Saturday Afternoon

Elliot was in his work truck headed back to the same location, that keeps having the same problems. They have the same broken parts with no plans on correcting issues from happening again. Sometimes he thought his job was getting redundant. He comes out to this same location 2-3 times a month because of the same oversight that the area supervisor over these machines can do to keep it from going offline so frequently. But Elliot gets $100+ an hour to go out there so he did what he was hired to do and make sure it was back online and working within 24 hours. This factory location was right off the main highway and easy to get to. He was only 20-30 minutes away but almost immediately after getting on the highway it turned into a parking lot. He picked up his phone and tried reaching out to the local contact he had there at the factory, but Sam wasn’t picking up and it was going right to voicemail. He turned his radio on to a local news station to see if he would get any information on the hold up ahead of him. As he rolled slowly westbound, he noticed that the eastbound lane was bustling and moving at a faster pace than the 70-mph posted, this didn’t seem normal. As he got closer to the exit he needed, he noticed up ahead a large presence of emergency vehicles and then all at once it seemed cars ahead of him were making U-turns and there was almost a sense of panic in these actions. As soon as he looked back at the road ahead of him, he had to swerve to avoid rear-ending the tractor ahead of him. After he regrouped, getting back into a lane he tried to see what was going on less than 200 yards from the exit ramp. With him behind the tractor he gets out of his truck and tries to look ahead to see what was going on. He grabbed his phone and tried getting through to Sam again hoping he might have a better idea of what was going on. The phone went straight to voicemail again. He tried calling the main factory line and there was a message for those who did call that they were shut down due to safety measures. This wasn’t right, why wouldn’t someone have reached out to him to let him know not to come up there? He called his company dispatch to see if they had gotten word of anything going on he should know. The dispatcher that answered him put him on hold a minute. His boss was the next voice he heard and was being told that there was an explosion at the factory and he needed to get himself turned around and come back to the shop. So he had made it over to the fast lane and pulled into the median hoping nothing would keep him from getting over into the other lane. He pushed the gas pedal to the floor and he was off rushing away from the factory. What had happened? Elliot’s mind was racing how was Sam did he make it out alive?