NO EXIT by Taylor Adams
Sent: 12/23 6:52 p.m.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
We’ll do it tonight. Then we'll need a place to sleep for a few weeks. And I need to know — for sure — that you’re good for what we talked about. Send me the numbers. Then delete this email and I'll delete yours.
I’m stuck out in a rest stop in Nowhere, Colorado, the blizzard is getting worse, and I’m about to do something that can’t be undone.
Oh, and Merry Christmas.
DUSK
7:39 p.m.
December 23
“Screw you, Bing Crosby.”
Darby Thorne was six miles up Backbone Pass when her windshield wiper broke, and that bass-baritone voice was just kicking into the second chorus. It was official: he’d be getting his white Christmas. He could shut up about it now.
She thumbed the radio dial (nothing else but static) and watched her left wiper blade flap like a fractured wrist. She considered pulling over to duct-tape it, but there was no highway shoulder — just walled embankments of dirty ice crowding her right and left. She was afraid to stop anyway. The snowflakes had been big and soppy when she’d blown through Gypsum ninety minutes ago, but they’d grown smaller and grittier as her altitude climbed. They were hypnotic now in her racing headlights, a windshield of stars smearing into light speed.
Chains mandatory, warned the last sign she’d seen.
Darby didn’t own snow chains. Not yet, at least. This was her freshman year at CU-Boulder and she’d never planned on venturing any further off-campus than Ralphie’s Thriftway. She remembered walking back from there last month, half-drunk with a gaggle of half-friends from her dorm, and when one of them asked her (only half-giving a shit) where she’d planned to go for Christmas break, Darby had answered bluntly: that it would require an act of God Himself to make her come back home to Utah.
And apparently He’d been listening, because He’d blessed Darby’s mother with late-stage pancreatic cancer.
She’d learned this yesterday.
Via text message.
SCRAPE-SCRAPE. The bent wiper blade slapped the glass again, but the snowflakes were dry enough, and the car’s speed fast enough, that the windshield stayed clear. The real problem was the accumulating snow on the road. The yellow lane markers were already hidden by several inches of fresh white, and periodically Darby felt her Honda Civic’s chassis rake the surface. It returned like a wet cough, a little worse every time. On the last one, she’d felt the steering wheel vibrate between her knuckled fingers. Another inch of powder and she’d be stranded up here, nine thousand feet above sea level with a quarter-tank of gas, no cell coverage, and only her troubled thoughts for company.
And the brassy voice of Bing Crosby, she supposed. He crooned the final chorus as Darby took a sip of warm Red Bull.
SCRAPE-SCRAPE.
The entire drive had been like this — a blurry, bloodshot charge through miles of foothills and scrub plains. No time to stop. All she’d eaten today was ibuprofen. She’d left her desk lamp on in her dorm room, but she’d only noticed this as she left the Dryden parking lot — too far to turn back. Stomach acid in her throat. Pirated Schoolyard Heroes and My Chemical Romance tracks looping on her (now dead) iPod. Racing green signboards with faded fast food decals. Boulder had vanished in her rearview mirror around noon, and then the foggy skyline of Denver with its fleet of grounded jets, and finally little Gypsum behind a screen of falling snowflakes.
SCRAPE-SCRAPE.
Bing Crosby’s White Christmas faded, and the next holiday song queued up. She’d heard them all twice now.
Her Honda bucked sharply left. Red Bull splashed in her lap. The steering wheel went rigid in her grip and she fought it for a stomach-fluttery second (turn into the skid, turn into the skid) before twisting the vehicle back under control, still moving forward and uphill — but losing speed. Losing traction.
“No, no, no.” She pumped the gas.
The all-weather tires gripped and released in the sludgy snow, heaving the car in violent contractions. Steam sizzled off the hood.
“Come on, Blue—”
SCRAPE-SCRAPE.
She’d called this car Blue since she got it in high school. Now she feathered the gas pedal, searching for the sensory feedback of traction. Twin spurts of snow kicked up in her rearview mirror, lit vivid red by her taillights. A harsh rattling sound — Blue’s undercarriage scraping the snow’s surface again. The car struggled and fishtailed, half-boat now, and—
SCRAPE—
—The left wiper blade snapped off and twirled away.
Her heart sank. “Oh, shit.”
Now the incoming snowflakes stuck to the left hemisphere of her windshield, rapidly gathering on the unguarded glass. She’d lost too much speed. In seconds, her view of State Route Seven had narrowed into tunnel vision, and she punched her steering wheel. The horn bleated, heard by no one.
This is how people die, she realized with a shiver. In blizzards, people get trapped out in rural areas and run out of gas.
They freeze to death.
She sipped her Red Bull — empty.
She clicked off the radio, leaned into the passenger seat to see the road, and tried to remember — what was the last car she’d seen today? How many miles back? It had been an orange snowplow with CDOT stenciled on the door, hugging the right lane and spouting a plume of ice chips. At least an hour ago. Back when the sun had been out.
Now it was just a gray lantern slipping behind jagged peaks, and the sky was dimming to a bruised purple. Frozen fir trees becoming jagged silhouettes. The lowlands darkening into lakes of shadow. The temperature was 4° according to the Shell Station signboard she’d passed thirty miles back. Probably colder now.
Then she saw it: a half-buried green sign in a snow berm to her right. It crept up on her, catching the glow of her Honda’s dirty headlights in a flash: 365 DAYS SINCE THE LAST FATAL ACCIDENT.
The count was probably a few days off due to the snowstorm, but she still found it eerie. One year, exactly. It made tonight some sort of grim anniversary. It felt strangely personal, like one of her gravestone rubbings.
And behind it, another sign.
REST AREA AHEAD.
*
Seen one? You’ve seen them all.
One longhouse structure (visitor center, restrooms, maybe a volunteer-run convenience store or coffee shop) nestled among wind-blasted firs and chapped rock faces. A bare flagpole. A drum-like slice of an ancient tree. A crowd of bronze statues buried to their waists; taxpayer-funded art honoring some local doctor or pioneer. And an offshoot parking lot with a handful of parked cars — other stranded motorists like herself, waiting for the snowplows to arrive.
Darby had passed dozens of rest areas since Boulder. Some bigger, most better, all less isolated. But this one, apparently, was the one fate had chosen for her.