The Fifth Lane Opens Only for the Drivers It Chooses

Hello, I'm Wolken stories all the time.

The lardewer here.

Let's get into it.

My name's Ray, and right now I'm sitting in the driver's seat of a frit liner, and he's

popping every time I shift my weight.

You'll hear the engine idling, the clatter in the doors.

This is for the record, in case something ever happens or in case I just need to convince

myself later that I didn't dream it.

Sun's not quite up yet, but there's just enough grey light spilling over the interstate

that you can spot just eaming off the mirrors.

I've been on the stretch since 3am, somewhere way out past mile, maca 136.

Rose of fresh ass what go on for miles, the sort of work only on the county money and

federal indifference can buy.

Missed hovers up of the berm, making the antefields beyond look deeper than they should like

you could step out of the cap and just keep falling.

I've hauled everything from produced propellants done high with 41, and every so often you know

the sod things at this irretire blowouts aftermath.

Capus fuel tanks, a deer at the tree line with its eyes can powder blue in your high beams.

But this was different, right before the sun broke the horizon, there they were a set

of tire tracks, deep and unmistakable, slicing down the embankment from the shoulder with

the fresh blast up met a spill of red dirt.

At first my brain tried to explain, must have been another holer, someone in trouble,

maybe a service crew taking equipment to a work site.

Except, these tracks weren't made by anything smaller than my own rigatwin grooves pressed

heavy and recent, the soil at the edge is still clumping with morning damp.

I saw the divots from Jule axles, the wavy chatter of a loaded trailer bouncing off

you blacktop.

My own foot hovered up at the glutch, a line of sweat forming under my collar despite

the chill.

There wasn't a break in the gov rail.

That got me right off.

No sign of an exit or temporary ramp no tire rubber, no marks carrying the pavement

where someone might have crushed the currents are drifted by accident.

Everything about it said a deliberate, but the road didn't offer any place to go.

I parked up behind the shoulder, hazard lights clicking, then eased out into the mist.

Out here, traffic's boss enough that silence gets thick.

No wind.

The birds keep their distance, or maybe just stay quiet, there wasn't a sound, but

the ping of my engine cooling and I boot crushing the wet grass.

I felt their shivering against my neck, smelled a leak of cigarettes that was my encurling

up thinly as if someone had been standing right where I was minutes before.

Then I noticed the cap.

Not mine appeared to be built without of state plates sitting nose first in the emergency

lane about 20 yards from where the twin track vanished off the shoulder.

All the windows were rolled up.

The cab door, when I gave it a tug, was locked from the inside.

I wrapped gently, got no answer.

The only response was the low hiss of a CB radio still switched on inside.

Leaning closer, I could make out a homostatic, then a voice feigned tinny repeating the beginnings

of a sentence before being clipped off.

The scent of cigarettes was stronger here, there with the ghost of fast food coffee.

I pressed my knuckles against the warm glass, spotting an ash tree full of fresh butts

a ham radio mic looped against the dash, and a lupric open to half finished route list.

For a second I felt like I was breathing in someone else's air.

Everything was in place.

The seat still sucked in body heat.

I could swear the echo of footsteps lingered in the gravel behind me.

No sign of struggle, nothing broken, no glass in the ground.

It looked like the driver had rolled up parked, sit the brake, and simply left stepped away

without turning off the radio or locking the lock.

This sort of thing isn't unheard of, but combined with the tire tracks and the dirt tracks

leading nowhere through earth's softest butter, with no exit anywhere inside the gut level

sense of wrongness kept piling up.

I grabbed my hand held and called it in.

My voice kept catching, and I had to force myself not to sound panicked.

Eastbound 41, mile 136, found a band and rig, cablot drove a missing, no visible accident

with after requesting local law, possible medical.

The words tasted citer, lodging behind my teeth.

My thumb pressed the transmit button harder than it should have, watching my own exhale

billow inside the cab glass.

Something in my bones told me I was sending out a message into silence that had already

given its answer.

By the time I slid back into my seat, hands shaking worse than after a tripless presso,

the only thing left was that see be the last scrap of connection to whoever had vanished,

still sending out its faint, broken warning.

The truth is, this kind of an ease doesn't come out of nowhere.

Life on the road gets you used to seeing weird stuff, and it's easy to brush moments like

these office tricks of exhaustion, boredom, or the endless, rolling dark.

But leaving that truck behind, knowing the driver could have been me or might still be

out there, just beyond the age of sight I told myself I'd pay attention.

Just in case this was the last time I stumbled across a set of tracks running off the map.

Forging's the only thing that keeps you sane out here.

When you drive across state lines week after week, hopping time zones like it's nothing,

you start to measure life and rest stops and fuel receipts instead of birthdays.

Usually the day begins with a groan of vinyl seats and the ritual of checking tyre pressure,

sloshing cheap coffee into myself until it burns just enough to shock my system awake.

The radio is always low, tuned to static or the sim handful of olders everyone passes

along the route.

On good runs I'll scan for voices, add a hey there, trouble ahead or a break of 1-9,

anyone were spun past Evanville, just to remind myself I'm not the only living soul

on the ribbon of blacked up.

A lot of people don't understand what I mean by brotherhood of the road.

It's not some noble blue collar myth.

It's the fact that, at 3am, if you find yourself boxed in near a way station and see

another set of headlights flick the brights twice, you know that a friend.

Guys like Mike Peanut Butter Trasky or Sheila Gichirez, who once saved my ass with a single warning

when a dearly tougher football field out in front of my load.

We swap jokes.

He'd be amazed what passes for conversation tall tales about haunted diners, bob threats

about DOT checks, birth years traded over truck stop pancakes.

There's gossip too.

Maybe you've heard versions, Mike doesn't met a hitchhiker who vanished from mile 98

or Tom Garrison, remember him, he just disappeared, left his logbook to everything.

Always somebody of the buddy, always a little tongue and cheek until it isn't.

But for most, I was like this one the infamous stretch of 41 or more about survival and

spookstores.

You talk about real hazards, construction that never seems to finish, cones blinking

for weeks on end, details posted with angry arrows sending you double back instead of forward.

This section is known in the circuit.

The guys call it that infinity strip cones by the mile, glaring halogens at all layers,

concrete barriers that seem to shift overnight.

And for all our complaining, you get a sixth sense about which net crews do the work and

which leave things half done where a panel's loose or a sign doesn't match its post.

Guys keep mental lists of bad markers, avoiding them like you would a putthole the size of

a dalcarous.

I do what most do.

Poisonier, a poppycafine pill, wash it down with warm water, crack the window to let

a near so cold at burns.

Sometimes I'll scan the CB just to catch a voice and make sure I'm not alone with only

the hum of the engine and my own thoughts.

Sometimes we laugh about the fountain lane, a piece of blacked-up that appears, disappears

shows up on GPS only after three in the morning.

Silliness, right?

Usually someone rolls their eyes, pinches their cigarette into the astray, and says,

if you're seeing extra highways, time to hang up the keys.

And I'll admit, most of the time it is just fatigues gulking in the corners of your eyes.

At the end of a shift, parked at one of the stubby pull-offs they leave for us in the

middle of nowhere.

I fire up my TV, watch her runs on spotty wife I, so now to the loft truck.

Sometimes you feel something brewing under the skin of the night, the tension, the hiss

standing up on your arm when you see a stretch of cones that don't seem to match yesterday's

map.

