Sara Reinke - Backwoods

“Hey, McGillis, you know that twenty percent chance of storms you said the National Weather Service predicted for today?” Andrew Braddock called into his hand-held radio as from overhead, a crooked lash of lightning slapped across the underbelly of thick, low-lying rain clouds. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say they were a little off. Over.”

The only response that came back was a low, ominous grumble of thunder and a garble of static through the Motorola Talkabout. Not that Andrew had expected anything else. A good forty miles from anything and at least half that deep into the dense forests of the rugged Appalachian foot hills, he hadn’t been able to raise either Ted McGillis or Dean Allcott, the pair of forestry technicians he was working with, for the better part of the last two hours.

The thunderheads that been distant fixtures all day long, smoke-colored peaks rising among those of the Appalachian foothills, had finally filled the sky like a heavy, steel-grey shroud. Andrew could smell the rain, crisp and almost metallic, even before the first fat droplets plopped down through the pine boughs and tree crowns, spattering against the plastic dome of his hard hat, a bright orange thing that matched the mesh day-glo vest he wore. They were hideous, but necessary if he hoped to distinguish himself from a deer or elk through the sights of a poacher’s rifle. And in the particular corner of southeastern Kentucky in which he currently stood, poachers were more than just a potential threat, they were pretty much a guarantee.

“Out in those backwoods, you’re in God’s country—His and the drug dealers,” McGillis had told him, laughing at Andrew’s subsequent surprise. “Oh, yeah. They’re up there growing marijuana by the acre. The acre. With guards posted and everything, armed with machine guns and machetes, I’ve heard. Not to mention booby traps and tripwires.”

To counter this possibility, the trio had left their hotel in Pikeville in separate company Jeeps, each equipped with a .22-caliber rifle. All three had been trained to handle them, and trekked through their respective acres with the guns strapped to their backs.

“Hey, I’m going to close up shop here, meet you back at the hotel,” Andrew called into his walkie-talkie as the raindrops fell faster. “You guys copy me on that? Over.”

Still no reply. But neither McGillis nor Allcott were morons, so Andrew figured if it got wet enough, they’d head back to town, too. He clipped the radio back onto his belt, then leveled his angle gauge out in front of him, panning it quickly through the last few trees left in his survey plot.

By the time he made it back to the company Jeep, a late-model Liberty 4x4 with a fat blue W stenciled onto the door, the occasional plump raindrop had turned into a downpour. He leaped inside, tossing his rifle into the rear compartment, then slammed the door shut and yanked the hard hat from his head. His hair was soaked beneath, a drenched and dripping mess that clung to his forehead and cheeks and sent a network of interlacing rivulets of icy water sliding past the collar of his shirt and down his back.

When he started the car, the dash vents belched a thick, moist haze against the inside of the windshield, promptly obliterating any hope of a view ahead of him. He switched the system over to defrost and sat hunched in his seat, sopping and shivering, waiting for the fog to clear.

It had taken him a half an hour to get from Highway 460 to the entrance of the expansive property he’d been hired to survey, and from there, another hour at least spent bouncing and jostling along the steep, cragged terrain to reach his first site. As he used his hand to smear the lingering film of moisture away from the interior glass, he realized he still couldn’t see for shit and that it would probably take him at least twice as long to make his way down from the mountains again with the weather against him.

Terrific. He buckled his seatbelt, put the Jeep in gear and maneuvered it in a tight semi-circle, feeling the deep treads of the tires grinding for slippery purchase in the mud beneath him. Already, he could see rain forming shallow but expanding ponds along the rutted trail he’d followed.

By the time Andrew reached the highway, the windshield wipers were having trouble keeping pace with the torrential sheets pelting against the glass, even at top speed. The windshield started to fog again and Andrew glanced down, taking his hand off the gearshift long enough to reach for the temperature control, to swing it from the mid-level cool zone all of the way to bright red hot. A sudden blur of motion out of the corner of his eye snapped his gaze back to the windshield and the world immediately beyond it and he had less than a second to see something pinned by the stark white glare of the Jeep’s headlamps—bipedal, upright and what appeared to be naked, it looked like a man, except its back was hunched in a sharp hook like a question mark, its arms and legs hideously elongated. There was nothing discernable to its face but its mouth; wide open and gaping, it shrieked at the oncoming Jeep.

“Holy shit!” Andrew shrieked back, because there was no way he would miss the thing, whatever it was.

Another vehicle whipped around a sharp bend in the road almost immediately ahead of him, a very large truck that dwarfed the Jeep at least once over, with bright headlights that punched through the cab, impaling the creature between them in sudden, blinding glow.

“ Holy shit!” Andrew slammed his boot hard enough against the brake pedal to nearly raise his hips out of the driver’s seat. The wheels lost their tenuous grasp against the rain-slick pavement and the back end of the truck began to swing, skidding wide in a broad, wild arc.

He struck the thing that had darted out into the road in front of him, hearing a solid, heavy THUMP as the hood buckled with the forceful impact. The airbag deployed with a loud, startling BANG , mashing his lips against his teeth, snapping his head back and stunning the senses from him.

The Liberty rolled, crashing first onto its side and then over again onto its top. Again and again, the Jeep traded its ass for its fenders, rolling down a steep hillside, smashing into trees, battering across rocky outcroppings, gaining momentum with every rotation. Snapped to and fro like a rag doll in a clothes dryer by the tether of his seatbelt, Andrew’s head slammed into the passenger side window once, then twice. Three times was apparently the charm, because on the third blow, he heard the tinkling of splintered glass, stunning the senses from him.

The sound of rushing water brought him to, close enough and loud enough to rouse him from murky unconsciousness. For a long, groggy, hurting moment, he struggled to get his bearings.

The Jeep had come to a rest on its roof at the bottom of the hill, apparently landing in a rain-swollen creek. That torrential current, fueled to flash flood capacity, had engulfed the Jeep and streamed through cracks and holes in the broken windows.

Andrew tilted his head back, trying to peer around the airbag. Enough water had entered the Jeep to cover the interior roof, which was now, for all intents and purposes, the floor. The shallow depth was rapidly rising. A nearby skittering sound as a spider web of cracks in the window began to widen with the water’s force let him know it was about the get a lot deeper.

“Shit.” Blindly, he groped for his seat belt.

Plink!

The glass in the Jeep was tempered, designed to break in hundreds of tiny shards that were, in theory, to be of less potential destructiveness than any gigantic, jagged fragments. But now those miniscule pieces were beginning to pop out, shoved out of place by the rushing current, allowing a steadily increasing series of fountains to pour into the cab, narrow streams of muddy water that splattered against his face and quickly raised the water level to the crown of his head.