//------------------------------// // Crash // Story: Off the Beaten Path // by PingSquirrel //------------------------------// //----------------------------- // Story: Off the Beaten Path // Chapter: Crash // Author: PingSquirrel // Editor: Primary Feather //----------------------------- 1. “I suppose I should start at the beginning of the day. Only seems right to put some context to this whole thing, because it's crazy. Seriously, if I heard this story, I would think the guy telling it is nuts,” I said to the rather stern-looking visage across from me at the table. You know, I would never of thought a pony could look so angry, but that's just another thing on a long list of comfortable illusions that has been shattered with extreme prejudice today. “I mean, not every day someone-” “Don't you mean, “Somepony”,” he corrected in that gruff voice he had without once losing his glare right at me. Seriously, that frown just doesn't belong on a pony. I just gave a hapless shrug in return. The pony across the interrogation room table was Officer Cuffs, and he looked looked like a stereotypical Irish cop who was three days from retirement and two days from a total mental breakdown. That is, if that cop was a copper-red pegasus that had a very palatable dislike for me. To be fair, that wasn’t helped by my reaction when I first saw him. I mean, there he was, looking every bit the 'bad' cop with a dour and angry face and all I could think was he was adorable. I wanted to hug him. And when he told me to lose the smirk, I lost it alright. I think it took me like fifteen minutes to stop laughing at the pony and even for a while after, I would still break into snickers when he tried the 'bad cop act' again. Just leave it to me to find something that hilarious when I was in so deep. My initial reactions aside, there was no need to fight over grammar and I conceded the point to him. “Right, whatever. Some'pony',” I corrected with exaggerated clarity in the pronunciation, “It's not everyday somepony comes crashing through the barriers of reality in his truck. Now, this is going to be God's honest truth here on how this all played out. You know, from my end. It's going to sound weird too, so don't interrupt, please.” How odd that I was the one that had to worry about sounding weird to a pony, but I suppose it was his world and I was the visitor. He had the home-field advantage in the whole, “who is crazy” game. “Is this going to be more of that, “Other world” nonsense that you were babbling about?” he wearily asked. He didn't believe me the first time I told him and I doubt the sixth time was the charm. “If you want the truth, it's going to have to be.” He rolled his eyes. “Just... get on with it,” he muttered in exasperated defeat, but I was left with the sense that pause could have been filled with a number of words filled it, and none were too kind in regards to my character. I didn't want to give him a chance to revisit the choicer of the words, so I recounted the day to the officer while he took notes. +++ There it is. The most accursed sound one can ever hear. With its harsh and grating cry, it will jar anyone into immediate, abrupt action to leave what was likely the most comfortable place they would be all day. The alarm. With all the energy one can have at five o’clock in the morning, I reached out and fumbled blindly around for the phone that was the source of such terrible sound. Sometimes, I wished I used a proper alarm clock simply so I could have a larger target. The blessed silence filled the room. For a moment, I considered the virtues of calling in sick, or using that snooze button but my sense of duty wins out in the end. I remind myself that neither were an option today. By that afternoon, I had to be on a rooftop in Rollo, Saskatchewan to help install an industrial sized dehumidifier. And between myself and that rooftop was several hours of driving. Every fiber of my being filed protests when I sat up in the dark. They were noted and summarily dismissed before I stood up in the dark room. “How does the boss even find these jobs?” I mutter to myself as I groped in the dark for my other sock that went AWOL at some point during the night. “It’s in the middle of nowhere.” It is not that I really minded being sent out of town for a couple weeks. It was that I liked an excuse to gripe and have a pity party every once in a while, and that is always easier when one is required to get up before dawn, drive several hundred kilometers and do a rooftop job that was likely to be a total disaster before the end of it. At least everything but the one elusive sock was ready. My tools and the material were already on my truck and the load they made was stacked high enough to look the Clampett's did the packing. My personal items like my clothes, a few books for the evenings and a cheap laptop to manage my iPod were in the cab. And now that I found my sock under the dresser, I was ready to go. I turned to leave when I remembered that there was just one more thing I had to do. There was no way I was going to forget it either because it was simply the most important thing I had to do before I hit the road. “Love ya, dear. See you in a couple weeks.” I give my sleepy dear a kiss on the cheek, and she nearly got a few recognizable syllables out of her mouth without ever really waking up. It would of been nice to talk to her before heading out, but that was what my cellphone was for. I would call her when I got to the hotel that night. I made a whirlwind tour through the kitchen, where much cereal was consumed. I guess there’s a little irony when I say I eat 'horse-food' for breakfast, but I really do like that whole grain, no sugar or salt stuff. Knowing what I do now about ponies, it's something else that goes on list of things I was wrong about, but I digress. After a quick clean up of the room, I was on the