But you force yourself to focus on the mundane.

Take your iris, wash up in a tile bath in that smells of ammonia, call home to a foist

male if you have one left worth calling.

This comfort in numbers, receives tickets, iris of service, lanes cut and paved, every

detail accounted for.

I used to think that was enough.

That numbers and routines would form a shield against anything weird creeping out at the

edge of the lamp light.

Truth is, no matter how practical you are, no matter how hard you try to laugh off the chill

clutch in your rubes at odd iris, the road's always hunting for ways to slip past your guard.

At night after I saw the tracks, I lay though a can laughter echoing off the window.

I must have watched six episodes in a row, barely taking in the plot, just waiting for my

mind to slip from static to sleep.

But my eyes kept drifting to the sidefee mirror and the doggaline beyond the cones.

Like I was waiting for a patented snap into view some logic in the way the highways twist

routes half remembered, lanes split and vanish.

That was the last good sleep I had for a long while.

All school truck stops, a kind bill before the chain stores rolled in, I tracked all the

drift as too proud or too tired to fate big city jam.

Play classic with fingerprints, bacon that taste of last week's coffee.

It's the best place for news that dispatchers never tell you.

Next morning, Albo's perched on a sticky linoleum counter, I overheard two drivers talking

in the next booth.

Kept their voices low, like maybe saying it out loud would make it stick.

He see that thing about freeburn's truck, upon 144, one asked, callous hand trembling

over a mug.

Yeah, left it locked up neat, the other replied.

No forced entry, C.B. still going, keys inside.

Their eyes darted briefly my way.

I lifted my mug, feigning interest in a faded jam packet beside my toast.

I finished breakfast quickly, too aware of my town, my hands, my pulse.

I stepped out into the brazing air and thumped up in my tablet.

They're soothing in patterns.

I marked out all the last known locations where I'd heard about new experiences scrolling

through incident reports and local news blogs, trucker forums mostly designed for talking

about pay scales and DOD harassment.

It didn't take much to notice a pattern.

All these phantom rigs, similar times, at past midnight, always within sight of huge

stretches of construction, but never in town.

Check-ins at nearby truck stops time stamped after the fact.

My late logs ending mid-sentence.

One even had a fuel receipt registered miles past where the rig was discovered.

I began aligning depends on the digital map.

Each incident followed a path, roughly parallel, thirding through the parts of the highway

still under work.

When I checked satellite imagery from months apart, something I'd stood out at every site

somewhere along the stretch was in unopened, never driven fifth lane, cordoned by barrels

or cones painted like it was meant for traffic but never used.

Curiosity is an inch that gets under the skin.

At first, I told myself it was just interest, a hobby to keep my brain busy between shifts.

I started keeping notes in my seat back ledger, drawing arrows whenever I spotted barriers

for a fifth-laned or a temporary closure on a night with empty traffic and no visible

crews.

Driving became a little different after that.

I found myself checking construction sites for signs of activity crushed soda cans, cigarette

butts, the scrape of steel boots over concrete.

Sometimes I'd slow, letting headlights crawl over the aggregate dare in the cones to move.

Most time nothing happened.

But one night I passed closed work zone, a cone stacked in a haphazard line, not a single

machine in sight.

Where a sign should have reed work ahead of my out-left, someone scrolled and no exit

and faded spray paint on the reverse.

In my log, I wrote, keep track, fifth lanes unused, always at night.

I pressed my pin a little too hard, left a dent on the next page.

A week later, I realized I'd lost track of who I was writing the record for.

Caffeine and habit massed the weirdness, but nothing dulled the edge of an ease.

The more I said of the maps in the seats, the less since the hire was made.

Nothing lined up between the paperwork and the pavement beneath my wheels.

That next run, I kept my recorder running, testing, 1-2, rev 41 through 140, lane closures,

fifth lanes sealed no active crew in sight, all clear.

The glow from my dashboard beaded the cap and pale blue light as darkness pressed in

closer outside.

I kept watching the road for the subtle hints, but mostly I waited for the moment the pattern

might reveal itself.

I couldn't have known it was about to get a whole lot weirder.

Crossing state lines at midnight on the third Thursday in March, rain drumming the paint

off the loose lung cones, I switched the CB to channel 19 for the usual nighttime talk.

At first, nothing but static.

Then a sudden hiss broke the silence of panit voice, hide and quivering, spun out in

bursts between feedback squalls.

Smile marker 1-4-4 repeat, don't turn, don't you see it left, it's not.

The voice bled out, overlapping itself, a reversal like someone had hit rewind in the

tape.

For a moment, I thought it was garbled with broadcasts, some joker running a loop.

But then another voice deeper, familiar cut through, trailing off into raregid, metallic

echoes.

I realized, ice cold, it was my own, garbled but unmistakable.

I slammed on the brake, ice scanning for points of reference.

The GBS showed my location as clear, smack dab on route 41, not a single detroposter.

Yet there was the glow of orange lights up ahead, and an hour's eye and set against

a median that didn't match my memory of the route.

I gripped the wheel, chest height, irrestraining for any real sound outside of the slap of

a wiper, the rattle of trailer chains, a voice that wasn't minor composed of static.

Instead, I got the hollow hush of a world with too much background removed.

And then it was gone transmission snapped to silence, the orange lights dimming behind

an art haze like someone rolling back the world an inch at a time.

Memory can be treacherous, but in the following days, I started comparing stories on the late

night net channels.

Eyes who had lost a rig in a fog bank.

Others who mentioned traffic pilots who simply drifted off radio, with no trace but the

echo of their last signal.

I asked around.

To fly in J20 miles up the interstate, there's a driver named Hemi double-crunk cells who's

been running this route longer than I've earned a license.

We bumped into each other swapping out our thermoses.

I asked, careful.

What's your take on these fifth lanes, all the closures?

He squinted a voice lowered just above a growl.

He see a fifth lane open, doesn't mean you're meant to use it.

He spat a stream of tobacco into the gravel.

If the cones are there, leave him.

If they're gone, drive on by, never seen a crew working those, and you weren't neither.

Something in the skin around his eyes, a bruise looked like he'd stayed awake too many

nights, seeing things worth forgetting.

He tapped the gauge on his glove a bucks twice, a superstition or a nervous tick, before

heading off without another word.

I spent hours back in my cat, screened bright in the dark, reviewing dash of feeds from

drivers who vanish, courtesy of a dispatcher who owed me a favour.

Again, and again, the same glitchy flicker.

Roadway light stretching too far, angles warped, digital times dims jumping backward and forward

by minutes, sometimes even ires.

Always in the missing frames a flash of alternate pavement, another set of reflectors running

parallel, not marked by any official sign.

The more I compared notes, the greater the compulsion to dig.

I dug up permanent records, notes on construction crew scheduled along the rats, pulling up Google

Street View archives to compare what showed up to what was supposed to be there.

At every phantom lane site, the details were off signage spelled wrong, all capped warnings

posted in styles I'd never seen on a real construction site.

No heavy equipment, just neatly aligned barriers and warning arrows that pointed a little too

sharply off-road.

No permit matched.

No official record tied to the closures.

When I pressed the county clerk, she stammered something vague, company five handles the

rural expagion, except the company didn't exist in a state business database.

The investigation ate up more of my life.

I cataloged these irregularities the warped signage, the missing logs, the time slits

and the dash footage.

Sleep didn't come easy, I drifted toward the edge of the fringe, pressing play again and

again, looking for anything I missed.

