Chloe Carter's Arc

Chapter 11 of 12

The highway ran flat for maybe thirty yards. Then it bent, and Chloe had to choose. Left dropped away between dark pines. Right climbed a grade that shone under her headlights like glass. She slowed the sedan to a crawl at the seam of the two directions. The gauge sat just under an eighth. The man in the coat was somewhere behind her on foot, but not for long. She had no map. She had no sign. She had a highway she didn't know and a safe house at the end of it that a federal voice on a phone message had promised her weeks ago. Down felt right. Down was towns and gas stations and people. But down was also the way she had come, and the way anyone hunting her would expect. If down was where they had staged the first man and the second, then down led back to whoever had paid them. She picked up. Up felt wrong, and wrong felt safer than obvious. She turned the wheel right and gave the sedan gas. The grade steepened inside a hundred feet. The headlights caught a switchback ahead, a tight curl of pale ice hugging the mountain. The rear tires spun once, caught, spun again. She eased off. The car crept. She could hear the tread hunting for anything to grip and finding a polished sheet instead. She took the first bend at ten miles an hour. The back end drifted left toward the guardrail. She steered into it the way her father had taught her on wet grass. The sedan straightened. She breathed out. The second bend was worse. The ice curved up and away, sculpted smooth by wind. She gave it a touch more gas to keep momentum. The rear wheels broke loose. The tail swung wide. The guardrail flashed white in her window and the bumper kissed it with a sound like a dropped pan. She stopped. The engine idled. The car sat crossways on the switchback, nose uphill, rear pinned against the rail. She tried the gas. The tires screamed and went nowhere. She tried reverse. Nothing. The sedan was done climbing. She cried once into her glove. Then she made it stop and let the anger come up under it. She had picked wrong. Up was a trap and she had driven straight into it, and the man in the coat was walking toward her right now on the flat road below. She killed the headlights. She killed the engine. In the sudden dark she heard her own breath and, under it, far down the grade, the soft crunch of boots on packed snow. She pulled the knife off her thigh. She unlocked the door. She would not die inside the car she had paid for. She stepped out onto the ice and started climbing on foot.