The man who hunted me on the freeway every morning stood in the center of the ballroom, shaking my CEO’s hand and laughing.
For a year, that man in his black monster truck made my commute a fifteen-minute nightmare. He used two tons of steel to make me feel small and powerless, a nameless target for his daily road rage.
Here he was, a corporate shark in a suit, preaching about aggression and dominating your lane while my own boss nodded in approval. He had no idea who I was.
He never saw the driver in the silver Volvo as a person, but he was about to learn my name in a calculated collision of his own making, with a powerful witness he never expected.
The Daily Siege: The Beast in the Rearview
The monster appears at exactly 7:38 a.m.
It crests the hill behind me on the I-5, a black slab of steel and chrome that blots out the sun. It’s a pickup truck, but calling it that feels like calling a great white shark a fish. It’s been lifted, armored, and given tires that could conquer a small country. And it’s my personal, daily specter of death.
My hands, already slick with a low-grade anxiety, tighten on the steering wheel of my sensible Volvo. The first wave of adrenaline hits, a familiar metallic taste on my tongue. He’s two lanes over, but I know the dance. It’s always the same.
He weaves through the commuter traffic like it’s a slalom course, a predator cutting through a school of minnows. No signal. Never a signal. Just aggressive, decisive lunges that force other drivers to slam on their brakes. I watch him in my side mirror, my heart a frantic hummingbird against my ribs.
Then he’s behind me. The four bone-jarring high beams fill my rearview mirror, a glaring, angry sun. He’s so close I can’t see his grille, just the void of his windshield and the blinding light. My own car feels like a tin can, a fragile shell about to be crushed. My breath catches. The world shrinks to the two feet of asphalt between my bumper and his.
It isn’t just traffic. It’s a violation. A year ago, a minivan ran a red light and T-boned this very car, spinning me across three lanes of traffic. My son, Leo, was in the back, screaming. We were lucky. Whiplash, a concussion for me, and a terror of intersections that still makes Leo go quiet. Ever since, a car getting too close feels less like an annoyance and more like a physical assault.
And this man, this stranger in the black truck, assaults me every single morning. He’ll ride my bumper for a mile, maybe two, a constant, threatening presence. Then, just as my nerves are completely shot, he’ll jerk the wheel, swerve into the fast lane without a glance, and disappear ahead, leaving me shaking and spent before my workday has even begun. He’s not just a bad driver. He’s a hunter, and I am his sport.
White Knuckles and Weak Coffee
I pull into my reserved spot at the Sterling Solutions corporate park, my hands trembling so badly it takes me two tries to get the key out of the ignition. I sit for a full minute, just breathing. In, out. The leather of the steering wheel is imprinted with the panicked grip of my fingers.
“Rough one?” Jenna, my assistant, asks the moment I walk into the office. She’s twenty-five, sharp as a tack, and sees everything. She’s already placed a steaming mug on my desk.
“You could say that,” I manage, trying to force a casual smile that feels like cracking plaster. “The usual I-5 demolition derby.”
She leans against my doorframe, arms crossed, her expression a mix of sympathy and Gen-Z cynicism. “Was it him again? The Truck-Zilla guy?”
I nod, shrugging off my coat. The fact that my daily tormentor has a nickname around the office is somehow both comforting and deeply pathetic. “He seemed particularly dedicated to re-enacting a scene from Mad Max this morning.”
Jenna shakes her head. “You should get a dashcam, Carolyn. Get his plates. Report him.”
I’ve had this conversation a dozen times, with her, with my husband, with myself. “And say what? ‘An officer? There’s a man who drives aggressively near me every morning.’ They’d laugh me off the phone. He hasn’t actually hit me. He just lives in the space where a threat becomes a promise.”
She doesn’t have an answer for that. No one ever does. She just gives me a tight-lipped smile and backs out of my office, leaving me alone with the weak coffee and the lingering vibration of fear in my bones.
I stare at the project timelines on my monitor, the sales projections and regional reports, but the numbers blur. All I can see are those four headlights, burning a hole in my memory. I’m a regional manager. I handle multi-million dollar accounts, oversee a staff of fifty, and negotiate contracts with cutthroat executives. I am competent. I am in control.
