Screams in the Fog

At least 10 people were killed when a long line of cars and trucks collided on Sunday on a Florida highway so shrouded in haze and smoke that drivers were virtually blinded. – The Guardian 

The car pulled slowly to the side of the road and parked on the shoulder. A heavy fog carried down from the hill that isolated them from anything on the other side of the windows.

“I can’t see a thing,” he mumbled to himself.

He leaned over the steering wheel and peered through the glass. The fog moved slowly through the car’s headlights, abruptly changing from orange to yellow with the steady tick of the warning lights.

He heard a man scream. It was faint and distant and he wasn’t sure if he had actually heard what he thought. He turned the music off and opened the window. The fog wafted in and he listened for the sounds of pain. The night was quiet. The fog rolled by his window and in the distance the noise sounded again.

It was undeniable. Somewhere in the distance there was a man screaming for help. He couldn’t hear the words but he stretched his neck out into the fog, trying to hear the direction of the pain.

A car drove by then. It was fast and he listened to the wind as it barreled down the highway towards the agonizing pain. The brakes sounded. He heard the tires as they desperately gripped the cement. The screech of the skid marks and finally the impact and the sound of glass shattering.

He opened the door and started running toward the screams. There was an explosion and to his left he heard the noise of another car. The fog was thick and he couldn’t see the crash. But the same haunting sounds filled the night sky.

The brakes, the tires, the screech, the glass. All of that was followed by screaming as people tried to free themselves from the wreckage.

He stood on the side of the highway.

“They’ll die,” he thought. “I’ll die,” he said aloud.

The man climbed down the hill next to the highway walked back toward his car where there was a guardrail. He could see the beam of his headlights above him, flashing back and forth from orange to yellow, and nothing else.

There was screaming in the distance and he listened as another car raced down the highway toward certain death. There were nothing he could do. The car slammed into what of pile of cars were already sitting on the road and he leaned against the hill and listened to the metal twist into unfamiliar shapes.

There was a siren then, and he waited for another car to pile onto the flames.