The Overpass

May 04, 2025

Breaking news coming to you right now out of Laden, Georgia, where emergency crews are on the scene of what appears to be a bridge collapse. This is a massive accident with multiple vehicles involved, including what appears to be a dump truck. Moments ago, Laden County and Mayfield EMS confirmed at least fifteen patients, with several pinned inside their vehicles and five fatalities. This happened this morning, in the westbound lanes of Interstate Twenty, near the Mayfield exit.

Chapter One

Grey Toyota Sequoia, 2012 - License Plate 8134 ASA

Male - Richard Ames - Age 38 - Deceased

Female - Sharon Ames - Age 36 - Deceased

Sharon Ames woke up first, as is usual in the Ames’ house, even for a Saturday. Her alarm is set for four forty-five, but she is up and out of bed by four fifteen for another busy day. After taking a shower, and before fixing her curly saddle brown hair and doing her makeup, Sharon slips back into bed and kisses Richard on his neck.

“It’s time to get up.” She whispers in his ear, kissing him again. Richard smiles and stirs, but doesn’t open his eyes. “There is coffee and eggs in the kitchen.” That does the trick and Richard rolls over, taking her into his arms. They make love as the world outside wakes up.

“You’re sure?” Richard asks when they are done. “Are we ready?”

Sharon doesn’t answer. She just laughs as she gets dressed. Sharon is more than sure. She is bursting at the seams with excitement. The last couple of years have been hard on her. A string of miscarriages and broken hearts have pushed her to her wit’s end, but throughout it all, Richard had stood by her. When she blamed herself, he was there. And when her despair mutated into anger and the blame fell on him, he was there too.

After fifteen years together, twelve of which, as a married couple, there was no love lost. The tingling feeling of excitement still sent jolts of energy through them both when they were together. They were good for each other and it was apparent to anyone who knew them.

Two months ago, when all their hopes of pregnancy had fled them, the stars came into alignment for the Ames family and they received a phone call they thought would never come. A patient had cancelled their appointment, freeing a spot for them with one of America’s leading fertility doctors. Richard called in his PTO and they booked their flights the next day.

Even then, with their chances for a successful pregnancy at an all-time high, Sharon couldn’t get her hopes up, at least not fully. There was a shadow of pain and unfounded guilt that clung to her like a static charge. That was until their first in-person appointment where she met Doctor Cody. Her hopes and her excitement were rocketed into orbit after that, and they never came back down.

By six in the morning, they are both showered, fed, and packing luggage into the back of their Toyota Sequoia. Their flight to New York is scheduled to depart at ten and although TSA recommends arriving two hours early, their nerves are too high to sit around anywhere but the airport.

“Did you let Mike know we’re going?” Richard asks as they pass his house.

“Yup, I talked to him yesterday. He is going to keep an eye on the house.” Sharon says, blowing on her steaming cup and taking a sip of coffee.

“Alright, good. UPS should be delivering the parts I need for the Peterson’s on Tuesday. Hopefully, he can grab it before the pirates do.” Once he is on the interstate entrance ramp, Richard rolls down his window and lights a cigarette.

His father started Ames Plumbing when Richard was still in diapers. In elementary school, Richard spent his afternoons on job sites, doing his homework by generator light while his father routed water lines. By high school, Richard was running jobs with his own assistant, and after graduating, he took over the business completely, giving his father the retirement he deserved.

“What are you doing? Put that out,” Sharon hisses with a venom rarely heard in her voice.

“What? You’re not pregnant yet.” Richard laughs and takes two long drags, pulling the smoke deep, before knocking the cherry off and dropping the butt in the small door pit of the door handle, and slams on brakes as traffic comes to a dead stop.

“It’s too early for all this,” Richard says, trying to look around the rusted pickup in front of them.

“Well, at least we’re in the shade.” Sharon says, looking around too. They are under an overpass that connects the access road on both sides of the interstate.

“You’re right. It’ll be getting warm soon. It’s a good thing we got up and left so early.” Richard says with a strained smile.

“Hurry up and wait.” Sharon says back, returning the smile.

Chapter Two

Red Kenworth T800, 1996 - License Plate BGU 327

Male - Adam Bell - Age 47- Critical

Adam wakes up twenty minutes late after snoozing his alarm unconsciously. The pounding in his head sends pain shooting into his eyes like laser beams. His mouth feels dry and his breath smells rancid. His back hurts, not as much as his head, but enough to make him cry out when he stands and stretches.

