Exit 614 – A Thriller Short Story by Rick Jones

Kevin had been late getting out of Toronto and the five hour drive home to Ottawa was just half over and yet already felt ten hours long. He’d been selling steels and alloys for eight years, and that felt long, too.

Highway 401 through Ontario is boring, a nearly straight shot for eight hundred kilometers from Michigan to Quebec that passes through almost nothing of interest, bypassing every downtown. There aren’t even any mountains. Not that it mattered to Kevin at this point, as it was one in the morning.

The client, a blowhard, had insisted they go out to dinner. Business dinners were getting rarer these days; expense accounts were a fraction of what they had once been, and along with that, there seemed to be an increasing, unspoken acknowledgement among most people in business that they didn’t really want to spend free time with one another. But not McWhirter. He was loud and red-faced and fast and blustered and used Kevin as an excuse to eat noisily and drink too much. So Kevin was late.

Kevin may have hated McWhirter, but, in fairness, he didn’t like most of his customers. They were boring and smelled of factories. With the smaller ones he had to talk to arrogant, dumb assholes like McWhirter, and with larger ones he was dealing with midlevel purchasing agents who weren’t empowered to make many decisions, or were too lazy to bother. Oddly, Kevin was good at his job anyway. It paid well. Selling a few more tons of 316 stainless wasn’t fun but there was cash in it. That was all that could be said for it.

Kingston was coming up, a nice just-past-halfway landmark. A green information sign loomed up, growing in the headlights. It was a new sign. Kevin had seen every sign on the highway a hundred times or more, and he didn’t recognize this one.

KINGSTON EXITS

611 – GARDINERS ROAD

613 – SYDENHAM ROAD

614 – PORTSMOUTH ROAD

615 – SIR JOHN A MAC. BLVD

617 - DIVISION STREET

619 – MONTREAL STREET

Portsmouth Road?

Kevin had in fact grown up in Kingston. It wasn’t a big city, but it was long east to west, clinging to the shore of Lake Ontario, so it got a lot of exits.

But Portsmouth Road wasn’t one of them. Or it never had been. That road didn’t even go up as far north as the 401.

“Christ,” Kevin said aloud. He talked to himself a lot on the road. He didn’t have anyone else to talk to, so he had long ago decided to be his own travel buddy. He rather liked his travel buddy. “I haven’t been back in awhile. They’ve been busy.” Or maybe he’d misread. He was tired. It was very late. He was starting to think maybe driving this late and tired was a bad move, but home wasn’t that far. He could do another two hours.

The road blurred by. Kevin had left Kingston long ago. He no longer even had family there. His father, a mild drunk who tried his best to raise Kevin and his brother after their mother had tired of them all and left for parts unknown, was dead ten years. Kevin had departed for bigger cities and schools within days of picking up his high school diploma. There were likely high school classmates still there, but that was twenty years ago and anyone who didn’t get the hell out of that town was scarcely worth visiting, Kevin had long ago determined.

Gardiners Road approached. Exit 611. And it went by.

Sydenham Road, exit 613, approached. And it went by.

And sure enough, on an overhead arch sign:

PORTSMOUTH ROAD

Kingston

With the little 614 in the upper right. The sign was clearly new, no wear. The reflective green fairly sparkled, as if they’d come up with a new, more attractive way of painting them.

Kevin suddenly wanted to pull off. He looked at the fuel gauge. Three eighths. He could make it home on that, but he’d have to fill up soon after, so pulling off now would work. And a coffee might make the trip a little safer.

And he was overwhelmingly curious. Sure, it was a silly little sign of growth in a town that surely had grown a lot since he lived there decades ago, but there was something about that new, bright, forest green sign and its dazzling reflective letters that just made Kevin want a little joy of discovery. Though no car was behind him, he began to signal his exit.

Exit 614 was a cloverleaf. Kevin knew all the exit types. He’d been on them all. Cloverleaf seemed an expensive, elaborate approach for a less-important exit in a third tier city, but there must have been some extra cash in the government coffers. It occurred to Kevin he hadn’t bothered to check for the gas, food and lodging signs to see how far a gas station would be, but it hardly mattered. All of Kingston was to the right, to the south. And so Kevin turned that way.

There were a few streetlights around the exit itself but immediately south was nothing at all, but the stretch of Portsmouth Road, only two lanes, between berms of earth covered in tall grass. Canadian semi-rural scrub. Kevin had lived in it all his life. It was tiring.

Kevin drove along through nothing. This, at least, was very consistent with his memory; there was nothing here. Nothing at all north of Counter Street, where Portsmouth had once ended. I guess they were really optimistic this would spur growth or something. Soon, city government would start begging businesses to move in by offering big tax breaks to take up residence along Portsmouth. “Easy access to the 401!” they’d add. Kevin knew many businessmen who would exploit this and then move along to the next town in a few years. They’d shake the sweaty hands of the desperate politicians who development plans hadn’t gone as well as hoped, and drive off in their Range Rovers and Maseratis and then fuck over some other city. Belleville, probably, back towards Toronto. Kevin disliked Belleville even more than he did Kingston.

There still wasn’t a gas station. Actually, there still was nothing at all. Kevin furrowed his brow. How long had he been driving since he got off the highway? It felt like he’d kind of gotten dreamy there, but it can’t have been THAT long. He was doing sixty. At that rate, he’d sail through the city and into the lake in eight, maybe ten minutes.

