Red Lights Over the Ridge

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A young woman driving at night turns to her wing mirror, where three red lights glow on the empty highway behind her.
Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
From the passenger seat, a young woman grips the wheel and looks up at her rear-view mirror, which shows red lights on the road behind.
Nobody behind me. Nobody ahead.
A young woman at the wheel looks over her shoulder as three red lights hover beyond the car's rear window.
She looks back. They’re still there.

Don’t pull over

They call it the Extraterrestrial Highway, and after midnight it belongs to nobody. She has been driving it alone for an hour. No cars, no towns, no signal. Only the white line, unspooling in the headlights.

Then three red lights lift over the ridge. They don’t blink like aircraft. They don’t drift like stars. They keep pace with her.

Red Lights Over the Ridge is the prologue to my Area 51 series, A Light Away From Home: a different traveller, a different night, somewhere out on the long road past the base. Dark trip-hop with a slow, heavy breakbeat, deep sub bass, car-radio static and a theremin that won’t leave you alone, under a breathy, whispered vocal and a guitar that finally tears into a distorted wall.

The road is real. Everything that happens on it here is made up.

Her car coming down the empty desert highway at night, three red lights over the ridge behind it.
Red lights over the ridge, keeping pace.
From the back seat: a phone on the dashboard reads No Service while three red lights hover low over the road ahead
No Service. The lights come lower.
Her hand on the tuning knob of a glowing amber car radio, an empty desert road and stars beyond the windscreen
Between stations, the static almost sounds like words.
From the back seat, one red light falls behind the mountains ahead while two more glow in her rear-view mirror.
One of them falls. The others go dark.
Her hand holding a phone that reads No Signal, her face on the screen and a faint dark figure behind her.
No signal. Not even a reflection I recognise.
In the rear-view mirror, her wide eyes and, in the back seat behind her, a dark figure with three dim red lights on its face
Everything cuts out. Almost everything.
A dark figure in the back seat shines a bright white beam from its forehead at the woman, frozen at the wheel
Then the third light opens.
Dawn over the desert: the woman sits at the wheel of her car on the hard shoulder, her face in the rear-view mirror
Dawn on the hard shoulder. Engine running, lights on. Nobody behind her. Nobody ahead.

Listen

Listen on Suno: Red Lights Over the Ridge

Headphones on, lights off. If you see three red lights in the mirror, keep driving.

Would you have pulled over? Tell me in the comments.

Next: Tikaboo Peak, chapter one of A Light Away From Home, 14 October, 8pm UK.

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