She leaned on her car horn and began flashing her lights at the driver in front of them. “Get out of the way! Move over!” she shouted.

“Carolyn! What’s going on?” Lou cried out. “What are you doing?”

Carolyn’s eyes remained locked forward, unblinking. She continued to flash her lights and beep her horn. “Move over!” she yelled. “Get over now!”

“Please slow down! Carolyn, slow down and pull over!”

Instead of responding, Carolyn steered the SUV into oncoming traffic, presumably to try to pass the car in front. But here the road turned, and Lou saw the dotted yellow dividing line become a solid one. In the next instant, he was blinded by a set of powerful headlight beams. He heard a deep-timbred horn—not a car’s beep, but something much larger. Lou’s stomach knotted. The horn had to be an eighteen-wheeler. A second later, he saw the rig emerge from the fog like a huge phantom. Carolyn, acting unfazed, continued on a straight course, unable to pass the car to their right. She sped forward as though playing a game against the forty-ton machine.

“Look, Lou,” she called out, still surprisingly calm though her voice had an anxious edge. “The car three ahead of us. Its left taillight is out. Someone’s going to get killed unless we warn them. There’s been enough death today.”

“Carolyn, let it be! Slow down. Please, slow down!”

The car boxing them in accelerated. Lou reached across his seat and took hold of the wheel, pulling it clockwise, aware that the move might well cause Carolyn to lose control.

“Lou, don’t do that! I have to warn him!”

The tires slipped several feet, then gained purchase, pulling them into the right-hand lane. Lou released the wheel. The car shuddered and rose on two tires. There was a ferocious crack as the rig sheared off the left-side mirror. The rush of wind as it flew past was probably all that kept them from flipping over.

“Okay, now, Carolyn,” Lou said with as much insistence as urgency. “Pull over there and let me drive.”

Again she leaned on the accelerator and the horn. “In this fog, somebody is going to ram into the back of them.”

“Carolyn, don’t!”

She turned the wheel right this time, attempting to pass the intervening car via a narrow, muddy soft shoulder. Lou sat pressed against his seat back, unwilling to grab at the wheel again. The speedometer moved upward.

Forty.

Fifty.

Fifty-five.

Carolyn Meacham looked purposefully ahead, beyond reason.

“Carolyn, stop!” Lou screamed. “You’re going to kill us both because a guy’s taillight is out!”

They raced even with the car to their left. The driver leaned on his horn and refused to slow down.

Lou could feel the high center of gravity in the SUV threaten to flip them. Every jolt on the uneven ground seemed magnified.

“They’re just two cars ahead.”

Patches of fog flew past like ghosts. Then, Lou froze. Through one of the patches, directly in front of them, a speed limit sign had appeared.