Hairpin Bridge

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  Unless he kills them, too.

  Maybe he will.

  A jarring pulse of red and blue behind her. He’s flicked on his light bar. The wail of a pursuing siren. It doesn’t sound like other sirens she’s heard—it’s too low-pitched, too heavy, like an underwater echo from a nightmare. Maybe it’s the adrenaline clouding her thoughts.

  She’s also oddly offended. Do you think I’m an idiot?

  She reaches out her window and flips Raycevic the bird. In answer, the siren cuts off abruptly.

  At first this feels triumphant, like landing a good comeback. But it fades quickly. He was just acting out a ruse. Corporal Raycevic—if that’s his real name—tried playing the role of highway cop one last time, to try to appeal to her sense of responsibility as a law-abiding citizen. Maybe it works with other people. Not Cambry. So, he discarded it.

  His light bar remains on, though. The red-and-blue flash gives him more peripheral light to pursue her through the darkening country. The steady, relentless strobe of it needles into Cambry’s thoughts, giving her a headache. She flips the rearview mirror down to reduce the glare.

  For the next mile or two, they drive in silence.

  She’s going sixty—eighty in the straightaways, wherever possible. She wants to go faster, but the road is too dark and ropy, rising and dropping. The twists come hard and fast in the dying twilight. And Raycevic’s Charger remains firmly planted on her ass, the same twenty feet behind her bumper. A beacon of vivid color, pulsing a silent heartbeat against glass.

  Cambry isn’t stopping. She won’t. She’s not stupid, and she understands the danger. She tries to think ahead. What will this cop try next, then? He’ll need to force her to stop. He might try crashing into her, knocking her car into a spin. Or maybe he’ll pull alongside her and shoot her through a window. Whatever he might do, he’ll need to do it fast, because soon she’ll be out of this cellular dead zone and able to call the police. The real police.

  Time is on your side, Cambry. She realizes this with a funny twinge.

  All you have to do is keep driving.

  The next turn comes up fast—an ugly, banking ribbon—and she has to pump her brakes and cut her speed all the way down to forty-five. She hates doing it. The car pulls a bit, fighting her. A tire nudges the panic strip with a harsh buzz.

  Keep moving, stay alive.

  She tightens her grip on the wheel. Clearing the hard turn, she quickly accelerates, and so does the Charger behind her.

  It’s lunacy, but she’s starting to feel good about the whole thing. Yes, time is absolutely on Cambry’s side, and not his. All she has to do is keep driving like hell. It’s a chase, but one she can win. Because eventually, one dark mile or the next, she’ll come across another motorist, or the glimmering lights of the next town, or the magic threshold for the Verizon cell signal.

  Then her gas light clicks on.

  Part 2

  The Plastic Man

  Chapter 7

  Cambry Nguyen knows from experience that without Blake’s trailer, her Corolla can last roughly thirty miles on a low fuel light. That’s the farthest she’s ever pushed her luck. From Fort Myers to Fargo, she’s always been diligent to watch her maps, mind her location, and never stray far from a population center. Whether it’s a few bucks at a gas station or a quick siphon from a parking lot, she’s never been careless enough to let her tank run empty too far from civilization. But she wasn’t counting on that asshole reaching through her window and grabbing her backpack.

  Thirty miles. That’s the known limit.

  Polk City is forty-two miles ahead, according to the next sign she sees. A twelve-mile difference. She wonders—what’s the fuel reserve of a 2007 Toyota Corolla?

  Thirty miles. Plus twelve more.

  She stares at the dim orange fuel pump icon just below the E. Driving to Polk City is a major gamble, she knows. If she’s wrong—even a mile short of forty-two—she’ll coast to a halt in a dead car and he’ll catch her defenseless on the road. A knife won’t save her. He’ll shoot her or strangle her or rape her. Whatever he was planning to do when he first asked her to step out, barely twenty minutes ago.

  But maybe . . . maybe cell signal will resume sooner than forty-two miles? This is likely, since Polk City is a population center. There’s bound to be some sprawl. But it won’t solve her gasoline problem. Getting a successful 911 call out won’t help her if he murders her on the spot.

