NO EXIT a gripping thriller full of heart-stopping twists

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  “Who’s Bing Crosby?” the younger man asked.

  “One of the Beatles,” the older one answered.

  “Oh.”

  Somehow, Darby liked the older one already, and regretted snapping at him about the Wi-Fi.

  “I don’t know much about music,” the younger one admitted.

  “Clearly.”

  On the big table, she noticed a deck of dog-eared playing cards. A little Texas hold ’em apparently, to bond two strangers stranded by a blizzard.

  A toilet flushed in the restrooms.

  Three strangers, she tallied.

  She slipped her phone back into her jeans pocket, realizing both men were still staring at her. One in front, one behind.

  “I’m Ed,” said the older one.

  “Ashley,” said the younger one.

  Darby didn’t give her name. She elbowed out the front door, back into the subzero chill outside, and stuffed her hands into her jacket pockets. She let the door swing shut behind her, hearing the older man ask the younger one: “Wait. Your name is Ashley? Like the girl name?”

  He groaned. “It’s not just a girl name—”

  The door closed.

  The world outside had darkened under shadow. The sun was gone. Falling snowflakes glittered orange in the visitor center’s single exterior lamp, which hung over the doorway in a big pan. But Snowmageddon seemed to have thinned out for a few moments; against the descending night she could see the outlines of distant peaks. Craggy shards of rock, half-shrouded in trees.

  She drew her windbreaker up to her neck and shivered.

  The crowd of statues that the younger guy — Ashley — had mentioned were to the south of the rest area, past the flagpole and picnic area. Near the off-ramp she’d taken. From here, she could barely see them. Just half-buried forms in the snow.

  “Hey.”

  She turned.

  Ashley again. He let the door click shut and caught up to her, taking high steps in the snow. “There’s . . . so, there’s a really particular spot I had to stand. That’s the only place I could pick up a signal, and it was just one bar. You might only be able to send a text.”

  “That’ll still work.”

  He zipped up his coat. “I’ll show you.”

  They followed his old footprints out there and Darby noted that they were already half-filled with several inches of fresh powder. She wondered, but didn’t ask, how long he’d been stranded here.

  Gaining some distance from the building, she also realized this rest area was nestled on a precipice. Behind the back wall (the restrooms), scoured treetops marked an abrupt cliff. She couldn’t even see exactly where the land started to drop, as the blanket of snowpack disguised the verticality. One misstep could be fatal. The flora up here was equally hostile — Douglas firs whipped into grotesque shapes by powerful winds, their branches jagged and stiff.

  “Thanks,” Darby said.

  Ashley didn’t hear. They kept lurching through waist-deep snow, arms out for balance. It was deeper here, off the footpath. Her Converse were already soaked through, her toes numb.

  “So you go by Ashley?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not, like, Ash?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Just asking.”

  Again, she glanced back to the visitor center, and spotted a figure standing in the amber glow of the building’s single window. Watching them from behind the frosted glass. She couldn’t tell if it was the older man (Ed), or the person she hadn’t seen.

  “Ashley is not just a girl’s name,” he said as they trudged. “It’s a perfectly viable man’s name.”

  “Oh, definitely.”

  “Like Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind.”

  “I was just thinking that,” Darby said. It felt good to bullshit a little. But still, the wary part of her brain that she could never quite disengage wondered: You’re familiar with that old-ass movie, but you don’t know who the Beatles are?

  “Or Ashley Johnson,” he said. “The world-famous rugby player.”

  “You made that one up.”

  “Did not.” He pointed into the distance. “Hey. You can see Melanie’s Peak.”

  “What?”

  “Melanie’s Peak.” He seemed embarrassed. “Sorry, I’ve been stuck here a long time, reading everything in the information center. See the big mountain over there? Some guy named it after his wife.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Maybe. Unless he was calling her frigid and inhospitable.”

  Darby chuckled.

  They’d reached the icicled statues now. A crowd of them. There was probably a plaque detailing what it all meant, under the snow somewhere. The sculptures appeared to be children. Running, jumping, playing, cast in bronze and coated with ice.

