Narrator: Evan C. | Colorado, USA
I’m putting this down while I still remember the sequence properly. My brother says the truck was behind us the whole time and I missed it. I drove delivery trucks for twelve years. I look in my mirrors.
We were coming down a mountain road in my pickup. It was late afternoon, dry, nothing dramatic. My brother had fallen asleep with a bag of chips open on his chest.
A horn sounded behind us. In the mirror I saw a white box truck so close I couldn’t see its bumper. I pulled right as far as I could. It didn’t pass. The horn kept going without a break.
There was an emergency escape lane ahead. I wasn’t driving a heavy vehicle and there was nothing wrong with my brakes, but I had the sudden certainty the truck was going to shove us off the road. I turned into the gravel. We stopped hard enough to put chips all over the dashboard.
The horn cut off. No truck came past.
My brother woke up swearing at me. While I was trying to explain, we heard several sharp cracks from down the road. A patch of the outside shoulder broke away, taking part of our lane with it. Not the whole mountain falling down. Enough that a pickup coming round that bend would have had nowhere sensible to go.
We waited with our hazards on until another driver stopped. He had come down behind us and hadn’t seen a box truck. My brother had heard the horn through his sleep, though. He was certain of that.
I went over the truck in my head for weeks. Dirty white body. One amber marker light out. No driver visible, but the cab was high and I was looking in a mirror. I can’t attach a dead relative to it or find some local story that makes it neat.
My brother thanks me for reacting quickly. I didn’t react quickly. I panicked and drove into a load of gravel. Whatever happened, the useful part of it didn’t come from me.