The fifth lane was no longer rumored to me.

It was a pattern, and it was drawing me closer every night.

Out at the edge of a little gas station by the crossroads, I waited ires for a contact

I only knew as Maddox.

Ended up with a riding manila envelope left on my dashboard instead, no no, just a battered

flash drive inside.

On the casing, in some odd sharp eye it was a single warning, don't ask, just watch

and stay awake.

Back at the cab that night, under a rain street canopy of sodium lights, I slotted the

drive into my laptop.

The file was rolled dash footage 63 minutes a highway, all shot from chest level in a freight

liner.

The time stamp matched the night a rig vanished up at the 144 exit, for the first 20 minutes

an eventful.

Highway hits the regular thump of lane markers, occasional sight of rain in the passenger

window.

A closure had four inch cones, blinking arrow, warning to merge right.

Only as the truck rolled closer, the lane head didn't arrow.

Instead, a brief flicker subtle, almost an artifact showed another smooth laptop lane

peeling away to the left, and marked with just the shimmer of reflective paint and a row

of solar powered post lights.

The truck didn't so much turn as drifted the wheel twitches, like a magnet's pulling

it off course.

The camera lurches, headlights illuminating stretches of a complete highway and behind

a quickshutter of the lens.

The lane seems to open up wide as if cut into nothing but rolling dust, barriers scattered,

arrow boards blinking in impossible patterns, cones making a pentagram in the dark.

Across the footage, the warning sign flickers replaced by half-lits, silhouettes, men

and vests, faceless, moving behind unfinished rails.

The engine revs, the views nap sideways, and the screen freezes on-road struts vanishing

under a slab of half-port concrete.

The last sound is not metallic, not quite human as sharp, fizzings freeing before the

camera drops to the truck floor, showing only dash lights jittering, then total black.

The time stump hopped forward, for 32 jumps to 544, a full eye had gone with no interval.

I sat there, staring at my reflection in the monitor wide eyed, select jord, unable

to reconcile what I just watched with 20 years of real world experience.

The caffeine pills in my pocket felt like pebbles suddenly useless against the tide

crawling up my spine.

Every jokey story, every room a half laughed off at the diner, had a foundation.

Every phantom lane was a real, physical thing there and not there at the same time, a parallelogram

of unreality have laid on to the world.

And it hunted the roads were men, and women ran their lives, unnoticed by any authority

who might care enough to stop it.

After that obsession hummed under every thought.

I started marking my logs with more detail, noting off kilter cones, misnumbered exits.

Any time a lane closure looked wrong, I slowed, scanned the barcades, checked for those

impossible parallelogram shining at night.

By this stage, I couldn't shake the feeling that whatever was out there and the fifth lane

wasn't just passively feeding on circumstance.

It was actively selecting its moments waiting for the right driver, the right fatigue, the

right space between worlds.

On a grey ski day per morning, with low clouds pressed to the ground and the wind picking

at the back of my ears, I left the rig parked beside airclothes with worksite at dawn.

No crew, no trucks.

Just a row of cones, one not flat, their lane closed, sign and disturbed, but a slip of

tire shining through the clay.

I walked slowly, boots crunching over patches of scattered gravel.

The smells were ordinary, sun-worn asphalt, petroleum, the tang of old insulation.

But then our details snapped into focus about a target tucked aside as sign, a new

invest half-bearer near a fold-out chair, a Duncan Cup still worn to the touch-a-top

of pylon.

Peepers drifted at the edge of the cleared area.

I gathered them with trembling hands handwritten logs, stamped tickets for fuel and gatorade,

receipts from out of state shops.

The times were wrong again, meals paid for 10 minutes after sunrise when the sun was

barely up, stamps with counting names that didn't line up with any county in a state.

I stood a while listening, straining for any hint this place had real workers, any ordinary

rhythm of day labor was prepping for the morning's poor.

Nothing.

Just the wind, a distant engine on the main road, and the shell of a single crew hiding

out of sight.

It was too much for coincidence.

I drove out east, stopping at a tiny station with a single cracked pump.

There was a flagger at front-hole jack of all trades in a faded vest, warming his hands

over a cigarette stub.

The folks say to ones who last on these crews know the store was better than anyone.

I offered him a coffee, made awkward talk about the endless closures, asked to try to

about the crews working the fifth lane.

He stared, then looked away, a tight-grink-racking, his sense-guff face.

You ever notice a teacher with no paste-ups, no paper-trail, he said, keeping his gaze-low.

Some projects, you run him until the feds show up, then you keep him off-shut act like

you were never there, sometimes they'll pay you to forget, sometimes you forget for

free.

I pressed him, but he wouldn't give up details.

Things changed, crews switched, if you wanted to sleep, stop asking.

He made it sound like advice, not fret.

But the facts in my hands grew heavier.

State databases showed no construction permits for half the lane-cloters.

The company named printed in the warning signs appeared nowhere else, the numbers routed

through dead ends, lines that always went to an answering machine looping the same static

at the end.

Over weeks, I thumbed back through news clippings and old stable ports.

Every phantom lane incident lined with a never-completed segment, the permits ended half-processed,

the auditors' signatures mismatched, contract a name's gaped in the ledges like someone

had erased them during their block out.

Even on the satellite maps, lines of new paving called up to nowhere sometimes marked

as feature junction that never materialized.

It started looking like someone, maybe a lot of someone's was using these half-fisible

closures, slipping vehicles and out undercover of construction, erasing paperwork as needed.

I mapped it all out, connecting each disappearance, each vaguely enclosure, onto a single stay-at-line.

What emerged was a ship more rather than coincidence a pattern, a pathway under construction

that, if completed, would run counter to officially state a project.

It hinted at a new road threading just under the skin of the one we all knew, never quite

seen whole.

The far-struck, maybe it isn't a ghost story at all.

Maybe it's a system-blood at the edges, sometimes human, sometimes something older, something

built to swallow up mistakes, debts, or worse.

I couldn't tell if that was better or worse than the alternatives.

I always thought my instincts were pretty good, but by this point, any sense of self-preservation

I had was buried under the need to know.

In the next message came a USB dropped in a TA restroom, wrapped in a torn knack in

that need-over-road caution.

I went back to the cap, don't light barely gold at the horizon, and plugged it in, half-expecting

nothing.

The file opened with a jolt.

Night footage this time it was real time, no edits.

A big rig calls along the closed zone, mile 141, there's the same glow of fresh cone barriers

in the distance, only this time the dashboard reflects a set of rose stripes diverging sharply

off the main line.

As the headlight's swaying, a lane opens that isn't visible to the naked eye, framing

cylinders a falcon muddle blue grey work lights.

The truck's wheel-books left.

For just a second, you see the alternate lane stretch out empty and silent.

Then chowdoy figures all in motion, never quite clear as downed at the edge behind the

cones, faces hidden by safety helmets in glare.

Suddenly something yanks at the lens before it goes down, bright flashes pulse across

the windshield distorting everything into a pinched colorless blur.

The video ends in a grey-weight wash, like a TV channel blinking out.

When I blinked the after-image is from my eyes, the blue glow from my dash almost hurt

to look at.

That's when I knew I was going to chase the fifth lane until I caught it, or until it

swallowed me up too.

There's a line you cross when the need to understand up ways your sense of survival.

I'd reached it, and maybe passed it long ago.

That night I started my rig, tough my notebook on the dash, and made one last voice memo.