Adam is hung over and probably even still a little drunk. There was a time when he could drink all night and not feel a thing, but that time is no longer. When he turned forty-five, Doctor Conley had warned him about his drinking and drugging. He told him he was prone to heart and liver problems, but Adam was also hard of hearing.

He fishes a cold coke-cola from his fridge and swallows a few ibuprofens before starting his coffee pot and taking a good, long piss. When he catches his reflection in the mirror, his black eye makes him double take. Adam goes through the short reel of memories of the night and, for a painfully long time, he can’t recall what happened. Something happened, something bad, and it danced at the edge of his memory.

Adam lives alone on the outskirts of Asbury in an RV he bought for five hundred dollars. The roof leaks and the tires rotted off two years ago. The breaker trips if he brews coffee and runs a heater at the same time, but it’s home and it works for him.

With his thermos full of strong black coffee, and ibuprofen dissolving in his stomach, Adam begins to feel like himself again.

He starts his big block Chevy and crunches gravel as he pulls out his driveway. He drives to the shop, where an even bigger truck waits for him.

He is going to be late to work for the third time this week, but it is Saturday and Adam couldn’t care less.

Chapter Three

Black Honda Pilot, 2006 - License Plate PMX4951

Female - Dove Wallis - Age 26 - Deceased

Like Adam, Dove Wallis is also late for work that fateful day. However, unlike Adam, Dove isn’t hungover. She is up early, doing a load of dishes before her shower. As a single mother, it is those precious early morning hours alone when the real housework is done. When she is dressed and ready for the day, it’s time to wake up Joey.

Joey is sixteen months old and big for his age. He was sleeping on his stomach with his head to the side and his mouth hanging open when Dove began to rub his back and sing her Good Morning song. Joey opens his eyes immediately and rolls on to his back. He smiles and holds his arms out to be picked up. Dove picks him up and hugs him tight, spinning and dancing around his small room.

Joey eats a jar of apples and an entire egg for breakfast. With a thirty minute commute, including dropping Joey with her mom, Dove has plenty of time to grab a coffee and get to work. But when she starts to clean him up, Joey starts to fart. It goes on for almost two minutes straight and by the time he is finished, the kitchen reeks and Dove has to flee into the hallway for fresh air. Joey laughs as he fills his diaper and his onesie with green-brown liquid shit and Dove is forced to give him a bath and change her own clothes when the vile water drips onto her pants.

Thirty-five minutes later and officially late for work, Dove loads Joey into the backseat.
“Alright, if you have to poop again, save it for Granny.” She kisses him and gets behind the wheel.

Hill Machine and Service has a rather strict attendance policy and in the last three months, Dove has been late four times. The last time she was fifteen minutes late, and they had a meeting with her about how important it was to be on time and how next time, they would have to write her up. Dove thinks about this as she pulls into the Dunkin parking lot to order a large French Vanilla coffee.

Coffee in hand, Dove drives from Asbury to Mayfield singing Disney songs to Joey the entire way, only taking short breaks to sip from her cup. Joe kicks his feet in excitement and cheers her on, in absolute awe of her beautiful voice.

When she gets to her mom’s house on the outskirts of Mayfield, by the old abandoned Walmart, Dove kisses Joey on his forehead and she passes him over to his grandmother and she cries as she drives away.

Ten minutes later, her coffee has cooled enough to gulp instead of sip and Dove finds herself in gridlock traffic. The highway is completely shut down and beside her, a good-looking man in a Grey SUV is getting out of his car for a better look. Sand and small particles of concrete fall on his head as cars cross on the overpass above them. Dove watches the man hold his arm up above his head, as if bracing for a larger chunk to come falling. When it doesn’t, the man lights a cigarette and leans against his car.

Dove digs her phone from her purse and after getting lost looking at pictures of Joey for five minutes, she opens Google and types ‘jobs near me’ and taps the enter button of the virtual keyboard.

Chapter Four

Red Kenworth T800, 1996 - License Plate BGU 327

Male - Adam Bell - Age 47- Critical

“Come in, six. Do you have copy?” Adam’s radio screeches.

“Yeah, come on.”

“We’re sending you and truck seventeen to RCQ for a run of crush. Drop off, new construction in Carmel.”

“Copy that, I’m on it.”

“Be advised six. Twenty to two eighty is a no go, I repeat. Interstate Twenty west is a no go. Over.”

“Ahh shit,” Adam says as he puts on his blinker and taps his brakes. His truck is old and out of maintenance, and the truck pulls to the left with each tap. Adam grips the wheel and counter steers to keep the truck straight. If an observant DOT agent ever reviewed his paperwork or performed a safety inspection, they would shut him down on the spot.

