| abstract | - I had taken road trips often as a child. My dad had some sort of fantasy relating to seeing the wild America he had dreamed about as a kid. We’re not from America you see, native Englanders. My dad had seen those old movies about great road trips like National Lampoon and that one movie with John Travolta as an angel, whose title escapes me. When we moved here, we would venture out, every spring break, every winter break, every summer. We would drive for hours to see things like the ‘Biggest Ball of Twine in the World’ or those dry, arid Badlands that were only a few days away. My childhood was filled with images of empty roads and endless fields, grazing cows every few miles. It was a boring childhood, I’m sure anyone who has road tripped would agree. Reading books and counting the billboards, advertising roadside attractions. My mum and my sisters eventually pestered him into taking us on proper vacations, like visiting England or going to Florida or New York. The road trips stopped around middle school and my dad abandoned his ‘American Dream’. I didn’t leave my state for several years afterwards, getting a chance to focus on more local places for fun during vacations. My friends who traveled around began to share the same grievances I had as a child and I offered my sympathies. One of my friends reported of this rather funny story where he had driven twenty miles all hyped up for his trip before getting car sick and having to drive back home. I told my dad about this and he said I got carsick often when we did the trips. Now, this was kind of strange because I never once remember being sick when we traveled. I asked my dad to explain. He said that when I was around 8 or 9, I started getting violently sick on vacations. At first he thought it was because of the food we usually ate - road food was shitty. He never considered the idea of carsick because we traveled to often for something like that to happen. Then he mentioned what I did when I was sick. He said I saw a man. My dad said that when I was sick, he sat me by the window so I could vomit outside if I couldn't hold it in long enough to pull over. When I sat there, I kept saying there was a man outside following the car as we drove and that he was scaring me. Apparently, my mum would look out and said that nobody saw anything as the road was empty and the fields or forests we passed were empty. At this point my mum chimed in and said I started crying at one point because no one believed me. My entire family was sick of me being sick as well as insisting seeing this man so we stopped doing car trips all together. Naturally, I was curious as to what frightened me as a little kid. Having no memory of this I began searching through my mind for any recollection of a strange man, but nothing came to mind. I’ve always been interested in weird or unexplained things (huge creepypasta lover!), but this attempt at remembering left me feeling...uneasy, I guess. I mean, I don’t get scared easily, but I was...I don’t know. I had a strange feeling about it. I left it alone after needlessly questioning my family who had no answers. I’m going into college now and I have to drive all my stuff to my new dorm down south. Driving to Florida was going to take a couple of days, so I had my friend Micha come with me to keep me company and switch off with me so we didn’t need to stop or rent hotels. Micha is a really down to earth girl and didn’t share my fascination with the unknown. But, she got scared easily so it was more fun on my part to tell stories about ghost hitchhikers and backseat serial killers while we drove. I packed all my bedroom things into a rent truck and started my drive early morning on a Tuesday, expecting to reach somewhere around St. Louis by midnight or earlier. Micha and I drove onwards for hours, trading stories and advice and constant “oh my god, high school is over, what are we gonna do with our lives” moaning. I’ll skip everything about our journey towards St. Louis as most of it isn’t really understandable out of context. We had driven past a place called Decantur in Illinois, off the main road, at around nine that evening and we switched places. Our truck had a sort of back seat that we designated as the bed, so I prepared to take a nap. Micha started listening to this audiobook on the radio via her phone cable and as I hunkered down, I gazed through tired eyes out the window from my half slouch. It was then that I saw two, tiny lights. Two, glowing, pale white lights gleamed from the darkness outside of the car. From the black of the outside, I wondered in my fatigued state of what it could be. At first, I thought something inside the car was reflecting off the window, maybe my phone or some shiny buttons from the dashboard, I don’t really know. But these lights moved all around, in a pair. The car wasn’t bouncing around, so it couldn’t something within the car. I sat up and drew closer to the window and peered out, my curiosity overcoming my tiredness. As I stared out, I found myself staring at the road rushing by us, with thick forests on the side of the road in the almost imperceptible darkness. My eyes adjusted, despite the light within our car from the dashboard and I saw what I cannot explain to this very day. The two lights, tiny pinpricks in the night, were attached to a hairless, wrinkled head. They were eyes, eyes that shone like the tapetum in animals. The head was a part of long, lean, naked body that spanned around the length of a horse, eerily thin and pale. Muscular legs raced along the side of the road and its arms were bent at painful angles to match its speed. It had long clawed hands, barely visible in the slight light from our truck’s beam. It ran beside us, like some sort of wild animal chasing its prey. The