The Big Plan?
The Silent Engineers
The roads were graves. The work zones were eyes. One woman tried to keep steering through a world that felt engineered to break.
The asphalt shimmers under a blood-orange sky, choked with dust from a hundred construction zones snaking across the American heartland. They call it progress, but the roads are graves. The interstate was a labyrinth of orange barrels and flickering signs, each detour a chokehold on what used to be a free country. Lena gripped the wheel of her battered pickup, weaving through a work zone in rural Ohio. The signs screamed "SLOW," but the lanes were so narrow, the barriers so close, it felt like driving through a trap set to snap. She’d seen the stats whispered on X: 956 dead in work zones in ’21, still 850 last year, even as traffic deaths dipped. Incompetence, they said on the feeds. Lena didn’t buy it. The zones felt engineered to kill—too precise, too consistent, like someone wanted chaos on the roads.
She passed a crew in neon vests, their faces blank, tools idle. No work was happening, just like the last three zones she’d navigated. Cones funneled her toward a merge where a semi loomed, its driver distracted, barreling too fast. Lena swerved, heart pounding, tires screeching on gravel. Another near-miss. Her radio crackled with static, then a voice: “Stay vigilant. The famine’s spreading west.” She shut it off. Everyone knew. The Midwest’s crops were failing again—blight, drought, supply chain “glitches.” Empty shelves in Cincinnati, ration lines in Dayton. And now, disease warnings on her phone: some new strain, hospitals overflowing.
Lena’s mind churned. It wasn’t just bad luck. The patterns were too neat. Work zones clogging arteries, slowing food trucks to a crawl. Fields dying just as transport stalled. Clinics turning away the sick while “vaccine shortages” headlined X. She’d seen the posts before they vanished—murmurs of secret meetings, names like Davos, WEF, even old Masonic lodges thrown in by the wilder accounts. Elites pulling strings, they claimed, orchestrating scarcity and death from glass towers. Lena scoffed at first, but the pieces fit too well. Someone—or something—was tightening the noose.
She pulled into a gas station, the last before a 50-mile stretch of barricades. The pumps were dry, a handwritten sign reading “CLOSED—NO SHIPMENTS.” A man in a tattered jacket leaned against the wall, coughing into his sleeve. “They’re doing it on purpose,” he rasped, eyes darting. “Roads, food, the sickness. All planned.” Lena didn’t answer, but her gut twisted. She handed him half her protein bar and drove on.
Night fell, and the work zone stretched endless, cones glowing like eyes. A digital billboard flickered: “TRUST IN PROGRESS.” Lena’s headlights caught a figure—a worker, standing alone, staring. No tools, no crew. Just watching. She floored it, the road narrowing again, barriers closing in. Her phone buzzed with a new alert: “OUTBREAK WARNING—STAY INDOORS.” Too late. She was trapped on this road, in this world, where every barrier, every shortage, every death felt like a move in a game she couldn’t see.
They called it incompetence. She called it control.
Somewhere, in a room she’d never enter, hands shuffled papers, screens glowed with data, and voices whispered plans. The zones would stay up, the trucks would stay stuck, the fields would stay barren. And Lena, like everyone else, would drive on, one wrong turn from becoming another statistic in a plan too vast to prove.
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