Adam pulls into the parking lot of an Outback at the last moment before the entrance ramp, a move that would be impossible later in the day when the place is packed. Adam turns his big truck around and pulls the microphone down from the roof mounted radio.

“That’s a copy. Appreciate the heads up. I almost got stuck. How’s Chef Road looking?”

Adam unclicks the button and the radio chirps. He lights a cigarette and waits for a reply. With traffic as bad as they say, he is in no hurry to go get stuck somewhere. His hangover is mostly gone, but his head still lights up with jolts of stinging pain when he looks down or tries to focus on anything for long.

Adam’s thigh vibrates, and he unbuckles his seat belt to get the phone free from his tight jeans. He checks and sighs. Without tapping the notification, Adam can only read the beginning of the message.

“I'm calling the cops you assh,”

Adam drops the phone into the passenger seat and closes his eyes, trying to remember what happened and why Amy is so mad.

He sees himself at the bar, drinking a cold amber beer with Amy at his side. There is loud country music playing and a man shooting pool is smoking a cigar that pummels every other smell in the room into submission.

He sees himself behind the wheel of his truck driving at night with his high beams on. Amy is there with a blue can of beer between her bare thighs and flicking the long ash of her cigarette out the window. The music has changed, but the volume hasn’t, Adam can feel the bass in his chest pounding and beating with music.

He sees the white, swirling texture of the ceiling. He hurts, and he’s confused. Amy is punching him in the chest and slapping him in his face. Stop it, why are you hitting me, he thinks but cannot say. His mouth is filled with fluid and she just keeps hitting him. He’s in a stream of cold water, drowning, dying and she’s killing him, pushing him down and holding him under with a broom handle.

In his final moments, dying and slipping away, Adam screams. He sits up, spewing yellow fluid from his face, and pulls one arm far back before letting loose a punch that carries every ounce of his dying energy and sends Amy spiraling backwards, crashing into a dinner table.

When his radio pops and scratches, Adam wakes and sits up with a jerk and then a groan. His cigarette had gone out halfway down and he digs into his pocket for a lighter.

“How bout it Six? You got ears?” It is Brad Fernandez, truck nine.

Adam coughs and spits a wad of snot out of his window. He takes a drag of his cigarette before grabbing his microphone.

“I’m here. How we looking?”

“Chef is loaded, but it’s flowing, I just came through.”

“Good to hear, I’m doing a RCQ to Carmel run. How’s my way back?”

“Four here. Back roads are clear Six. I’m on the same run and coming back now.”

“Got it, thanks. Let me know if anything changes.”

Adam stretches in his seat to wake himself up. His stomach rumbles with an earthquake of hunger and he decides there is a Waffle House breakfast in his near future. He tosses his cigarette butt out the window and pulls off, heading for Chef Road.

Brad was right, and Chef Road is loaded. Sandwiched between two jacked up pickup trucks, Adam moves at a snail’s pace. He drinks his coffee and smokes his cigarettes, getting more frustrated and growing more impatient by the nanosecond.

At one point in the traffic parade, the pickup in front of him begins to honk and hang his body out of his window.

“Let’s go, you fucking idiots!” The man screams at the cars in front of him. “The gas pedal is the one on the right!”

The man looks ready to keep going when Adam honks his own horn. The massive one-hundred and thirty decibel air horn sends the man scurrying back into his truck with his hands over his ears.

“How you like that shit?” Adam says to himself, laughing and half wishing the guy would get out and say something.

The man doesn’t get out and almost an hour later, Adam pulls into the Rockdale County Quarry and gets in line behind Larry in truck seventeen.

Chapter Five

White Toyota Corolla, 2000 - License Plate CGL1288

Male - Neil Howet - Age 38 - Deceased

Female - Jane Doe - Age Unknown - Deceased

Neil didn’t wake up on Saturday morning, in fact, he didn’t wake up on Friday morning either. The steady supply of vaporized methamphetamine he has been ingesting has been more than enough to keep him awake and besides, he has work to do.

Neil sits on the small linoleum square that constitutes a kitchen in the shit motel he has been renting. He loads a fresh rock of cloudy crystal into his pipe. He smokes and looks at the mess for an hour, trying to gear himself up for the work ahead.

On the ground between the bed and the dresser, the body of a young woman lies in a puddle of red blood, turned brown at the edges where it has congealed and dried. A thick tendril of yellowish green bile hangs from her open mouth, and her open eyes stare up at the smoke stained ceiling.

