, plastering my hair to my skull. We repositioned the jumper cables around the pumpkin.
"On three!" I yelled. "One! Two! Three!"
We both hit the pumpkin with our shoulders. The rough rind tore at my wet jacket. We heaved. The massive gourd rolled, fighting us every inch of the way, until it tumbled onto the leather seat of the mobility scooter. The machine groaned under the weight.
"Engage the lift!" I shouted.
Arthur hit a button on the handlebars. The electric motor whined in protest, but the hydraulic seat slowly began to rise. It elevated the massive orange sphere until it was perfectly level with my open trunk.
"Push!" Arthur commanded.
We shoved. The pumpkin slid off the scooter seat and rolled into the back of my hatchback with a heavy, solid thud. The entire car rocked forward. The rear tires sank another inch into the mud.
We had done it. Goliath was in the car.
Suddenly, the sound of a heavy diesel engine cut through the noise of the rain.
Arthur spun around, his eyes wide. Up on the road, a massive, lifted black F-250 truck had just pulled up beside the abandoned Ford. Four men in heavy waterproof jackets jumped out.
"The Jenkins brothers," Arthur whispered, his voice trembling with genuine fear.
"Get in the car!" I screamed.
I scrambled into the driver's seat. My hands were slick with freezing mud, slipping against the plastic door handle. Arthur threw himself into the passenger seat, his boots leaving thick chunks of wet clay on the floor mats.
"Drive!" he yelled, pointing a muddy finger at the windshield.
I jammed the key into the ignition. The engine turned over, coughing once before catching with a ragged whine. I threw the transmission into drive and slammed my foot on the gas. The front tires spun violently, spitting mud high into the air, before finally catching the edge of the gravel shoulder.
The hatchback lurched forward, dragging its heavy rear end out of the ditch. The suspension groaned, the metal protesting the five hundred pounds of squash in the trunk.
In the rearview mirror, I saw the Jenkins brothers scrambling down the embankment. One of them pointed at my car. The massive black F-250 roared to life, its headlights cutting through the freezing rain like searchlights.
"They are in pursuit!" Arthur shouted, craning his neck to look back.
I wrestled the car onto the main road. The steering felt sluggish, heavy, like driving through wet cement. I hit the accelerator, but the speedometer refused to climb past thirty miles per hour. The weight in the back was anchoring us to the asphalt.
"We are moving too slowly!" Arthur yelled, gripping the dashboard.
"I know!" I screamed. "It's a four-cylinder engine carrying a dinosaur egg!"
The F-250 swerved onto the road behind us, gaining fast. Its massive chrome grill filled my rearview mirror, blinding me with its high beams.
"Take the next left!" Arthur ordered.
"That's a dirt road!"
"Take it!"
I wrenched the steering wheel hard left. The hatchback skidded, the heavy rear end swinging wide. We fishtailed onto a muddy tractor path, the tires sliding in the deep ruts. The rain was coming down in sheets now, blurring the windshield. My wipers slapped frantically back and forth, barely clearing the glass.
The F-250 turned after us, its massive tires chewing up the mud with ease.
"Where does this go?" I yelled, fighting the steering wheel as the car bounced violently over the uneven terrain.
"Into the maze!" Arthur declared.
I looked ahead. A massive wall of towering, dead cornstalks loomed in the rain. It was the local county corn maze, shut down for the approaching storm.
"You want me to drive into a corn maze?" I asked.
"They cannot maneuver their behemoth in such tight quarters!" he reasoned. "Plunge into the labyrinth!"
I didn't have a choice. The truck was right on our bumper. I aimed the hatchback at the entrance of the maze and floored it.
We smashed through the wooden entrance gate. The dry, brittle cornstalks whipped against the windshield, a deafening drumroll of snapping fibers. The path was narrow, winding sharply to the left and right. I threw the car into a hard drift, the massive weight in the back forcing the rear tires to slide through the mud.
Behind us, I heard the crunch of fiberglass and a heavy metallic thud. I glanced in the mirror. The F-250 had tried to make the turn but failed, its massive front end plowing straight into a thick wall of stalks, getting tangled in the deep mud and heavy roots.
"Ha!" Arthur cheered, slamming his fist against the dashboard. "The behemoth is ensnared!"
I didn't stop. I kept navigating the maze, relying on my hyper-developed gig-driver spatial awareness to memorize the turns. Left, right, hard left, straight. The stalks scraped loudly down the sides of the car, leaving long, pale scratches in the paint.
We burst out of the far side of the maze, launching over a small ditch and landing hard on the paved county highway. The impact sent a painful jolt up my spine. The pumpkin in the back shifted, thudding heavily against the rear seats.
"The fairgrounds are precisely two miles ahead!" Arthur shouted, checking a battered silver pocket watch. "The weigh-in concludes at exactly four o'clock! We have four minutes!"
I kept my foot pinned to the floor. The engine screamed. The rain lashed against the glass.
We tore through the open iron gates of the county fairgrounds, sliding onto the wet grass of the exhibition field. Tents flapped wildly in the wind. A small crowd of people in heavy raincoats stood huddled around a massive industrial scale under a corrugated metal pavilion.
I slammed on the brakes. The hatchback skidded across the wet grass, stopping inches from the pavilion steps.
Arthur threw his door open and scrambled out. "Halt the calibration!" he screamed at a man in a yellow slicker holding a clipboard. "Goliath has arrived!"
The crowd parted. I got out of the car, my legs shaking. My clothes were soaked, heavy with freezing mud. I walked to the back of the car and popped the hatch.
The pumpkin sat there, a massive, bruised, magnificent sphere of orange.
It took six men to lift it out of my trunk. They grunted and cursed, sliding it carefully onto the heavy steel platform of the digital scale. The red numbers on the display flickered, climbing rapidly. Three hundred. Four hundred. Four hundred and fifty.
The numbers slowed. They ticked up one by one.
Four hundred and ninety-eight.
Four hundred and ninety-nine.
Five hundred and two.
The man with the clipboard blew a short, sharp whistle. "Five hundred and two pounds! New county record!"
Arthur threw his hands into the air, letting out a primal, triumphant roar. The crowd clapped politely, their applause muffled by the heavy rain.
I leaned against the side of my ruined car, crossing my arms to stop the shivering. My delivery app buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it.
Arthur walked over to me. He reached into his heavy wool coat and pulled out a thick, muddy envelope. He slapped it onto the roof of my car.
"One thousand dollars," he said, his voice quiet, stripped of its usual theatrical boom. "As agreed."
I reached out and took the envelope. The paper was wet, but the thick stack of bills inside felt heavy and real.
"Thank you," I said.
He nodded, looking at the scratches on my car, the shattered pizza boxes in the back, the mud caked on my face. He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a plastic-wrapped caramel apple. He held it out to me.
I took it. I unwrapped the plastic. The caramel was hard and cold. I took a bite. The sugar fractured sharply against my teeth, giving way to the cold, tart crispness of the apple beneath. We stood there in the freezing rain, leaning against the dented metal of the hatchback, watching the red numbers on the scale glow brightly against the dark afternoon.
“The sugar fractured sharply against my teeth, giving way to the cold, tart crispness of the apple beneath.”
