Run, Girl, Run: A Thriller

by Alex C. Franklin

  So if, for some reason, one of the companies wanted to be absolutely certain there’d be no glitch to delay or prevent the hand-over, sure, Dromel could see himself playing his part to make certain the transfer happened.

  He looked into the stranger’s eyes, and the sides of his mouth turned up in a tightly controlled smile.

  The stranger gave a shallow nod. “We’ll talk again. I know where to find you.”

  With that, the man in the expensive suit rose and slipped away through the crowd.

  Chapter 9

  One month later

  The leaves had peaked the week before and I was angry with myself.

  I berated myself as I searched among still unpacked boxes for my digital SLR camera.It was now mid-October and I had hardly been out in the woods. What was the use of leaving behind the fast-paced, big city life and moving to the forest if I didn’t actually get out and experience the Nature I’d said I wanted to be close to?

  In September, while I had waited for the closing on my new home, I had rented a vacant house from Ada, the real estate agent. Since then, and after I had moved into my own bungalow, two weeks prior, I had considered myself chained to my computer.

  I no longer had a boss to crack a whip at me. So I had determined that I would act like a responsible adult. I would wake up early and plant myself at the keyboard and churn out at least twenty pages of the novel every day.

  I had placed the unvarnished pine table I’d brought from Vancouver — one that my grandfather had made with his own hands — right beside the large bay window in the living room. I’d bought two red, vinyl upholstered chairs from the sixties in a yard sale and placed one at either end of the table, which served as my desk or dining table, according to which end I sat at.

  Yes, I had been disciplined. I jumped out of bed at the sound of the alarm by seven every morning. I usually switched on the computer by eight or nine. Except for trips to the kitchen or the bathroom, or to my bed for an afternoon catnap, I would remain at that table until well after the sun disappeared and darkness had caused the maples, pines, and cedars outside the window to merge with the blackness of the sky.

  For all that effort, though, there was nothing I felt I could show the world.

  I had never made my daily quota but still managed to turn out two hundred or so pages. The printed text was covered with disapproving notes I’d scribbled in with a red pen. The pages were destined for the wastepaper basket — each and every one of them.

  This was not working.

  I hated the length and rhythm of almost every sentence. But the problem was not only the style. It was also the content.

  I had set out to write a romance novel, but now thought of myself as woefully unqualified on the subject.

  Who was I to write about the giddy heights of love when I felt stuck in limbo?

  There I was, waiting day after day for any form of contact with Peter. It was a constant battle to keep my mind off the ever-present dull pain that had lodged itself in some part of my being that I couldn’t name, or see, or touch.

  I felt like a broken vessel that had shattered into a million pieces, and I longed to hear Peter’s voice; I needed to hear his voice. My entire “me,” the person I’d been for almost a year and a half and the person I thought I would be for the rest of my life, was totally wrapped up in him. His voice, his eyes on me, his smile…these things bore the magic I needed to glue those shattered pieces of myself back together again. And the romance novel served poorly as a distraction from my restless yearning for that magic.

  Trying to reach out to others had only made matters worse.

  My feelings of inadequacy in the romantic sphere had grown deeper since I had joined Facebook.

  Back in Vancouver, the social media craze had completely passed me by; I had told myself I was just too busy and too tired to be bothered with such things. And besides, I hadn’t felt like I had anything to share.

  But in Syron Lake I had reached what I’d considered a major milestone in my passage through adulthood: I had bought a house, and I’d done so all by myself as a single woman. So when an email from an old school friend from Trinidad showed up in my Inbox inviting me to join the social network, I didn’t hesitate to take a break from struggling to fill a blank MS Word page.

  Logging on, however, brought me into the worlds of girls who had sat next to me in school uniforms and pigtails, and whose status now read “Married” or “In a relationship.”

  There were streams of photos of men with beards, or nose piercings, or tattoos emblazoned across beefy chests; and there they were, these men, hugging my old schoolmates, or kissing them on the cheek, or grabbing their lower cheeks; acting foolish, or manly, or romantic.

  And then there were the babies. Fat, droopy cheeks; eyes filled with wonder; tiny fingers reaching up to touch their mother’s face….

  And what did I have? A handyman’s special in the middle of nowhere, no job, and no prospect for a date in this town, unless I wanted to take up with some widower in his eighties who had a set of perfectly aligned false teeth and a bottle of blue pills.

  I was tired of being responsible. If I couldn’t have the man and the kids, at least I could unchain myself from the computer and treat myself to an adventure in the wilderness.

  The morning had been brilliant and warm, much nicer than it had been since the end of summer. I had walked into town to the car rental agency, picked up some groceries, and now was back at home, packing a tent and my camera.

