Highway 502

by Admiral Biscuit


Chapter 2: Highway 502

Highway 502
Chapter 2: Highway 502
Admiral Biscuit

The semi rumbled under my seat, and in the mirror, I could see a big black cloud billow out of the exhaust pipe. I looked back over in the driver's seat, to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, and she was still there, big as life. Her blue-grey eyes were looking right at me, and I gave a weak smile. It seemed like the thing to do.

I couldn't help but feel that she was as brimming with questions as I was, but was enough of a driver to not want to be overly distracted until we were back to speed, so I just watched her. I learned that she knew how to double-clutch, and that pony trucks had just as many gears as real-life big rigs.

Her eyes flicked back over to me. “What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

“No, I—“ I shook my head. This was probably all a hallucination, brought about by a night in the desert or something. But how to tell the real from the unreal? That was the real question. “Where are you going?”

“Las Pegasus,” she said. “But I can drop you off in Palomino. It's just up the road a way. There's a tow truck in town.” She shifted up a gear and leaned back in her seat, resting one arm on the windowsill, hooking her hoof just in front of the channel for the window. “Where are you from, anyway?”

“Moriarty,” I said.

“Never heard of it.”

“I'm not surprised.” I slumped back, trying to find a comfortable position. I couldn't think of a thing to say, and she wasn't much of a conversationalist, either, so we rode along in silence.

The desert looked the same as it had in New Mexico.  Nothing but scrub brush and rocks and distant mesas, but it was a view I loved, and seeing it was somehow reassuring.

I was expecting Palomino to be a collection of ramshackle huts in a barren wasteland—blame too many Hollywood movies—but it turned out that it was a nice little town, filled with nice houses set back from the road, each one of them surrounded by flowerbeds. The homes themselves were two- and three-story adobe affairs, their flowing lines blending neatly into the surrounding desert.

There were fewer cars than in an American city, but the streets were hardly deserted. The sidewalks, unsurprisingly, were crowded with ponies going about their business. The truck driver kept up a good pace as she went through town, but she wasn't reckless. She had an air of calm competence.

“Well, here it is,” she said as she braked to a stop in front of a small garage. A weathered sign with a pegasus on it hung over the a single gas pump out front.  Next to the small lobby were two service bays, and there was a row of abandoned cars parked along the property line. The air brakes hissed as she popped a switch on the dashboard, and without waiting to see what I was going to do, she opened her door and climbed out of the truck.

I waited until she had crossed the parking lot and poked her muzzle into the shop before I got out of the truck. That would give her time to introduce me, I figured, and maybe prevent a panic, although if all the ponies were as laconic as she was, I’d be fine.

I followed her into the shop, smiling at the familiar scents of grease and oil and gasoline. A tube radio was softly playing bluegrass or gospel; I couldn't tell which. Not that I would have known the song, anyway. The car up on the hoist had its differential cover off, and I watched in wonder as the unicorn mechanic lifted the stamped steel plate back into position, held it in place with a hoof while she started all the bolts with her telekinetic field, before spinning them in with a socket wrench.  She ran them snug with her field, before torquing them by hoof.

The truck driver was paying the mechanic no mind; she was talking to who I assumed was the owner of the shop. The two of them bumped hooves, and the truck driver headed back towards her rig.

“Good luck,” she called over her shoulder at me.

“Thanks! Thanks for the ride!”  I gave her a wave as she walked around the front of her truck, but I don’t think she saw me.  The air brakes were released with a soft sigh, and the truck billowed out another cloud of smoke as it drove out of the parking lot.

I turned back around.  The unicorn had started to fill the differential with a hose attached to a bucket pump, but her attention was fixed on me.  I kept watching her out of the corner of my eye as the other pony leaned into the front office.

“Dusty! Me 'n your sis are going on a wrecker call out on 502.”

“Okay mom.”

She turned around and looked up at me. “You got a name?”

