brush with death

Or, rather, brush with alarming insurance claim. We spent the weekend with our friends Ben and Natosha and Ben's brother Seth. 4am, we're playing Call of Cthulhu, horror role-playing, when there's a loud bang, like a hammer dropped inside a moving truck. We pause, shrug, and then I say, "Y'know, my car's out there." And then we're moving. We dash out to the street, and there's some activity around a pickup truck across the street, so I figure someone, well, dropped a hammer onto his truck bed.

Then Ben notices another pickup, two houses down, sticking its bumper through their wooden fence. And there's no activity there, which makes me think the driver is unconscious. Ben takes a Maglight down to investigate, and Tosha calls 911. Neighbors start to appear. Then we realize that the first truck, across from where we're standing, is mangled all to heck, with lots of important-looking bits scattered beneath it. Its windshield is shattered. It is empty. The other truck, across the street and two houses away, is also empty.

A car accident with no drivers? An ambulance, a fire truck, and a police car arrive in response to Tosha's call. The owner of the thrown truck speaks up, from the crowd of groggy neighbors. It had been parked when it was hit and thrown down the block. The driver of the throwing truck finally shows up, apparently after retrieving his girlfriend on foot (she is in slippers and looking none too pleased). There are no skid marks.

EMS, having no one to treat, goes off to rescue other people. Firemen sweep up glass and scatter sand under the engines of the trucks. Police officers question a sheepish looking guy in his early twenties. Ben meets his neighbors. We finally piece together the scenario:

A white pickup, in a block and a half, gathers enough speed to hit a red pickup on the wrong side of the road (parked across the street from my innocent little Honda) and throw that pickup diagonally across and down the street, covering about four house-lengths and jumping the curb, and then continue for two house-lengths itself.

The last time Jon ran a Cthulhu game, there was a tornado just north of us, complete with golf-ball-sized hail. Jon is not allowed to GM anymore.