The Blood We Spill: Suspense with a Dash of Humor (The Letty Whittaker 12 Step Mysteries) (40 page)

“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 thrashed 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.

N
ight 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 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 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.

It wasn’t for joy.

Light exploded like a bomb all around us. Glancing
over my shoulder, I saw two headlights growing bigger, brighter, and closer
with every second. The roar of its engine made the ATV sound like a wind-up
toy.

The lights weren’t stopping. I wrenched the
handles to the right and we bounded into the shallow ditch that bordered a
cornfield. We lucked out, this time. The ditch had obviously been used
regularly by other off-road vehicles seeking to avoid the highway.
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to branch off anywhere. Worse, a galvanized wire
mesh fence ran parallel to the track, making it impossible for us to escape
into the cornfield.

The pickup pulled even with us, the passenger side
window rolling down. That meant there were at least two of them. I almost
didn’t register the significance until the crack of gunshot zinged past my
head. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a near stop.

The bastards had a gun. Handgun, I thought. I
didn’t remember seeing the barrel of a shotgun or rifle, thank God. A shotgun,
with its wider spray, would have nailed one or more of us, for sure.

The truck barreled ahead, so I took the chance to
shoot up the bank, back onto the road, then down into the opposite ditch,
hoping to find a way off the road.

Thick hedges bordered the outlying field and were
just as impenetrable as the fence. The truck slowed and came up even with us
again. I sped up, praying a culvert or other obstacle wouldn’t suddenly
materialize in front of us.

Looking across, I found myself staring into
Justus’s handsome face. Not so handsome, now—especially since his nose had
swollen to the size of an Idaho potato. His teeth were pulled back in a feral
grimace, and even as I watched, he swerved the truck, crossing the road as
though he was going to plunge the truck into the ditch after us.