“Al,” I said.

“I'm Orchid Frost,” she said, sticking out a hoof. I bumped it politely. “And that's my daughter, Poppy Mallow.”

“Hi.” The unicorn gave me a half-grin, flashing braces at me. I waved back.

“You wanna get the wrecker started, while me and . . . mister? Al talk?”

“Sure, Mom.” The unicorn wiped her hooves off on a rag, and trotted out the door. As soon as she was gone, Orchid's eyes narrowed. “Just what in Tartarus are you? No offense, I'm just curious.”

“I'm not from around here,” I began.

“That's as plain as the muzzle on my face,” she said. “Where are you from? Prairie Fire—that’s the truck driver, in case you didn’t know—said you told her you came from 'Moriarty,' but I've never heard of that.”

“It's not in your world. I'm from another world.” As soon as I'd said it, I imagined how it would sound if someone told me that. Then again, if I'd been back home and a horse had come up to me and made that announcement, I might have been inclined to believe it.

And so was Orchid. She just nodded. “You got any money?”

“None that would do you any good,” I said. “Unfortunately.”

“Of course you don't.” She turned in annoyance as the wrecker bounced over the sidewalk beside the garage, nearly scraping the passenger-side mirror off. “Kids,” she muttered under her breath. “But you've got money that would do you good, right?”

I nodded. I always carried a few hundred bucks in cash, just in case.

“Alright. We'll worry about that later. Get in.” She motioned to the truck. “Slide over, Poppy. You're riding in the center.”

“But Mom, I want to drive.”

“Not this time.” I grinned as I slid into the truck. Even here, kids and parents were the same.

I didn't have a good frame of reference for how old the wrecker was, but it looked well-used. The seat had a blanket covering it, since the original upholstery was probably long gone. A crystal doorknob was on the shifter handle in place of the original knob, and the pull handle for the floor vent on my side was tied open with a length of bailing wire.

Poppy gave me a dark look as I slid into the truck. I just smiled back. Teenagers the world over had mastered that look, apparently.

Orchid slammed her door and shifted the truck into gear. Poppy looked at her mother and then at me, and scooched in my direction millimeter at a time. Satisfied she’d snubbed her mother enough, she braced herself with a hoof as Orchid slowed to let a car go past, before making a left turn onto the road.

Either the engine was woefully underpowered, or the wrecker was geared really low: I could have kept up with it walking for the first block, and jogging for the second. It was just as well; the seat springs were completely shot, and with no load on the suspension, it bounced me in the seat every time she hit a bump.

“How did you get here?” Orchid asked once we'd passed out of the town limits, and the wrecker had reached the blistering speed of thirty.

“I don't know,” I said. “I was driving my Jeep along a two-track last night. I turned onto a paved road, swerved to avoid a bear, and broke the radiator on a bush.”

“On 502?”

“Yeah, I guess. It's this road. The Jeep's maybe ten miles out of town.”

“I wonder. . . .”

“I bet Discord did it,” Poppy chimed in, ending her sullen silence.

“That's what I was thinking.”

“Discord? Isn't he reformed?”

“He was.” Orchid took her eyes off the road long enough to look me intently in the eye and drift over into the other lane of traffic. “But now that Lady Fluttershy's dying, he's kind of gone back to his old ways.”

“It rained root beer last week,” Poppy said bitterly. “I used to like root beer.”

“He thinks that if he makes enough chaos, he can somehow stop it from happening.”

I gawked at her. “Fluttershy's real? What about Twilight Sparkle?”

“Princess Twilight?”

“She's, like, Princess of Magic.” Poppy reached up and tapped her horn. “She wrote half my textbooks.”

“I know of your world,” I said. “Or one very much like it. One where Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy and four other mares freed Nightmare Moon.”

“Yes, that's what happened.”

“How long ago?”

“Like, over a thousand moons ago. That's ancient history.”

