We jounced and bounced and rattled well over a mile before the trail seemed to peter out. A wall of scrub bushes and scraggy trees rose up in front of us. I concentrated on downshifting to a stop without pitching us all off the four-wheeler. Priella had the worst of it; she had been thrown around the metal basket and was pretty banged up already.
Despite my best efforts, I didn’t coordinate the clutch with the gas well enough, and the engine died as we jolted to a stop. The quiet that enveloped us after the engine shut off was delicious.
“Where did the trail go?” Beth asked, peering around my shoulder.
“Don’t worry; we’ll find it,” I said. “We’ve seen this trick before.”
“We need to get to Draper,” Priella said. “It’s the closest town. Or at least I think so. I’m not really sure where we are anymore.” She twisted back and forth as she tried to get her bearings.
“If I’m right,” I said, “we’re a couple miles west and south of Megiddo.”
“That means Draper is at least ten miles north, maybe more.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think we should head that way. We’d have to go right past Megiddo. And I hate to remind you guys, but Maggie was calling someone and you can bet it was Father. By now, the old bastard probably has the whole church ready to come after us.”
Beth’s sigh rattled my ear. “At least they’ll be more disorganized without Moses and Eli. Of course, if Eli were here none of this—”
“Maybe,” I interrupted. Thinking about how desperately I needed Eli would only make things worse. “But they still have Gabriel and Justus.”
“But Justus had the hots for you. Don’t you think he would—”
“Justus is a sleazy little weasel. I’d trust Gabriel sooner than I’d ever trust that slimeball.”
“Gabriel has a sense of honor,” Priella added. “He reminds me of Enoch that way. They were good friends.”
“Yeah, but even Gabriel said he couldn’t help anymore than he already has. So we’re on our own, ladies. Which way?”
“Hell if I know,” Beth said. “Down the rabbit hole? We’ve got a wall of trees in front of us. Somebody stole our trail.”
“No, they didn’t,” I said. “They just hid it.”
I got off the ATV and started walking along the tree line. Since I knew what to look for this time, it was easy to find.
We had to approach at an angle in order to slip between the bracken where a scraggly trail had been hacked out. This alley was even narrower than the one in the clearing between Megiddo and the meth camp. Twigs and branches scratched at our clothes and hair as I navigated the ATV down the narrow path. Priella had a hunk of hair snagged so tightly, it snapped her head back. I tried to go as slowly as I could, but the stupid machine bucked and jerked whenever I attempted speeds below 10 M.P.H.
We emerged onto a dirt road—a real one, this time. Not just an ATV trail. I checked the compass. The road ran north-south, which meant if we turned right in a couple of miles, we would run into County Road-W. Unfortunately, W was the road Megiddo’s driveway branched off. Heading that way increased the likelihood of running into anyone chasing us.
We got off the four-wheeler and scanned the roadway.
“I think this is Thornapple Road,” Priella said. She confirmed that it intersected with W. “But M picks up between Thornapple and Megiddo, and runs up to Draper. If we could get to M before the church is mobilized—”
“Is M the road we take to the restaurant?” I asked.
“Yeah, and if—”
“How likely is it that we’ll be able to make it over to M before running into a church posse? M is only a quarter mile from Megiddo. They know we’re going to come out right here. They’re probably halfway to us by now.”
“What’s south of us?” Beth asked.
“I have no idea,” Priella said. “I’ve never been on this road. We just pass it sometimes when we cut over to get to Highway 70. I think if we keep going south we’ll run into Rusk County, but as far as towns…?” She shrugged.
“What about west?” I said.
She shrugged again. “If we go straight west, eventually we’d have to cross Highway 27. That could take us north to Winter or south to Ladysmith, but we’d have to cross a whole bunch of woodland to get there. I think this is mostly county-managed land. There won’t be houses or towns for quite a ways.”
“It’s going to be getting dark soon,” Beth reminded us.
