Doranna Durgin - Survival Instinct

And then she drove away.

Karin headed west, through Jefferson National Forest and toward Bluefield, West Virginia. She’d been to Pipestem State Park a couple of times…she thought she could find some work around there. Not enough to live on, but better than just spending down what she had with her.

The terrain gradually changed around her, starting as long, folded ridges of earth with plenty of valley-graceful formations, in harmony with each other. But slowly the mountains took on a different flavor-craggy, the formations harsher and struggling for apparent dominance, one over the other. The valleys started to narrow into hollows, and humans took themselves to live upon the sides and tops of the ridges instead of down in the bottom. And every now and then…the roadside view turned spectacular, offering long, uninterrupted vistas of the mountains fighting with one another to be king of the hill. Sometimes there was even enough shoulder available to form an official scenic viewpoint.

Karin drove for three hours, crossed I-77 on Route 61, and found herself one of those spots. She’d made some distance. Unless Dave-or the persistent geek-had tied themselves to her bumper, they weren’t going to find her. By the time she settled in somewhere with her hair dyed, her eyebrows plucked into bare existence, and a horrible home perm…

“The sacrifices we make,” she grumbled, cutting the engine after her bumper tapped the guardrail.

Come daylight, she’d want to get moving again. But finding a place to settle wouldn’t happen in the wee hours of the morning, and she needed sleep as much as the next refugee.

Temporary refugee.

Out of habit, she reached for her courier bag, pulling out the journal. Until now the leather-bound book had had an easy existence, sitting in one spot on the same desk in the same room. Now it was about to take some dings. “You’ll have character,” she told it, rummaging for the pen.

Dear Ellen,

Boy, has your life gotten adventurous in the last twenty-four hours. How could you have failed to mention Dave Hunter? I can understand why you might have left Barret out of the picture. But Dave…okay, I would have talked about him if I were you. I wish you were here so we could talk about him now.

Too bad I can’t give him what he needs, and there’s no way I’m staying in a safe house with him. He’s no dummy. He’s an investigator, and he’s already noticed I’m not quite you. Put us in the same house for more than a few days and he’s going to start investigating who I am-and he’ll figure it out, too. I have the feeling he’s damned good. And then he’s going to put my name in the system just to see what it spits out, and why I’m pretending to be you.

On the other hand…it might be nice to know what my lovely little warrant is for. Here I am on the run, and I don’t even know why.

Well, except that here in your life-the one that’s gotten adventurous-there’s a very big man who’s looking for me. And Dave is going to look, too-and even if his reasons are totally admirable and all that stuff, I don’t need the attention.

So I’ll make sure neither of them finds me. But stayed tuned. The next couple of days aren’t going to be about chores.

Karin rolled the truck window down a crack for the fresh air, but only a crack. She’d driven up to a higher elevation, where the nights still regularly nudged freezing. She pulled on a thick knit cap, wrapped a scarf round her neck and pulled an old wool army blanket over her legs. Oversize mittens on top of her insulated work gloves, a good wiggle to scratch her back against the truck seat, and she was ready for napping.

But oh. She added that one final touch-she reached for the rifle. If anyone came tapping around her windows, they’d be in for a surprise.

She warmed herself with decadent thoughts about that moment in the henhouse with Dave, and fell asleep.

Something shattered, raining shards down upon her. Karin barely had her eyes open when the truck door pulled out away from her, and fingers clamped down on her arm through her old army surplus coat. She was yanked up and out; something in her hand tangled with the steering wheel. Only after it was torn from her grip did she realize she’d lost the rife; only then did she remember why she’d been sleeping in the car at all. Sleeping deeply, after a long, hard day and gone straight through to the wee hours of the morning.

How-?

How didn’t matter, not when she was flying through the air to land on the hard grit of the one-vehicle parking area. Another car jammed in beside her truck, engine still running, lights still on. Karin threw her hand up against the light, blinded, but it wasn’t a good move-it only gave her still-unseen assailant a convenient handle. He snatched her up and gave her a little shake. “You’re a real pain in the ass,” he growled.

Errand goon with gangster mullet. Oh crap.

“If Barret told you I’d be easy, that was his mistake,” she gasped, her feet barely touching the ground. She’d lost her oversize mittens and her scarf skewed to cover one eye; her world whipped back and forth as he shook her. She had to get to the truck, to the rifle or the baseball bat or even her keys…

“You’re done running now,” he said.

She squirmed, still breathless. “Tell him you couldn’t find me. I can make it worth your-”

He shook her again. Hard. “I’m not being paid enough to listen to you.”

“Ohhh,” she groaned. “I’m going to…” And she gave a convincing heave. He thrust her away, slamming her against the side of the truck. She floundered, reaching into the bed of the truck, hand groping for…for anything, any tool small or large, any hard object…

She came up with a handful of hay detritus-dusty, prickly little bits of dried grass stems. What the hell. What you’ve got, you use. She flung the dust into his eyes and dove for the open truck door.

He snarled-the real thing, a nasty, animalistic sound-and blindly scooped her up on the run, a hand clutching the material between her shoulder blades and another hand grabbing her jeans at the hip and he flung her-

Right over the guardrail.

Right over the effing guardrail…

Flashes of the night Ellen died hit Karin head-on, tangling with reality as she bashed into a small outcrop, smashed up against the windshield, scraped against a verticle of dirt and vine and stone, tumbled in the rolling car, cold air on her face, cold rain on her face-

Impact.

At first she couldn’t breathe. Diaphragm frozen, lungs empty of air and burning, straining-I’ll never breathe again and I’ll die right here and now-and then the air rushed back into her lungs with a great whoop. The outrage began to sink in. How the hell had he found her? How fair was this, to find herself thrown over another embankment?

From above-far above-came a nasty string of words.

“How do you think I feel?” she muttered. But she got the idea. He hadn’t meant to throw her over the edge of anything. He probably still needed to return her to Barret. “Cree-ap.”

A moment of silence passed, during which the errand geek was presumably contemplating his options. Karin took the moment to assess her situation, carefully not moving, not until she had a feel for the width of this uneven little outcrop. She stared up into the night sky, glad enough to see the waning moon. Slowly, she picked out vague details of her surroundings, allowing her peripheral vision-the best night vision-to feed her the details. The stunted rhododendron above her, the thick fall of foliage beside it that could only be invasive kudzu, the occasional glimpse of treetop in the otherwise open space to her left.

But mostly, just that open space.

Using only her fingers, she felt out toward the left and found gritty, sloping rock. She allowed her hand to creep over, and then her whole lower arm. She had about a foot before the ground rounded off and fell away.