Hardwired

by Trisha Leaver

  “Idiots,” the driver mumbled as he eased the van around a second fallen tree, barely clearing it. “I deserve hazard pay for this.”

  His eyes darted to the window on his left, then back to the road before he used the rear-view mirror to signal the security guard behind us. Chris saw it too and craned his neck to catch the guard’s response.

  “What?” I mouthed to Chris.

  “Something’s not right. The guard in the back is acting weird, and the driver is going way too slow.”

  “Crappy roads,” I offered up. With the wind whipping the snow around, there were times you couldn’t see more than three feet in front of you.

  “Nah, that’s not it,” Chris said. “The roads are bad, but the van is heavy. Besides, it seems the driver is more focused on the woods than on the road.”

  We slowed to a crawl again, a third, larger tree encroaching on our lane. I leaned over the seat in front of me and peered out the windshield, focusing on the dark shadows looming ahead. The road had leveled off and the wind had momentarily stopped, giving me a clear view of what lay ahead. It took a few seconds, but I made out the shapes of several more downed trees. One on the right side of the road, the other on the left. It continued like that for as far as I could see, like a zigzag pattern forcing the driver to literally weave his way down the already narrow road.

  I flashed another concerned look at Chris. It was definitely windy enough for the storm to have knocked over some trees, but why like that? Why in such a weird pattern? And why so close to each other?

  The guard in the back row swung his head around to look at the tree we’d just passed. I’d bet my life we were thinking the same thing. The fallen trees were perfectly spaced, each one coming closer and closer to completely blocking the road. Like someone had purposefully dropped them that way. Like someone was trying to slow us down.

  Not wanting to draw attention to myself, I kicked Chris’s foot and tilted my head toward the window. “Trees. All down,” I whispered.

  Chris looked at me like I was insane—the same way everybody at school had looked at me when they found out my brother tested positive. But I wasn’t crazy then, and I sure as hell wasn’t crazy now. “Just look. No way the trees fell on their own like that.”

  A muffled curse drew my attention forward. The driver’s hands were wrapped around the steering wheel, his knuckles white, his eyes darting in a frantic pattern from the windshield to the passenger-side window. He muttered something under his breath, then leaned over and keyed in a code on the small lockbox resting on the center console.

  “Gun,” Chris said, his eyes no longer trained on the woods outside but on the guard in the back seat. The guard was fumbling with a lockbox of his own, his hands shaking so hard that it took him three tries to key in the right code.

  “Shit, those aren’t Tasers,” I said as the driver jammed the clip into place and released the safety. I took one quick look around the van. No one had moved. No one had so much as sneezed.

  “Who?” I asked, completely confused as to where the threat was coming from. There were no tire tracks on the opposite side of the road, no masked men waving guns or demanding that we pull over.

  I cupped my hands around my eyes and leaned into the window, my vision honing in on the woods slowly creeping by. “Nothing. There’s nothing out there.”

  A glint of light caught my attention, and I leaned forward, shoving the guy in the seat in front of me aside so I had a clear view of the road. My pulse quickened, my hands clawing into the seat as I screamed at Chris to hang on. We had three seconds—five at most—to brace ourselves before we hit the van barreling toward us.

  seven

  The entire world slowed down, every fiber of my being hyper-focusing on the chaos unfolding. Every smell, every sound, every broken cry echoed around me in unimaginable clarity.

  Our driver pounded his foot on the brake, but it was too late. We were skating all over the road, the snow-

  covered pavement slick and uncooperative. The driver had two options: he could steer us away from the oncoming van and into the guardrail, or hit the other vehicle head-on.

  Our van’s brakes locked up, the high-pitched squeal reverberating through the van. Our driver yanked on the emergency brake, probably hoping to slow our momentum, but all that did was jam up the rear wheels, causing us to slide even more. We picked up speed, the backside of the van fishtailing, violently swinging us back and forth.

  The security guard in the back seat swore long and hard, then yelled at us to brace ourselves. The silence that followed was short and deafening, each one of us staring straight ahead. Watching. Waiting.

  The van lurched to the right, and I braced my feet against the metal frame of the seat in front of me as I prayed to whatever God was listening to let me live. Screams erupted seconds before we slammed into the other van. I pushed those panicked sounds to the back of my mind, my senses completely overtaken by the feel of the tires struggling to gain traction and the smell of fresh-cut pine and piss. All of them mingled together into one terrifying moment.

  The force of the collision tossed me backward. The van tipped, steadying itself at a perilous angle before slamming down onto the guardrail. It landed on its side, tearing through the metal. Through all the noise, I heard a thump—the unmistakable sound of someone’s head hitting the side of the van—immediately followed by a sickly warm spray of blood coating my seat. Coating me.

  The van slid downhill, a blur of shrieking metal and sparks igniting the air as we bounced from boulder to boulder. The snow did nothing to slow our descent, and we plowed into a tree, then rolled two times before jolting to a stop.

  Strangled breaths replaced the chaos, the sound too quiet to be comforting. Afraid that the slightest motion would set us tumbling again, I didn’t move. I didn’t even dare to blink. I simply lay there, listening to the unsettling silence.

