All stories › Science Fiction › Nine Minutes on the Ramp › Episode 1
Exit 212
Episode 1 of 3 of Nine Minutes on the Ramp by Travis Underwood · free to read
My coffee cup was jammed in the door pocket, and I was typing 2:38 into the log, when the truck signaled for Exit 212.
Ninth run on this truck. Ninth time.
Nobody touched the wheel. It turned by itself in front of me, slow and polite, and the truck took the ramp and eased onto the shoulder halfway up. The air brakes hissed. The engine kept idling under the floor.
There was nobody else on the ramp. There never was.
I started the stopwatch on my phone.
The radio clicked. “Southbound four, check call.”
“Southbound four, awake,” I said.
“Morning, Gordon.” Joyce Ochoa ran the overnight board for the whole fleet from a room I had never seen. She had the voice of a librarian who had heard every excuse. “You sound parked.”
“I am parked. Two-twelve again. Up on the ramp.”
I heard her keys. “Board shows you green at mile two-twelve. No faults.”
“It’s been green nine times.”
“Did you paddle it?”
The paddle was a red bar under the dash, the only control in the cab that was mine. Pull it and the truck would stop wherever it safely could, then wait for me to clear it.
“First two nights,” I said. “Review called them unnecessary. Forty-five dollars each.”
“Ouch.”
“I make two hundred thirty-six a run. Ninety is more than a third of a night, gone.”
“Reviews are a computer, hon. Nobody reads them unless you write a note. Write a note and a person reads it, and then a person calls you.”
“I didn’t write a note.”
“Then a computer took your ninety dollars and went back to sleep.”
I looked out the side window. The ramp climbed to an overpass and a stop sign. Past the median, the northbound lanes were dark and empty.
“How long can I sit here before you notice?”
“Board pings me at ten minutes stopped anywhere that isn’t a yard. You’ve never pinged.”
“Because it’s nine. Exactly nine.”
“Then it’s a tidy truck. Is the eye happy?”
The eye was a small camera on the dash that watched my face. When the wheels turned, it counted my blinks. Close my eyes four seconds while we moved and it logged a flag.
Miss a check call by more than sixty seconds and that was a flag too. Three flags in a quarter and the company found you a different career.
I had one. My first week, a straight stretch, two in the morning.
I was thirty-four. I had my daughter four days a week, and she was six, and on those days I did not sleep much.
“Eye’s off,” I said. “It only counts when the wheels turn.”
“Then drink your coffee. You’re not paid to drive, Gordon. You’re paid to be awake.”
“You say that every night.”
“Somebody needs it every night.”
Headlights came up the northbound side. A company truck, our colors on the trailer. As it passed under the overpass, its cab light flashed twice.
“Who’s that?”
“Northbound six. Hector Cutler. He had your truck six years, same run. When the contract changed, they put him on the new northbound and gave you his old ride.”
“He flashes everybody?”
“Everybody. Sixty-three years old, and he never once got an eye flag. I can’t do that, and I’m sitting in a chair.”
The stopwatch hit nine minutes. The brakes released. The truck rolled to the stop sign at the top, crossed the overpass, and took the on-ramp back down to the highway, as if it had remembered an errand.
At 3:22 a noise like a smoke alarm filled the cab, and I put coffee down my leg.
“That’s the move-over chime,” Joyce said before I could reach the mic. “Somebody paddled up ahead. Northbound two, flat tire. Log that you saw him.”
A mile on, a company truck sat on the far shoulder with its hazards going. I typed it in with a wet knee.
“Does that go off in every cab?”
“Every company cab inside a mile. Both directions. Loud enough to wake the dead, which is the point.”
“Can you stop a truck from your chair?”
“No, hon. Only the paddle stops a truck. That’s the law, and that’s why they pay you.”
I dabbed my jeans with a napkin and watched the white lines come at us until the sky went gray.
At the yard I pulled up the trip log before I signed out. Every mile was there. Every lane change, every speed, the chime at 3:22, the flat tire I had logged.
Then it simply skipped from 2:38 to 2:47, as if those nine minutes had happened to some other truck.
Who tells a truck to forget nine minutes?