Chapter 2 - The Light in the Ravine
The beam of light didn't sweep the forest like a search party looking for survivors. It was steady, clinical, moving with an eerie, practiced rhythm.
It illuminated the torn briars, the smashed ferns, and the deep, skidding tracks our bodies had carved through the mud as we fell.
I pressed Valerie’s head down into the hollow beneath the oak root, burying her face against my ribs, using my dark fleece coat to shield her pale skin from the glare above. I squeezed my eyes shut, holding my breath until my lungs burned, my face pressed into the freezing black rot of the leaves.
The halogen beam hovered directly over us for five excruciating seconds. I could feel the faint warmth of the lens through my wet clothes.
"Hey," a voice called down from the top of the embankment.
It wasn't the voice of a panicked driver who had lost control on black ice. It wasn't the voice of a man asking if we were okay.
It was low, raspy, completely devoid of inflection—like gravel being turned over in a rusty bucket.
"I saw you," the voice said.
A quiet, wet cough rattled from the man’s throat above us, followed by the distinct clink of a glass bottle hitting the steel guardrail.
"I saw the white jacket," he continued. He spoke slowly, drawling his words out as if he had all the time in the world. "You jumped over the steel. You think that mud's gonna keep you warm out here, sweethearts? It’s thirty degrees. You stay down there twenty minutes, you won't ever get back up."
Valerie shuddered violently against my chest. I pressed my hand tighter over her mouth, feeling the frantic, shallow puffs of her breath against my palm. Stay still, I prayed into the dirt. Please, God, stay still.
Above us, a heavy metallic latch clinked again. The trunk of the car groaned open.
Then came a sound that made the blood in my veins freeze solid.
The heavy, unmistakable double-click of a sliding steel bolt. A metallic clack-clack that carried through the damp night air with terrifying clarity.
He was loading a firearm. A long gun. A pump-action shotgun or a hunting rifle.
"I got a rope in the back," the man called down, his tone conversational, almost pleasant in its utter detachment. "I can pull you up. Or I can come down there and help you up. But one way or another, you're coming out of that ditch."
Footsteps began to slide down the steep incline. Slosh. Crunch. Slosh.
He was coming down.
Every survival instinct I possessed screamed at me to run, but running up a forty-five-degree muddy slope against a man with a gun and a flashlight was suicide.
I looked down at the dark bottom of the ravine.
The embankment didn't stop where we lay; it sloped deeper into a narrow, stone-choked creek bed that cut through the state forest—a natural drainage channel carved by years of mountain runoff. The trees down there grew thicker, their lower branches weaving together into an impenetrable black canopy of cedar and mountain laurel.
I leaned my mouth directly against Valerie’s ear, my lips touching her cold skin.
"When I pull your hand," I whispered, so softly the sound was swallowed by the rain, "you crawl on your stomach. Do not stand up. Follow the creek line. Do you understand?"
She gave a microscopic nod against my shoulder.
I didn't look back at the light. I grabbed the collar of her jacket, and together, like two wounded animals, we slid backward off the root system, plunging deeper into the dark throat of the ravine.
"Hey!" the voice barked from fifty feet above us. The halogen beam whipped violently through the trees, catching the edge of my dark coat as I ducked beneath a fallen pine log.
BOOM.
A flash of orange lightning shattered the darkness, accompanied by a deafening roar that shook the damp earth beneath us.
A shower of shredded pine bark and splinters rained down on our heads as a heavy charge of lead shot pulverized the trunk of the oak tree we had been hiding behind three seconds earlier. The smell of burnt gunpowder—sharp, sulfurous, and hot—swept through the wet air, overpowering the scent of pine and mud.
Valerie let out a muffled shriek, but I dragged her forward by the belt of her shorts, scrambling through the freezing, calf-deep water of the creek.
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"Run!" I hissed, abandoning all caution. "Run!"
We didn't look back. We crashed through the icy creek bed, our feet tearing through submerged gravel and slippery river stones. Behind us, the man let out a long, wheezing laugh—a sound that cut through the darkness like a rusty saw blade—followed by the heavy, rhythmic clack-clack of his shotgun being cycled once more.