Kevin craned forward to try to see further. Nothing at all. He should be seeing something, right?

Portsmouth was dead straight. And there seemed to be no cross streets at all that far up north on it, though he surely couldn’t be that far north now. He looked at the clock. 1:09 AM.

Okay, I’ll drive a few more minutes. Gotta get to something.

At 1:15 AM, Kevin said “What the fuck is this? Where the fuck am I?” It had been six minutes of straight driving at now about 70. Kevin knew his driving; that meant he’d gone over six kilometres. By now he should be swimming in Lake Ontario. He still had not seen a single goddamned building. Or light.

His phone’s map app wasn’t working. It had him still on the 401. Presumably, then, there were few cell towers here. Figures. There were no customers around.

“Did I turn at some point?” he said aloud. And now he started to wonder. HAD he turned right off the highway? If he’d turned right then yeah, he should be right downtown. But if he hadn’t – if he had turned left in his fatigue, or if the exit had turned him around – then he could have spent all the time driving north. North of that exit, there would be nothing at all. That would explain everything. Sure, he really, really remembered turning right, but he was tired, and it was dark.

Kevin and his brother had, long ago, often gone camping with their old man. Those were some of the better times, actually. Oddly, his father hardly drank at all on those trips. He seemed to be happier in the woods, and the three of them had some great fun. Kevin’s father didn’t mess around about safety, though. Having had his wife wander way, Mr. Forster was not going to lose a kid to a stupid accident. His sons were taught the right way to go about not getting killed or sick or into poison ivy. And one thing they were taught was not to assume you knew your directions without verification. Don’t have faith you made the turn you thought you did. Act as if you’re lost. Orient yourself. Use logic. Do not assume.

Kevin drove five more minutes. Nothing at all, so it was impossible he had turned right. He slowed to a stop and craned forward even more; he couldn’t even see the sky-glow of a city.

“Shit. I’ve been driving north.”

He pulled a three point turn and sped off towards the highway. 1:24 now. Christ almighty. He’d killed fifteen minutes, maybe more.

Kevin proceeded south now. He felt stupid, but he was definitely awake and alert; problem solving had gotten his brain going. “Now I really do need gas,” he thought.

Fifteen minutes went by. Twenty. Still not at the highway. “Fuck, now far did I go?” It could have been thirty minutes, dammit.

There was no one else on the road. Kevin sped up, bringing it up to 90. He’d seen no cops on the way up and there was nowhere for one to hide, no cross street for them to come from. He got it up to 100.

Still nothing. And no sign indicating he was approaching the highway.

After 45 minutes, Kevin was becoming alarmed. Portsmouth Road was just as straight as an arrow, for what now had to be fifty kilometres at least. Roads in this part of the world did not go straight for that long. It was impossible. Everything here was lakes, little lakes everywhere torn into the earth by the last ice age, lakes beyond counting. The roads had to dart around them. Or bridge them, and he hadn’t been over a single bridge. Just a straight flat road, the grassy berms framing it.

Kevin pulled over. His fuel gauge was now at a quarter full, maybe a bit below. There wasn’t enough shoulder to really be off the road, but he saw no cars anyway. The road must have turned or forked. He must be going east or west. He cannot have missed an entire city.

He again checked his phone. Still no pickup from after he’d left the highway. He zoomed in on his last position; the Portsmouth Road extension wasn’t even on the map.

He opened his door and got out, standing in the middle of the road. The asphalt surface looked new, as he figured it would be, the center line freshly painted. So… did that mean he was still on a new road? It must. He looked both ways on the road. Nobody was coming. He wished someone was. Wandering idly up the road – the direction he’d thought was north, but maybe wasn’t – he decided, time to figure out for sure what damned direction I’m going in. Let’s find the North Star. He looked up.

It was then that Kevin moaned in terror.

The sky was not the sky. Or it was, but not the one he knew. Kevin knew the sky. His father had taught him how to find the North Star with the Big Dipper, and some of the other highlights. If you knew where the North Star was, his father had explained, you always knew your directions. It was not there. Nothing he knew was. The Milky Way, which should have been rising up from the south east and covering the ecliptic, wasn’t even there.

What was there was a sky Kevin had never seen before and did not believe existed. Not on Earth. Instead of the glow of the Milky Way, in the north was a huge field of stars in the shape of a spiral galaxy. In the west was another burst of stars, like a huge cluster. Around them were stars, but not in any constellation Kevin knew. There was no Big Dipper. No Orion. The familiar W of Cassiopeia wasn’t there. There was no moon. Kevin saw no planets he knew, but one, maybe, brighter than any star he'd ever seen, that was unmistakably green.

“What. What… what…” was all he could say.

He darted towards the side of the road, through the swale, and up the grassy berm.

Beyond was nothing. Nothing at all. Just, from what he could tell in the alien starlight, a grassy veldt that went on forever, bathed in violet.

“What...”

It was then that the creatures came. They surrounded him. Some had eyes that were not eyes. Kevin tried to run, but the air became thick, like mercury in his lungs. The ground because something that was no longer ground, clutching. He screamed out but no one existed to hear him. Then the things were upon him. Consuming.

Out on Highway 401, the sign changed.