NO EXIT a gripping thriller full of heart-stopping twists

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  “He’s chasing us,” Jay said. “Drive faster—”

  Darby was trying. She increased pressure on the gas, and the truck fishtailed but accelerated. The tires sprayed ice chips through the windows, peppering the interior with cold grit. Lars fired again — CRACK — and the truck’s side view mirror exploded. Jay screamed.

  Darby tugged her down with her free hand. “Keep your head down. It’s fine—”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “He’s not going to catch us—”

  CRACK. Another hole punched through the windshield, a jagged star-shape above Darby’s head. But Lars’s gunshots sounded different. They were getting hollow, thinning across a widening distance.

  “Yes.” Her heart fluttered. “Yes, yes, yes—”

  “What’s happening?”

  They were rolling down the exit ramp now, gaining speed. Thank Christ for momentum, for gravity, for the steepening grade. Darby gave the pedal another pump of gas. Another engine-roar. The world tilted downward and kernels of safety glass skittered loosely around them like gravel.

  “See? I told you—”

  Lars fired again — CRACK — but missed the truck entirely. He was too far behind them now. Vanishing. The orange glow of the Wanapani building was vanishing, too, its familiar shapes sinking into the snowy darkness, and Darby was so glad to see it all go. Like awakening from a dread-sweat nightmare, she never wanted to see it again. Ever. Good riddance to that shitty place.

  Jay peered around her seat, watching the pursuing figure of Rodent Face shrink through the perforated rear window — “Stay down” — and she raised a shaking fist. Her ring finger up.

  It took Darby a moment to understand. “Uh . . . wrong finger.”

  “Oh.” Jay corrected. “Better?”

  “Better.”

  “Thanks,” said the seven-year-old girl flipping the bird through the bullet-riddled back window of a stolen pickup truck, and Darby started to laugh. It was involuntary, rattling her lungs like a cough. She couldn’t stop it.

  Oh, my God, we actually did it.

  We got away.

  Just seven or eight miles to go. She dug her iPhone from her pocket and tossed it to Jay. “Hey. Watch the screen, okay? If you see a signal bar, you hand it to me immediately—”

  “The battery’s almost dead.”

  “I know.”

  They scraped downhill, truck tires churning fresh powder like waterwheels. She feathered the gas pedal, keeping the Ford moving. Keeping the inertia unbroken. That’s all it was now — raw, desperate forward momentum. Like driving across two states with a stomach full of Red Bull and ibuprofen, fighting to hold her caffeine buzz with a cryptic text from Devon shaking in her palm (She’s okay right now), racing Snowmageddon over the pass. Forward, forward, forward. Don’t stop.

  Don’t-stop-don’t-stop—

  Now they came up on State Route Seven, high beams cutting over frozen mounds of windswept snow. Here she planned to merge into the oncoming northbound lane and pass under the first saucer of light. Darby felt another flicker of excitement in the bottom of her stomach. This was really happening. She’d done it. They were really escaping.

  Even still, she worried — what if the brothers dug their van out, got it moving in the snow, and chased them down the highway? Then another triumphant shiver as she realized: Ashley doesn’t even know where his Astro keys are.

  He never saw me throw them out the restroom window.

  Yes, yes, yes. It all felt too good to be true.

  “Hold my phone up.” She pointed. “Out the window.”

  Jay did this, crouched on her knees to lean out the passenger window, and Darby suddenly imagined hitting a hard stop and bouncing this poor girl out like a crash-test dummy. That’d be tough to explain to her parents.

  “And buckle your seatbelt,” she added. “Please.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the law.”

  “What if we need to get out and run?”

  “Then — Jesus. Then you’ll unbuckle it.”

  “Yours isn’t buckled—”

  “Hey.” Darby grinned darkly, doing her best angry-dad-voice. “Don’t make me turn this car around.”

  Jay buckled her seatbelt with a metallic snick, and pointed at the seat behind Darby’s head. “He almost shot you.”

  She touched the headrest behind her ponytail. Sure enough, her fingers found a ragged exit wound, leaking spongy clods of yellow foam. Lars’s bullet had sliced an inch high, at most, skimming her scalp before exiting the windshield. Saved by dumb luck. She let out a hoarse laugh. “Good thing I’m five-two, huh?”

