I was a truck driver for four years. Long hauls and lonely hours back and forth across the country. Truck drivers are an interesting breed, and during the pandemic, I discovered that I could no longer be one of them.
You hear a lot of stories and legends from truckers while you’re sucking down burnt coffee in a choke-n-puke, wondering what brought you to that kind of life. Some of those stories are funny and some affirm your faith in humanity, but most of them raise the hairs on your neck and make your ass suck in your shorts. There was one line of stories that I both hated hearing and at the same time, couldn’t get enough of.
Ones that truckers don’t speak of to anybody else but other truckers.
Ones that always stuck with me on those long nights. Stories of murals drawn in chalk on the sides of gas stations, diners, barns, and rest stops along the middle of I-90.
They’re described as incredibly detailed; put there by a maniac with talented hands. The drawings depict children falling to their deaths from the sky through the clouds.
The children are always screaming.
They’re always dressed in old fashioned pajamas; the fuzzy kind with the little boots over their feet. One hand is clutching a ratty teddy bear with one of the eyes missing, while the other is outstretched to a faceless depiction of Peter Pan, who flies above them.
Pan’s entire body looks exactly how you would picture it in your head, but the face looks like it was drawn and then smeared over by the artist, leaving only a streak of color behind.
It’s obvious in the murals or drawings, whatever the hell you want to call them, that Pan has dropped them, dooming them to a horrible death.
To the bears and the truck drivers they’re known as The Neverland Drawings.
Outside of the stories from other truckers, I had never, nor have I since, heard of them from anyone else.
They’re a sign of what’s to come.
The stories go that shortly after a drawing is found, a child in a nearby town will go missing in the middle of the night; their windows left open. There’s never any sign that the homes are broken into. It always looks as though the kids themselves opened them, letting something in.
There’s never any signs of struggle. No clues at all.
The bodies of the children from the murals are always found the next day somewhere in the middle of the highway. They’re always found with a ratty teddy bear stuffed in the crook of their arm. Their bodies are broken as if they’ve been dropped from a damn airplane.
Their eyes always open, looking up at the sky.
I’ve known guys who swore they knew guys that discovered the murals and bodies over the years. The legend says that it started back in the late thirties and continues to this day.
Hundreds of kids.
I always thought it was bullshit, but it was a good story that somehow seemed plausible on those long nights trying to stay awake.
-
During that damned lockdown, that highway was a lot more peaceful with a lot less morons on the road to deal with.
Nice and quiet.
I’d pull longer hours than I normally would. I had a haul all the way to Washington, and I was making good time, but I hadn’t slept in almost two days.
It was just after midnight when I pulled into a rest stop in South Dakota to get a few hours of sleep. There were no other trucks there.
I tossed and turned for a bit, and I knew it was no use. I was wired as hell.
I got out of the truck and stumbled my way over to the brick bathroom. The air was freezing. It was one of those colds that deaden sound, almost like a new snowfall at night.
I heard a scratching noise in front of me. I figured that maybe a racoon or something else had found some garbage. I didn’t pay much attention to it.
I threw open the steel door and walked to the urinals and went about my business. It reeked of piss and cigarette smoke. I reached for my zipper when something rolled across the floor and hit my foot. It was a small fat piece of green chalk.
I turned to my right and there on the back wall of that bathroom was one of those drawings.
It looked exactly like the stories I had heard, but somehow even far more grotesque. The falling child looked so real, but it was Pan who struck me. The face had not been smeared over.
His hair was white and it hung over his face in long strands. He was smiling; a long deformed expression as if his jaw was twice as long as it should be. His eyes were yellow.
The cigarette smoke hit me again.
I turned toward the line of stalls. Only one of them had the door closed. I could see shoes, black and white chucks, underneath the door. Smoke seeped through the cracks of the stall.
My blood ran cold.
I was frozen.
It was only the sensation of feeling the piss run down my leg that snapped me out of it. I ran out the door and out to my rig.
Once I got inside and locked the door, I grabbed the radio.
Before I could call in what I saw, the bathroom door opened.
What looked like a young boy ambled out of the bathroom. He had white hair that was stained yellow toward the ends and it hung down to his shoulders and shrouded his face. He was wearing jeans and a long black coat. His hands were covered in different colors of chalk. He kept his head low.
He looked young; couldn’t have been more than fifteen or so.
I couldn’t see his face too well.
I was tired but I swore that he was smiling at me, and yellow eyes glowed like fire behind that veil of stained white hair.
He started walking towards me.
I looked down to my right and grabbed the gun I kept under the seat. When I looked back up, the kid was gone.
I looked around for a moment,but I saw nothing.
I tore ass out of there and called in what I saw.
The cops wanted me to stay where I was, but I didn’t stop driving until I was in the next town.
They found the drawing, but the face of Pan had been wiped into a smear. I talked to the cops for maybe an hour before I was back on the road. I wasn’t tired anymore. I just wanted out of South Dakota.
-
The sun was coming up behind me a few hours later, barely any light, just an empty stretch of highway and a gray landscape in front of me. I had the heater blasting, but I had the window down.
I had finally come to the point where I was gonna pass out on the side of the road.
For a split second, I heard something coming from above.
The sound of a child screaming.
It got louder, and then I saw something in my headlights.
A child fell from above right in front of me and hit the pavement.
I’ll never forget what that looked like.
I’ll never forget how quick that scream was silenced.
I swerved and my foot slammed on the break, but it was too late.
I felt the body go underneath the wheels just before the truck rolled over.
The truck grinded on its side to a halt on the highway.
Once I freed myself from the seatbelt, I climbed out of the cab and ran backward along the road, gun in hand.
At the back end of the trailer, I could see a small hand sticking out from underneath and a ratty teddy bear just beyond it. It was sitting up, looking at me with only one eye.
Something hit the ground next to me.
The other eye of the teddy bear was looking back up at me.
I could smell cigarette smoke in the air.
I swear I heard a boy laughing out there in that cold, quiet dawn.
-
The death of the child was ruled an accident.
The likeness of the child from the drawing in the rest stop matched her perfectly.
Although I told them I had watched her fall right in front of me, everybody thought I was too exhausted to be taken seriously. They figured she had been kidnapped by the young man I had seen, somehow escaped, and unfortunately ran in front of my truck.
I know what I saw.
That was my last ride.
I’ve never driven on that stretch of road again.