The Second Plague

It was after midnight, and I was driving fast in the Tule fog. My headlights created a wall of light in front of me, not so much illuminating the road as making it painful to look for. I’d been thinking about turning them off. I was driving more or less by feel, Botts’ Dots keeping me between the center divider and the shoulder, and watching the odometer so I’d know when I was close to the 46 turnoff.

I was on 6th Avenue, which turned into a country road not long after you left Corcoran, California, which happened not that long after you left the center of Corcoran, California. Somewhere around where I was, it changed its name and became the Corcoran Road.

It was about twenty-five miles long, and it was dead straight, except for a quick zig to the right which was coming up here soonish.

I hit something in the road, of course. And kept hitting it; it felt like I had suddenly driven up onto a lawn, a wet lawn covered in twigs and leaves. I started to hydroplane, the truck going sideways even as I steered into the skid and forced my twitchy foot off the brake pedal; I thought I had it controlled when I skidded sideways into a berm on the shoulder and came to a sudden stop.

My head hit the frame of the open driver’s side window; it didn’t knock me out, but I sat there feeling dazed for a few minutes before I got out of the truck to see if I’d wrecked it.

The ground was crunchy and wet. I moved out into the road; the fog was still thick around me and the truck, but for a small circle around me the headlights illuminated the road pretty well.

The road was covered in frogs. For as far as I could see -- which, admittedly, wasn’t far -- the road was alive with tiny creatures, all crossing the road from east to west, like some sort of amphibian reenactment of the settling of the West. The skid-marks my tires had left were a soup of frog-gore, looking just like little drifts of slush after a light snow, except red and...

In the heavy, hushed silence, inside the private little space created by my headlights and the fog, I could hear them moving, a sort of massed slapping shuffle as they hopped, crawled, waddled over the pavement.

I stepped up on the front bumper of the truck, swinging around to sit on the hood. With hands still shaking from the accident, I lit a cigarette; and then I sat in the dense velvet night and watched the frogs cross the road.