Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

Around midnight the station in Mancos radioed the general that there was activity in Dolores again. Two vehicles were pulling into town from Telluride. Before they made it to the roadblock, a third beacon suddenly appeared on the screen. It left the roadblock and moved towards Cortez. The other two vehicles were only a few miles behind it. This was definitely something . The general and all his men were immediately on their radios.

As the two vehicles passed the roadblock and continued south towards Cortez, six jeeps were sent west from Mancos. As the American vehicles came to the intersection with the road heading east to Durango, the six jeeps coming from Mancos were only two miles away. Also on the move—and having packed up the high-tech system in Aztec—the general was depending on the radar station in Mancos to keep him updated with all the movements. The officer on the radio in Mancos told General Roja the two American vehicles must have seen the lights coming because they had greatly picked up the pace. They were heading south towards Shiprock, but the six Qi Jia jeeps were rapidly closing on them.

The road from Cortez to Shiprock also had a two-way fork in it—directly south to Shiprock or diagonally west to Teec Nos Pos. The six Qi Jia vehicles were immediately behind the two American occupied ones now. The Americans were about to die.

Pulling into Cortez, Danny saw the lights. “Sam. You gotta fly now, man.” Danny slid open the window at the back of the cab and slid into the back. He yelled at me over the howling wind to get everyone else reversely inside the jeep. We scrambled to comply, through that same small sliding window. Directly behind us, Isaac could see what we were doing, and he told Blake to do the same. Blake slid into the back and urged everyone else into the cab of their jeep. Blake could see the lights gaining ground on them. Please, God . We couldn’t go fast enough. We were loaded down, and they were coming too fast.

We were coming up on an intersection in the road, intending to go straight south, when the southern road exploded right in front of us. I shrieked in a soprano octave I didn’t even think I had, but it nearly went unnoticed with all the other screams around me. We all looked frantically around for where the rocket (or whatever it was) had come from, but no one saw anything other than the jeeps closing in on us. “Uh, Danny,” I yelled out the back window.

“No, Dad, we don’t have time to stop at Four Corners,” he yelled back. In other words, “shut up.”

Totally was not going to ask that anyway. “Where do we—” I started to ask, but with no choice now, Sam swerved to the right fork. “Never mind,” I yelled back to Danny. Appropriately, he ignored me.

The sign on the right of the road had an arrow pointing the direction we were now going, with the words Teec Nos Pos, and the number 18. Crap. 18 miles?

I’m not exactly sure why that distance bothered me. We probably weren’t going to make it another mile or two anyway. The jeeps were right on us now, and Blake was starting to take fire.

He was giving it back too though, and he managed to take out the front tire of the first jeep. It swerved wildly off the road into the ditch and then launched into the air on the other side, flipping and landing on its back. That bought us a little time, but the next jeep was closing again as we now were approaching a bright light ahead of us. It turned out to be a fire from another explosion on the road. We were forced to take a county highway northwest from there. The Four Corners Monument was definitely out of the question now. But as Isaac’s jeep turned onto the county road behind us, there was another giant explosion behind him. The front pursuing jeep was a ball of screaming fire, and the entrance to the road was completely gone. The four remaining jeeps cut off the road and managed to find their way around the flaming jeep and back onto the highway, but they’d lost a full minute on us.

We raced on, apparently up county road 162, according to Tara—who had scrambled to see where we were heading on the map. Danny stuck his head inside the jeep and yelled, “What the hell is going on?”

No one had a good answer for Danny’s question. Either someone was missing us with all these explosions, or we were being directed somewhere in particular. It felt like someone was trying to help us. But who? And where were they? As we approached a giant wall blocking the road with yet another hole blown through it, we became more convinced that we were being assisted. Without someone blowing a hole through the Great Wall of Colorado, this would have been a dead end. This was crazy! It had to be more Americans.

Tara yelled back to Danny that, based on the map, we were heading towards a place called Twin Rocks Trading Post, and beyond that Goosenecks State Park. There were no roads past it, but there was a river. The San Juan River. If we could get there, maybe we could get the rafts in the water. We hadn’t seen a helicopter yet, and they probably weren’t pulling boats behind them at these speeds. I nodded at Tara with an impressed look. I hadn’t even thought of our two inflatable rafts. It was worth a shot .

Danny seemed to agree. He yelled back, “Okay. Get us there.”

We were coming up on a major intersection at the Twin Rocks Trading Post, Highway 191 according to the map, and we could see a jeep parked on it, blocking us from turning right. We raced past it, staring at it, but it didn’t move. As the four jeeps behind us closed on that jeep there were four giant explosions, and three of the pursuing jeeps were destroyed. The fourth pursuer remained stranded behind the three burning vehicles. This time there was no way around. From the back of the second jeep, Blake saw the parked jeep turn its lights on and pull in behind us. It raced up on us quickly but didn’t fire at us. It stayed about a quarter mile back, out of Blake’s range. To say we were bewildered would have been another colossal understatement. As Highway 191 was about to break to the left we saw another jeep parked ahead, and a long trail of lights coming north towards us. “Go straight, Sam,” Tara yelled.

“I don’t have a flipping choice, dude!” Sam yelled back. We swerved past the second parked jeep, and it too pulled in behind us as we raced down the county road into Goosenecks State Park. The road split about ten miles later, and Tara directed Sam to take a sharp left. The two jeeps that had been blocking the roads, and apparently blowing the other jeeps up, were tucked in about a half-mile back, side by side. There was a trail of about thirty sets of lights behind them.

We came up on a trailer park before the river, and Tara yelled to pull into it. We drove to the main lodge beside the water and were shocked to see about a dozen solid whitewater rafts stacked on top of each other next to the building.

“Forget everything else,” Danny yelled at us. “Get two of those rafts in the water and get going.”

Just then an explosion rocked us, then another. The two jeeps behind us were on this side of a giant fire, and there was a huge blaze immediately beyond their position. They’d blown up the road again. Seriously. Who were these people? We shoved two of the rafts in the water and as many guns and packs as we could carry in one run. Blake smashed in the door on the small building adjacent to the lodge and came out with an armful of life vests and paddles, tossing them quickly into the boats, and we all pushed off into the darkness. We left everything else in the jeeps.