Brakes on the pass

Text 1: Escape Lane, by Stellan Brook

An original short story extract.

The first time the pedal went soft, Gerrit told himself he had imagined it. He was tired. He had been driving since four, up out of the valley through the hairpins with forty tonnes of tiles behind him, and the top of the pass had been all cloud and sleet and a café that was closed. The road down the other side dropped away in long grey loops towards a lake he could not yet see.

He pressed again. The pedal sank, slowly, like a foot into mud, and the truck did not slow so much as think about slowing and then decide against it.

He changed down. The engine roared its objection, a deep animal bellow, and the needle on the rev counter swung into the red and trembled there. Fifty. Fifty-five. The crash barrier on his right was a thin silver ribbon, and beyond it there was nothing at all, only cloud, white and soft and endlessly patient, waiting.

Gerrit’s hands knew what to do before he did. Exhaust brake. Lower gear. Do not touch the pedal again, do not, do not. He could smell something hot and bitter, like a pan left on the stove. In the mirror a thin blue smoke was unrolling behind him.

A bend. He took it wide, the trailer swinging out behind him like a heavy, stupid tail, and for one long second the cab hung over the white and he saw, very clearly, a single bird sitting on the barrier post, a small brown bird with its feathers puffed against the cold. It did not fly. It watched him go past.

Sixty.

There was a sign. He saw it and did not read it and then read it in his mind afterwards, the way you hear a word after someone has finished speaking. Escape lane. Eight hundred metres. A red arrow, pointing up.

He began, under his breath, to count. Not the metres. Just numbers, anything, the way his daughter counted when she could not sleep. One, and two, and three. The lorry shuddered beneath him like a living thing that had understood it was going to die.

And there it was on the left: a steep ramp of loose gravel, rising out of the road like a hand held up, palm out. Stop.

He turned the wheel.

Explore how Stellan Brook uses language and structure to create tension as Gerrit’s brakes fail.

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