  The leaves were beginning to show some brown, tarnishing their autumnal brilliance. But if captured in the best light right at the start of dawn or just before dusk, they would make for some spectacular shots.

  They would be at least something to post on my Facebook page. Pathetic, yes. But it was the best I could come up with.

  The obvious place to go was the nearby provincial park, where there was a massive outcropping of the Canadian Shield that resembled a turtle poking its head out of its shell. The geological quirk had become the symbol of the region. The old-growth maple forest at its base could be relied upon to be resplendent. And if I was lucky to wake up to a morning mist rising off the nearby lake, the pictures were sure to be eerily enchanting.

  This was my last chance to catch such a scene; it was Thursday and tent camping was scheduled to close for the season on Saturday.

  The park, deep in the woods north of the town, was an hour’s drive if I took the direct route on Highway 103. But I’d heard that that road was mostly straight and flat and lined with conifers.

  Instead, I chose the scenic way, out onto the TransCanada Highway, and then up the road past the Garter Lake First Nation reservation. The drive would be three times as long, but the crests of some of the hills offered spectacular shots along the way.

  The map showed that long after passing the reservation, I would have to take a left turnoff, cut across a hill and descend onto Highway 103; then, with a right turn, I would be a short distance from the entrance to the park.

  With the window down and the wind whipping my hair back, I slipped in a CD with nineties music. Singing along at the top of my lungs helped to chase away the qualms that tried to invade my mind about spending the night alone in the woods.

  I had done it before, out in B.C., just over a year earlier.

  Peter and I had planned the trip weeks in advance. After a fight the night before we were supposed to leave, he had stormed out of my place and didn’t call the next morning. He was supposed to have driven us, but I was not about to sit at home moping. I took the bus and hitched a ride for the first time in my life, and I set up camp in the B.C. backcountry, all by myself for a whole weekend.

  Now, I had a rented car and I could very w
ell handle an overnight stay in a provincial park just a few miles from my home, I told myself.

  I was well on my way, about half an hour past the reservation, and was going over in my mind how to put up the tent when the first flash came.

  I told myself it was nothing.

  A few minutes later, though, I paid attention.

  There was no sound, but the periodic bursts of light had continued.

  The clock on the dashboard told me it was only about four-thirty; it shouldn’t have been as dark as it had suddenly become.

  I switched on the radio and found the local station. Interminable advertisements poured out of the car’s speakers. After a few minutes of cheerful, upbeat music, which was annoying just then because it was not the news report, the nasal voice of the host came on.

  “That was Bobby Farron with his biggest single, Cabana Girl; another golden oldie, right here on Moose FM. And, turning now to the weather, as we mentioned earlier, the meteorological office has issued a severe thunderstorm warning….”

  Good Lord, it was about to hit. Wind gusts of sixty miles per hour or greater were expected, along with three inches or more of rain per hour.

  The camping was off!

  All I could think about now was getting onto Highway 103 and heading back to my warm, dry bed.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid me for forgetting such a basic thing. Check the conditions before leaving! I had been so focused on getting the photos for my Facebook timeline, I hadn’t listened to the radio all morning. Didn’t Google the weather before I’d left. Such a basic thing!

  The next flash blinded me for a second. The air rumbled and boomed.

  Involuntarily, I pressed down on the gas. My fingers curled tightly around the steering wheel and I pulled hard on it to keep the car from veering onto the shoulder. A few seconds later, I eased up on the pedal; drew a long, deep breath; and told myself to slow down and stay calm if I wanted to arrive alive.

  After driving for what felt like an hour in deepening darkness, I came upon a road to my right. I took the turn, relieved to be heading toward Highway 103.

  The rain now came down in a blinding sheet and I had to slow down to a crawl. The flashes came every two minutes or so, followed by peals of thunder. Trees on either side of the road bowed and swayed in the howling wind.

  An eternity later, it seemed the unlit highway had narrowed considerably. Nobody else was crazy or stupid enough to be way out here on a night like this. I drove in pitch blackness, except for the narrow, yellow beams from my headlights.

  I was only an occasional driver; had been on the road at night only a couple of times; and had never before faced a storm like this. My trembling foot could barely keep firm contact with the gas pedal; my fingers now curled in a death-grip around the steering wheel.

  But I pressed on, thinking only of eventually hearing the tires roll onto the gravel of my driveway.

  A bolt of lightning forked down altogether too close, above the trees just ahead. It set the sky ablaze and made me blink. Thunder rumbled, then exploded, as if Heaven, itself, was cracking open right above me.

  That killed my resolve.

  I pulled over and parked beside the guard rail on a high ridge, as far off the road as I could. I turned on the hazard lights, lowered the back of my seat, and lay back with my eyes closed, breathing slowly to calm myself.

  I would wait out the storm.