  Tentatively, I stretched out my legs, then my arms, breathing a sigh of relieve at the sheer agony the movement brought. If I was in pain, then I was alive.

  I swept my hand out to my right, searching for Chris. My fingers landed on something solid and wet. I reluctantly turned my head, seeking him out.

  “Chris?” I had to swallow twice to get that one word out. Even then, it was rough, the ragged sound sputtering from my chest in a strangled whisper. Chris didn’t answer, and I tugged at the seat belt digging into my shoulder, desperate to get free so I could see if he was alive.

  A thin streak of blood trailed down the left side of his face, his hair was covered in pine needles and chunks of glass, and his shirt was soaked with what looked like vomit. “Chris, answer me!” I yelled as I wrapped my hands around his upper arms and began shaking him. There was no way he could be dead. There was no way I would allow him to be dead.

  His breath came out in a hard gasp, his entire body shuddering with the effort. He opened his eyes, his gaze locking on some point in the distance. I let him sit like that until the haze lifted and the realization of what had happened finally set in.

  “Lucas?” My name was choked, cut off by what I thought was fear.

  I swiped my eyes, embarrassed by my tears, and smiled. “Yep, it’s me. You okay?”

  “Hell no,” Chris said as he struggled to find the latch of his seat belt. I went to help, but he shoved my hands aside, determined to do it himself. “Do I look okay?”

  I looked around the van, horror quickly replacing my relief. No one was in the seat they’d started in. Their bodies had been tossed around, landing in grotesque, unnatural positions. We’d all been told to buckle up when we first left the facility, but an hour into the trip, even the security guard had taken his seat belt off in an effort get more comfortable. Whatever had possessed Chris and me to leave ours on was beyond me.

  A soft groan caught my attention, and I looked back at Chis. He was staggering to his feet, one hand firmly planted o
ver the gash on his side of his head. “I need to get out of here.” The hand he was pressing to his wound moved to cover his mouth. “I’m gonna puke.”

  Miraculously, our van had landed upright, but the doors were caved in. The only way out was over several limp bodies and through the shattered windshield. “That way,” I said, pointing toward the front.

  No matter where I put my foot or my hand, it always seemed to land on a person. Or some part of a person. Eventually I gave up being careful and purposefully started planting my palms on their bloodied chests, hoping to get them to scream, to cough, to give me some indication that they were alive. I would’ve pulled every one of them out. I swear I would’ve, had any of them so much as moaned.

  “We can’t leave them,” Chris said as he placed two fingers on the side of someone’s neck. “Some of them might still be alive.”

  “They’re not,” I said, slamming my foot into the windshield and kicking out the remains of the shattered glass. I needed to get out this van, away from the dead bodies lying around me and the overwhelming fear threatening to paralyze me in place.

  I stumbled out into the snow and fell to my knees. Chris crawled out behind me, then collapsed to the ground beside me. I lay there for a second watching the blood drip from his head, staining the snow in an odd polka-dot pattern.

  “You messed up your head,” I finally said, pointing to the cut above his right eye. It was still bleeding and caked with dirt, probably deep enough to need stitches.

  He swiped his hand across his forehead, wincing. “Wouldn’t be the first time,” he replied as he stared down at his blood-coated fingers. “What do we do now?”

  “Nothing,” I said, completely content to lie there and let the snow numb my entire body.

  “We’re alive,” Chris choked out a few minutes later. “We’re actually alive.”

  I mumbled a weak “yes” and continued watching his blood trickle onto the snow. The bleeding had slowed enough that I could count to ten before the next drop fell. A speck of gray dropped into the pool of blood, and I stared at it for a minute, trying to figure out what it was. A second, marble-sized rock fell next to it, and I jerked my head toward the road, panic screaming through my body.

  The stones falling toward us were getting bigger; the last one hit me in the chest, stealing my breath. The sound of metal whining in protest drifted through the air, and I looked up, following the path of the falling rocks. The other van was directly above us, its back tires caught on what was left of the guardrail.

  “We’ve got to get out of here.” I rolled over and pushed myself upright. The debris was tumbling down the embankment even faster, pinging off boulders and trees before settling on the ground around us. We had minutes, maybe only seconds, before the other van lost its balance and came skidding down the cliff, crushing us.

  “Give me a second,” Chris said. He pushed himself up off the ground and climbed back through the van’s broken windshield.

  “Are you crazy?” I yelled, pointing toward the wall of rock sliding toward us. “We don’t have time to pull anybody out.”

  “I’m not planning on it,” Chris said, poking at our driver with his foot. The man didn’t move, didn’t so much as grunt. Chris rolled him over, gagging at the sight of his mangled face. Swallowing hard, he dug his hand into the man’s pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen was nothing more than a giant spider web of cracks, but Chris hit the power button anyway, muttering a prayer that it would work. He got nothing, not even a dim flicker of light.

  “Check the ground. The guard must’ve had a phone too,” Chris said as he tossed the broken one aside.

  I had no desire to crawl back into that wreckage, to cement those mangled bodies in my memory as I searched for a phone I knew wouldn’t work. But I quickly looked around anyway, hoping to find a perfectly intact and functioning phone just lying there in the snow.

