Idea: Evil car spirits

Most of the story ideas that will appear on this blog will have first appeared in the Idea Bank. For those that don't know what that is, it's a twitter account where I post story ideas in 140 characters or less. They're in the public domain, free to use by anyone that wants to. All that I ask is that you pay back into the bank by sending me something to add to the bank.

I'll generally take ideas from the bottom of the Idea Bank, where they're unlikely to be found. This is the first idea that that ever went into the bank, and it came to me while I was learning to drive. I don’t like driving cars, because there are a lot of things to keep track of but I tend to slip into a one-track focus very easily, and I just plain don’t think that it’s a good idea to put me in control of something which is going more than forty miles an hour. I think that a quick reference in American Gods also helped contribute to this idea, but I can’t find my copy to reread it and know for sure.

Anyways, there are dark, bloodthirsty spirits which live in cars. I haven’t determined if they simply wait there until death occurs or if they actually have some degree of influence, and if they do, how much influence they have. These beings perceive the world in faded, shrouded shades of black and white red, and they have fed off of death and suffering for as long as there have been enough humans to support them.

Most of them followed the tribes which migrated over the land bridge to the Americas long ago, and of the few stragglers who remained in the Old World, to set up their own cults of human sacrifice in their old homelands, the last were exterminated by the Romans with the burning of Carthage. Or perhaps a slight few survived still, retreating to the edges of civilization, in the darkest parts of Africa and the coldest regions of the north, and to the distant islands in the east.

In the New World, though, they bred and they thrived, rare in the north but growing strong and fat and numerous elsewhere, with the Aztecs and Mayans, and the Olmecs and yet older civilizations who were not lucky enough to leave traces of their existence for archaeologists to find. They bred with the invasions of the Spanish and found their way back to their old hunting grounds, and with each great war they flourished, feeding on the battlefields of the American Civil War and breeding in the trenches of the First World War. With the end of each war, however, many would starve with the sudden drop in food supply, but with each year the modern world brings new ways to die just by accident and these creatures now hook themselves onto industrial equipment and hang onto cars like bloated, invisible remoras.