Chloe Carter's Arc

Chapter 9 of 12

Chloe woke stiff in the driver's seat. Gray light filled the windshield. She had run the engine three times in the night. The gauge sat just under a quarter tank. She rubbed her eyes and looked at the fork in front of her. She still did not know how far the highway was. Without a number she could not plan anything, not fuel, not steps, not how long the cold would take her. She got out. The air burned her nose. She walked to the other track, the one into deeper timber, and looked at the ground. No tire marks. Old ruts under new snow. She walked twenty paces in and stopped. The road bent and kept going. She had no way to see the end of it from here. She went back to the sedan. She had to know. She could not sit here another night guessing. She would drive the flat track until she saw the highway or ran the tank to a half. If she saw nothing by then she would turn around while she still had gas to get back to this fork. She started the engine and rolled forward. The ruts were shallow and hard. The tires bit. She kept the wheels on the raised center where the wind had scoured the snow thin. The trees pressed close. Branches dragged the roof. A quarter mile in the road dipped. She saw the drift too late. It sat across the track in a smooth, rounded pile, wind-shaped, taller than her bumper. She hit the brake. The sedan slid forward on packed snow and pushed into the drift up to the headlights. The front end stopped hard. The rear tires spun and caught nothing. She put it in reverse. The wheels whined. The car did not move. She tried again, easing the pedal. Nothing. She got out and looked. The drift had swallowed the front bumper. The rear wheels sat in a glazed rut. Under them the snow was ice. She stood in the road and felt the tears come. She let them. Then she wiped her face and made her jaw set. Crying would not dig the car out. Anger would at least move her arms. She walked back the way she had come and counted her steps to the fork. Four hundred and twelve. She marked the number in her head. She looked down the flat track once more. No highway sound. No engines. Just trees. The sedan was stuck again, and this time she could not push through and she could not back out. The car was no longer the cabin. The car was the thing pinning her here. She would have to leave it and walk, and she still did not know which way the highway lay.