  “There’s no way we’re going to get a signal out here,” I said as another wave of rocks skidded down the hill, landing inches from where I stood. “Forget about a phone. We gotta move. Now!”

  I stumbled over my own feet, fighting the shakiness in my legs as I attempted to navigate the uneven ground quickly. Stopping a few feet away, I slowed down to wait for Chris, my attention completely focused on the steady flow of rocks tumbling toward us.

  We carefully picked our way up the rocky bank. For every three steps we took, we slid back two, adding more bruises to our already battered bodies. The van above us was swaying, and I shifted my course, losing ground but steering clear of the van’s eventual downward path.

  I cleared the last boulder, was only steps from the road, when I waved Chris to a stop. “You hear that?” I asked. I was positive I’d heard something—like a knocking, only deeper. The knocking turned to a scream, and I heaved myself up and over the guardrail, then took off running for the van.

  It was identical to ours, the letters IGT decaled on the driver’s-side door. They’d been headed to the Bake Shop. That van was full of guys just like us—the newbies from the intake facility. The ones we’d been moved out to make room for.

  “It’s gonna go,” Chris called after me. “There’s no way you’re going to make it in time.”

  I would. I just needed to stay on my feet, to push my pain aside and will my body to move.

  The van lurched, the guardrail pulling free of its anchors with a thunderous pop before the vehicle rolled forward. A hand flattened against the inside of the window as the van began to slide over the bank, the terrified eyes of the people trapped inside pleading with me for help.

  I collapsed on the snow-covered road and screamed out my rage as the van disappeared over the side of the cliff. It didn’t roll like ours. It plummeted straight down, smashing into our van and exploding in a ball of fiery red.

  “They were alive,” I choked out, cursing myself for not making it to them sooner, for wasting precious seconds resting in the snow rather than racing up to help them. “They were alive.”

  “We tried,” Chris said, falling to his knees beside me.

  I shook my head, my world spinning violently with the motion. The fact that I’d tried wasn’t good enough for me. All that mattered was that I’d failed.

  eight

  The pain I’d been pushing aside crashed into me with a vengeance. I coughed, ignoring the tinge of blood I could taste circling my mouth, and focused instead on the burning pinpricks biting at my legs.

  The road was littered with glass and shards of metal, and I was kneeling in it, had been for the last ten minutes. I forced myself to stand and searched for a clean spot to rest. But no matter where I looked, all I saw was dirty snow littered with debris. Debris and the occasional splatter of blood.

  “You going to be all right?” Chris asked.

  I shook my head, unable to grab on to a single one of the thousand thoughts flying through my brain. Everything hurt and nothing made sense. In the end, the only thing that struck me with any clarity was the image of a guy’s hand pressing against the window of that van and my inability to help him.

  I tried to heave myself off the ground, but my body protested, an impressive array of dark spots clouding my vision. I finally gave up and slumped back to the road, content to just die right there.

  Chris sat down next to me and began poking at a hole in his jeans like he was trying to wedge something free. It wasn’t until I heard the clink of glass bouncing off what was left of the guardrail that I realized what he was doing—pulling a large shard of glass out of his leg.

  “You made it all the way up here with that thing stuck in you?” I asked, amazed at his tolerance for pain.

  “Nope. I’m pretty sure I got it on the way up here.”

  I looked down at my own pants. They were torn in several places, dirt and tiny pieces of glass stuck in the fabric. But I wasn’t bleeding, not as bad as Chris anyway.

&nb
sp; “Any ideas?” I asked. The road was deserted, only one set of tracks coming in each direction, and even those were beginning to disappear under the still-falling snow.

  “Start walking, I guess,” Chris said. “Sitting here isn’t exactly an option. It’s not like we passed a crapload of gas stations or 7-Elevens.”

  He was right. My toes were already numb and most of my body ached. Plus, sitting here, staring at the charred remains of the vans down below, wasn’t something I wanted to do. I’d walk as far as I could until either my body or daylight gave out.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, struggling to my feet.

  “Any idea which way we came from?” Chris asked.

  “That way, I think,” I said, turning a complete circle in the road. “The guardrail was on our right, which means we were coming from that way.”

  Less than a quarter-mile down the road, Chris stopped walking and bent over, trying to catch his breath. He was hurt but fighting it. I wasn’t in much better shape. My lungs burned, my ribs ached, and the throbbing in my shoulder was getting worse. Between the pain and the cold that had lodged itself in my bones, I wasn’t going to make it much farther myself.

  We spotted a break in the road up ahead, a small path that looked like it led into the woods. “Think we should stop for a while and wait the storm out?” I asked, pointing to the path.

  “Nope, I’m fine,” Chris replied as he straightened up. “I just need a minute to rest.”

  I doubted a minute was going to make that much of a difference. What we needed was to find a place where we could sit down for a few hours, a place where the wind wasn’t constantly lashing at our backs. “This road is like one giant wind tunnel,” I said as I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my sweatshirt. “It would be warmer in the woods.”

  “If we leave the road, the chances of us being found are slim to none, and I didn’t crawl my way out of that van only to freeze to death in the woods,” Chris said.