naked, awful thing pursued alongside us, leaping over speed signs and ran along the fences of private properties. It keep pace with us, never faltering and always staring at me with those terrifying, piercing, glowing eyes. My mind lapsed and I my ability to decipher what this was escaped me. I instinctively pulled back from the window and cowered on the opposite side. I don’t know if you’ve had that feeling of pure confusion and fear, but oh my god, it...it is awful. Micha at this point had glanced back at me and asked me what was wrong. My eyes were still glued to the window, to those lights, those eyes. I tried to speak, but my mouth wouldn’t open, no words could come to mind. She asked me again and slowed the truck down, her more-rational-than-mine mind thinking maybe we need to stop. But once I felt the steady speed of the car drop, I broke from this strange, nightmarish grip of fear. I screamed at Micha to fucking drive, to not stop, to go as fast as the truck could go. She was confused and a rapid-fire influx of questions came. “Fucking drive!! Just fucking GO!” was all I could respond. Micha, now beginning to look terrified, complied. That thing, that frightening, naked, godless thing never stopped. It ran beside us, a few feet away from my window. I stared into it face, wanting nothing more than for it to go away. It souless eyes glared at me and as my eyes adjust even more to the blackness of the night, I began to see its entire face come forth. A gaping, hungry mouth, so human yet not at all normal, bleed blackness, teeth like a wild dog’s. No tongue flapped in it mouth, just a cavernous empty dark. Skin stretched over protruding bone, pale, bloodless and scarred. It had stumped, ragged flesh around its supposed ear, like it had been chewed on, torn out. This thing was noseless, an unbroken expanse of skin where it should have been. It wasn’t human yet it looked so similar and real and terrifying and I just wanted to go away. I felt wetness on my skin and touched my face. I had been crying, crying and not remembering any of it. I glanced to Micha and saw her wide-eyed face, fiercely driving down to road. In broken sobs, I told her what was outside, though I don’t think I made much sense in retrospect. I don’t think she believed me anyways, but the way I was acting must have, I don’t know, struck her in some way. I stared back out and that thing was still beside us, still chasing, still fucking staring at me with those fucking glowing eyes. I felt sick and nauseous and my body was shaking, my skin cold and clammy. Something inside me snapped and I slammed on the window, crying out. I screamed at it, begging it to stop, to stop following us, to leave us alone, to leave me alone. Overwhelmed, I pleaded Micha to drive faster. She was frightened out of her mind, spewing questions and demanding I answered them. The world began to tilt sideways and spin. I felt off center and gripped the seat to steady myself. It was a blur, those eyes, Micha’s questions, the constant, steady stream of words from the audiobook that played over the audiobook. That thing never faltered, always following, always fucking following us. My hands to my face, trying feebly to block out what I saw. The eyes, my sobs, my hand weakly pounding on the window. My mother comforting me. Micha almost hysterical questions, the blare of the sound, the car on the road. There’s nothing out there sweetie. Those eyes. Those disgusting, gut-wrenching, mind torturing, burning, soulless eyes. Mum there is! I see him! He’s following us! MUM! PLEASE! Those eyes. Daylight. I remember daylight. Micha’s hand on my face. The faint roar of speeding cars on some nearby highway. Her gentle questions rose me from the feverish, uncomfortable unconsciousness. We were outside a hotel - we had agreed previously never to stop at motels if we were going to stop. Too many scary stories had come from them. Laying in back of the truck, I sat up and asked, my voice raspy, what had happened. She said I passed out as we approached the main highway again. She said I had been a shrieking, shriveling mess, screeching about some thing chasing us. She even said I had been sick all over the floor of the backseat, her face recoiling slightly as she glanced on the floor beside me. We stayed at the hotel for a brief time, having arrived early in the morning and agreed to travel by day on only on major highways. I sketched for her what I saw and with shaking hands described it. She claimed she never saw it head on, focusing on the road instead. I don’t know, even now, if she thinks I was telling the truth or if she thought I was having some sort of breakdown, but she comforted me all the same. For the rest of our trip, I barely spoke, those eerie eyes filling my thoughts, at night, filling my dreams. We stayed at hotels at night, but neither of us slept well. Well, I didn’t. I would sit and stare, ramrod straight, at the curtains, too afraid to look out, too afraid to look away. To this very day, I don’t venture out at night. To this day, I never road trip. I always take public transport, despite my mum’s disdain of, despite the dangers of getting mugged. Humans don’t scare me anymore. Nothing can scare me the way that thing did. Micha tried to drive back but I insisted she take a plane and even paid for it myself. She was the only one who had been with me then and the thought of...it getting her was enough to make me fork over the money needed. I never told my parents or my sisters. I tried to go back to normal life, but it’s still hard. I live with roommates, but they avoid me because I sometimes breakdown in that gripping fear all over again. My walls are plastered with images of the figure, that thing. It never leaves my mind, not even in the brightest, sunniest day. I’ve been