Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
"The laptop won't survive a river crossing."
"I can waterproof the bag. The case is rated for submersion up to thirty minutes if we seal the port covers."
She's already doing it. Pulling the laptop, closing every port cover, wrapping the case in the plastic liner from the first-aid kit, sealing the edges with medical tape. Her hands are fast and precise and they don't shake. Not even the left one.
I check the mirror. The lead SUV is three hundred yards back. The second is just behind it, drafting on the straight. Two miles to the logging road.
"When we hit the turnoff, I'm going to brake hard. Brace yourself."
She wedges the sealed laptop bag between her knees and grabs the door handle with one hand and the center console with the other. "Ready."
One mile. The road is straight here, which means the SUVs are gaining. I can see the lead driver now, a shape behind tinted glass, pushing the big vehicle with the aggressive confidence of someone who has done this before and expects the ending to go his way.
Half a mile. I'm watching for the logging road. It won't be marked. It'll be a gap in the tree line, a break in the continuous wall of pines where the canopy opens just enough for a vehicle to slip through.
There.
The gap appears on the left. I stand on the brakes. The sedan's front end dives so hard the bumper nearly scrapes pavement. The tires howl. Enley is thrown forward against her bracing but holds position. I crank the wheel left and the car slides, rear end swinging wide, and for one long second we're pointed sideways across the road with the tree line coming up fast.
The tires catch. We shoot into the logging road like a round entering a barrel.
The road is everything I expected and worse. Mud. Ruts deep enough to swallow the front wheels. Branches that scrape the sides of the sedan with sounds like fingernails on metal. The surface is so rough that the damaged front end starts making noises I don't like, sharp metallic complaints that suggest the tie rod I was worried about has just become a more immediate problem.
Behind us, the lead SUV tries to make the same turn. It's too heavy and too fast. The rear end breaks loose on the mud and the vehicle slides past the opening, overcorrects, and nearly puts itself into the trees on the far side of the main road. The second SUV brakes in time and makes the turn, but it's lost distance.
"One still on us," Enley reports.
"How far to the mill site?"
"About two miles. The road gets worse."
She's right. It gets worse. The ruts deepen into channels that the sedan straddles with diminishing clearance. Branches don't just scrape anymore, they crack against the windshield and leave wet smears of moss and lichen. The engine temperature gauge is in the red zone. Something under the car is dragging, a metallic scrape that sends sparks visible in the peripheral vision of my mirrors.
We're killing the car. It's given us everything it has and we're running on borrowed time and borrowed machinery.
A mile in, the road narrows to a point where the trees are close enough to touch from inside the car. The SUV behind us is still coming but it's taking damage too. I can hear its engine laboring, hear the crack and groan of branches against its wider body. They're committed. They followed us into the logging road and now they're stuck in the same tube we're in, unable to turn around, unable to do anything except keep pushing forward.
The mill site appears as a sudden opening. The trees pull back and the road widens into a clearing of packed mud and old concrete foundations. The ruins of the mill are just that: ruins. Collapsed walls of brick and timber, overgrown with ten years of unchecked vegetation. The river is beyond it, maybe fifty yards past the last standing wall. I can hear the water. Fast. Cold. Swollen from the recent rain.
I stop the car. The engine makes a sound like a sigh of relief and then a clunk that says it isn't starting again.
"Go," I say.
We grab the bag and run. The clearing is open ground and the SUV is going to emerge from the logging road in about thirty seconds. I put Enley in front of me and we sprint toward the mill ruins. Old concrete underfoot. Broken glass. The remains of a chain-link fence that someone cut through years ago. Past the first collapsed wall. Past a rusted piece of machinery that might’ve been a saw frame. Past a loading dock whose concrete lip is cracked and tilting toward the river.
The water comes into view. It's wider than the satellite imagery suggested. Maybe forty feet across. Moving fast, brown with runoff, the kind of cold that tells you the mountains it came from still have snow on them.