The Route Card

The route card was already in my slot when I got to the depot, which was wrong. I was always first. I parked my personal car in the gravel lot behind the chain-link, keyed in the gate code, and walked the long way around to the dispatch office because the concrete walk was still wet from the night sprinklers and I didn't want to track grit into the cab. The office smelled like burnt coffee and the same pine cleaner they'd used since I hired on eleven years ago. The fluorescent over the dispatch board buzzed in that way that made my back teeth ache. And there, in the thin metal slot marked MEEKS, sat a route card that hadn't been there the night before.

I pulled it out and held it under the light. The paper was warm. That was the first thing I noticed. Warm, like it had been sitting in a pocket or run through a printer that hadn't cooled down. The ink didn't smudge when I ran my thumb across it. Monday's route, the same as every Monday for the past three months: St. Anne's Infirmary, the outpatient pharmacy on Clover, two private residences up in the hills, the county hospice. Standard. My fingers knew the sequence before my eyes did. I'd driven it so often I could have done it asleep.

But there was a fifth stop, inserted between the pharmacy and the first private residence. Corvid Lane. No street number, no suite, no contact name. Just the words CORVID LANE in the same block capitals as everything else, and next to it a delivery code I didn't recognize: X-0.

I checked the map on the wall. I checked the GPS unit mounted in my truck. I checked the county grid book I kept under the passenger seat, the one with the plastic spiral binding and the coffee stain shaped like Florida on page 17. No Corvid Lane. Not in the index. Not on any overlay. The word corvid I knew, a bird word, crows and ravens and the like, but no road by that name existed in the county. I asked myself if I'd heard it before, and my own voice in my head sounded like a man trying to remember a dream while still inside it.

I folded the card once, crisp, along the center crease, and slid it into the chest pocket of my work shirt. The paper made a small sound against the fabric, a sound like a match striking. I did not think about the warmth. I did not think about the fifth stop. I started my pre-trip inspection, the way I always did, left front tire to right rear, checking pressure and tread and the tightness of the lug nuts with the back of my knuckles.

The truck was a Freightliner Cascadia, white, with the company name stenciled on the doors in faded blue: Alden Cross Medical Supply. I'd put four hundred and twelve thousand miles on her. I knew every rattle, every squeal, every soft spot in the brake pedal. That morning the cab smelled like cold vinyl and the pine tree air freshener I'd hung from the mirror last week, and under that, faint, like old pennies, the smell of the defroster core. I ran my hand along the dash, checking for dust, and found none. I always found none. The truck was the one thing I kept clean.

The engine turned over on the second crank. The radio came on with the weather band, a man's voice reading temperatures in a monotone. I pulled out of the lot at 4:52 a.m., eight minutes ahead of schedule. The gate clicked shut behind me. The road was empty. The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.

St. Anne's went fine. The pharmacy went fine. I signed the manifests, scanned the barcodes, stacked the boxes in the order the card told me to. My body did the work while my mind stayed on the fifth stop, the one that didn't exist. I caught myself glancing at the GPS more than usual, waiting for it to populate, to offer some new road, some gravel spur I'd never noticed in eleven years of driving these hills. It didn't. The screen stayed flat and gray, the little blue arrow of my truck crawling along the familiar route.

I passed the turnoff for the first private residence, the one with the long driveway and the gate with the broken intercom, and kept going. Not because I'd decided to. Because the road seemed to want me to. The truck drifted right at the next intersection, and I let it. My hands sat loose on the wheel. The engine hummed. The radio static rose for a moment, then settled back