  “Shit.” She punches her steering wheel.

  The cop car still tails her. Plenty of gas in his tank.

  Time is not on your side. Her heart sinks. Not at all.

  The cop switches off his light bar behind her. Another act discarded. Maybe it was interfering with his night vision? It’s still something of a relief on Cambry’s nerves. Now it’s a clearer, simpler world of black night, headlights, and racing pavement.

  She tries to collect her thoughts. It’s already been a minute since she passed that green sign, so now it’s forty-one miles to Polk City. She has one less mile in her tank. The engine itself is a ticking clock. Burning her finite supply of fuel, slurping away at a descending total every minute, every second—

  Think, she urges herself. Just think.

  This is a bad bet.

  She can keep driving the remaining forty-odd miles to Polk City, and make it the entire way if she’s lucky. She has no idea how much spare fuel she has. Her odds could be a coin flip. Or they could be significantly worse.

  Magma Springs, she remembers with a jolt. Twenty miles away. Maybe twenty-five, now? It’s directly behind her. There won’t be a cell signal—at least not until she’s right in the middle of whatever their Main Street is—but she has enough gas to get there, for certain. The town itself is roughly the size of Polk City. Maybe larger. There should be a sheriff’s department or a grocery store or a gas station or something with living, awake people inside it. People who can be eyewitnesses.

  “Okay,” she whispers.

  If you turn around . . .

  “Okay, okay, okay . . .”

  Another hard turn comes up—she holds her speed at seventy this time. The world banks like a racetrack. Loose change rattles in the console. She twists to avoid the panic strip and nearly overcorrects into the oncoming lane.

  Coming out of the turn, the black Charger is still pinned on her tail. Headlights burn into her rear window. Just like the last turn. Raycevic is a trained pursuit driver; he knows exactly how these chases unfold and he’s barely lost an inch on her.

  She’s already preparing for it, and she hasn’t fully thought it through yet. But yes, she knows what she needs to do. Staying the course to Polk City is a mistake. She needs to turn around, to go back to Magma Springs, which is a safer bet and half the distance. She needs to slam on her brakes and turn around. Somehow, without getting caught. Or shot. Or rammed off the road.

  She decides: She’ll do it on the count of three. Just like Raycevic, standing outside her car with that wide smile, strawberry antacids caked on his teeth, his hand on his Glock.

  “One.” Her foot hovers on the brake pedal.

  The speedometer needle hovers, too, at seventy-one. She can’t slow down now, because that will be a tell. The cop will match her speed. And if she takes the turn too slowly, he’ll seize his chance to ram her right off the road. She’ll be vulnerable taking that turn, facing him broadside.

  She imagines her car wrecking in the trees, tumbling and blossoming into a fireball—“Two”—and she grinds her molars. Her toothache is back.

  You’re going too fast.

  No, she’s going just fast enough.

  And if he rear-ends you by mistake? And knocks you off the road?

  A risk, but an acceptable one. Certainly better than running out of gas ten miles from the outskirts of Polk City, dead on the road with an armed psychopath on her tail. Better odds than anything else right now. That’s an objective fact, she tells herself as his headlights scorch the edges of her vision.

&nbs
p; Three?

  She’s afraid to say it. It’s trapped in her throat like a cough. But she forces it through, forces her lips to part, to form the word:

  “Three—”

  She stomps the brakes.

  The entire world seems to drop anchor. A brain-jarring impact without impact. The metal shriek of locking brake pads in her left and right eardrums. The seat belt whips out of nowhere and clotheslines her, punching the air from her lungs.

  A flurry of shifting light—the Charger swerves hard to his left. His high beams flash as intensely as sunlight, and Cambry knows in the pit of her gut that he’s not dodging her fast enough, that he’s going to clip her tail and wreck them both. But the instant passes. He doesn’t. He didn’t. Her Corolla squirms right, skidding toward the road’s shoulder with a scrape of gravel—she fights the wheel now—still sliding sideways on locked tires. Then another bracing impact-without-impact spills her against her seat, noisily tipping the cooler in the back seat, and then airy stillness. Her headlights stare at dark pines.