getting better though, if I’m gonna end this account on a lighter note. Last night, my roommates took me out and I had a genuinely fun time, dancing and drinking away what would have been a nervous night. But there is a nagging fear. As an adult, I know now why I was so afraid, why I have nightmares of those road-tripping days. I’m sure as a kid you did the same thing that I did then. When looking out the car window, you imagined some sort of thing running beside your car, hopping along fences and telephone poles. I’m sure you saw something tame like a cat or dog or a horse or something running along. I’ve had friends who imagined skateboarders do the same thing. But I very much doubt you saw what I saw. Sometimes, traveling at night, the idea that something was running alongside you was darker. This thing needed to see as it ran. This thing needed to look at you as you slept in the backseat. This thing needed what I see every night, in every dream, along every road, in every single corner.
- Faction: Autobot Species: Transformer Function: RAPID RECON Rank: 1/Personnel - SpecOps ROADRUNNER is an experimental Autobot, the latest flowering of Dr. Fujiama's scientific genius. Built at a human-like scale, and given the mind of a child, this swift courier often is the first to spot interesting situations. Unfortunately for her, the likelihood of her surviving those situations intact is almost nil. She is unarmored, and has very little sense of self-preservation, not to mention a complete and total lack of interest in hurting others. The only things keeping her intact are that she is her fast reflexes and small size. Her extreme agility is compounded by her top speed of 350mph as a racing motorcycle. She can fly to an altitude of two hundred feet with back-mounted energy wings in robot mode, and can cling to any surface in either form. Both forms are surprisingly well armed. Her vehicle weaponry is concentrated in her wheels, which can tap her plasma generator for a variety of effects, while her robot mode is armed with a small rifle, a built-in cutting torch, and a small sticky-mine dispenser, for close combat. Given the option, she'd rather be following something interesting than having to use any of those. Roadrunner was last seen: Sun May 26 23:50:10 2002
- The label was launched in the Netherlands in 1980 and was originally called "Roadracer Records". Roadrunner's initial business was importing North American metal-band recordings into Europe. In 1986 Roadrunner opened its US headquarters in New York City and later opened offices in Wales, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, Denmark and the latest in Canada. Early successes included albums from King Diamond (the first Roadrunner artist to enter the Billboard Top 200 albums chart) and Annihilator. The label also handled early Metallica releases in the Scandinavian region. The end of the 1980s saw the release of two albums that are now considered classics of their respective genres: Obituary's Slowly We Rot and Sepultura's Beneath the Remains. The 1990s saw the arrival of acts such as Life of Agony, Machine Head, Suffocation and Type O Negative. As the 1990s wore on, several of Roadrunner's bands managed to make an impact on the mainstream, most notably Sepultura and Type O Negative. Sepultura's 1993 album, Chaos A.D., became the first Roadrunner band to crack the Top 40 on the Billboard album chart. Type O Negative became the first Roadrunner band to receive a certification from the RIAA; this was a Gold award (and later Platinum award) for the 1993 album Bloody Kisses, which was certified in 1995. The band also became the first Roadrunner band to receive radio play. In 2000, Slipknot became the first Roadrunner band to go Platinum. Nickelback were also very successful on the label (except they were on another label at home in Canada). Derek Shulman ran the label in the late '90s. Beginning in 2001, Roadrunner was distributed by the Universal Music Group through a share of the label owned by The Island Def Jam Music Group. This deal has now expired. On , Warner Strategic Marketing signed an agreement to purchase a majority in shares (73.5%) of Roadrunner Records' parent company, Roadrunner Music Group B.V. This deal became finalized on after receiving regulatory approval in Germany. On , Roadrunner Records was voted as the "Best Metal Label" by Metal Hammer at their Golden Gods Awards, an award that it has won the past four years in a row. The award was accepted by Sharon Den Adel and Ruud Jolie of Within Temptation, one of Roadrunner's biggest acts. However, Roadrunner have also been accused as of being a label only interested in current or trendy alternative music, reflected by their current roster of mainly popular and metalcore acts. The most notable example of this is the treatment of the main death and thrash metal bands on Roadrunner's roster throughout the 90s including Obituary, Deicide, Death, Gorguts and Pestilence who were either dropped or left the label after ill treatment. Ex-Roadrunner Records artists, GlassjAw, also have nothing but horrible things to say of Roadrunner regarding their treatment from the label. More recently, in 2008 punk cabaret chanteuse Amanda Palmer was told by the label that they wanted to re-edit her video for "Leeds United" to make her look slimmer, causing a firestorm on the Internet from fans. Palmer has since asked to be dropped by the label. Roadrunner Records was majorly affected by Warner Music Group's legal dispute against Youtube, including having their account's Youtube partnership cancelled. Most of the videos on their channel, however, are still viewable. There is even a disclaimer talking about Warner's dispute right on the channel. Some of their artists, like Slipknot, have their own accounts.
