Chapter 1
I’ve never told anyone this because it sounds like a cheap sci-fi rip-off, but it happened, and I still don’t have a logical explanation for it.
Last October, I was doing a straight shot drive from Salt Lake City to Reno. If you’ve never made that drive, it is a massive, soul-sucking dead zone. Just hours of pitch-black desert and absolutely nothing to look at. I was running on three hours of sleep and gas station energy drinks, just trying to get the trip over with.
Around 2:00 AM, my GPS chimed. It found a faster route that shaved about fifty minutes off my arrival time. I didn’t even question it. I took the next exit, which dumped me onto a two-lane blacktop that looked like it hadn’t been paved since the nineties.
Almost immediately, my cell service dropped to zero. I figured that was normal for the middle of nowhere. I just turned up my music and kept driving.
About twenty minutes into this detour, I passed a green reflective mile marker. It said 42. I only noticed it because it was literally the only thing my headlights had illuminated besides sagebrush. I kept driving. Ten minutes later, my headlights caught another sign.
Mile marker 42.
I didn’t panic. I honestly just thought it was lazy state workers who screwed up the signage. I even tried to text a picture of it to my group chat to make a joke about it, but the message failed to send. I tossed my phone on the passenger seat, mildly annoyed, and kept going.
That’s when I noticed the headlights in my rearview mirror.
They appeared out of nowhere. One second the road behind me was pitch black, and the next, there was a car coming up fast. Really fast. They got right on my bumper and stayed there, practically blinding me with their brights.
Instead of being scared, I just got pissed off. The road was completely empty. They could easily pass me. I tapped my brakes a couple of times to give them the hint to back off. They didn’t. They stayed right on my ass for another two miles. I finally got fed up, laid on my horn, and swerved slightly into the oncoming lane to force them to go around.
The car gunned it, whipped past me, and merged back into my lane so sharply it almost clipped my front bumper. It sped off into the dark until its taillights completely disappeared.
I muttered some insults and kept driving. Five minutes later, I saw a bright orange glow up ahead.
As I got closer, I realized it was a fire. A car had veered off the shoulder, crashed through a barbed-wire fence, and wrapped completely around a massive dead tree. The engine block was in flames.
I pulled over immediately. I didn’t know what kind of meth-head or drunk driving situation I was walking into, so I grabbed the heavy metal flashlight from my glovebox before stepping out.
The heat coming off the wreck was intense. I ran up to the driver’s side, shielding my face, yelling to see if anyone was conscious.
The driver’s side door was crushed inward. The window was shattered. I shined my flashlight through the broken glass.
The driver was slumped over the steering wheel, completely still. But that’s not what made my entire body lock up.
The car was a silver 2014 Honda Civic with a cracked side mirror. It was my car.
I stared at the driver. He was wearing the exact same faded grey hoodie I had on. I could see the side of his face illuminated by the fire.
It was me.
My brain completely flatlined. It rejected what I was seeing entirely. I didn’t scream. I didn’t try to pull the door open. I just backed away slowly, my mind completely blank, until my back hit the door of the car I had just stepped out of.
I got in, locked the doors, and slammed my foot on the gas.
I didn’t look back. I drove at ninety miles an hour, my hands gripping the wheel so hard my knuckles ached. I fully expected the road to loop again, or to see another mile marker 42, but thirty minutes later, the dirt road merged back onto the main interstate. My cell service instantly reconnected. My phone started vibrating with missed notifications.
I didn’t stop until the sun came up and I hit a crowded gas station on the edge of Reno.
I sat in the parking lot for an hour trying to convince myself it was a hallucination caused by severe sleep deprivation and caffeine. That had to be it. Your brain plays tricks on you when you’re exhausted.
But when I finally got out of the car to pump gas, I looked down at my front bumper.
There was a fresh, deep scrape on the front left fender, layered with a smear of silver paint. It was exactly where the other car would have made contact if it had clipped me while aggressively merging
