Tyler was grumbling again. He seemed to be making a habit of it lately. It wasn’t the kind of pastime that a person willfully picked up, but more one that an individual fell into under specific circumstances. Circumstances like lying on one’s side in a ditch on the side of the road, half buried in muck and forgotten. Normally he’d pick himself up and continue walking home, if he still had arms or legs. But those had been robbed from him and replaced with a pair of rubber tired wheels about a week ago.

It had seemed like a good plan at the time; motor into town, find a place to gas up and maybe try to find a rider, someone to keep him in petrol. What he hadn’t counted on was the fact that even before he had hit the road, the former human was running on fumes. He had been starving when he picked up that damnable wheel, having skipped dinner to get home quicker the previous night. As far as he could tell, an empty stomach equated to an empty tank, and he had only made it a few miles or so before the strength had left his motor, causing him to teeter and swerve off the road, plowing into a ditch. That had been a week ago, by Tyler’s count. Might have been a bit more, or a bit less. Whatever the date was, it seemed like he was doomed to lie here and rust away to nothing, with nothing to say in the matter save the curses he mentally hurled at the driver of every vehicle that passed by without noticing him. Tyler had been an idiot to fool himself into thinking that he could enjoy this change, enjoy being a motorcycle. All he could do now was lie on his side, sink more and more into the mud with every rainfall and be miserable.

But it seems that every man has a limit. A point in his life that the universe will stop piling on accidents and misfortunes and, in a great act of ambivalence, throw him a bone. Tyler’s bone was about to arrive.

Tyler woke to the sound of a running engine. Not his, but that of what sounded like a truck, idling nearby. Of course, it was difficult to say whether or not he awoke as an animal would. Ever since his change, the young motorcycle wasn’t entirely sure if he needed to sleep, but he still found small comfort in shutting off his eyes and resting his mind for several hours each night. Nevertheless, clarity of his surroundings returned as he heard a female voice call out.
“Definitely a bike. Bit dirty, but looks to be in great shape. Help me pry it loose, would ya?”
A pair of boots passed through Tyler’s line of sight. Then, he felt a pair of hands grab his handle bars and another pair on his rear fender. With an audible SHLORP sound, the motorcycle was pulled free of his muddy coffin and slowly, steadily carried back on to the road. Even if he were capable of moving, Tyler wouldn’t have resisted, feeling nothing but gratitude for these two strangers that had rescued him. After being righted and getting his tires on the ground once again, Tyler finally got a good look at one of his saviours. She was a weathered looking woman, probably in her thirties, clad in a grungy under shirt with a red bandanna holding her frizzy brown hair back. She hunched over and looked Tyler in the headlight, wiping a few flecks of mud off of his lens.

“Alright” She said “Let’s load him up”
Tyler felt the hands of the second stranger on his handlebars once again, and then an odd click signalled a shift in his gut as he was popped into neutral. The figure he couldn’t see wheeled him up the back of a pick-up truck that they had arrived in, and with the help of the girl, lifted him in and lay him back down again.
Tyler sighed as the girl threw a tarp over him, happily surrendering his vision if it meant finally getting into the city. Once he got some gas in his tank, he’d be mobile again.
Then he heard the exchange between the two strangers that made his hydraulics run cold.
“So Wendy, think we can sell this thing?” a male voice asked.
“Oh hell no” Wendy responded with a snort “Who would want an old beater like that? But heaven help me if I don’t know good parts when I see ‘em”