* 3 Inches Of Blood
* 36 Crazyfists
* Airbourne
* Amanda Palmer
* Annihilator
* Anyone
* Believer
* Biffy Clyro
* Biohazard
* Black Label Society
* Black Stone Cherry
* Brujeria
* Carnivore
* Cavalera Conspiracy
* Chimaira
* CKY
* Coal Chamber
* Cradle Of Filth
* Cynic
* Daath
* De Novo Dahl
* Death
* Defiance
* Deicide
* DevilDriver
* Dirty Americans
* Disincarnate
* Dislocated Styles
* Dommin
* Doubledrive
* Downer
* DragonForce
* Dream Theater
* Dresden Dolls
* Dry Kill Logic
* Earth Crisis
* Exhorder
* Fear Factory
* Five Pointe O
* Floodgate
* Front Line Assembly
* Gang Green
* Glassjaw
* Gorguts
* Gruntruck
* Hatebreed
* Ill Nino
* Infernal Majesty
* Jerry Cantrell
* Junkie XL
* Karma To Burn
* Kemuri
* Killswitch Engage
* King Diamond
* Life Of Agony
* Machine Head
* Madball
* Madina Lake
* Malevolent Creation
* Megadeth
* Mercyful Fate
* Misfits
* Murderdolls
* Mutiny
* Nailbomb
* New York Dolls
* Nickelback
* Nightwish
* Obituary
* Opeth
* Pestilence
* Port Amoral
* Red Tape
* Rumblefish
* Sanctity
* Sepultura
* Shockwaves Skull Sessions
* Sinch
* Slipknot
* Soulfly
* Spineshank
* Steadlür
* Still Remains
* Stone Sour
* Suffocation
* The Agony Scene
* The Cult
* The Parlor Mob
* The Wombats
* The Workhorse Movement
* Theory of a Deadman
* Thornley
* To My Surprise
* Trivium
* Type O Negative
* Vision Of Disorder
* Wednesday 13
* Whiplash
* Within Temptation
- The Roadrunner is the weapon of choice of the Wild Pirates' sniper, Christina. It was built by her father, Billy Bob, the sheriff of Coyote Rock, a town located in Lasso Island.
- He, Fantastico and Conduit mix it up with the Syndicate goons that crash the Halloween party. He's part of the Good Ol' Boyz plot to blackmail Phase and She-Beast. He gets injured by Minefield's bombs when the trap they were preparing for Phase is discovered and neutralized.
- Extracted on this occasion from the (slightly tongue-in-cheek titled) LP "Berserkly Chartbusters Vol. 1", released in the UK on the United Artists label. Peel comments that he'd like to hear more from Jonathan Richman ("Well worth encouraging, I think"). His wish was granted - "Roadrunner" was released (or re-released) in the wake of the punk explosion as a single in its own right on the Berserkly label (catalogue number BZZ 1) and reached no. 11 in the UK singles chart in July 1977.
- Artist: Bo Diddley, The Clash Album: Unreleased Length: 3:11
* A cover of this Bo Diddley song was played during the soundcheck on the 21st September 1979 at the New York Palladium.
- Graham sees a roadrunner in Endless Desert of Serenia. It looks like something's after it.
- Roadrunner was first released with painted eyes. This version either has no feet or has feet.
- "Roadrunner" is a song written by Jonathan Richman and recorded in various versions by Richman and his band, in most cases credited as The Modern Lovers. Critic Greil Marcus described it as "the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest". Rolling Stone ranked it #269 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
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