  “Good thing,” Jay said. “I kind of like you.”

  Darby guided Sandi’s truck to the highway, merging into the desolate oncoming lanes. Under normal traffic conditions, this would be a suicidal maneuver. She reflexively nudged the right turn signal, before feeling stupid. Her hands were still shaking. A strange silence settled in and she cleared her throat, struggling to fill it: “So . . . Sandi’s your school bus driver, huh?”

  “Mrs Schaeffer, I think.”

  “Was she nice?”

  “She kidnapped me.”

  “Aside from that.”

  “Not really.” Jay shrugged. “She subbed for a while. I hardly remember her.”

  But she sure remembered you, Darby thought. She remembered you, and your sleek McMansion, and your yuppie parents’ daily schedules. A school bus driver made a logical spotter for a ransom operation, and Ashley and Lars were obviously handling the dirty work. But why would Sandi risk meeting Beavis and Butthead in person, all the way out here? In a remote rest stop, two states away?

  She watched the snowy highway unfurl, feeling the blood return to her extremities, bracing against the frigid air blowing through the windows. Only now did she start to see the gallows humor of the whole mess, in her own misfortune and poor judgment. She’d unwittingly trusted a kidnapper for the second time tonight. That carafe of scalding water she’d planned to use as a weapon? Jaybird had dumped it over her over face, which still tingled with first-degree burns. Nothing had gone according to plan. She couldn’t help it, her teeth chattering: “I swear to God, Jay, next time you think you recognize someone else here . . . like, if the first Colorado cop we see looks like your orthodontist back in San Diego, please tell me, okay?”

  “My orthodontist lives in LA, actually.”

  “Los Angeles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you take an airplane to see your orthodontist?”

  Jay winced, embarrassed. “Sometimes.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s . . . my parents really like him—”

  “No shit. Did your parents invent Google or something?”

  “You’re teasing me.”

  Darby grinned. “Is it too late to ransom you myself?”

  “Maybe not.” Jay grinned back. “You’re the one driving a stolen tru—”

  Brain-jarring halt.

  The entire world seemed to drop anchor. The truck nose-dove into a rise of deep snow, headlights burrowing and going dark, two tons of moving parts slamming into a hard stop. An empty Gatorade bottle flew out of the console. Loose glass shards bounced. Darby banged her jaw on the steering wheel, biting her tongue, and in a microsecond, they were stuck again, trapped again, and all of the joy turned sour and tinny, like the taste of blood in her teeth.

  Oh, no.

  No, no, no—

  Jay looked at her. “Good thing you made me fasten my seatbelt.”

  3:45 a.m.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Darby cranked into reverse. Tried again. Throttled it, again and again. No luck; the tires spun until the cab stank with scorched rubber.

  The truck was stuck there, facing the wrong way on the rightmost northbound lane of State Route Seven, just ahead of the blue REST AREA sign. She craned her neck to look back through the splintered rear window — all in all, she’d made it less than fifty feet down the high
way. A quarter-mile from the Wanapani building, tops. She could still see the orange parking lot lights through a copse of jagged Douglas firs. It didn’t actually matter if they found their keys, because Ashley and Lars were still within walking distance.

  “Shit-shit-shit.” She punched the wheel, accidentally blaring the horn.

  Jay looked back, too. “Can they catch up to us?”

  Yes, yes, yes, a hundred-percent yes—

  “No,” Darby said. “We drove too far. But stay inside.” She opened the driver door, sprinkling loose bits of glass, and slid out into the deep snow. She felt old and tired. Her bones ached. Her eyes still stung with pepper spray.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Digging us out.” She circled the Ford’s front bumper, squinting in the half-submerged headlights. Her stomach plunged when she saw the huge mound of displaced snow, sloughed into a rolling snowball in front of the truck’s grill. It must have been a hundred pounds, maybe more, as dense and hopeless as wet cement.

  She almost collapsed at the sight of it. The enormity of it.

  But then her eyes fell on the little girl behind the cracked windshield, on the verge of an Addisonian crisis. An anxiety-time bomb; a single bad moment away from a seizure, or a coma, or worse.

