Chloe Carter's Arc

Chapter 7 of 12

The drift filled the road ahead like a wall. Chloe stared at it through the windshield and felt the anger drain out of her hands. The logging road had ended. There was no turn wide enough for the sedan. The pines pressed in close on both sides, trunks and stumps and heaped snow. She had to go back the way she came. She shifted into reverse and eased off the brake. The tires spun. She let off and tried again, slower. The car crept back a foot. Then the rear dropped into a rut and stopped hard. The engine whined. She lifted her foot. She got out. The cold hit her face. She walked to the back of the car and knelt. The rear tires sat in a deep wheel track carved by something bigger than her sedan long ago. Old ice glazed the bottom of the rut. The tires had nothing to bite. If she gunned it, she would only dig in deeper and pack the ice smoother. She needed something under the tires. Branches again. She had used branches before and it had worked. She looked at the trees. The living limbs were high and green. The dead ones lay half-buried under snow along the shoulder. She dug with her gloves. She pulled out a length of pine, then another. Her fingers went numb inside the wet wool. She dragged four branches to the car and shoved them under the rear tires, thick ends first, pointing back the way she wanted to go. She pried the floor mat out of the driver's side and laid it flat behind the left tire, where the ice was worst. She got in. She set both hands on the wheel. She let the clutch of the brake go and gave the gas a slow, steady press. The tires caught. The branches cracked under the weight. The sedan rolled back two feet, three, then the mat spat out sideways and the left tire dropped again. She held the pedal. The right tire found wood and pushed. The car climbed out of the rut and kept rolling. She steered by the mirrors, one arm over the seat. The ruts ran straight for a hundred feet. She rode them backward, slow, until the road widened at a bend where trees had been cleared for a landing. She cut the wheel and worked the car around in short pulls, forward and back, until the nose pointed downhill again. She stopped. She was breathing hard. Her gloves were black with sap and mud. She looked through the windshield at the way out. The logging road ran down between the pines toward the fork. Beyond the fork, the plowed grade dropped toward the valley and the highway. She put the sedan in drive and started back down.