Darby cranked into reverse. Tried again. Throttled it, again and again. No luck; the tires spun until the cab stank with scorched rubber.
The truck was stuck there, facing the wrong way on the rightmost northbound lane of State Route Seven, just ahead of the blue REST AREA sign. She craned her neck to look back through the splintered rear window — all in all, she’d made it less than fifty feet down the highway. A quarter-mile from the Wanapani building, tops. She could still see the orange parking lot lights through a copse of jagged Douglas firs. It didn’t actually matter if they found their keys, because Ashley and Lars were still within walking distance.
“Shit-shit—shit.” She punched the wheel, accidentally blaring the horn.
Jay looked back, too. “Can they catch up to us?”
Yes, yes, yes, a hundred-percent yes—
“No,” Darby said. “We drove too far. But stay inside.” She opened the driver door, sprinkling loose bits of glass, and slid out into the deep snow. She felt old and tired. Her bones ached. Her eyes still stung with pepper spray.
“What are you doing?”
“Digging us out.” She circled the Ford’s front bumper, squinting in the half-submerged headlights. Her stomach plunged when she saw the huge mound of displaced snow, sloughed into a rolling snowball in front of the truck’s grill. It must have been a hundred pounds, maybe more, as dense and hopeless as wet cement.
She almost collapsed at the sight of it. The enormity of it.
But then her eyes fell on the little girl behind the cracked windshield, on the verge of an Addisonian crisis. An anxiety-time bomb; a single bad moment away from a seizure, or a coma, or worse.
So Darby dropped to her bruised knees and started to dig.
“Can I help?” Jay asked.
“No. You can’t over-exert yourself. Just focus on my cell phone, please. Tell me if it gets a signal.” She lifted a crumbling snow-boulder and heaved it aside. Her bare fingers throbbed with coldness.
Seven miles, she thought, glancing downhill.
Seven miles to that jackknifed semi. Could that really be all? She imagined a busy accident scene down there, swarming with first responders, bustling with lights and motion. The red-and-blue pulse of police light bars. Road maintenance crews in reflective jackets. Paramedics inserting tubes into throats. Dazed victims being evacuated on chattering gurneys.
All of that, just seven miles down the dark road. It didn’t seem possible.
Seven miles.
State Route Seven was raised here where they’d crashed, cresting the upper lip of a switchback. The coniferous trees were at their thinnest, the land rocky and vertical. In daylight, with clear weather, this might’ve opened up into stunning mountain panorama. But here and now, it was perhaps the only stretch of Backbone Pass that had even the barest chance of catching a cell signal. To hell with Ashley’s Nightmare Children. In hindsight, she understood that had almost certainly been another of his lies. Another wicked ruse, to make her waste her battery.
Another gust of wind breathed up the mountain, creaking branches, tugging her sleeves, lifting strange swirls of powder that slithered across the roadway like passing ghosts.
“Hey, Jay,” she panted as she dug, straining for conversation to fill the eerie silence. Trying to keep the mood light, pleasant, unhurried. “What . . . what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m not telling.”
“Why?”
“You’ll tease me again.”
Darby leaned around the Ford’s headlights, checking the rest stop’s exit ramp for the advancing figures of Ashley and Lars. No sign of them yet. “Come on, Jay. You owe me. I took pepper spray in the face for you.”
“It wasn’t for me. It was aimed at you.”
“You know what I mean—”
“A paleontologist,” the girl answered.
“A what?”
“A paleontologist.”
“Like . . . like a dinosaur fossil hunter?”
“Yeah,” Jay said. “That’s what a paleontologist does.”
But Darby wasn’t listening. She’d noticed the truck’s tire looked strangely flabby, and now her blood froze. She brushed away another armful of snow and saw a steel circle protruding from the tire’s sidewall. A nail head. She heard it now — the gentle, reptilian hiss. Leaking air.
She crawled to the other tire. Two more nails pierced into the treads.
Oh God, this was Ashley’s backup plan all along.
She punched snow. “Shit.”
He disabled all of the cars, just in case we managed to escape in one— But this didn’t make sense — why, then, would Ashley nail-gun the tires of Sandi’s truck, too? If she was an integral part of the kidnapping plot? After they’d taken all that care to meet up here, in the frozen Rockies?
Jay peered over the door. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” Darby scrambled back to the front of Sandi’s truck and resumed digging, double-time. Her heart racing, thudding against her ribs, as she tried to appear calm. “Jaybird, tell me. What’s . . . what’s your favorite dinosaur?”
“I like them all.”
“Yeah, but you have to have a favorite. T-Rex? Raptor? Triceratops?”
“Eustreptospondylus.”
“I . . . I have no idea what that is.”
“That’s why I like it.”
“Describe it, please.” Darby just needed to keep the conversation going, scooping armfuls of snow, her frantic thoughts churning: He’s coming for us. Right now, he’s catching up to us, and he’s carrying that nail gun— “It’s a carnivore,” the girl said. “Walks on two hind legs. Jurassic period. Three fingers on each hand, kind of like a raptor—”
“You could have just said ‘raptor,’ then.”
“No. It’s Eustreptospondylus.”
“Sounds like a shitty dinosaur.”
“You couldn’t spell it,” Jay said, pausing. “Oh. Your phone found a signal—”
Darby jolted upright and ran to the passenger door, reaching through the shattered window, snatching her iPhone from Jay’s fingers. She didn’t believe it until she saw it — a lone signal bar. Blinking urgently. “Your turn to dig,” she said.
“The battery’s one percent—”
“I know.”
The door croaked, sprinkling more glass, and Jay jumped out. Darby held the phone with red fingers, mashing 9-1-1 with her thumb — but the phone vibrated in her hand, startling her. A NEW MESSAGE bubble blocked her touchscreen. She was about to swipe past it, until she saw the sender’s number.
It was 9-1-1.
An answer to her text message; the one she’d tried to send hours ago tonight, and must have only now successfully auto-sent:Child abduction gray van license plate VBH9045 state route 7 Wanapa rest stop send police.
The answer?
Find a safe place. Officer coming ETA 30.
Darby almost dropped her phone. ETA, as in estimated time of arrival. 30 must be minutes, right? It couldn’t be hours, or days— Thirty minutes.
“Is it working?” Jay asked, panting as she dug.