“Unless we come up with something quick, we can probably figure on spending the night outside.” I checked the gas gauge. “We have to keep moving.”
“So do we go cross-country and try to pick up Highway 27 or head south on this road as far as we can?” Priella asked.
Anxiety slid like acid through my veins. We were taking too long to figure this out. Way too long.
“We’ll go faster if we stick to the road and head south. The problem is they’ll know we came out right here. We have to assume they’re coming for us.”
“Oh, they’re coming for us,” Beth said.
Suddenly, Priella gave a squeal and, rooting in her pocket, dug out the cell phone she had nabbed at the trailer. My breath caught with joy as she waved it around.
Short-lived. Her face fell as she studied the face of phone. She held it up again, not with excitement this time, but in that futile trying-to-conjure-up-a-signal-from-the-sky pose that told me we weren’t going to get any help from Verizon anytime soon.
“It’s the hills,” Beth said. “Next time we get to the top of one, we should try again.”
“How’s the battery charge?” I asked.
Priella made a face. “Not great.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
By my calculations, we only had about an hour or so until sunset. We headed south, going about 35 m.p.h. because I was too afraid to go any faster. Every few seconds, Beth would twist around to look over her shoulder. Priella, holding on to the basket for dear life, had her neck craned to see around me too.
They were coming and we knew it.
We had gone about a mile when I saw a break in the scrub brush lining the road. I hit the brakes, but we had already zoomed past it, so I had to turn around and go back.
“What are you doing?” Beth yelled in my ear.
“We have to get off this road,” I yelled back.
I drove up to the opening and studied the trail, no more than two tracks heading into the vast county managed forest. The direction was favorable; it was heading west, but I had no idea where it would take us or what kind of new trouble we might run into on it. Still, the area was crisscrossed with ATV and snowmobile trails. If we could just—
“Letty!” Priella pointed north.
A vehicle, maybe a mile or two away, was racing down Thornapple, heading straight toward us. Decision made. I gunned the ATV, and we jolted down the ditch and through the bracken.
Beth slapped my shoulder and hollered, “Wait!”
When I braked, she jumped off and ran to a downed tree branch and dragged it across the trail.
“I saw that in a cowboy movie once,” she panted as she leaped back on. “Probably won’t work, but you never know.”
The track, thick with weeds and undergrowth, forced me to slow down to the point it felt like we could crawl faster. It wasn’t until we lost sight of the road completely that I felt I could draw a full breath.
If I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me.
We kept going, sometimes losing the track, but somehow picking it up soon after. At one point we had to navigate around a felled tree and lost the trail completely. We ended up getting off the machine and thrashing through the undergrowth until Priella found it again.
The next hurdle we came to was a creek. It was only about five feet across at its widest, but spring waters had cut it down deeply. Whoever had blazed this trail had created a bridge using a stack of miscellaneous lumber laid in a pile across the narrowest point. Apparently, the DIY engineer had depended on
caked mud to glue together a “foundation” of twisted two-by-fours and an old wooden ladder with missing rungs; for the flat surface, slabs of soggy, mildewed plywood and, in one spot, a dilapidated factory pallet topped the structure. The whole pile had disintegrated beyond the point of safety, if indeed it ever had been.
But what choice did we have?
Beth and Priella both elected to “lighten the load” by picking their way across the bridge before I attempted it with the four-wheeler. I could hear the creaks and snaps of wood as they crossed and, at one point, Beth either tripped or fell to her knees in prayer.
When Priella reached the other bank she held the phone up, circling again, looking for a signal. Beth and I waited hopefully, but she shook her head and stuck it back in her pocket.
Despite the rapidly chilling air, my pits were sodden with flop sweat. I was going to have to ride the ATV over that heap of kindling, and soon. The day was disappearing on us. The creek would be impossible to cross in the dark.
I got off the machine and studied the bridge, looking for the most secure way across. Hopeless. The jumble of wood looked like a gigantic pile of kindling, only lacking a match to suit its true purpose.