If you find this, remember the pattern isn't just in the roads, it's in the spaces behind

the paperwork nobody checks, the lives they forget.

The route was fixed in my mind.

I took it slow, easing through the familiar construction zone, sights and sounds etched

like glass and a docus.

Rain fell in a fine spray, caught in halogen arcs of working lights only for miles, there

was no real work being done.

No machinery, no chatter, just the end of the smart of orange cones weaving patterns that

didn't match the reflectors drilled into the shoulder.

The landscape seemed to twist as I drove, leaned multiplying, barriers flickering at

the edge of my headlights.

With sign swap numbers, sometimes blurring out entirely before refocusing into words

I couldn't quite pass.

My hands cramped in the wheel, knuckles pale, as the dashboard clock glitched from 238

back to 219, then forward again.

I saw it then at the periphery, a lane splitting off from the main road, untouched, smooth,

gleamings lightly in the harsh light of my high beams, though no official marker pointed

that way.

Signs with corporate logos accompany five, route expansion, in progress stood at crooked

angles, a company name phasing in, and out as if half meant to be seen.

And I came up to the split, my CB exploded a sound.

Hundreds of voices, all overlapping drivers I'd known, voices I'd only heard in passing,

and my own, Ray, don't take it steroid if you see the fifth laner.

The sound built to fever, a wall of pleading, morning, carpooled warnings echoing through

the fog.

For a moment, every inch of the truck seemed to vibrate, radio light strobing between

static and fragments of all conversations from all the routes I'd ever driven.

I gripped the wheel, willing myself to keep straight.

Without warning, the lane I was unseen to dissolve.

For an instant, I lost sight of everything, but the alternate road blew tinted lamps

and half-built exits, arching off into the mist, with rigs parked, empty, eye-ling in

the distance, like rows of steel tombs and a graveyard.

My foot hammered the brake.

Tire shrieked, slowing the rig just before the ghost lane could claim me completely.

Forcing the door open, stumbled out into the cold, fog licking at my boots.

Up here, the illusion thickened the world beyond the cone's felt nonexistent, eroded to

nothing.

My breath hung in front of my face, and behind it I heard voices men and women weaving.

Angels for help that seemed to fade before I could look at them.

Footsteps came from the darkness too regular to synchronized.

This CB, still on, repeated a new warning, where you don't leave, tell them.

Blancs in over my shoulder, I caught a flicker of movement at the edge-shaped, wearing

work-fests, arms raised as if to beckon, faces too smooth to be entirely human.

I bolted for the cap every since screaming.

In the mirrors I caught sight of myself, face-white, foreshaking as I slammed the door, shoving

the stick into reverse, searching desperately for my own tie tracks.

The world snapped back in increments.

Headlights picked up ruts in the dirt, leads, and grooves still glistening with dew.

Far down the row, official construction lies began to warm normal, reel the kind that

through yellow halos instead of weird, shifting beams.

Back up beep sounded, a familiar human profanity told me an actual work crew was finally setting

up.

I jerked the wheel, barely missing a barrel, lurching onto the paved shoulder just as the

sunburned off the last fringe of mist.

When I finally stopped shaking, I realized my hands still gripped the recorder, pressing

record, voice trembling, and too loud in my ears.

Nightrun, 41, construction zone, do not take the fifth flame unless you want to end up

like them.

I'd come back alive, or at least I was out, but I didn't know what that meant anymore

not with the memory of empty caps, looping signals, faded tracks still aching in my bones.

Russianality, reason, ordinary explanations they all felt as thin and insubstantial as

the early morning fog.

And I knew the fifth flame wasn't done with me, not by a long shot, but as I eased away

from that gym construction patch, clutching the steering wheel so tightly my wrist saked,

it hit me how silent it had become.

The CB was dead calm nobody chatting, no routine check-ins were cussing about waystations

and the usual crackle of some far off trucker was missing.

My own breath sounded overloud in this more cab.

The engine's rumble was the only anchor left.

I checked my mirrors compulsively, glancing over my shoulder every few hundred yards as

if those half-scene figures and neon vest-might materialized right there in the shoulder, arms

raised in warning, or welcome I couldn't say.

Each time the landscape behind a dressette, cones where I remembered none, a mile marker

I'd swear I'd just pass showing up again in the same reflected blur.

A part of me thought maybe the world out there beyond the glass was mollified by my escape,

indulging me this little pocket of normality until it decided to close its hand for good.

Even though the crew bustling at the next stretch looked like ordinary men was stubby-beard

and union stickers on their helmets, I felt reluctant to slow down again.

Something between embarrassment and shame made me push the throttle just a hair harder.

If any of those workers saw my face, did see more than fatigue.

They'd see the ghost of whatever I'd newly joined.

I caught myself whispering a count of every sign and every passing mile-mark of almost

an unconscious ritual, my voice gruff and low, trying to recall every detail in case

some detail blurred or faded out of existence.

With the hazards still blinking, I guided the regard to the shoulder a good half-mile away

from the crew, packed up my little voice recorder, and only demorous to long, shuddering breath.

If I'd believed in cusses or visions before, I would have prayed right then, but all I

had was the cold, logical tangle of a real experience.

It wasn't a ghost, and it wasn't a dream.

Something engineered, or maybe something that had learned to slot itself right at a

lomside human engineering, was hungry out there waiting for drivers too tired, too pained

by memory, too curious to stick to familiar blacked-up.

Watching the sunrise from a safe distance, I replayed my voice memo in the cab, my voice

was higher than I remembered, raw and creased at the edges.

For a brief stretch of road, I thought about pulling off entirely and leaving the rig at

the next well lit truck stop, just walking away.

Maybe that was what all those vanished drivers had tried.

Maybe it made no difference whether you stayed or ran.

Traffic picked up soon after the morning crowd streaming east, headlights fading under

the indifferently sky.

This seemed oblivious to the history hiding beneath last night's mess.

Trucks like mine, all spotless and loggered, threaded past the old construction barriers as

if nothing could possibly happen other than another long day's hole.

I drove on, following the familiar curve of highway out of the construction zone, my eyes

stinging with fatigue but fixing the lines.

I wasn't thinking of breakfast or of my next check-in.

I was only thinking of the tire tracks in the dirt, the fleeting flicker of alternate

blot up the voices some mine, some not that I almost couldn't bear to remember.

Part of me wished I was back at my haunts, safe on the striplet by Garroshney on over a

crack for my counter, swapping jokes and gripes with Henry and Sheila.

But the old comfort of the brotherhood felt distant now.

I crossed the line between driver and witness without ever meaning to.

I could pretend for a few hours maybe that nothing had changed.

But all I needed was to count signs, log Ios, and avoid the open, a mark lane at all costs.

But the truth was obvious as the dawn was washing over the trucks behind, some patterns,

once seen, never fade.

And something in me already knew I'd be tracing that fifth lane shadow for as long as the

road stretch for as long as men and machines kept rolling, and the lines between the real

and the impossible kept blurring just outside.

When I finally poked for the day, the cab's dank of sweat and untie freeze, hands trembling

as I tried to unsuccessfully to thread a call for on the CB just to hear another human voice.

Every muscle from neck to toes felt bricked up and stiff.

I washed on half a thermos of waxy, burnt coffee, staring at the glass it had on too clean.

The highway behind me was just another barely visible scar between fuels, but the image of

a fifth lane gleaming, empty, separate from a stream of same well-dependent self inside

my skull.

