As mentioned Monday, I have a new e-book available when you sign up for my weekly (or so) newsletter. It is called Escaped, and is about a girl that is abducted and escapes her captor, only to be abducted again years later. It is very different from my Dixon-Prince stories. Currently I don’t have any plans to release it aside from as a gift for subscribing to the newsletter. The subscription form is just to the right… –>
Steve Bird pulled off the state highway into the gas station. He’d been leading, but as they approached the trail they had talked about, he became less sure of his sense of direction. He’d been there a couple of times, but Garrett had always been the one to take the lead. He always marveled that Garrett usually knew a trail somewhere that they hadn’t done. He waved his friend around as he called out on the radio for him to take the lead. Then his phone rang.Read More
Garrett pulled back out, but when he looked up in the rearview, Steve was still sitting in the gas station. Garrett rolled to the side of the road and called out to him on the radio.
“Sorry, Man. My mom just called. I gotta bail. Her car died and I have to take her to work. I’ll call you on the cell after I drop her off and maybe I can catch up to you,” he said over the radio.
“Whatever, Dude. Later,” Garrett replied. He put on his blinker and pulled back into traffic and turned up his stereo. He knew there was no cell coverage anywhere around Booth Valley, where they were headed.
A few miles later he turned off the main road onto a two-lane country road, then onto the dirt road that led back to the trailhead. He slowed and moved to the side of the road as the Sheriff’s car passed by him going the other way and waved. When it was past him, he sped up a little and kept driving.
He loved driving by the old farms out here. Aside from a few he’d run across, everyone he met had been very friendly. Often, when he was getting ready to hit a trail, he would end up in a conversation with a local. More often than not, they would know of another trail for him to try. He kept a little notebook in his console with directions. He had found several challenging runs that way… and that was how he had found the trail he was on his way to today. It wasn’t challenging, but it was fun.
A mile after the police car he turned onto narrow two-track. “Stage Road” it said on the street sign. He always thought it was funny when there was a street sign in the middle of nowhere, especially when the “street” was a pair of muddy ruts.
He drove a few yards up the trail to a wide spot and jumped out. He walked to the front and locked in both hubs. He checked around his Jeep to make sure everything looked the way it should… it always did, but it was a habit his father had pushed off on him.
He hopped back into the Jeep and pulled the transfer case shifter back into 4wd high, then a little further back into low-range. When he let the clutch out, the Jeep lurched forward and smoothed out at a pace just below walking speed. He could have done the first mile in two-wheel-drive, but that was another habit his father ingrained… not to spin tires trying to see how far you could make it before shifting into 4×4. Besides, in low range the Jeep just rolled along at a little more than walking speed, idling in second gear.
“What the…” he said as he pulled up to the creek crossing. There was a girl huddled on the far bank, a little downstream. She looked naked. The temperature outside was probably hovering around fifty, and being wet and naked… she had to be half frozen, he thought to himself.
“Hey, are you ok?” he yelled at her. She looked up and even from twenty yards away, he could see the terror in her face. “Do you need help?”
He drove across the creek to the side she was on and cut the Jeep off, leaving it in the middle of the trail. He jumped out and started walking along the bank toward her. “You must be freezing,” he said calmly, “let me help you.” The girl had twigs stuck in her hair and mud smudged on her face and all over her body.
She hadn’t moved. It was like she had been rooted to the spot. But she also never took her wide eyes off him. He raised his arms wide to show her that he wasn’t carrying any sort of weapon and meant her no harm. Then he saw that she had a knife in her hand. She was holding it low, but she could barely control her shivering.
Her lips were cracked and purple, and her teeth were chattering so much that when she finally spoke, he could barely understand her. “C-c-c-c-c-old-d-d-d,” she said.
“Let me get you a blanket, I have one in the Jeep,” he said as he started backing away from her. He turned and trotted back to his Jeep and pulled out an old horse blanket he kept behind the seats. It was rough and stiff, but it should also help her warm-up. It was all he had.
When he turned around, she was only a few steps away. She was crouching and trying to cover nudity, but she was still trying to look threatening with the knife.
“It’s gonna be ok,” he said to her, “I promise. My name is Garrett.” He put his hands out, but she just stared back at him. “Yeah… ok… well, here’s a blanket,” he said, unfolding it. “What are you doing out here like this? You could freeze to death.”
She wrapped the blanket around herself, but still held the knife in her hand, sticking out past the edge of the blanket. “H-h-h-he t-t-ook-k-k m-m-me,” she said softly, shivering violently. “W-w-w-as g-g-g-onna k-k-ill m-me.”
He approached her again, hands still held wide. She looked at him warily, but he could tell she was losing strength. Before he could catch her, she toppled to the ground. He scooped her up and carried her back to the passenger seat of the Jeep. He ran to the back and got the doors and put them on, then hopped behind the driver’s seat and started it up so he could turn on the heat.
He dived into the back again and rummaged up some socks and shoes, a pair of rain pants, a flannel shirt and a jacket. Everything was going to be huge on her, but it would be better than nothing.
He went to slip her feet into the socks when he saw how cut-up they were. He grabbed his first aid kit from behind the seat and went to work cleaning up the worst of the cuts and the bloody, raw skin around her ankles, then he slipped her delicate feet into the socks. He winced to himself as he pulled the scratchy wool socks over her injured feet and ankles.
He reached up and stroked her face with the back of his hand and plucked some of the sticks from her hair. Her skin was still cold, but not as cold as it had been a minute ago. He slipped the knife out of her hand, folded it and set it in the cup holder on the front of the console. Then he noticed her wrist had the same type of bloody, raw skin all the way around her ankles. It looked to him like a rope burn from a manilla fiber rope, but he’d never seen it as bad as this.