road with thermos full of coffee in my little red Ranger. It was small enough to get my co-workers making fun of me for driving it, but it was mine, all mine and I loved it. It handled well, didn’t drink up too much gas and the speakers were pretty good. They sounded even better with some good metal music filling the cab and disturbing every bit of wildlife within a couple hundred metres of the highway. (Yes? Why are you interrupting? What was I? I thought you didn't believe that bit, but I was human for this part. I was 182 centimetres tall with fingers and all that creepy stuff you did not want to hear about. Now, let's get back to the story. Where was I? On the road. Thanks.) The highway was in good condition with the perfectly clear weather all the way to the horizon and beyond. I was just lost in my music, bobbing my head as I moved further from civilization and deeper into the rural farmlands and fields. If you ever driven in Saskatchewan, you would know why I needed the music for entertainment. The joke was you could fall asleep at the wheel leaving Manitoba and end up in Alberta and still be in your lane. It was a familiar drive for me because I had been to Rollo before several times. Even so, there was still one part of the trip that I loved. I called it the “Twilight Zone Highway” because you would be on it, doing a hundred kilometres per hour and seemingly going nowhere. Sure, you would be passing fences, wheat fields, and telephone posts, but if you looked either way, the road ran to the horizon in both directions. In that leg of the drive, you could lose all perspective on motion. It gave you the sense of being stuck on the highway and not going anywhere, and I could totally see that being an episode of that show. That was where it happened. Along that stretch of road where nothing seemed to change, everything did change. I had been out of coffee for a couple hours at that point and not really paying as much attention as I should to the drive. I'm not saying I fell asleep at the wheel, but it would be fair to say I wasn’t exactly alert either. I doubt I’d could have seen it coming though. I just know that one blink, I was looking down a paved highway, and the second blink had me on a rough dirt road. My surroundings, from what I can remember, still looked right although now there were hills and that part of Saskatchewan definitely did not have hills. Nor did it have a forest either. Alright, it wasn’t the same at all and I needed to stop to get my bearings. Maybe I’d made a wrong turn that I didn’t remember or somehow was on the wrong road entirely. Either way, I went to hit the brake when I hit... Something. I never felt anything like it. Imagine running full tilt into a paper banner, but less substantial and much more connected to you. Forget it. It's like tasting “blue”. It’s impossible to explain, but I can say that everything went intimately, incredibly and very wrong at that point. My hands slipped off the wheel with a loud honk of the horn, my feet couldn’t reach the pedals and I was careening through a herd of horses that, looked truly shocked at the truck amongst them. They scattered, some of them moving so fast I swear they flew out of the way instead of jumped. Others just scrambled away in any direction that was away from me. I hate the sound of hitting something in my truck. It’s happened to me a before and it sounds horrible. It can even compete with your alarm. There’s a harsh crunching noise that sets every nerve you have right on edge, even when you already think you’re at your maximum adrenaline level. I think it was a table or something I hit first. It looked like a table and I remember plates flying past. It was followed by, I don't know. I think it was purple, and a bit smaller. It all happened so quickly and I was too busy trying to get back in control of my truck. “This is the End” by Machine Head was blaring out the speakers at this point. When I consider how I felt at the moment, it really was appropriate because I was sure I was going to die in a horrible crash. “I never did get to make that phone call,” was all I could think. It was then that I was able to get my hands through the wheel and crank it right over, and aimed the truck squarely towards a tree. I slid myself down in that seat to stomp the brake and that time I was able to punch that pedal right to the floor, though I couldn't see over the dash anymore. I hoped it would be enough to stop me from destroying myself, and I’d settle for it hurting like nothing I’d ever felt before. Not that I liked pain mind you, but in a high speed highway accident, having everything hurt beat the most likely alternative on every level. I pulled my arms from the wheel, and let momentum take its course. “Oh, this is going to suck!” Not exactly heroic, but they were accurate last words. I missed the crash entirely because my eyes were clenched shut and I was screaming something I rather not repeat, but the crash didn’t sound too bad. Only thing I could say for sure was that airbags hurt when they deploy, but I was still mostly intact. I think. To be fair, I was pretty rattled and not up to any deep analysis of my situation. Instead, I sat there, looking into that white cloth that made up the airbag and took a good, long breath. It seemed the biggest crisis had been adverted and now, time to check damage. I lifted my hand and moved it to my recently airbag-tenderized face to check for blood, only to find a solid yellow-orange hoof where a hand should be and a long snout (Muzzle?) where my nose was. I went right back into my crisis mode. In the face of adversity, it is best to keep it to cold calculations without emotion. Emotions never help me in the face of utter disaster and there is plenty of time to panic after everything is resolved. Right now, the crisis was this hoof I was looking at. “Huh. That's different.”