But for fifteen minutes every morning, a man I’ve never met reduces me to a terrified animal. And the rage at my own powerlessness is almost as bad as the fear itself.
A Husband’s Well-Meaning Blindness
“Just take the surface streets,” Mark says over the phone later that day. His voice is calm, reasonable. It’s the voice he uses to solve problems, which is one of the things I love about him. It’s also, at this moment, infuriating.
“Mark, it would add forty minutes to my commute. I’d have to leave before Leo is even awake.”
“So? It’s better than having a panic attack every morning, isn’t it?” He means well. He’s a good man. He held my hand in the ER after the accident and told me everything would be okay until I almost believed him. But he doesn’t understand this. To him, it’s a traffic problem, a logistical puzzle with a simple solution.
“It’s not a panic attack,” I say, my voice sharper than I intend. “It’s a perfectly rational response to a two-ton truck trying to occupy the same space as my backseat.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. I can picture him in his workshop, surrounded by the reassuring certainty of wood and tools, things he can measure and cut and control. “I know, Care. I just hate hearing you like this. The guy’s an asshole. The world is full of them. You can’t let one get to you.”
*One?* I want to scream. *It’s the same one. Every. Single. Day.* It feels personal. It feels targeted. But saying that out loud sounds paranoid. It sounds weak.
“I know,” I say, letting the air out of my lungs. “You’re right. I just needed to vent.”
“Get one of those ‘Baby on Board’ signs,” he suggests, a flash of misguided brilliance in his voice. “Maybe it’ll appeal to his better nature.”
A bitter, humorless laugh escapes me. “Mark, I’m not sure a man who drives a weapon of mass destruction has a better nature.”
We hang up a few minutes later, the conversation ending with his familiar, loving “drive safe.” But the words feel hollow. Safety isn’t something I can just decide to have. It’s something that can be stolen from you, inch by terrifying inch, by a stranger in a black pickup truck. And the loneliest feeling in the world is trying to explain a haunting to someone who can’t see the ghost.
The Ghost of the Guardrail
The memory of the accident isn’t a movie I can rewind. It’s a collection of sensory snapshots, a nightmare collage.
The green light. The squeal of tires from the left—a sound you feel in your teeth before you understand it. The shocking, violent slam of metal against metal. Not a crash, but an explosion.
The world turning sideways. The crunch of the driver’s side door folding in around me, the universe compressing into a single, deafening roar. The smell of burnt rubber and something hot, metallic, and wrong.
But the snapshot that stays, the one that flashes behind my eyes when the black truck gets too close, is Leo’s face in the rearview mirror for the split second before impact. His mouth was open, about to ask a question about Minecraft, his expression one of perfect, innocent nine-year-old contentment.
Then the world broke.
When the car finally stopped spinning, its back end mashed against a guardrail, the silence was more terrifying than the noise. My head was throbbing, a deep, blooming pain. Glass was everywhere, sparkling like deadly confetti. My first coherent thought wasn’t *Am I okay?* It was a raw, primal scream in my own mind: *Leo.*
I twisted in my seat, ignoring the shooting pain in my neck, and saw him. He was strapped in his booster, wide-eyed, silent. He wasn’t crying. That was the worst part. He was just staring at the spiderweb of cracks on his window, his face pale, his knuckles white where he gripped the seatbelt. He was in shock.
I unbuckled myself, my body a symphony of aches, and scrambled into the back. “Leo? Buddy? Can you talk to me? Are you hurt?”
He just shook his head, a tiny, jerky motion. He didn’t speak again until the paramedics were checking him over.
He doesn’t like talking about it now. But sometimes, on the freeway, if a car brakes too hard in front of us, I’ll see him in the rearview mirror, his body tensed, his hands gripping the seat. He has the same look on his face. The look of a kid who understands, far too young, that the world can break at any moment.
That’s what the man in the black truck doesn’t know. He’s not just tailgating a middle-aged woman in a Volvo. He’s chasing the ghost of that guardrail. He’s putting that look back on my son’s face. And for that, I feel a rage so pure and so hot it threatens to burn right through me.
About the Author
