For the fourth time since midnight, he’d looked down to see a driver wearing a mask in their otherwise empty car. Each time the mask reflected the lights of their dashboard like a drive-in movie theater screen. Idiots. He asserted himself by breathing deeply in his lonely truck cab. You can’t catch a disease from yourself.
Can you?
He’d had his GPS off for some time now. Tonight he preferred voiceless solitude, marred only by the rumble of the diesel engine. His eyes scanned the freeway ahead, looking for the Highway 12 junction, even though he knew it wasn’t coming up for a while. Interstate 5 stretched ahead like a delicate gray ribbon, and personal vehicles zipped around him at speeds not normally permitted by the California Highway Patrol. Let them zip.
His radio cut through the quiet. “Breaker one nine. Driver of the 18 wheeler heading for the ’Yoch.”
There hadn’t been another truck for miles. The message could be coming from anyone. “Come on,” he replied, opening the communication.
“No rest for you tonight. Step on it. The bears know. They’ll leave you alone.”
“Do what?”
“Word is out on you. Look out for civilians.”
“Come again? Repeat?”
The reply came through a wall of scratching noise like ripping Velcro. “You’re the last flour truck on the goddamn Left Coast, bubba. You better drop your groceries before somebody drops you.”
“Who is this? What’s your handle?”
Static was the only reply.
The green sign looming out of the night announced Highway 12. He downshifted and thought over the strange transmission. It was true, the large trailer behind him was stacked with nothing but refined flour in paper bags, but he didn’t see how or why that would be common knowledge. He’d been hearing about flour shortages and knew that was why the rates were a little higher for this particular haul. But…“look out for ‘civilians’…somebody drops you”…had the unknown driver been insinuating that someone was out to rob him?
Was he really driving the last truck full of flour in the whole Western U.S.?
Was somebody out in this dark night looking for him?
Highway 12 was narrower than the interstate and had more curves. And fewer lights. He mashed down on the accelerator anyway. Aiming to hit 75 mph for the first time in 300 miles.
Even at this pace, faint headlights were glowing brighter in his rearview mirrors. A double-cab pickup truck came growling up behind him.
He sighed and downshifted again, letting go of all the speed he’d built up, letting the pickup pass on the wrong side of the two-lane road. The headlights got brighter, closer.
The pickup didn’t budge from behind him.
Alright, paranoia time. Let’s say this is it, that back there in that truck is some kind of gangster or mafioso with a gun who wants to knock you over and move that flour on the black market. So what? You’re in a semi. They’re in a gasoline-powered toy that they bought at the local Ford dealership. You’ve got a full tank and enough horsepower to haul all the flour left in the northern hemisphere. Let’s see them catch you.
Unless there’s more of them…
Mash the pedal. Get back up to speed. 70, 75, 80…
Mile after mile, the truck stayed right on his tail. But it didn’t duplicate itself. It didn’t ram him, pull up alongside him, pull ahead of him, or do anything to acknowledge his existence other than tailgating him. The dark hours passed and no daring flour heist occurred. And as they came up on the Highway 4 junction the trailing pickup truck peeled off onto a cross street and vanished…
The night was growing lighter. His diesel engine rumbled under the hood. He was the only vehicle on the highway now. It was his highway. He was free and clear.
Had that strange radio exchange really happened? Or had he simply been awake too long? Too much caffeine and adrenaline, not enough food and sleep…had he hallucinated the whole thing?
Here came another pickup. Up from the endless unmarked highway behind. Right on his tail. The sun poked up on the horizon behind but the lights of the tailgater were brighter…
****
They’d come from miles around, from within Antioch, California (“the ’Yoch” in local parlance) city limits and from well outside them. They lined up obediently on the stretch of concrete in front of the tall, wide storefront, standing on duct tape markers spaced six feet apart. They wore medical masks, cloth masks, bandannas, dish towels, neck gaiters, and sweaters around the lower halves of their faces. The face protection obscured their hopeful, expectant expressions.
The improvised sign in the clear glass of the still-locked automatic doors of the grocery store read, “For those who have been asking: We expect a large shipment of flour to come in on Friday. We will open at the usual time.”
The sun came up on the Antioch grocery store and reflected itself off the mirrors of the cars that had already filled the parking lot. No truck had appeared yet…
Bryan Vale is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals, including Scribes*MICRO*Fiction, Paddler Press, Friday Flash Fiction, Boats Against the Current, and Quibble. Learn more at bryanvalewriter.com, or follow Bryan on Twitter and Instagram: @bryanvalewriter.