  Ashley pointed at one wielding a baseball bat. “There. By the little leaguer.”

  “Here?”

  “Yeah. That’s where I got a signal.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you . . .” He hesitated, his hands in his pockets. “Need me to, uh, stick around?”

  Silence.

  “You know. I mean, if—”

  “No.” Darby smiled, a genuine one. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that. It’s cold as balls out here.” He flashed that easy grin of his and walked back to the orange lights, waving over his shoulder. “Have fun out here with the Nightmare Children.”

  “Will do.”

  She didn’t realize how unsettling the statues were until she was alone with them. The children were missing chunks. It was an art style she’d seen before — the sculptor used raw hunks of bronze, fusing them in odd and counterintuitive welds that left seams and gaps — but in the darkness, her imagination rendered gore. The boy to her left, the one swinging a baseball bat that Ashley had called the little leaguer, had an exposed ribcage. Others waved spindly, mangled arms, missing patches of flesh. Like a crowd of pit-bull-mauling victims, half-gnawed to the bone.

  What had Ashley called them? Nightmare children.

  He was twenty feet away, almost a silhouette against the rest area’s orange light, when she turned and called to him. “Hey. Wait.”

  He looked back.

  “Darby,” she said. “My name is Darby.”

  He smiled.

  Thanks for helping me, she wanted to say. Thank you for being decent to me, a total stranger. The words were there, in her mind, but she couldn’t make them real. They broke eye contact, the moment evaporating . . .

  Thank you, Ashley—

  He kept walking.

  Then he stopped again, reconsidering, and said one last thing: “You do know Darby is a guy’s name, right?”

  She laughed.

  She watched him leave, and then she leaned against the statue’s baseball bat, frozen mid-swing, and held her iPhone skyward against the falling snowflakes. She squinted, watching the screen’s upper left corner.

  No service.

  She waited, alone in the darkness. In the right corner, the battery had fallen to six percent. She’d left her charger plugged into an outlet in her dorm. Two hundred miles back.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please, God . . .”

  Still no signal. Breathing through chattering teeth, she re-read her sister’s text:She’s okay right now.

  Okay is the single worst word in the English language. Without context, it’s an utter non-thing. Okay could mean her mother Maya was doing better, it could mean she was doing worse, and it could mean she was . . . well, just okay.

  People say pancreatic cancer is a swift killer, because death often follows a diagnosis within weeks or even days — but that’s not true. It takes years to kill. It’s just symptomless in its early stages, invisibly multiplying inside its host, not manifesting jaundice or abdominal pain until it’s far too late. This was a chilling notion; that the cancer had been there inside her mother when Darby was in high school. It’d been there when she’d lied about
the broken Sears tags in her purse. It’d been there when she drove home at 3 a.m. on a Sunday night, woozy from bad ecstasy with a green glow-bracelet on her wrist, and her mother broke down in tears on the front porch and called her a rotten little bitch. That invisible creature had been perched there on her shoulder all along, eavesdropping, and she’d been dying slowly, and neither of them had known.

  They’d last spoken on Thanksgiving. The phone call had been over an hour of crisscrossing arguments, but the last few seconds lingered in Darby’s mind.

  You’re the reason Dad left us, she remembered saying. And if I could have chosen him instead of you, I would have. In a heartbeat.

  In a fucking heartbeat, Maya.

  She wiped away tears with her thumb, already freezing to her skin. She exhaled into the biting air. Her mother was being prepped for surgery, right now, at Utah Valley Hospital, and here Darby was, stranded at a run-down rest area miles into the Rockies.

  And she knew she didn’t have enough gas to idle Blue here for long. The visitor center at least had heat and electricity. Whether she liked it or not, she’d probably have to make small talk with Ed and Ashley, and whoever had flushed that toilet. She imagined them — a huddle of strangers in a snowstorm, like gold miners and homesteaders must have shared refuge in these same mountains centuries past — sipping watery coffee, sharing campfire stories, and listening to the radio for garbled clues as to when the snowplows would arrive. Maybe she’d make a few Facebook friends and learn how to play poker.

