It hit the glass like buckshot.Tick. Tick. Tick-tick-tick.
The temperature gauge on the dashboard dropped from 34° to 31° in the span of three miles. The spray from the semi-trucks ahead of him wasn’t misting anymore; it was sticking to his grill, his mirrors, his glass.
“Come on,” Jake pleaded, leaning forward as if his body weight could push the car faster. “Just let me get there.”
He thought about calling Wes, but he had checked his phone ten miles back.No Service. The ice was affecting towers and antennas, snapping the fragile infrastructure of rural Georgia like dry twigs.
He exited the interstate, hoping the back roads would be less crowded with fishtailing trucks. It was a mistake.
Hwy. 57 was a tunnel of gray. The pine trees, usually a vibrant, stubborn green, were encased in silver. They bowed low in places, like weeping monks praying to the asphalt.
Jake slowed to twenty. Then fifteen.
Every bridge was a trap. Every curve was a gamble. Jake white-knuckled it the whole way.
Around 4:00 PM, four miles from Spoon city limits, his luck ran out.
He wasn’t speeding. He wasn’t distracted. He was simply travelling on a road that had become a hockey rink. The back tires hit a patch of black ice on a gentle curve near Sun Hill Creek.
The car went silent. The steering wheel became weightless in his hands—a sickening, disconnected feeling that made his stomach drop through the floorboards. The vehicle didn’t skid violently; it floated, drifting sideways with a terrifying, slow-motion grace.
This is it, Jake thought, calm and detached.Sayonara.
The sedan slid off the shoulder. The world tipped.
Crunch.
It wasn’t a loud crash. It was the wet, heavy sound of plastic and metal meeting mud. The car nose-dived into the drainage ditch, sliding down the embankment until it hit the bottom with a bone-jarring thud. The engine sputtered, coughed once, and died.
Silence rushed back in, heavier than before.
Jake sat there for a moment, gripping the wheel, breathing hard. He checked his limbs. Fingers moved. Toes moved. Neck hurt, but it turned.
“Okay,” he breathed. “Okay.”
He turned the key. The starter clicked—a hollow, mocking sound.Click-click-click.
He pushed the door. It groaned, heavy with the angle of the car, but cracked open. Mud and slush oozed in over the floor mat.
He looked at the exhaust pipe in the side mirror. It was buried in the red clay of the ditch bank. If he somehow got the engine running, the cabin would fill with carbon monoxide in minutes. He couldn’t stay here.
He checked his phone again. Zero bars. The screen mocked him with a picture of the property deed he’d snapped earlier—success that felt completely hollow now.
4:15 PM. Sunset was coming.
Jake looked out at the road. It was empty. No salt trucks. No sheriffs. Just miles of frozen pines and a sky the color of a bruise.
He had a choice. He could huddle in the car, wrap himself in the floor mats, and pray someone came by before hypothermia set in. That was the logical choice. That was the banker choice.
But then he thought of Wes. He thought of the terror in Wes’s eyes when they talked about the 2019 storm. He thought about the vow he’d made.I’m not leaving you.
“I promised,” Jake whispered, his breath clouding the air.
He grabbed his leather weekender from the back seat, fishing out a thick pair of wool socks he’d packed, pulling them on over his dress socks. He buttoned his suit jacket first, then pulled his heavy wool peacoat over it and buttoned it, too, all the way. He jammed his leather gloves on and grabbed the heavy-duty flashlight he traveled with.
Jake forced the car door open and stepped out into the mud.
The cold was shocking. It wasn’t just the temperature, though. It was a presence, smelling of ozone and wet iron. The wind whipped the sleet sideways, stinging his cheeks like needles.
