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ALL-HALLOWS EVE EVIL
Terry Trueman and His Haunted Hovel
We talked about politics AND the devil.
We met downtown, home to zombie hordes shuffling from the Walmart parking lot to the hell that is one of America’s largest retailers.
He forced me to leave my car behind, insisting that we take his. “For a casual spin in the country” he claimed, cackling vilely.
I’d arranged this ill-advised conclave thinking — wrongly perhaps — that meeting a fellow Medium writer would be a pleasant way to spend a few hours.
Witness the horrors I was subjected to, then you decide.
We first crammed ourselves into Terry “the terror” Trueman’s claustrophobic, smoke-belching Yugo. Once crammed, we careened across the Walmart parking lot and into rush hour traffic not braking or looking either right or left. Nearly striking a busload of anti-coagulated preschoolers on a field trip (their vehicle was labeled thusly, and in English too), Terry drove at breakneck speed down his native Vladivostok’s crowded narrow streets dodging hunched disfigured babushkas astride ragged mules and mangy burros.
Then, almost before I realized, Terry had turned off the main highway and we were suddenly and suspiciously alone, on our way down a dusty…