  A complete stop.

  No time to breathe. She thrashes forward in her seat, tasting the acrid odor of burnt rubber, heaving the steering wheel right and flooring the gas (the faraway scream of the Charger’s brakes, too, slamming in enraged response), and she swerves into the eastbound lane, completing her turn.

  A one-eighty, at seventy miles per hour.

  “Holy shit.”

  Even her furies are impressed: Not bad, girl.

  She brushes her hair from her eyes, accelerating. The road unfurls. Her path to Magma Springs, to civilization, to safety.

  She flips her rearview mirror back into position—Raycevic is still fumbling his vehicle through a one-eighty turn of his own back behind her, shrinking into darkness. Fifty yards. A hundred. His reaction time was even slower than she’d dared hope. Maybe he’d been on his radio or something? She’d caught him off guard. She’d done the one thing he couldn’t possibly anticipate in a life-or-death chase: she slammed on the brakes.

  She feels like she’s gained a full quarter-mile lead when she finally sees his headlights rejoin the pursuit behind her. Tiny faraway pinpricks of light.

  “Fuck you,” she whispers.

  It feels good. It’s a minor victory, but it feels monumental. She’s changed direction, toward a closer town. That’s something. She takes the road’s previous curve—now a hard left—and the Charger’s headlights momentarily vanish behind the sloped land. She’s gained considerable distance, and he’s struggling now to close it. Hell, yes.

  A sign races past, catching a fiery glint: MAGMA SPRINGS 22.

  Even better than she expected! Twenty-two miles is doable, with eight to spare. The Corolla is certain to have that much gas in its tank. Better odds than making it forty-two to Polk City. Much better. But she’ll still have to contend with an armed pursuer every mile of the way there, and when he gets desperate, he’s liable to start shooting. She doesn’t have a plan for that yet.

  It’s been a few seconds, and the cop’s headlights haven’t yet reappeared around the turn behind her. Something else occurs to her, just a whisper.

  You can hide.

  The cop is following her brake lights, which must be tiny red dots from his distance. The rest of the countryside is now pitch black. While visual contact is broken by the terrain, she could skid off the road, cut all of her lights, and let Raycevic barrel on past her to the next bend.

  Do it, Cambry.

  His headlights reappear. Still distant. Tugging closer.

  Okay. The next turn.

  She’ll need there to be an access road, or at the very least a flat patch of earth, or else she’ll just crash into a ditch. That would be bad. And she’ll need to be cognizant of her dust trail. Anything that can give her location away in his passing headlights.

  A clearing races by on her left, stalks of tall grass and saplings. Too fast to anticipate.

  “Damn it.” That would have worked, too. But the cop is still within eyeshot, and he would have just followed her off the road.

  She promises herself: Next time. No excuses.

  The next turn is coming up now. It’s the same nasty bend she remembers from minutes ago. It had almost spilled her into the forest. A ribbonlike twist in the pavement, racing toward her in the night.

  Her hair is in her eyes again. She sweeps it away. Her speedometer needle touches eighty, ninety. Inefficient fuel management, but necessary now. Her engine roars under the hood, breathlessly chugging its finite supply.

  She knows, from a few minutes back, that she can attack this bitch of a turn at fifty and still stay on the road. This time, she’ll try sixty. She’ll need every second of her lead to get her car safely off the road and concealed in the darkness. Without leaving obvious tracks. And giving the dust trail a few critical seconds to settle.

  Here it is.

  At sixty, she’s already chosen to cross into the oncoming lane to make for as broad a curve as possible. A head-on collision is the least of her fears. The road swerves away underneath her, a hard right, and she fights the wheel. The tires screaming again, the panic strip a furious buzz saw in her ears. She feels it vibrate her locked teeth. Again, the gnarled pine trunks whip past in her headlights, a strobing carousel of freeze-frames. Any one of them could turn her car into a fireball. They feel just feet, inches away. She keeps wrenching the wheel right, harder right, as the two-ton Corolla wrestles out of her grasp and the tight curve keeps going and going, more trees, more and more and more—

  Then, abruptly, the road straightens.