“Hey mister, you got a beer?” She had said, two nights before, when Neil was changing his oil in the parking lot of the motel. She was wearing shortcut-off denim shorts and a Metallica T-shirt. In the dirty yellow light of the parking lot, she looked beautiful.

Neil did have a beer, and they drank. When she asked for a cigarette, Neil had one for her and when she wanted to smoke a joint, he had that too. The two partied all night and when Neil was drunk and ready to either fuck or sleep, she pulled out a bag of crystal meth from her tiny purse and shot him a wicked smile.

That was forty-five hours ago and the baggie of drugs is empty, turned into vapor and released into the world to fly high into the sky, not unlike the essence of the woman, vaporized and freed from its fleshy constraints.

“Well, there ain’t nothing to it, but to do it.” Neil says out loud, using his voice for the first time in hours. The words come out with a thick loogie of green snot that sends Neil into a coughing fit. His chest burns and he pulls air into himself through what feels like a straw.

He slaps his knees and stands on gummy bear legs. He reaches his arms high above his head and stretches his back, but has to sit down when the world starts going black.

When he is able, he takes a big step over the woman and her blood and goes out to move his car. He backs it up to his room and pops the trunk. His plan was simple. He would load up her body and find somewhere to dump her. What else could he do? He considered just burning the Motel 6 to the ground, but he had seen a kid staying a few rooms down, and that wasn’t something he could carry on his conscience.

He could just get in his car and leave, but how long could he get away if he did that? The room was in his name, after all. No, if he left her here, his face would be plastered on the nightly news and he wouldn’t make it out of Georgia before some asshole saw him and called it in. Neil backed up his Corolla and popped the truck.

The woman was small, dangerously thin and Neil assumed the drugs had some part to play in that, but he thought that even if she wasn’t too spun out of her mind to eat, she would have still been a rather skinny woman. Neil folds her arms over her chest and picks her up. He lays her down on the stiff comforter laid out on the floor and rolls her up. He opens the door and looks both ways before hoisting her limp body into the trunk.

With her body stuffed into the surprisingly spacious trunk of the Corolla, Neil goes to work cleaning the room. He mops the kitchen floor and scrubs soap into the carpet. When he is finished, his shirt clings to his back, wet with sweat. The carpet isn’t perfect but it at least doesn’t look like there had been a dead bloody woman laying there.

He takes a shower for a long time, using only the hot tap. The room fills with steam almost instantly and the hot water turns his skin red, cooking him alive. When the hot water starts to give out and go cold, he gets out and dries off.

At six-twenty, Neil leaves the Motel Six and pulls onto the highway. He only makes it a mile before he finds himself stuck under an overpass into what is building into a massive gridlock traffic jam, and that is when the woman begins to speak.

Chapter Six

Red Kenworth T800, 1996 - License Plate BGU 327

Male - Adam Bell - Age 47- Critical

When Adam finally gets to the front of the line, he radios his order and truck number and pulls forward to get loaded. The maximum load weight for his truck on the highway is twenty-five and a half tons, legally speaking. His old Kenworth is thirteen tons empty and when he ordered his load, Adam asked for fourteen tons of crush, but when his truck squats under the weight of the rock, Adam knows he is closer to twenty. On his way out of the quarry, the scale confirms his intuition with a weight just shy of thirty-eight thousand pounds.

Adam takes it slow, pulling out onto the road. He is too heavy and his truck fights him with every turn. When Adam tries to accelerate, a lurching shudder is the truck’s reply.

“This six, you got your ears on?”

“Loud and clear, what’s up, six?”

“These idiots at RCQ can’t count and just loaded me five tons too heavy. I’m going to be slow getting back.”

“10-4 Truck Six. Drive safe and keep us up to date.”

Adam lights a cigarette and drives back towards Laden for his last time.

He drives back the way he came, only this time, he is following behind truck seventeen. They avoid the highway and the traffic jam that is starting to attract helicopters, like flies to honey, or shit. On the radio, an old Black Sabbath song comes on and Adam cranks the volume.

On Chef Road, an old cavalier with flaking paint pulls out in front of him, cutting in and forcing him to lock down his brakes. With the extra weight, his brakes are slow to respond and the wheel jerks to the left when they finally do their job. The pads have been due for a change three months ago and Adam is standing on the pedal and honking the horn before the sputtering car gets up to speed and out of his way.

In order to avoid the traffic coming off the highway, they take the long way around the city to get to his drop site in Mayfield. Coming down a hill, following behind truck seventeen, Adam’s phone vibrates on the seat beside him, rattling against his empty thermos. Adam reaches for his phone as traffic ahead of him comes to a stop, on top of an overpass.

