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

through. If the date meant what she thought it meant, it was posted by survivors like her.

Or she hoped they were like her. If they were like fascists or cultists or cannibals, she was heading straight for doom. “Sometimes you just have to hope for the best,” she told herself as she got back in, turned the key in the ignition and resumed her journey.

Which was a nice sentiment for about a minute. That was how long it took her to drive onto the Golden Gate Bridge itself – and get stuck in place by a pileup. She shook her head. This was the one place on the entire route where going off-road to get around an accident wasn’t an option, since the only thing off the road was clear air and a long drop into the water. She had to get past this, not around it. And the only way past was through, possibly demolition derby style.

She tried a subtle approach first. The obstruction consisted of about twenty vehicles, including a couple panel trucks and a moving van, spread out over the six lanes. In theory, she’d only have to move a few of them, make a hole big enough for the Dodge to get through, and she’d be on her way. In practice, they were tangled and interlocked like one of those weird wooden puzzles her Grandmother Sweeney would give her for Christmas when she was in middle school. She could always solve them, given a few weeks to putter at it. She didn’t have weeks here.

She got out and walked up to the accident. Let’s see … if she pushed the Ford Five Hundred it would be stopped by the Transit. Shove the Jetta forward and it hits the Mercedes; shove the Mercedes and you push it into the Grand Cherokee. Lean on the Gremlin and it probably folds up like an accordion against the Penske truck, and there’s no way to get to the Penske directly. The Corolla …

She spent quite a while looking it all over, but no easy solution presented itself. The only way she could think to push past was to go to one side and try to cram everything from there toward the middle. Unless she was coming at things from the wrong direction again.

Kelly gave that some thought. She was having trouble pushing – but if she pulled! Could she carve a path through that way? It would take time, but not as much time as standing there, trying to pursue a remedy that wouldn’t work. Did she still have the rope in the bed?

She did, and she turned the Ram around, tied one end of the rope to its trailer hitch and the other to the bumper of the Jetta. She didn’t need to put the Volkswagen into neutral – it was just a matter of dragging it about a hundred feet, untying it, then using the Ram’s grille guard to manhandle it to the side of the road. Then she did the same with the Mercedes, then the Jeep, then the Cadillac that was on the other side of the Jeep.

Beyond that was a Neon which was sitting sideways, making it hard to pull. But beyond it was empty space, so she didn’t have to. She drove slowly into the gap she’d just made, put the grille guard into the left back tire of the fellow Dodge, and it slid right out of the way. Easy as pie. On she went.

Until the next accident – two tractor-trailers, one in front of the other. Well, one way or another she was getting past this. It was just a matter of how. She went to the back end of the near trailer and began to apply brute force with the grille guard. The trailers’ tires began to skid along the roadway, opening up space.

She heard a creak and didn’t catch the significance until it got louder. Alarmed, she looked closer … threw the Ram into reverse and floored it. Just for a second, enough to flee clear of the toppling trailer. Her applied force had caused the rear axle to break, allowing the floor of the trailer to crumple, which threw off its center of balance and came perilously close to bringing it right down on her. As it was, it brought it down on the road.

She sighed as she looked at the mess. “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another,” she said, shaking her head. But she didn’t have any better ideas – pulling wouldn’t work, since she probably didn’t have the torque to move the cab end and if she tried to pull the trailer end it would drag it into the suspension cables. She’d just have to push more … very carefully.

But having fallen, the trailer couldn’t fall twice, so there was that. She pushed, it scraped, and the one behind it bumped along. Soon he had a space past them, one Ram and about an extra foot wide, and she took it. It felt good to be making up ground again, but she was careful to take it easy. No faster than twenty-five. Past the stalled vehicles. By a one-car accident, no problem. Working her way south across the entrance to the bay, nice and steady. Around the tipped oil tanker …

Once again, she found herself glad she wasn’t going very fast, or the slide would’ve been far worse. She recalled her high school driver training, steered into the skid, gently pumped the brake to ease herself to a stop –

If only the tow truck she ran into had taken the same class, or barring that, had better padding. The saving grace was that since she was spinning, she banged into it sideways rather than head-on. She still stopped abruptly, jarring her to the right, then whiplashing her to the left and directly into the deploying airbag. Dang, was the thing filled with