The time for earnest and heartfelt prayer had truly arisen.
I got back on and attempted to self-induce a fugue state of unthinking, unemotional numbness that would allow me to disconnect from the reality of driving a seven-hundred-pound behemoth over a stack of twigs.
It might have worked, except Beth startled me out of it by yelling and waving like a madwoman. I flung my hands out in a WTF gesture, and she signaled me to shut off the ATV.
I did. Both Priella and Beth had their heads tilted and shared an alert, listening expression.
I was so attuned to hearing an engine thrumming in my ear, I didn’t register the new sound. And then I did. In the distance, another engine. Maybe more. And men, yelling.
Had they seen us pull off Thornapple? Beth’s cowboys-and-Indians trick obviously hadn’t worked. However, it had happened. They were on the trail behind us, and likely coming fast. Somehow, they knew where we were.
No time…
My heart started thumping so loudly it drowned out any other noise. I started the ATV, made wide-eyed-to-wide-eyed contact with Beth, and set off across the twig pile.
Denial is a particularly strong defense mechanism in alcoholics; it has to be or we couldn’t go so blithely down the path of self-destruction as we do. Technically, it’s considered in mental health circles to be an unhealthy coping skill; however, there are some situations when a blind disregard for reality is a blessing. Despite the firecracker-loud snapping of dry wood underneath me and the splashes of falling debris hitting the creek below, I kept a steady hand on the gas and worked the clutch and gear shift like a pro as I jounced across.
Apparently, near-death experiences bring out the driver in me.
I braked in front of Beth and Priella. They were grasping each other’s hands, both faces kabuki white. Priella had a dot of blood on her lip where she had bitten it. They looked at me as though they were not quite able to process the fact that I’d made it across.
Join the club.
Night fell like somebody had tripped it. Supposedly, darkness is merely the absence of something. Light. But this darkness was a thing unto itself. The ATV’s single headlight only served to illuminate the edges as it pressed in on us. It had a thickness, a texture to it. It had energy. I could feel the blackness trying to seep its way inside me. Beth buried her head between my shoulders and Priella went back to whispering prayers.
Miles and time ceased to be measurements of progress. I had no idea how far we had come or how long we’d been running. The rest of the world disappeared. Evaporated.
Strangely, in normal circumstances, the dark and disorientation would have triggered off a series of incapacitating panic attacks. But after the bridge, my adrenal glands had finally given up sending fear signals. Why bother, they probably asked.
I concentrated on navigating the slender portion of the path that the headlight illuminated. It was enough to keep us moving. The arc of light, the few feet of trail bracketed by weeds and bushes on either side—those were as much of the world as I could deal with anyway. That poorly lighted, narrow strip of the world consumed me.
When it suddenly split off into two different directions, I freaked and slammed on the brakes, unable to process the situation. Beth shoved into my back, and poor Priella, who must have been dozing, almost took a digger over the side of the basket.
I shut the ATV off and we sat there, contemplating what seemed to be an intersection in the trail. We all took the opportunity to dismount. Beth and Priella began to stretch and bend as soon as their feet hit the ground. I just stood there, staring at the path that branched off into two different directions.
Beth punched my shoulder. “Stretch,” she told me. So, I did.
She reached over for the compass dangling from the keychain and studied it. Priella pulled out the phone, looked at it briefly and stuck it back in her pocket.
“We go this way,” Beth said, pointing right. “That’s north. Wherever we’re at, if we keep going north we’ll run into Highway 70 or W. Either one will get us back to people.”
“Do you hear something?” Priella asked.
We all froze, straining to listen.
After a few minutes, I said, “I don’t hear anything.”
“Maybe they stopped for the night,” Beth said. “They couldn’t have gotten across the bridge. The whole thing disintegrated out from underneath you when you crossed. I don’t even think they could walk across it in that shape.”
I shuddered.
Priella said. “I can’t believe they would stop. Father wouldn’t let them.”
