“But you can’t. You made it across that stream once by sheer dumb luck. You can’t do it again.”
When she had the car straight and aimed down the hillside, she looked at him. “In or out?”
Alex took a deep breath. “In,” he said as he braced himself.
In the next second, Bailey floored the accelerator and hit the stream at full speed. And for the second time, she managed to twist the car around the rocks.
When they were on the other side, Alex said, “I need a drink.”
“You’re too young to drink,” Bailey snapped.
“I’m too young to die, but that isn’t going to keep me alive.”
Bailey jerked the wheel sharply and turned onto the road that she’d come up the mountain on. For a moment she almost relaxed, but then Rodney and his big black truck came roaring out from the trees, and Bailey went down the trail at fifty miles an hour.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Alex yelled.
“I don’t know,” she yelled back. “I mentioned Gus and Luke and the mulberry tree, and he went insane.”
She swerved around a rock and nearly sent Alex through the windshield. “He’s getting closer,” she said as she looked in her rearview mirror.
“Half a mile. If you can stay in front of him for half a mile, you’ve got it. He can’t drive on the highway. Too many DWIs, among other things. He steps out of these mountains and the sheriff will lock him up forever.”
“Is there a shorter way out of here?”
When Alex said nothing, she glanced at him.
“Where?” she yelled.
“It’s an old logging road. Impassable. You can’t go that way!”
“Where?” she shouted again.
Alex lifted his hand and pointed, and she could see an opening through the trees just ahead of them. “Hold on,” she shouted, then turned the car in a spray of gravel and headed down the old road.
Alex looked out the back. “He won’t follow us this way. He knows he can’t make it. He knows—Holy shit! He’s right behind us.”
“Watch your language!” Bailey said as she ran over a four-inch log and sent their heads banging into the ceiling.
“We’re gonna die any second, and you’re telling me not to cuss?”
“The Lord is my shepherd,” Bailey said. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in—”
Alex turned to look at what she was seeing. There was a bridge that had been whole the last time he saw it, but now half of it was in the river. The deep, fast-moving river. “—in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. Yea though I—”
“—walk through the valley of the shadow of death—”
The next sound was their screams in unison as the car went flying off the bridge and sailing over the river.
When the car hit the other side, they landed hard, and for a moment they were both too dazed to comprehend that they had made it, and they were alive.
Alex recovered first. He looked out the back window and saw his father on the other side of the river, getting out of his truck—with his shotgun.
Alex looked at Bailey, and Bailey looked at Alex.
“—I will fear no evil—” they said together, then Bailey pushed on the accelerator, but the car had stopped. She turned the key, but it wouldn’t start. Alex leaned across her and looked at the gauges.
“Lady, you’re out of gas.”