  So Darby dropped to her bruised knees and started to dig.

  “Can I help?” Jay asked.

  “No. You can’t over-exert yourself. Just focus on my cell phone, please. Tell me if it gets a signal.” She lifted a crumbling snow-boulder and heaved it aside. Her bare fingers throbbed with coldness.

  Seven miles, she thought, glancing downhill.

  Seven miles to that jackknifed semi. Could that really be all? She imagined a busy accident scene down there, swarming with first responders, bustling with lights and motion. The red-and-blue pulse of police light bars. Road maintenance crews in reflective jackets. Paramedics inserting tubes into throats. Dazed victims being evacuated on chattering gurneys.

  All of that, just seven miles down the dark road. It didn’t seem possible.

  Seven miles.

  State Route Seven was raised here where they’d crashed, cresting the upper lip of a switchback. The coniferous trees were at their thinnest, the land rocky and vertical. In daylight, with clear weather, this might’ve opened up into stunning mountain panorama. But here and now, it was perhaps the only stretch of Backbone Pass that had even the barest chance of catching a cell signal. To hell with Ashley’s Nightmare Children. In hindsight, she understood that had almost certainly been another of his lies. Another wicked ruse, to make her waste her battery.

  Another gust of wind breathed up the mountain, creaking branches, tugging her sleeves, lifting strange swirls of powder that slithered across the roadway like passing ghosts.

  “Hey, Jay,” she panted as she dug, straining for conversation to fill the eerie silence. Trying to keep the mood light, pleasant, unhurried. “What . . . what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll tease me again.”

  Darby leaned around the Ford’s headlights, checking the rest stop’s exit ramp for the advancing figures of Ashley and Lars. No sign of them yet. “Come on, Jay. You owe me. I took pepper spray in the face for you.”

  “It wasn’t for me. It was aimed at you.”

  “You know what I mean—”

  “A paleontologist,” the girl answered.

  “A what?”

  “A paleontologist.”

  “Like . . . like a dinosaur fossil hunter?”

  “Yeah,” Jay said. “That’s what a paleontologist does.”

  But Darby wasn’t listening. She’d noticed the truck’s tire looked strangely flabby, and now her blood froze. She brushed away another armful of snow and saw a steel circle protruding from the tire’s sidewall. A nail head. She heard it now — the gentle, reptilian hiss. Leaking air.

  She crawled to the other tire. Two more nails pierced into the treads.

  Oh God, this was Ashley’s backup plan all along.

  She punched snow. “Shit.”

  He disabled all of the cars, just in case we managed to escape in one—

  But this didn’t make sense — why, then, would Ashley nail-gun the tires of Sandi’s truck, too? If she was an integral part of the kidnapping plot? After they’d taken all that care to meet up here, in the frozen Rockies?

  Jay peered over the door. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.” Darby scrambled back to the front of Sandi’s truck and resumed digging, double-time. Her heart racing, thudding against her ribs, as she tried to appear calm. “Jaybird, tell me. What’s . . . what’s your favorite dinosaur?”

  “I like them all.”

  “Yeah, but you have to have a favorite. T-Rex? Raptor? Triceratops?”

  “Eustreptospondylus.”

  “I . . . I have no idea what that is.”

  “That’s why I like it.”

  “Describe it, please.” Darby just needed to keep the conversation going, scooping armfuls of snow, her frantic thoughts churning: He’s coming for us. Right now, he’s catching up to us, and he’s carrying that nail gun—

  “It’s a carnivore,” the girl said. “Walks on two hind legs. Jurassic period. Three fingers on each hand, kind of like a raptor—”

  “You could have just said ‘raptor,’ then.”

  “No. It’s Eustreptospondylus.”

  “Sounds like a shitty dinosaur.”

  “You couldn’t spell it,” Jay said, pausing. “Oh. Your phone found a signal—”

  Darby jolted upright and ran to the passenger door, reaching through the shattered window, snatching her iPhone from Jay’s fingers. She didn’t believe it until she saw it — a lone signal bar. Blinking urgently. “Your turn to dig,” she said.