  Or maybe she’d go sit in her Honda and freeze to death.

  Both options were equally enticing.

  She glanced to the closest statue. “This is going to be a long night, kiddos.” She checked her iPhone one last time, but by now she’d given up hope on Ashley’s magic signal-spot. All she was doing out here was wasting battery and courting frostbite.

  “One hell of a long night.”

  She headed back to the Wanapa building, feeling another migraine nip at the edges of her thoughts. Snowmageddon had kicked up again, obscuring the mountains with windswept snowflakes. A sharp gust of wind raced up behind her, creaking the fir trees, whipping her jacket taut. She unconsciously counted the cars in the parking lot as she walked — three, plus her Honda. A gray van, a red pickup truck, and an unidentified vehicle, all half-buried by rolling waves of frost.

  On her way, she chose to circle through the parking lot, around this small collection of trapped cars. No reason, really. She would later look back on this mindless decision many times tonight, and wonder how differently her night might’ve played out if she’d merely retraced Ashley’s footprints instead.

  She passed the row of vehicles.

  First was the red truck. Sandbags in the bed, webbed tire chains. Less snow heaped on it than the others, meaning it hadn’t been here long. She guessed thirty minutes.

  The second car was completely buried, just an unrecognizable mound of snow. She couldn’t even discern the paint color — it could be a dumpster for all she knew. Something broad and boxy. It’d been here the longest of the four.

  Third was Blue, her trusty Honda Civic. The car she’d learned to drive in, the car she’d taken to college, the car she’d lost her virginity in (not all at the same time). The left wiper was still missing, tossed into some snow berm a mile down the highway. She knew she was lucky to have made it to a rest area.

  Last was the gray van.

  This was where Darby chose to cut between parked cars and take the footpath to the building’s front door, some fifty feet away. She planned to pass between the van and her Honda, leaning on the doors of her own car for balance.

  Printed on the side of the van was an orange cartoon fox, like a counterfeit Nick Wilde from Zootopia. He wielded a nail gun the way a secret agent holds a pistol, promoting some sort of construction or repair service. The company’s name was covered by snow, but the slogan read: WE FINISH WHAT WE START. The van had two rear windows. The right one was blocked by a towel. The left one was clear, catching a blade of reflected lamplight as Darby passed it, and in it, she glimpsed something pale inside the van. A hand.

  A tiny, doll-like hand.

  She halted mid-step, a breath trapped in her lungs.

  This little hand gripped a grate-like material behind the icy glass — white fingers gently unwrapping one by one, in that uncoordinated way of a child still mastering their own nervous system — and then abruptly, it drew back into the darkness. Gone from view. It all happened in three, maybe four seconds, leaving Darby in stunned silence.

  No way.

  The interior was quiet. Motionless again.

  She crept closer, cupping her hands against the window, squinting inside. Her eyelashes fluttering on cold glass. Barely visible in the blackness, near where the tiny hand had vanished, she made out a small crescent, a barely-there reflection of dim sodium-vapor light. It was a circular combination lock. Holding a latticework of metal bars, which the child’s hand had been gripping. Like the kid was in a kennel.

  Then Darby exhaled — a mistake — and the glass went opaque with her breath. But she’d seen it. There was no unseeing it.

  She stepped away, leaving a handprint on the door, feeling her heartbeat pounding in her neck. An intensifying rhythm.

  There’s . . .

  There’s a child locked inside this van.

  8:17 p.m.

  She went back inside.

  Ashley glanced up. “Any luck?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He was seated now, at the wood table, playing cards with Ed. A new woman was here, too — Ed’s wife, apparently — sitting next to him. She was a fussy little forty-something with a black bowl cut and a crinkly yellow parka, busily popping cartoon bubbles on her tablet. She’d been the one in the restroom.

  As the door clicked shut at Darby’s back, she tallied three possible suspects: Chatty Ashley, sad-eyed Ed, and Ed’s frumpy wife. So who did the gray van belong to?