  She overcorrects, back into her lane. Hitting the panic strip again. Another buzz and a clatter of chewed gravel. But she’s still moving forward, still racing, and she survived the hellish turn. It doesn’t matter that she took the oncoming lane to do it—had another motorist been coming the other way, it would have been an instant murder-suicide—none of it matters, none of it at all, because it’s just an alternative outcome that didn’t happen. She’s still alive.

  In her rearview mirror, the Charger’s headlights are gone again. The cop is probably just now cutting his speed to make the same turn. She tries to estimate how much time she has.

  You have twenty seconds. Tops.

  She searches all sides for a grassy meadow, a flat patch of earth, anything to skid off the highway onto and hide in the dark—and in her haste, she nearly misses something even better.

  A gated-off road.

  On a dusty little side shoulder, pitted with erosion tracks. A faded white sign—ROAD CLOSED—catches her lights over a locked metal gate. Coming fast, on her left.

  She twists the wheel. Still going fifty.

  Fifteen seconds now—

  Her tires seize and squeal again. The gritty howl of rubber on pavement. She hopes the cop’s windows aren’t rolled down—otherwise he’ll surely hear this, even from a quarter mile back around the bend, and he’ll know she’s stopping.

  Ramming the gate is suicide, so she swerves around it, blowing through a six-foot sapling that cracks against her bumper like a gunshot and explodes into a cloud of frizzy leaves. Her vehicle jostles hard on the rough land, hurling coins from the console. Her seat belt yanks her collarbone again. Her mirrors are out of alignment now. Then she’s back on pavement, completing her turn, leaving the locked barrier behind her, still racing—

  Ten seconds.

  Loose rocks clatter noisily against the undercarriage. Toothpick trees and low brush whip past on both sides. A dust trail obscures her rear window, lit blazing red by her taillights. A pothole bangs underneath her, another startling crash.

  She keeps driving, hurtling forward. Putting more and more distance between herself and the main road. For this plan to work, she’ll need to be far enough off the highway that the cop won’t see her in his headlights. She also needs to cut her own lights, obviously, or he’ll spot her in his dark periphery immediately. But when?

  Five seconds.

  It’s a risk either way, she kn
ows. If she stops too close to the road, he’ll see her and swerve to follow her. If she keeps driving and waits too long to kill her lights, he’ll see her, too. She twists her neck and looks back toward the highway through a shroud of dust. Watching for the Charger’s headlights to reappear around the bend. Although, she reminds herself: if she sees him, it’s already too late.

  Zero. Time’s up.

  No. She’s not far enough from the highway.

  Stop the car.

  She slams over another pothole, a trailing metal scrape. She can’t stop yet. She’s too close. The foliage is too low and sparse, the trees too thin. The sweep of Raycevic’s headlights will reveal her Corolla hiding in the low prairie, as plain as daylight.

  Stop the car, Cambry. Kill the lights.

  She waits another second. And another—

  Stop-stop-stop.

  Finally, she stomps the brake and twists the key, cutting the engine dead. She swats off the lights and the world goes black. At that microsecond, on the sharp turn of Highway 200 behind her, the pinprick headlights of the cop’s pursuing Charger streak into view, like twin shooting stars.

  She holds her breath.

  She waits, submerged in darkness. Her dust trail catches up to her and floats past, peppering her roof with grit. She watches the cop car’s faraway headlights complete the turn. His high beams scan the grassland, casting racing shadows among the brush, and their predatory light touches her vehicle’s blue paint, revealing its form in merciless detail.

  Cambry’s stomach twists into a knot as the car’s interior lights up around her. For a moment, her dashboard, her steering wheel, her clenched knuckles—all as excruciatingly bright as afternoon sunlight.

  Then darkness again.

  He’s straightening with the highway. She can hear the distant thrum of his engine. He’s driving fast, making up his lost time.

  Her lungs burn. She’s afraid to move.

  A new color: arterial red. The Charger’s taillights suddenly light up the road behind it. He’s slowing as he approaches the junction. He recognizes the sign and the gate. He must be familiar with the area. She swallows panic, gripping her key in the ignition. He’s already seen her.