Voices seemed to hang in the periphery even with the CB off, half their warnings in my

own chopped accent the rest in the plaintive, familiar drool of other lost drivers.

That feeling stuck.

It didn't drift away, didn't get softer, not even after I refilled my lock but can

thumb messages into a dispatch app from the safety of a busy truck stop.

They're at the buzz of strangers seen flat, disconnected.

Crack Blue Neon, clatter from the galley friars, the hollow coughs of a diesel starting

two lanes over each sound snapped me back to details to life, to now.

But under it, something else kept humming.

The thought I could have been one more missing face, tacked with thumbtacks, and old scotch

taped to the bulletin board by the restrooms.

I fumbled with my voice recorder, thunder new memo.

I meant to say safety update, something routine.

Instead my voice came out raw, a confession, a close call, the weirdness of the lane,

away my own voice and other driver seemed to tangle across there, reaching back through

time a forward from somewhere I barely escaped.

Each word made my throat burn, but I got it down.

I told myself maybe I'd play it for another driver, prove I wasn't losing my mind.

The morning drifted on in a limbo, engine noise, and truck stop noise.

Kept scanning the lock for familiar faces.

Over a half-hour staring through smeared glass, I caught sight of Sheila Gutierrez at

side, armed deep in her tool chest.

A normal sight, one of the best mechanics in the circuit, most days more likely to lend

you a crowbar than sympathy.

I grabbed my love book, headed out, forced myself to act like everything was still normal.

She glanced stop by his narrow way.

Bray, you look like you hit a deer and it got up to punch you back.

I shrugged, tried to sound casual.

Bad run last night, you ever run a split lane, end up somewhere you shouldn't be.

Her smile faded.

She looked past me toward the empty stretch down by the berm.

You seeing the fifth again?

My skin percoled, I hadn't said fifth.

Not out loud.

You ever known anyone who it looking, and made it all the way back?

Nope, but I know people who tried, and you don't see them at these stops anymore, you

need sleep, layers of it.

Every word grounded me, helped me move fingers, punching the mug, burning tongue, hard

seat.

But as I shook my head, Sheila put a hand on my shoulder, just once, and that was all

the comfort I needed I was getting.

After that brief exchange, I crawled a lot, eyes open for anything out of the ordinary.

I didn't even bother hiding it, now checked eyes, watched for anyone fiddling with their

plates, scoured the ground for trash that didn't belong to the morning crowd.

Every bit of normalcy they clung from a drop-fracture.

The sigh of a wave of urinal kicks felt like an anchor back to a life that nearly split

into last night.

Before heading out for my next run, I saw a newer set of missing posters on the bulletin

bore, Tom Garrison, Freepon, and two other names I have recognised, new tape glinting

over doggyed photos.

I checked the dates.

Recent within days.

Their faces all had that out late, not enough rest, thinking about Bill's look.

Stopped me cold, these weren't legends, but my night scene, or at least could have.

Didn't matter how crowded I was busy, a place got something in the way that was posters

multiplied, in a way everyone seemed to look away after glancing at them, made clear

that the road out here was fracturing.

The ordinary world and something that looked like it was suddenly closer than I wanted

them to be.

I tried to nap.

Couldn't.

Every time I'd shinned dipped onto my chest, a reel of flickering lights in silent,

empty trucks rolled through my brain.

The center-stale smoke and rain soaked asphalt followed me through shallow sleep.

Instead I plugged in old dash cam logs, rewinding every file from the last six months.

Late runs, gas stops, reflection of cones in the mirrors.

I watched with the eyes of someone newly attuned.

Once I saw I saw split a brief shimmer with a reflection didn't match the world outside,

a hint of a lane pointed nowhere.

But I blinked and it was gone.

I clung to habit.

The oil topped up the coolant.

Road at every possible regularity had logged since that first day dates, names, fake company

numbers, spot departments.

Even tried to call the local state patrol post but got nothing but polite thank you,

we'll look into it.

No follow-up.

It hit me how near invisible I'd become, one truck in a thousand, one voice mumbling

strange details nobody wanted to hear.

It was almost noon before I finally forced myself back onto the road.

Gravel crunched under my wheels as I pulled away.

Until in the interstate under clean blue sky and the shifting for it about whether I

could almost convince myself that what happened was just a trick of tired eyes.

Almost.

But at the first constructions on I pass, the cones sat silent, same odd spacing, same

off-brand reflective stickers, same sense that.

If I look away for even a second, the fifth lane might peel itself open once more.

And further out, I recognised a truth that would haunt everyone on this stretch, even

if they never admitted it aloud.

I was already lost, whether or not the fifth lane found me again.

Panic for me, always head behind business.

I spent the next days or was it a single, stretched out day, throwing myself at the logbooks

and digging for patterns.

The urge to root out what I'd seen grew stronger than any self-preservation.

New paperwork came in on my phone, load numbers and bill of leading details, some flagged

with haznatt codes that made me pause.

The longer I looked, the more inconsistencies emerged.

The brief comfort of the truck stopped turned brittle fast.

I'd got around someone saw me pacing at midnight, face pale as a tailpipe, mouth moving

in silent math.

I had a few whispers, nothing louder than a scrape of fork against plate, but the weight

of attention trickled at my neck even as I played off the rumors.

I dug deeper, logging into old networks, caused referencing routes against DOT warnings,

news articles, dispatcher bulletins.

Incidents of a fountain lane disappear, despite every few months always shadowing loads marked

company hold, federal clearance.

Always when the art was the non-workers, never in daylight.

A pattern came into focus more on settling than any minute campfire tail.

Every fifth lane event overlap with shipments described in only the Vegas terms, on mark

crates, a hot truck hazmat, or relocated assets.

These entries never fit the paperwork or the manifest, but always match with drivers

who'd gone missing or had never been contacted again.

The nightmare wasn't just that the lane existed.

It was that the lane existed in service to someone or something, a system that didn't

care who it chewed up, only that as business whatever it was got done.

I found trace notes from a highway patrolman named Goodlett, missing from his B2 summers

ago.

In a tucked away county report, he scribbled next to a map, vehicles turning off into

nowhere, marked as federal a clover.

Some things wrong crew say don't ask.

That was enough to holomeo.

The story is about ghost roads, or hungry high was lost all their dark charm.

Phantom lane was a tool one used by men as much as by whatever darkness squatted under

the miles.

Anything where anyone could vanish, and it would look like nothing had ever happened.

The receipts, the logs, the memories, would all evaporate under a paperwork for a gomia

handful of people even knew to look for.

That night, as rain battered my windshield somewhere past 152, and you've always bled

out over the CB.

It didn't belong to anyone I recognized as flat, mountain accented tone fredding in,

ray.

They see you watching.

Don't look at the mile-mockers after midnight.

The radio hiss then cut to silence.

I drove the rest of my shift with the radio off, mirrors folded in, hot hammering even

when roadwood crews flickered by in the stuttering dusk.

But the message was clear.

Eyes that one mine had begun tracking my progress with as much focus as I tracked the

route of the fifth lane.

Sleep all but abandoned me after that, dreams for commenting into reels of headlight splitting

roads of phantom signs blooming and vanishing with every mile.

Eating became a road of a thing to do with hands that wouldn't stop shaking.

Each run after dark, I started seeing things out at the edge, construction lights that multiplied

their glow following me for impossible stretches of road, where it crews on the periphery

always bent over something hidden, never lifting their faces.

