Tales of the Derry Plague , Anselmo, Ray [fun to read txt] 📗

had been going around. Which meant it would still be blocking the road. Worse still, the tail end of the trailer hung past the highway, over the abyss on the other side, so you couldn’t get maximum leverage. To top it off, there was no turnout nearby to force it into.

Suddenly a seemingly simple task (at least conceptually) had gotten very difficult.

She’d majored in business, not engineering, but she had no choice except to try and conceptualize how she could make this work. If she pushed here, that would go this way … if she tried there, would it go this way or that? What if she tried pulling this part that way … she could go back to the ranch, find some rope …

“Arrrgh.” She really didn’t know what she was doing. Maybe trying to find a tow truck or a ‘dozer in the Tam Valley or Mill Valley or San Rafael was the best idea. But she wasn’t going to give up on Plan A (or was it B?) yet. She got back into the pickup, choosing as she did to try and push the trailer toward the hill behind it and see what happened.

As she moved into position, she realized anew what a terrible position it was. The farthest she could get on the trailer and still keep all her tires on pavement was barely over halfway along its length. To use the analogy of a lever, she couldn’t reach its end, where the effort would have the most result – she was “gripping” it in the middle. But she didn’t have much choice.

She made contact with the grille guard against the side – top – of the trailer. “Here goes,” she muttered, and slowly pressed the accelerator down.

She was worried the outside of the trailer might cave in under the pressure, but either it was made of sterner stuff or the grille guard distributed the force enough to prevent it. Slowly, with a tooth-scraping screech of metal against asphalt, the trailer began to move. She gave it more gas. The trailer kept going. “Good, good …” A little more pressure. More movement.

The sound of scattering gravel caused her to pull her foot from the gas. For every action there was an equal and opposite reaction, and the opposite in this case was to cause the Ram to slide to the right – toward the drop on the other side of the road. The clatter was her right rear tires leaving the pavement for the narrow shoulder – there were four tires on the back end, two on each side.

She shifted the pickup into park, put on the emergency brake, got out and – “Yikes!” The outside right rear tire was maybe an inch from where the roadbed fell away into at least a hundred-foot drop.

Well, time to pick a new spot. But she’d moved the trailer enough that at its new angle, she could pick one a little farther toward the back. She returned to the driver’s seat, moved back, forward, back, forward, back, forward until she could reverse away from the Mickey D’s truck without careening off a cliff. Back into drive, she decided to approach at an angle, hoping she wouldn’t get shoved rightward off the highway in the process.

She didn’t, and she did move the trailer quite a bit farther. She backed up again, chose a spot farther down, did it again and made more progress. Once more, and all but the last few feet of the top was back on the highway, or at least the shoulder. She hadn’t cleared the road, but she’d done something that would hopefully lead to that.

Then she looked back and burst out laughing. She hadn’t realized it, but the hill had somewhat acted as a fulcrum – while she was pushing one end of the trailer around, at the same time she’d started pulling the other end, and the cab, toward the middle of the road behind her. Mercifully she could still get past the front of the big rig and home again, but she’d cut it kind of close …

“Wait a minute …” If the cab was moved away from the hill, and she could get around to the front of it (in this position, the underside of the cab) and push from there …

She threw the Ram into reverse, carefully maneuvered past the cab to where she’d started, shifted to drive, moved the grille guard up against the cab’s rear tires, got settled in and began giving it gas. Now she was pitting the Dodge against the entire tonnage of a semi loaded with spoiled fries and burger meat and whatever they put in the shakes to fake ice-cream thickness, but she had the power against pure dead weight.

She pushed. It shifted. She pushed harder. It began to scrape along the highway. She pushed harder. One of the semi’s tires popped against her grille guard, making the Ram lurch. She upshifted and pushed harder. It kept moving. She upshifted again. Soon she was in top gear with the pedal to the floor, giving it all she could, and slowly, slowly the big rig gave ground. The sound of it grinding against the asphalt was deafening, nerve-wracking, and she set her jaw and gripped the steering wheel white-knuckled.

Through the wheel and her seat, she felt something give and instinctively yanked her foot off the gas. The McDonald’s truck moved without her, sliding backwards as its center of gravity passed the edge of the roadbed. It picked up speed, the cab bumping along the road as it lost traction, then with a final rush it disappeared over the edge and plummeted into the ravine. Ten seconds later, there was a crash of rending metal as it hit bottom.

Kelly put the Ram into park, turned off the engine and went to inspect the damage. A couple of the grille guard’s pipes