The Strangest Thing Happened To Us In This Nevada Desert Town

“Sorry we stopped here,” Kyle said and then put the car in gear and headed to the exit.

I hated how dark the roads were around here. It reminded me of driving around where my grandparents lived in Montana, everything was black. We had barely left San Francisco, but I already missed the pale glow of the streetlights.

I would get my light though. We had followed the signs that directed us back to I-80 East from the truck stop and they had led us to a dark intersection and a freeway entrance that was quarantined off with road flares, cones and Marlboro men clad in reflective orange, working in the night.

Kyle rolled down the window and one of the workers strolled over after spewing out a thick jag of chewing tobacco. The worker gave out a verbal greeting that sounded like a mix of the clearing of a throat and someone saying the phrase “hee haw.”

“What’s going on?” Kyle asked.

The worker leaned against the open driver’s side window, close enough to where I could see the little bits of cement stuck in his short red beard.

“Road’s closed. Construction,” the worker spat out almost before Kyle could even finish his question.

“Is there another way we can take? We don’t know our way around here,” Kyle followed up.

The worker just walked away without another word and scratched his ass.

“Fuckers,” Kyle muttered underneath his breath.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“There’s gotta be some kind of.”

Kyle got cut off by the trumpeting roar of a horn from just behind us. I jumped out of my seat and looked in the rear view mirror to see the towering headlights of a big rig bearing down on us.

“Of fucking course someone is behind us right now in the middle of nowhere,” Kyle screamed as angry as I had ever heard him.

Kyle started to back the car up, but stopped when the big rig pulled around us to the left and quickly stopped once it came abreast.

“Sorry about that,” a vaguely-familiar voice called down from the open passenger-side window of the robin’s egg blue big rig. “These guys will close this thing down all the time without even telling anybody.”

I peered up at the open window of the big rig to see the grizzled face of Don, whom we had just met at the truck stop.

He went on with a big smile upon his face.

“Follow me. I know my way around this mess.”

A cracking noise sounded out from Don’s truck and he pulled out in front of us.

Jack has written professionally as a journalist, fiction writer, and ghost writer. For more information, visit his website.

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