I began doing some rough calculating in my head, coming up with a workable number. If their lunar cycles were the same as ours—and if that's what they were counting—it would be somewhere between a hundred twenty and a hundred thirty per decade, so somewhere around eighty years ago would be in the ballpark.

“What happened since then?”

Poppy got a slightly dazed look on her face, like I'd just sprung a pop quiz on her. Orchid glanced at me, licked her lips, and began giving me a summary of the last eight decades of Equestrian history. She focused largely on earth pony achievements, although Poppy occasionally added in a few notable unicorns.

When the show I knew had taken place, the ponies had been on the cusp of an industrial revolution, and thanks in no small part to Twilight's tireless campaign to educate everypony in Equestria, their society had flourished.

Orchid had just started in on the rise of the great dirigibles, when we came across my Jeep, sitting right where I'd left it. Poppy turned on the beacon, and we cut across the road.

She expertly backed up to the Jeep, stopping five feet short. Poppy turned back and lit her horn, moving levers on the wrecker body with her telekinesis. Once she had it positioned to her satisfaction, Orchid backed up until the sling touched the Jeep's rear bumper.

I would have liked to see them hook it up without getting out of the truck, but the Jeep was too foreign to them. Orchid got out and Poppy followed; I was curious enough to join them along the side of the road.

Poppy let her mother attach the chains, then ran the winch and boom with her hooves, watching the Jeep intently. Once she was satisfied it wasn't going anywhere, she walked around to the front and put her hooves on the fender, leaning into the engine compartment. I saw her eyes flicking across the components, identifying them. For a moment, I wished I'd been driving my Cruze last night. That would have baffled her.

“All right.” She tugged the hood down and I strapped the latches.

“We've got to keep an eye out,” Orchid instructed once I was back in the truck. “For the road you took last night. I think I know where it is, and I think the portal will still be there. They usually last a couple of days. If not, you'll have to go to Canterlot and see if one of the Princesses can find a way to send you back.

“Yellow Jacket's Folly?”

Orchid nodded. “Most likely. Reality always was thin up there.”

She jammed the truck in gear and meandered back to our side of the road, occasionally checking her mirrors to see if my Jeep was still following along.

We got there quicker than I'd expected, but she was driving faster than I'd been. She had daylight on her side, and knew exactly where she was, despite the complete and utter lack of mile markers or road signs of any type. She crossed over the road again, which made me grit my teeth even though we'd only seen a couple of cars and one truck in all the time we'd been on the road.

All three of us got out and inspected the ground with the same diligence a detective would give a crime scene. Luckily, the wet ground had held the impressions of my tires well, and it was readily apparent that this was indeed the two-track I'd come in on.

“It's gonna be rough,” I warned Orchid.

“I know.”

She climbed back into the truck, followed by Poppy and myself, and we began crawling across the desert. The stiff suspension on the tow truck alternately bounced me off the door and into Poppy, despite my deathgrip on the door.

“You really need to invent seat belts,” I muttered.

“We have. This truck doesn't have them.” Poppy glared at me as I slid away from her for the umpteenth time.

We scraped through a narrow passage between rocks that had been no issue for my Jeep, but was a little tight for a wrecker. Orchid took it at a crawl, leaning forward in her seat until the rocks passed abreast of the cab, then she glued her eyes to the mirror. The Jeep was almost clear when I heard a familiar chime from my pocket.

Without even thinking, I pulled my cell phone out. Fifteen missed texts?

“What's that?” Poppy looked over at my phone with interest.

I gave her a devilish grin. “Oh, nothing much. Just a cell phone. I can make calls and send and receive messages from pretty much anywhere.” I brightened. “Hey, we're back on my world, if my phone works. You can just drop me off and head back to town.”

“Here?” Orchid stopped the truck and looked out at the vast expanse of nothingness that surrounded us. “Is this where you live?”

“On second thought, maybe closer to town would be better.”