If the second call went through, she’d answer. But it didn’t go through, so she didn’t.
By the time I’ve cycled through calling and texting for help, it’s getting hard to breathe from how stifling the heat is inside the truck.
I stare out the front window at the gate. It’s still there, too far away to see the symbols. Runes? A weird art project? The woods continue to be woods around me.
“Maybe it’s gone.”
It didn’t seem to follow us after I whanged it with the rock. The poor thing was in bad shape. It very well could have keeled over and died as soon as I turned my back. There’s a strong possibility the danger is over.
Regardless, we have to get out of the truck.
It’s incredible how much cooler the air is outside. Ripley hops out and immediately shakes herself. I wipe my face with my shirt and take another swallow of water. The cool descent down my throat into my stomach is a sin.
I take a minute to breathe and scan the area around us. There’s a smell I didn’t notice in my panic. It’s chemical and sickeningly strong. I recognize it immediately.
There are puddles everywhere. One has a weird glint to it.
Water leaches into the knees of my jeans when I kneel in the mud. I point my phone’s flashlight under the truck and immediately wish I hadn’t.
A lake of liquid shining with rainbow bright chemicals. Gas. Gas mixed with mud; gas mixed with rainwater; gas that would get us home drained out of the tank and onto the ground.
There is a hole the size of my index finger in the gas tank above. The hole is neat. Smooth. Circular. I press my finger to it.
A curled plastic shaving sticks to my skin. I sit back on my haunches so I can hold the finger and the piece up to eye level. Ripley goes to lick my hand, then raises a lip and shakes her head at the smell of gas.
I have the strongest urge to keep the tiny piece of plastic. There’s no reason for it. I just want it. I wonder if the person who drilled a hole in my gas tank wants to keep me too.
CHAPTER 6
On the left is the new-construction home I passed on my way in.
It’s encased in robin’s-egg blue siding and bordered by precise boxwood landscaping planted in beds of fragrant mulch. The dark metal roof brings the whole look together. Track marks from large construction vehicles mark the ground at the edges of the woods and along the driveway. A sporty little Audi sits in the driveway. It has the energy of a frat bro brushing behind me at a dorm party and “accidentally” tugging my ass back into its groin. Wasn’t there a Jeep before?
I am drenched in sweat and sucking in air through my nose to try to calm my thudding heart. We alternated between jogging and fast walking the mile from my useless hunk of a truck to the intersecting road.
Ripley is panting—saliva slicking her snout and dripping from her tongue. Running in this heat is not good for her. She keeps looking at me like she doesn’t understand why I’m making her do it.
I don’t know how to break it to a dog that (1) you think someone has deliberately stranded both her and her person in the middle of the woods, (2) that her owner’s phone won’t connect to anyone despite having service, (3) that both of them somehow have to get to a phone that does work in order to get help, and, finally, (4) do so while avoiding being serial-killed, or axe-murdered, or attacked by a rabid coyote.
There’s a house farther down the road. I know this because I specifically made a mental note to put both it and the new-construction home into my report. The other house was set too far back to see much of the actual building from the road. What was visible were sun-bleached deer figurines, ragged windmills that had long ago lost their shine, and a crooked mailbox.
One of the curtains in the new-construction house twitches. It’s a second-story bow window that juts out of the house. Panes of glass like many boxy eyes glint down at me with over-Windexed intensity. That’s how I’d draw it—each window an eye and the front door a grotesque mouth. The curtain doesn’t move again. There’s a rock lying a few inches from my right foot that would shatter the bright-eyed windows spectacularly.
I keep walking.
I’m not sure how I’m going to explain this objectively silly decision to Emma or my mother. How do you explain to someone that, yes, you were in fear for your life, but the Audi reminded you of the coked-out, dull-as-sea-glass frat boys you went to school with and the distant, unsympathetic length of their gazes?
How do you explain that you were desperate for a phone to call for help, but that you used to deliver pizzas to houses that looked just like this, and they always contained pinch-lipped women and bunched-up men who took the time to write in a zero for the tip?
How do you explain, without sounding utterly ridiculous, that you don’t trust people with money to the extent that it means walking another half mile through the woods to find help?
“Let’s go,” I tell Ripley. She doesn’t move. She’s facing the way we came.
She’s going to hear someone following us long before I do.
I stare hard in the same direction, waiting for either a blood-splattered, axe-wielding killer or a mangy coyote to come trotting around the curve in the road. Statistically, it’s more likely to be a common-looking white man in a button-down with an office job than a serial killer.
A bell goesding ding dingin my head. Speaking of common white men. I did piss off one at the gas station.