  “The battery’s one percent—”

  “I know.”

  The door croaked, sprinkling more glass, and Jay jumped out. Darby held the phone with red fingers, mashing 9-1-1 with her thumb — but the phone vibrated in her hand, startling her. A NEW MESSAGE bubble blocked her touchscreen. She was about to swipe past it, until she saw the sender’s number.

  It was 9-1-1.

  An answer to her text message; the one she’d tried to send hours ago tonight, and must have only now successfully auto-sent:Child abduction gray van license plate VBH9045 state route 7 Wanapa rest stop send police.

  The answer?

  Find a safe place. Officer coming ETA 30.

  Darby almost dropped her phone. ETA, as in estimated time of arrival. 30 must be minutes, right? It couldn’t be hours, or days—

  Thirty minutes.

  “Is it working?” Jay asked, panting as she dug.

  Darby couldn’t believe it. It felt like a hallucination. She blinked, afraid it would all disperse like a dream, but the letters were all still there, trembling in her numb hands. Her text had successfully sent at 3:56 a.m. She’d received the 9-1-1 dispatcher’s response at 3:58 a.m. Just minutes ago.

  Oh, thank God, the cops will be here in thirty minutes—

  Her chest swelled with gulped breaths. Nervous electricity in her bones. She had questions. Tons of them. For starters, she didn’t know how this reconciled with CDOT’s snowplow situation — were the plows due in thirty minutes, too? Were they due first? Were they all charging up Backbone Pass at once — cops and road crews — as one big convoy? She didn’t know, and truthfully, she didn’t care, as long as the cops got here and shot Ashley Garver in his smirking face.

  “Oh, Jay,” she whispered. “I could kiss you—”

  The girl’s voice pitched: “Darby, stop.”

  “What?”

  Jay faced her now, standing in the curved glare of the Ford’s headlights. Staring with snowflakes collecting on her shoulders, alarmingly still.

  Darby tried to keep her voice calm. “Jay, I don’t understand—”

  “Don’t move.”

  “What is it?”
>
  She whispered: “He’s behind you.”

  * * *

  Ashley was just tugging the Paslode’s trigger, preparing to spear a 16-penny into the back of her skull, when Darby turned to face him.

  Her auburn bangs feathered off her cheekbone as she spun, her eyes coming around and up to find him. Catching a slash of moonlight, her skin marshmallow-soft. That white scar still invisible — unless she squinted or smiled. Like a an actress hitting her mark, a gentle flourish framed by a cinematographer’s eye, the way Eva Green greets Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.

  Just a turn.

  But Christ, what a turn.

  Under Darby’s jacket and jeans, he could locate the luxurious shapes of her body. Her shoulders. Her hips. Her breasts. He wished he could print this moment, this snapshot of heartbreaking beauty, and keep it forever. Like all the truest art, you’re never quite sure how it makes you feel at first, until you untangle your feelings later. And he’d have plenty to untangle. He wished it could just be something simple, like lust, because lust can be satiated with Pornhub — but ever since he’d kissed her in that grungy restroom, his feelings for Darby had become knottier and more complex than that.

  “Hi, Darbs.” He forced a smile. “Long night, huh?”

  She said nothing.

  No fear in those eyes. Not even a tremor.

  She just looked him up and down, assessing him, like this CU-Boulder redhead had somehow already anticipated this encounter, hours ago, and had a contingency plan prepared, which was of course impossible. Tonight had been a swirling, sweaty shitstorm of blind chance and left-field surprises. Not even a magic man like Ashley himself could stay on top of everything all the time.

  But still, he thought, I wish you hadn’t turned around.

  It makes this harder.

  He raised the cordless nailer again. He depressed the Paslode’s muzzle with his left palm, tricking the safety, squeezing the two-stage trigger, drawing careful aim on her left eye—

  Darby didn’t flinch. “That’d be a mistake.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t want to kill me.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “I hid your keychain,” she said. “I know where your Astro keys are, and if you kill me now, you’ll never find them. Now that Sandi’s truck is stuck here, and you shot up my Honda, you’ve trapped yourself here. That van is the only way you and your brother will ever escape this rest stop tonight.”