He slipped her hand back inside the blanket and wrapped it a little more tightly around her, then pulled out the seatbelt and put it around her. Just he was getting ready to close the door and go to the other side, she started struggling against the seatbelt.
“Hey, hey, hey… it’s ok. You’re ok now,” he said to her.
“No, stop, leave me alone,” she screamed back. She was hysterical, thrashing against the seatbelt, which had locked from her sudden movements. “I’ll kill you.” Then she looked at him. She slowly calmed down a little bit. “Please let me go. I won’t tell anyone,” she said, pleading.
“Won’t tell anyone what? I didn’t do anything. I was just trying to help you. You were freezing. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Why do you have me tied up? I can’t move.”
“Here,” he said, reaching past her to unbuckle her seatbelt and then stepping back. “I just want to help you.”
She looked at him for a minute like a cornered animal after she made sure she could move. She was scared and cold and didn’t want to trust anyone. But he really seemed to be trying to help her. “Did you put socks on me?” she asked, her voice barely above a squeak.
“Yeah. I have some other stuff, too, but I figured you didn’t want me peeling back the blanket. She flinched as he reached across her to pick the small pile of clothes up from the driver’s seat. He set them on her lap. “I’ll go over by the creek and wait if you want.”
“Th-thank you, she said. As soon as he stepped away, she quickly slipped on the rain pants and flannel shirt. He’d left some boots on the floor of the Jeep and she slipped her feet into them, but they were so big she wouldn’t be able to walk in them. She pulled the jacket on, then stole a look over her shoulder to where he was standing. He was staring off into the distance, and not looking at her. “Ok,” she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. “I’m ready.”
He turned around and smiled at her before he moseyed back in her direction. He walked straight to the side of the Jeep she was sitting on. “Those going to work for you?” Even sitting on the seat, the clothes hung limply off her. He was over six feet tall, and she couldn’t have been more than five-four and must have only weighed about half of his two-hundred pounds, if that.
“Thank you. I’m sorry,” she replied.
“Do you want me to take you to the police?” he asked.
He saw her start to shake. “Please… no… not the police. This was a bad idea. I have to go.” She started trying to get out of the Jeep struggling and shaking while she tried to get the blanket off again.
“Easy. It’s ok. What’s your name?” he asked her, trying to calm her down.
“Kelly,” she replied.
She’d gone back to the quiet voice. He was worried about her. She was still shivering.
“Kelly, when was the last time you ate?”
“I… I don’t know. What day is it?”
Garrett ran around to the back of the Jeep and opened his cooler. He had several bologna and cheese sandwiches and some Cokes. He brought her one of the sandwiches and put a bottle of Coke in the console cupholder by the knife she’d been carrying. “Bologna and cheese with mustard,” he said, smiling and handing her the sandwich.
Her hunger overcame her fear, and she devoured the sandwich. He grabbed another one for her, then went around and got back into the Jeep. He slipped the Jeep into reverse and started to back off the trail. She needed help, and it wasn’t going to come to them here.
“No police,” she said again, louder this time.
When he looked over at her, she was shaking again. He knew it had to be fear. “Did the police do this to you?” he asked.
“No… I don’t know… maybe. Or they knew,” she said, pulling back into her shell.
He shifted the Jeep out of four-wheel-drive and turned back onto the dirt road and started heading down the mountain. Just before he got to the switchbacks, she saw the Sheriff’s car on the road below them, heading their way. The first switchback was probably half a mile away.
“STOP,” she yelled, “go back… they’re coming.” He thought that if he didn’t get turned around, she would jump from the moving Jeep and stumble off into the woods again.
Garrett slammed on the brakes and threw the Jeep in reverse. He backed up into the ditch on the side of the road and turned around as quickly as he could and headed back toward the trail. He quickly made the turn, stopped and shifted back into four-wheel-drive, but left it in high-range.
Normally he liked to take his time and didn’t hurry on the trail, but he wanted to get out of sight, so he pushed along the trail as fast as he dared. He made it a couple of miles, to the beginning of the hard part, before stopping and shifting into low range.
She looked in front of the Jeep and saw a boulder strewn wash. To her eyes, there was no road, only giant rocks. She was surprised when the Jeep lurched forward and started crawling over the washing-machine sized boulders, climbing up and falling off of them, rocking back and forth.
Garrett was in deep concentration, sitting up in his seat, scanning the route ahead. He fought his inclination to keep a death grip on the steering wheel. Sometimes, the wheel would jerk one way or the other suddenly and he didn’t want to break a thumb with one of the spokes of the steering wheel when it snapped back.
“Where does this go?” she asked, breaking her silence for the first time since screaming about the police car.
“It goes over Booth Mountain, and then down into the valley on the other side. There is a little ghost town in the valley. Then, it follows a small river for a couple of miles and climbs out of the valley toward Meridian. I’ve driven it a few times. There are some other branches, but that is the one I usually take.”
She regarded him for a moment. She was starting to feel more trust for him. He didn’t seem like he was trying to trick her. More importantly, she trusted his eyes.
“What’s your name again?” she asked him after a moment.
Without taking his eyes off the route in front of them, he replied, “Garrett, but sometimes people call me Sparky.”
“Why?”
“When I was just a kid, my dad taught me to weld. The welding throws a lot of sparks. He was joking around and called me Sparky in front of a couple of the guys… it stuck.”
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“I guess. I don’t know. My nickname could be Booger or something. That would suck,” he said, looking over at her and smiling.
She smiled back.
“You have a really pretty smile,” he said. Even though it had been strained, he did see her beautiful smile. But it was offset by the gauntness of her face and how far her eyes were sunk into their sockets. Her hair was stringy and dirty, and she looked terribly pale.
She turned and looked out her window at the passing trail.