The fifth lane became less legend, more presence of constant buzz under my skull, a panic

rhythm thumping at my temples.

Other drivers' voices are sometimes my own sang out warnings in the static, don't

take the deejort ray, don't mark the surveyor's lines, don't answer when they call your name

on the construction channel.

The farther I drove, the clearer the voices became, as if some future version of myself

and dozens of others trapped beside were sending back a warning, each one increasingly

frantic.

Fatigue began warping the boundaries between real and imagined.

I'd lose 30 minutes watching headlights fizzle and refocus in the mirrors.

On two runs, I caught sight of a shadowy conway, a line of rigs with no markings hazard

lights flashing out of sequence, always deturing just ahead of me into what should have been

a close work site, only for the whole area to go dark a beat later.

I cataloged every incident with manic precision photographed unusual barriers, sent them by encrypted

message to a handful of trusted friends, reviewed every minute of dark and footage.

Photos came back warped, sometimes a second lane faded out of view, sometimes cones arranged

in unfamiliar geometric patterns.

One image pulled at random from a corrupted SD card showed a worker who's vest bled

into the air behind him, arms out as if sigling a turn that would never complete.

I started looking for this source comparing its traffic rerout plans, Google Earth images

of where the fifth lane appeared our list.

A path in swoley trickled out, suggesting the oldest to never finish section lay far

east, past mile 168, under three different layers of abandoned approved trumps, raised

from official memory decade to go.

If I was right, every new layer of construction simply covered up the bones of the original

road, leaping to fifth lane further under, folding the repetitions ever tighter.

Monsters or men it didn't matter, something had hollowed out a space in the wet concrete

where a logic couldn't reach.

Those days bled together asleep was just a blink, broken by engine noise, flashes of distant

lightning outlining the never completed lanes.

I rushed in caffeine, trying to bluff my way to sanity, wondering if every passing truck

might be the last I'd see outside the world the fifth lane offered.

Another corner of the cab now felt watched by something more patient than I'd ever known,

content to wait for the right moment to reel me in completely.

My mind frayed, but the need to see the heart of it the place where the fifth lane began,

or maybe where it ended to become all that kept me moving.

The last day before the storm, I called read every map stacked across the dash, traced

with mefing of the sequence of impossible closures, identifying the oldest, a closed

no exit stretch just passed a shuttered wrist area, three miles of blacked out lane visible

only on overlays, never present when you actually drove by.

I loaded my cab that afternoon flares, battery lanterns, extratates and batteries, print

it's of every regular permit, physical maps in place of my phone's unreliable guidance.

For the first time since this all began, I plan ahead.

If the fifth lane opened again, I wasn't going in by mistake.

I was going in watching, armed with every sense and every record I could master.

That night, the air grew heavy with pre-storm humidity, even the other driver seemed subdued,

hunkered in their vehicles with windows up as if the world itself was baddening down.

My midnight, thunderheads leaned huge and gray on the horizon, blue-white flashes illuminating

a broken lion's of abandoned driftwork.

When bent the last miles of grass along the shoulder, shaking candy wrappers and cigarette

butts from the ditches.

Static crawled up my forearm, as I set my work lights in the cab, lay every radio and

tape recorder out on the dashboard, taped coordinates to the windshield.

Woments after the clock flick from 12, seven to an unreadable scramble of digits, the first

volley over and arrived hard enough to phase headlights into use of sweat orbs.

Rucks up a head-drifted right, down-drifted in inter-restarts or blinking out in the mist.

My hands sweated and the wheeled knuckles dug and tied as I followed the route I prepared

east to the shattered rest area, to their closed section with its own secret geometry.

As I approached, barriers trembled, cone scattering in a natural patterns, yellow-white aerosine spinning

on the axis that I've guided by invisible hands.

Flare's head placed earlier guttered, then snuffed out as I swallowed from below.

My phone ping a GPS glitching, map-app-stuttering the screen call between several pass locations

and none I recognise.

In a bit in, the lane appeared, just a hint of first, a subtle gleam in the ham-out rain,

bending away from the real highway.

Signs updated with impossible speed, deed-or-left company 5, all in block-if-on that pulsed

with the rhythm of the storm.

Every instrument in the cab went haywire.

Clocks jumped backward in ten second chunks.

Even the un-logged dashboard needle flickered, moving from me to F with no fuel input.

My dash-ham set to record automatically if I breathed as if caught in a strobe, leaping

thirty seconds of footage with every new drop of rain.

The CB hiss, then spilled forth a cacophony of sound, first the whimpering of lost drivers,

then my own warnings lay at the top.

Each more desperate than the last, it's not a lane turn around.

Ray, don't follow the fifth, don't follow it by bursts of static in the hot, metallic

time of panor-writing each syllable.

Lightning split the horizon, showing the unearthly split of the real and not real, I had

a line of rigs, parked nose to tail, rolling forward without anyone in the cabs, white glove

hands on the wheels, or none at all.

As of empty truck sailed down the open fifth lane, hazard lights in perfect time, this

whole procession too measured to silent to belong in this world.

The moment harm stretched and sharpened by the thunder outside and the mechanical drumming

within, another chance to join a ritual or break it if I dared.

Hot-bucking, a chose action.

Shoveving the clutch, easing forward, a jammed record on the last working tape and

shot into the opening lane with every light burning.

Inside, time twisted.

The landscape bled and doubled, lanes forked, then folded back on themselves.

My own calf legged with phantasm's drivers in faded uniforms, hunched over steering wheels,

the mouse forming silent was the echoed in my head before I could recognize them.

I gripped the dash, repeating name, rat number, license plate, anything to stitch myself

to the real, ray monarch, 41 eastbound, 3j7-44, not lost it.

At the lanes end, the world pinched to grey, blinding corridor.

Torrents of blue light hurt my eyes, sodium workloads towering over colossal, never completed

of her past, tops whipping in the gale.

Beyond them, men in government black suits and badges carved of pure, oily gleam herded

lines of drivers forward, issuing silent orders he felt instead of heard.

A marked truck's rule behind, the cargo invisible behoming like a hornet in an oil drum.

I staggered from the cap.

Every sensation came and unsign muffled, vision doubled.

In front of me, under the main arch of the overpass, loomed a figure, badge clipped to

a neon vest that gluts so fiercely atach on the floodlights.

His face ran like wax, flickering in it, and out of existence, first double chin, then

gone, then holy edge less.

In his hand, a clipboard with my name written over and over, half the letters blurred into

nothing.

He spoke, and his voice sizzled in my mind while my ears rang with static.

You've seen what you weren't meant to see, forget, or help maintain.

These words don't pave themselves, maintenance is eternal, ray, you join, or you leave,

decide right now.

The impossibility of the moment broke something loose in me, I shouted my name, hammered the

dash with my fists, held a last working tape of the windshield, fragmenting the amulality

as I battered the side glass open.

Lightning detonated above, slicing the world, open water pouring through every seam, overpass

shuddering, tops tearing loose to reveal an abyssal black behind.

Everything convulsed, blue white ox scaded across the trucks, engines dying with a sickly

whine as the overpass collapsed into his own fog.

Instinct drove me no clear thought, just animal panic.

I slid back into the driver's seat, slown the truck into reverse, traced my own tire tracks

by blind faith and burned out headlight until the fifth flamethrowered, then amavalled

into blank, empty field under the unblinking orange halogens.