“I think you’re right, but even if you aren’t, we don’t have a choice,” I said. “We have to assume they’re still after us. Not to mention, we’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s getting colder.”
“How cold does it have to be for hypothermia?” Beth asked.
“Anything that lowers our core temp,” I said. “Especially if we get wet or if there’s wind. We’re damn lucky we grabbed these jackets.”
“Please, God, don’t let it rain,” Beth whispered.
“Come on. Let’s go.” I moved to the ATV, but Priella stopped me.
“Let me drive,” she said. “You’ve got to be exhausted.”
“I thought you didn’t know how.”
“I don’t, but obviously you don’t, either. I can learn.”
I was tempted, but I knew that if I didn’t have that strip of light to follow, the dark—the fear—would overwhelm me.
“I’ll drive,” I said. My voice sounded grim, even to my own ears. Neither woman argued, but Beth and Priella switched places. Beth looked curiously vulnerable perched in the basket, her fingers clutching the metal sides in a white-knuckled grip.
We kept going.
As we drove through the night, we began to run into forks and offshoots in the trail far more frequently. We chose north or west as much as possible, angling our way across the county forestland. As it grew colder, we made more stops, jumping off and doing some quick calisthenics to get our blood moving. Once, as I was slowing for a curve, my headlight picked out a pair of glowing, ruby-red eyes from the brush bordering the trail.
We immediately ceased slowing.
Every time we stopped, we listened for pursuers. Twice we heard ATVs in the distance, once they even got close enough to hear men’s voices again. After so many intersections and turnoffs in the trails, I thought we’d lost them for sure. We were trapped in a maze, and I knew I would never be able to trace our way back. Maybe they had figured out we were heading north to the little town of Winter. Except for Draper, it was the closest, so it made sense that way, but it also meant crossing the county forestland. I hoped the church posse would assume a bunch of women would have taken the easier, albeit the longer way—south to Ladysmith, a bigger town with
better resources.
We crossed another creek, but this one had an honest-to-goodness timber-and-four-by-six planked bridge. I could have kissed it, but something about being chased by crazed religious fanatics across the wilderness in the dark put me out of the mood.
A few miles down, the trail spilled us out onto another path. This one, wide and obviously cleared for all-terrain vehicle use, ran north-south. Without hesitation, I aimed us north and pushed the ATV up to 30 m.p.h. If it were daylight—and if I had any clue what I was doing—I would have risked going even faster, but visions of a deer or some ruby-eyed beast wandering out in front of us chilled me more than the night air.
Still, the faster speed felt glorious. Priella smacked my back and waved an “All right!” fist in my side vision. Beth just hung on, which was probably wise.
The fact that we were on a groomed trail was proved when we flashed by a diamond-shaped, caution-yellow mini sign that said ROUGH TRAIL.
Oh, crap.
We hit the rough trail section going far too fast. Beth “caught air” when we flew over one particularly bad dip and she almost sailed out of the basket. She came down hard, half on the metal side, half dangling in thin air. Priella had dug her nails into my midsection so deeply my sides burned.
I slowed, but now that we had a groomed trail the urge for speed was almost impossible to restrain. When we came to another mini sign that said SLOW, Beth bared her teeth at me, her signal for please-slow-down-or-I’ll-sink-my-teeth-into-your-neck-too.”
We were all a little on edge.
Luckily, it was only a few more miles before the next sign read CAUTION HIGHWAY. We rode straight up the bank of the ditch and onto the most beautiful, two lane, asphalt county road I had ever seen.
“This is Highway W,” Priella screamed in my ear. “Turn left. Winter is just up ahead.”
It was against the law to ride an ATV on a major road, but if a cop pulled us over, the only danger would be of him suffocating under a three-hysterical-women hugfest.
Right as we passed a sign—a big one this time—that said WINTER 1-3/4 miles. Priella screamed.
The Blood We Spill: Suspense with a Dash of Humor (A Letty Whittaker 12 Step Mystery Book 4) Page 30