  Oh, my God, there’s a kid outside in that van.

  Locked in a cage or something.

  It hit her again, all at once. She tasted raw oysters in the back of her mouth. Her legs went mushy. She needed to sit down, but was afraid to.

  One of these three people did it—

  “Make sure the door is shut,” Ed said.

  Like nothing had happened, the card game resumed. Ashley checked his hand and glanced sideways at Ed. “Four of hearts?”

  “Go fish. Two of spades?”

  “Nope.”

  Something else was wrong, Darby realized. The math didn’t add up. There were three cars outside besides her own. Three suspects in here. But Ed and his wife had almost certainly traveled together. Right? So there had to be a fourth person at the rest stop. But where?

  She glanced from Ashley, to Ed, to Ed’s wife, scanning the room front to back, her heart seizing with slippery terror. Where else could—

  Then she felt a warm breath touch the back of her neck. Someone was standing behind her.

  “Jack of clubs.”

  “Go fish.”

  Darby stood still, hairs prickling on her skin. A chill racing down her spine. She wanted to turn around, but she couldn’t. Her body wouldn’t move.

  He’s right behind me.

  He was breathing down the back of her neck. A mouthy waft, lifting her hair, tickling her bare skin. Gently whistling past her ear. Somehow she already knew this fourth traveler was a man — women just didn’t breathe like that. He was standing less than eighteen inches behind her. Close enough to touch her back, or reach around her throat and put his fingers around her windpipe.

  She wished she could turn around and face this fourth person, whoever he was, but the moment felt strange, floaty. Like trying to throw a punch in a nightmare.

  Turn around, she urged herself. Turn around now.

  In front of her, the card game continued: “Queen of hearts?”

  “Ah! Here you go.”

  “Nine of diamonds?”

/>   “Nope.”

  Behind her, the breathing halted for a few seconds — long enough that she briefly hoped she’d been imagining it, all of it — and then it sucked in a heavier gulp. Mouth-breathing. Standing there in rigid silence, Darby realized she’d done it again. She’d entered the room without checking the corner on her left.

  Jesus, Darby, just turn around.

  Face him.

  Finally, she did.

  She turned slowly, casually, with one palm up, like she was just obliging Ed’s request to ensure the door was closed properly. She turned — turned until she was face to face with the man.

  Man was a stretch. He was tall but slouching, rail-thin, nineteen at most. A weasel-like profile to his acne-encrusted face, all overbite above a shapeless chin shrouded with peach-fuzz whiskers. A Deadpool beanie and a baby-blue ski jacket. His narrow shoulders were wet with melted snow, like he’d just been outside, too. He was staring at her, so she met his gaze — tiny hazel pupils, rodent-like in their flat stupidity — and she returned a shy smile.

  The moment smeared.

  Rodent Face’s breath reeked of milk chocolate mixed with the earthy sourness of Skoal. His right arm lifted without warning — Darby flinched — but he was reaching past her to press the door shut. It engaged with a deadbolt click.

  “Thanks,” Ed said, turning back to Ashley. “Ace of hearts?”

  “Nope.”

  Darby broke eye contact and left the man by the door. Her heart banged against her ribs. Her footsteps sounded magnified. She squeezed both hands into fists to hide their shaking and took a seat at the table with the others. She pulled up a chair between Ashley and the older couple, and the wooden legs honked on the tiles.

  Ashley gritted his teeth at the harsh sound. “Uh, nine of hearts.”

  “Shit.”

  Ed’s wife smacked his elbow. “Language.”

  Darby knew Rodent Face was still watching her with those dim little eyes, studying her. And she realized she was sitting rigidly — too rigidly — so she sprawled in her chair a bit and pretended to play with her iPhone. Hunching her knees up to the table. She was play-acting now, just an over-caffeinated Art Major with a Honda full of gravestone rubbings and an exhausted phone battery, stranded here at the edge of civilization like everyone else. Just a harmless CU-Boulder sophomore.