Sunrise again, and I found myself crawling down State Route 41, hands sticky with sweat

and blood, wrist burny.

Clean rain was a rust the gutters outside.

My GPS flickered back to normal.

The police canna chirped, mundane as milk, speeders, a jack-knife two-cansers north, all

the ordinary hustle of a world that would never permit what I just witnessed.

The fifth lane had gone from every log and every local cop's record.

At the first major stop, a handful of drivers milled around a parking lot, studiously ignoring

the faded posters, voices worried with the morning harsh.

I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat who would believe what I'd seen.

But I printed my logs anyway, left every map and memo in a battered brown envelope marked

only to ask goodgeras in case ray.

My hands shriek while I sealed it.

One or two old drivers met my eyes no nods, but the camaraderie of the haunted lingered

between us.

Looking away, I glimpsed my own face ghosting back from polished chrome.

Line emptied out eyes bruised from sleeplessness.

In certain, for a moment, whether I was the one who escaped for just another survivor inside

an old warning broadcast, leaping forever on static air.

The compressor rattled down in my cab.

I took one final voice lock, a rash, disparate message, if you hear this, never trust eat

your smart company five, or any pattern of cones twisted into five pointed shapes, don't

listen for voices after midnight, don't it?

To tip cut to my own voice, warped in echoing warnings in the language barely my own before

collapsing into pure static.

Morning again.

Attach a fresh tie tracked across the newest spill of clay in the dawn, curling away past

the edge of marked pavement into open, abandoned earth.

No cones, no signs, only the faint chemical whiff of a safety vest once bright, now sun

bleached.

The fifth lane waits for the next driver, as ready as ever, until the road claims another.

The fifth lane waits for the next driver, as ready as ever, until the road claims another.

I never got used to the weight of sent clon, cheap nicotine, burnt wiring, that chemical

tan like antifreeze left too long in hot steel.

Every new morning after, the flavor stuck under the skin of my tongue.

In moments between routes, when the world felt briefly real, I tried to hang on to the

simple rituals punching a number into the fuel pump, feeling coarse diesel spill across

my gloves, washing with gritty green soap at the edge of some air post basin.

None of it could scrub out the memory of that luminous fog, the hollowness in the cabs,

the evil geometry of cones warped into patterns you couldn't see.

I can truck stop daylight, my voice barely worked.

Each word I said was a test half expecting to hear static.

She'll have always blunt, all business cornered me before noon.

You look wired, monarch, you need to sleep.

She pushed a couple of soup at me, I sit, hoping for comfort, and felt only pimprix will

sweat down my back as I tried to describe the storm, the impossible split in the road,

the way headlights blowed into the wrong horizon.

Her jaw locked tight, and for once she just listened, not joking or dismissing or even

frowning.

When I finish, she laid a callous palm on my shoulder, her eyes searching my face for

something lost.

Neither of us said the obvious thing, no one else would believe it.

Yet she didn't tell me to let it go either.

Maybe some people look for proof the rest just know.

Still, sleep turned ugly.

Even with the rig double locked and top tight under the well lit eve, I work at intervals

hands-coaching the sheets, stroked hot with the urge to yell, warnings I no longer remembered.

Sometime past 2am, I found myself at the window, watching the periodic, restless movement

of tail lights in the service ramp.

Some were down the lot, a light flicker through torn rain, then went out, but the shape

it left behind the wedge of blue-white against absolute darkness reminded me far too much

of what waited past the cones.

Empty sleepless iris became routine.

Each dusk, I circled the lot, staring at the photo wall.

The collection grew silently, more names tipped up over wrinkles and moisture stains, a change

in tide of absences.

A couple faces I knew the rest, just that same stubborn gaze, strong jawed, or tired,

osquiting against an unseen glare no chemo could record.

The bullet in board always seemed to add in you one after storms, the dates never more

than a date or two old.

No one ever explained why.

Drugs through sunlight didn't fix much.

The memory changed every run, I'd find myself staring at the road for too long, eyes

watering from focusing to hard on any blip of alternate pavement, any shift in signage,

any slightly wrong reflection trickling at the margins.

The normal well-worked guys in bad a gear, drilling, change smoking became comforting only

up to a point.

Certain zones, untouched since the storm, still bore marks of detours raised more efficiently

than any crew could have managed.

Once, passing a regular patch, I saw that familiar gap between cones, the line too straight,

branded not with a lane closed, but simply five stenciled in black spray paint on a mud-splattered

barrel.

My stomach clenched, I sped up without even intending to.

When I finally dared to sift through the logs I'd left for Sheila Maps, notes, tapes I

did in the far corner of an empty diner, a kind that closes only for health code violations,

not holidays.

She joined me behind the battered counter, running her eyes over the printouts and shaking

her head, left pressed into a single bloodless line.

I've heard stories for years, she said, but this, it fits, it all fits.

She counted out incidents, tapping the printouts for each.

You notice nobody goes missing in the day, where if they do, it's always the ones working

off-clock, cleaning up messes the rest for it just to.

Her voice cut short, like she couldn't bear to say vanished.

I nodded and spread out my new notes.

I'd begun overlaying fresh data, flagged manifests, company credentials that showed up only

on jobs connected to company five ore, atines, contracts that used no real name at all, only

code strings or federal routing digits.

The shipments always carried on marked containers, no clear manifests never anything traceable

to real cargo brokers.

That week, miners frayed until even daylight felt alien.

Twice, a caught email bounces returning forms as no record or not recognised authority,

routed in government ease but empty of real denial just a dead end at the border of an

official explanation.

I tried to trace the real origin of the company, driving to a listed regional office half

a state north.

The address led to a torn down gas station, all pumped around under grass, a mailbox

gaping with rainwater and treated junk mail.

Every step made it clear that the disappearances lined up with a schedule not written for human

eyes.

Shaking the next set of manifests, I hunted for overlap.

Three more rigs missing, all on the same hazmat run, carrying nothing but sealed containers

from authorized storage, loaded at midnight, all meant for a special delivery direct

hand-of-only.

Such direct hand-ofs never hit state inspection logs.

No trace after mile maca 153 except for the growing legend of phantom closures and a handful

of battered receipts showing tine stamps that were set and readable except for the frozen

iron, always 2 7 am.

A newling emerged, somewhere between the storm and now someone was using a phenomenon.

Someone was making people and machines disappear covering it up with paperwork, sidestipping

oversight with the promise of federal clearance, hiding abductions inside something inexplicable.

Didn't sleep that night either.

I spent eight straight hours trolling highway patrol feeds, look on news tips, out a few

underground forums where drivers traded stores about ghost roads.

The digital logs blinked and leaped.

Someone near dawn, a fresh message appeared in one of the forums from a user whose location

pinged us unknown route C5.

Short tense letters, they are moving again, if you look for mile markers after midnight,

they look back, stop drawing, they'll chalk your route for you.

I sat there, inhaling cold air, staring hard at the streetlights fracturing through

the windows.

Nobody else looked up.

That's how it always starts to nine a truth until it eats through every barrier you've

built, then comes for you, the first gap.

I already knew I was past the point of easy exit, a dead sprint for proof-overage accents.

The following dusk, I left the end of state for two Ios to track a shipment I shouldn't

have found.

No manifest, no legal booking, but clears words carved and pinned on a top, see if I

afraid no stop.

The highway was cut up by closures, arrow boards pointing coals into the dock, half the

cone scattered like an unfinished warning.