Chapter Seven

Under the Overpass

Dove opens her door, feeling weird and vulnerable. Even with the car in park and the engine switched off, stepping out on the highway feels like playing with a loaded gun. She has seen the videos online of multi-car pile-ups when a big truck fails to stop and plows through cars like snow. Normally, she wouldn’t get out of her car for anything, but the cigarette she is watching that man smoke is making her mouth water. She crosses under the shadow of the overpass, waving as she approaches.

“Excuse me, would you mind if I bummed one of those from you?” Dove turns up the charm, not because the man is good looking, which he is, but just because she wants a cigarette so damn bad.

A truck passes on the overpass above them, drowning out Dove’s voice, making her look like an old actress in a silent film. “What’d you say?” Richard asks when the noise dies down.

“Can I have one of your cigarettes?”

“Sure,” Richard says, reaching for his pack. “The less I have, the less I’ll smoke.” Richard smiles and offers the open pack in one hand and his zippo lighter in the other.

Dove takes them both with thanks and lights one for herself. Behind her, a car door opens and the smooth southern voice of a woman calls out. “Rich, the news says that it was a gasoline truck that turned over by Panola and cleanup is going to take all day. I’m on hold with Expedia now to get our flight changed.”

“Alright hon. Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine,” Richard says with a smile. In the small white car next to him, a man begins to scream.

“They know Neil. They know what you did. They know that you killed me. Everyone knows what you did, you murderer. I’m a mother. I have a kid, you piece of shit.” The dead woman in the trunk says, starting with a whisper and building into a scream. Her words send Neil into a whirlwind. He struggles with his seatbelt, screaming, trying to free himself. He has to get out of the car. He has to get away from her.

The button finally clicks and Neil falls out of his car onto the pavement, still screaming and scrambling to get to his feet. He slams the car door, falling down again. There are people coming towards him, a man and a woman. There is another woman too, but the man is telling her to go back.

Neil scrambles back to his feet, unwilling to be taken down by these two sacks of shit that are coming for him. These two, who know what he did and know what’s in his trunk. Two undercover cops who have set him up. They probably orchestrated the entire traffic jam in order to catch him.

Neil pulls a small black revolver from his waist and aims it at the man, screaming and scared.

There is a bang, and then the sky comes tumbling down.

When Adam looks back at the road, there is plenty of time and road left for him to stop, even his inefficient, left-pulling brake pads could do the job but when two of the four rear brake cylinders explode, Adam can only lay on his horn and radio Larry to tell him to stand on his brakes and brace for impact.

Overloaded and without the ability to stop, Adam throws the transmission into low gear and then to park. The noise that follows sounds like a gunshot as the driveshaft snaps loose from the transmission.

A second later, the grill of the old red Kenworth is pulverized by the tailgate of truck seventeen. The cab groans and twists in the impact and rocks rain down on the roof and hood. Adam’s chest is driven into the steering wheel and coming up out of his seat, his head smacks the windshield. Cracks run from the impact in every direction.

Amy is on the ground in the strewn remains of the kitchen. There is blood on the ground and Adam sees that it's coming from a cut above her eye. Snot is running down his face and there is a thick needle hanging out of his thigh.

Adam is back and a cloud of steaming antifreeze is billowing from the nose of his truck and oil is pouring from the engine onto the road. Adam has blood running down his face and dripping down his shirt. He touches his face and winces in pain. His fingers come back bloody from the cut above his eye.

After a moment of wavering dizziness, Adam lights a cigarette. His mind races with the unlocked memory of the night before, drinking and partying with Amy. He remembers being offered cookies and asking if there were peanuts in them but he doesn't remember her answer.

Adam reaches for his phone. It's just out of his reach on the floorboard. Stretching and feeling a crunch in his chest, he gets it. Checking his messages, he sees that Amy sent a photo of her swollen, purple face and another telling him to expect a visit from the police. Adam starts to tap the screen to reply to her, he wants to say he is sorry, but the blood dripping onto the screen is making it difficult.

There is a shift in weight that makes him think that a tire has kicked the bucket, probably damaged in the crash. But then, the truck lurches far to one side, sending papers sliding across the dashboard. A moment later, it shifts to the rear, groaning from the twisting strain. Adam’s view of truck seventeen’s ass is replaced by the baby blue color of the sky on a beautiful day.

When the gusset plates fail and the integrity of forty-seven year old infrastructure crumbles, the overpass collapses, raining gray boulders and black death onto the people and cars below, bringing an end to mothers and murderers in the same indiscriminate moment.

Stories by Orin

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