  I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep until the loudest boom of the night made me fling open my eyes and sit bolt upright. My entire body trembled, and, for a few seconds, I couldn’t remember where I was, or why I was there.

  Suddenly, I was aware of a continuous roar, louder than even the pounding rain on the roof and the windshield.

  Was it the wind? No, this was different from the gusts I’d heard earlier. It was a louder, roaring, hissing, unbroken sound.

  I leaned over to the passenger side and peered down, waiting for the next flash of lightning to illuminate the scene.

  The strobe that came showed white crests racing away in the distance; a torrent ripped through the land below.

  There had been no river there when I had pulled up. I was sure of it. I would have heard it if there had been one.

  I was also sure I didn’t care to stick around and find out how high or how fast the gushing waters would rise.

  Pelting rain or not, I started the engine.

  Somewhere in the midst of the terror and the disorientation it dawned on me to check the map.

  I flipped on the overhead light, and with my index finger, I traced the route I’d taken. There it was: my big mistake. I was supposed to have made a left turn and then a right to get to Highway 103 if I was going to the park. But as I had decided to go straight back home, it was supposed to have been two left turns. I had taken only a right and had ended up God alone knew where.

  I couldn’t leave there — wherever that place was — fast enough.

  Chapter 10

  Back at home, I couldn’t get that roaring sound out of my head. I tossed and turned under the sheets, unable to fall asleep.

  Finally, I slid out of bed and headed for the living room. I switched on the computer. It was quarter to four.

  Outside, the silhouettes of the trees still swayed and bowed. But the violent thunder and lighting had subsided, and the rain was gone.

  I should have been appreciating this renewed peacefulness, but I was agitated.

  That flood….

  What if I hadn’t awoken and the waters had risen so high and so fast that it swept the car away?

  The rational part of me knew the ridge had been too high and the gully too deep and the raging waters too far away for that to have happened. But still, I was shaken, and the nightmarish what-ifs attacked my mind.

  I typed “Syron Lake” into the Google bar and clicked to select the map search. I needed to locate the spot, as if in pinpointing the site precisely, I could somehow conquer it.

  The rudimentary research I’d done before leaving Vancouver had told me “Syron Lake” could mean four different things.

  First there was the lake itself, a pear-shaped body of water whose basin had been carved into the Canadian Shield at some point between 11,000 and two million years before.

  Then there was the Syron Lake Mine, the first uranium mine to be opened in the area in the mid-fifties, just north of the lake.

  The company that operated the mine also adopted the name: Syron Lake Resources.

  And then there was the town. The first mining camps had cropped up on the north shore of the lake; but as more prospecting companies moved into the area and mining expanded, all living quarters were relocated miles away, to the site where the current town sprouted. Although now far removed from the actual body of water, the town retained the name Syron Lake.

  Calculating the time it took to get home, I imagined that I’d been quite near Syron Lake, the actual lake, that is. On the satellite image it showed up as an the inky, pear-shaped blob in the middle of the forest, but the road network on the map showed that my route wouldn’t have taken me to the lake.

  Northwest of Syron Lake was a much smaller inky shape. It was an almost perfect oval, and a road led to it. There wasn’t any river nearby. What was confusing was that from retracing my wrong turn on the road network, the oval was right about where it seemed that I had seen the flood.

  Unlike most other lakes on the map, the oval had no name. I opened a new tab in my browser and typed in “Syron Lake,” again. But this time, I clicked on the image search. I figured that might turn up some other maps with the name of the oval lake.

  There were dozens of them. Maps were
attached to company reports, and newspaper reports and linked to a defunct uranium mining protest website. There were also government reports, environmental studies, and transcripts of hearings.

  I paid little attention as the dark sky outside the bay window slowly illuminated. I was lost in searching websites, reading reports, and poring over maps.

  Finally, I sat back, stunned and trembling.

  That inky oval was no lake.

  It was a uranium tailings pond that held thirteen million gallons of radioactive sludge left over from the Syron Lake Mine.

  Or at least it used to hold that toxic waste.

  Chapter 11

  He was certain to be concerned; at least I hoped he would be. The issue united two, possibly three, things he cared about. The first was the environment. The second was his hometown. And the possible third was…me.

  He was trained to handle environmental crises from the perspective of an activist, so it was quite natural that I’d turn to him first for advice on how to handle the situation. Quite natural, really.

  It was eight-thirty, my time; five-thirty, his. As an early riser, he would likely have been just about to start his morning routine of pumping iron.

  I sat at the edge of my bed with a sticky palm on the phone. I could almost hear my heart pounding as I tried to compose my thoughts. I would keep things simple, businesslike. Yes, that was the wiser approach; after all, it had been five months since we’d last spoken. Any discussion about us would have to wait for later.