Stomclads bolt up overhead, making the ordinary light too flat, too cold.

As I rolled into the closure zone, my CB crackled.

First nothing but distortion, then a voice had fought so long it felt like my own gun

and familiar, Ray, don't take the next teacher, my mark is lying.

No answer when I tried to reply.

Reception died for the next ten miles.

But I'd seen enough to know something invisible was tracking not just the routes, but the choices

the small moments drive was chased normally with intent.

It wasn't enough for the road to split, you had to want to see the split coming.

You had to look for it.

With every long night, my nerves unraveled.

Sometimes I'd spot an empty flat bed idling at a ramp, engine running, hazard lights

flaring, silent moss at the rain, and I'd think of it stopping to check the cap for signs

of life.

Most times I kept rolling.

After the first warning, I didn't dare linger anywhere I wasn't already known, wasn't

already real.

Inside the cab, the boundaries between real and possible slip further.

The mirrors kept showing the wrong number of trucks.

Twice, headlights behind me swore of left, driving for a non-existent lane, then phased

out of view as if blinked away.

The sensation of pursuit deepened like so mucher, patient and unseen, followed me through

every unlit patch, mapping my decisions.

Mapped crisscrossed my dash, each new annotation rendered in a hand that grew shake here with

every day.

Again and again, the line circled, stretched new mile 160 each always flagged, always a race.

The oldest and finished section, now layered with so much asphalt and misdirection that

history had worn out tracing its own memory.

Did I plan my final attempt, or did it plan me?

The days lost their shape.

The eye was folded in on themselves, every nap gave way to fractal visions, cones making

shapes in the dark, men invest calling my name while my lip shaped a warning on a dozen

alternate airwifts.

When the sky finally darkened into true night, then to roll in distant and mean, I knew

it was time.

I doubled my equipment, double recorders, flares in every pocket, physical maps, not a whisper

of digital reliance.

The storm would cover me, ice cream over the world, blank enough to mask any trace of

where I'd go if the lane chose to open once more.

I pulled up just before midnight, a pit forming in my stomach as the roads emptied and the

noise of the rig pressed high against a silence so thick it made my ears ring.

With each mile, the clouds lowered, lighting pimp-wheeling overfields drowned in shadow.

At Route 168, the realness of the moment so intense it made me nauseous, sparrows toppled

as if a wind gusted up only from me, I followed the coned with my high beans, ignoring

every muscle in my forearm screaming to reverse course.

Each sign on the detour shivered and glitched flipping between clothes, at Route 5, in no

entry.

Iroboards rotated with a wind, light strobing seamlessly into an alien code.

My GPS flick of through every state I'd ever driven, spinning coordinates from east to

west and finally flat lining at blank coordinates.

Then, as the rainfall punched in off the field, the 5th lane manifested with greater violence

than ever before.

No gradual shift to just a sudden, impossible, black top opening to the left, wet and gleaming

like a tonsilute from between teeth.

Beyond, workouts burned the steady, blue fire, casting triplicat shadows over the rigside.

The CB spewed a chorus of panic voices, my own layered countless times, plus a keening

of men and women too exhausted to say anything but it don't.

Some voices called me by every nickname I'd ever had, monarch, rayboy, underman, one

or two even in a tone I remembered from my own father decades before.

None sounded like they made it out.

I realized finally and fully there was no way out beforeward.

With every artifact and every load burning to memory, I aimed at center for the impossible

lane.

Tire is bit new black top.

The world shifted, the outside gun soft as a dream inside, time blinked out in spasms,

southward freezing on to seven, radio warping music into white noise shrieks.

The windshield painted with rain that fell up in sideways.

The fifth flame proper felt endless at first, a space with no horizon.

The blue lights arched overhead, illuminating not work but column after column of abandoned

cabs, all line nose forward, has a blinkers time to the pulsing in my eardrums.

Between them, shadow workers, invests, amasks, wave me forward or signal cryptic patterns

with bathed flashlights.

A trio of men in suits real or illusion, I couldn't tell stood against a span of unfinished

overpass, shielded from the elements, faces pixelated beyond memory.

I slowed to a crawl recording over every available truck, reciting coordinates time, names,

words that reminded me of flesh and weather and years I thought could anchor me.

The men invest motion more urgently.

Engines idled inside trucks that couldn't run one of mine, I was sure, from three years

back a bottle cap and an old stick I left in a nook of the dashboard, visible for only

a blink before it was swallowed by the fog.

Last the overpass loomed.

On foot now, walking no, running through water that never quite wet, I faced the figure

awaiting where the concrete arched up into the sky.

The badge on his vest flared like a warning flare or a sun caught in a rainstorm.

His clipboard listed drivers by first and last names, each one fading as he flipped

pages.

I tried to read my own but the letters scrambled, shuffling into nothing.

He spoke without moving lips of voice both inside me and far off electric, cold, you want

to know most don't.

I swallowed they are crackling in my lungs.

He lifted his hand, palm up offering what might have been a key or might have been a clip

of raw, expose film.

I tried one last time to speak.

What is this for?

His answer was part school, part benediction.

The world runs on what's in the dark, you drive it every night.

His face cycled through ages, old, down blank.

Take the record or join the others, maintenance is forever.

In that instant, lighting shattered the horizon, blowing out the overpass in a white flash

and silencing every engine, every hidden voice, every possible past and future road.

I ran toward my cap clutching the offered record of cold, metallic, weightless.

Inside, the dash lit up in a spiral of signals and old CB traffic.

Names ran across the display mine, all the missing, looped in the sleigh and flickering

amber.

I jammed the truck into gear, screaming coordinates into a dozen recorders at once.

The world outside poles with blue-white fire.

Under disturbing lights, I spotted the ghosts, drivers moving backward against time, waving

as they faded, engine to whispering last mile secrets into the humid, storm lit dark.

It all collapsed in a rush.

Five boiled up, every color leeching out from the world but red and white and black.

My route snapped back into existence mile marker 141, traffic growing past in the honest, unenchanted

dawn.

The fifth flame erased itself mid-breath as old stains barely visible where concrete

mech grass.

Every trace of the ordeal vanished.

The rig was battered but intact, all radios reset, recorders dead, their record heavy

in my pocket and now just an ordinary key fob marks C5's liquid condensation.

No one at the truck's dark commented in the new dent of the shadow's gas.

The only acknowledgement of battered thermos of coffee left on my fender, still warm,

from a driver-pale as Jorke who didn't sign the note.

Saw the lights glad you made it, it reed and blocky pen.

Walking away, I felt the reflex begin, checking for cones for stenciled five marks for lane

closures that didn't quite match the plan.

But the world had said it's lines in you.

Somewhere, a dispatcher radio called alert I'd never heard, and the ordinar traffic resumed.

In the mirrors I climbed back into the cap, my reflection blurred.

Shadows of vast passing through my shoulders as if I were now part of the living mystery

witness in warning, half year, half not.

That's all there is.

At dawn, fresh tie trucks cover away from the pavement into wild grass, ten yards wide

like a ghost road no map will ever claim.

The a-taste faintly of ash and ozone.

For a beat, I catch my own warning tone recorded, replayed, echoing into the static of the

morning and I realise the story cycles again.

Any driver could be next.

As the fifth lane and spools at the edge of memory and map, only one message remains,

don't trust the detour, no matter how familiar it claims to be.

And that is the end.

Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.