Chapter 1

The blare of the RV's air horn broke me from my reverie just seconds before disaster occurred. I'd been so lost in my gloomy thoughts that I'd let my car drift across the double yellow lines enough to be an oncoming driver's nightmare — two bright halogen headlights from an unseen vehicle on a direct path for a head-on collision. It took a few moments for the sound of the short, almost panicked blasts of the horn to penetrate my distraction, and another second for my mind to register their meaning. I jerked the steering wheel hard to the right, avoiding the oncoming motor home with room to spare, but I felt my rear end start to fishtail. The rear wheels finally lost their battle for traction, losing their grip on the road and swinging to the left. I felt, more than saw, the huge camper pass me, and it showered my car with a spray of water in its wake. An instant later, the car swapped ends, the rear end swinging through the oncoming lane and back over the double yellow before bouncing over the curb and onto the gravel of the shoulder. The momentum from the spin drove the car through the thin fence at the edge of the gravel, coming to a halt with a bang and a jolt at the culvert just beyond.

The sudden impact following the breathtaking spin froze me in my seat. For a few moments, all could hear was my own heartbeat. As that receded, I realized that the windshield wipers were still making their swish-scrape noise across the glass. I managed to turn them off after I unlocked my hands from the steering wheel, noticing how much my fingers and palms hurt from trying to control the uncontrollable spin. I tasted a little copper in my mouth, and swished my tongue around trying to figure out where I had bitten myself. Slowly, I puzzled out that I actually had bitten my tongue, not my cheek. Turning on the map light above the rear view mirror, I stuck out my tongue and saw that I had somehow managed to clip the tip with my teeth. The small cut wasn't bleeding profusely, but had left red streaks across my teeth and lips. I took a napkin from the passenger seat and pushed it against the cut, trying to put pressure on the site of the cut, but mostly only succeeding in getting a mouthful of wet paper for my trouble. I could feel a familiar headache forming at the base of my skull. A pinched nerve in my neck from a fall years ago was the trigger. When it flared, it caused one of those monsters that creeps slowly up the back of my head, over time leaving me unable to move without blinding pain and massive nausea. I knew I had a couple of hours before the pain would reach its peak, but once it happened, I'd be miserable for at least a day, if not more. Even worse, the only over-the counter remedy that had ever helped with the pain was in my medicine cabinet, a hundred miles in my wake.

But thinking about that gave me a new pain that had nothing to do with the accident. My former medicine cabinet, I corrected. I hung my head for a moment, letting my thoughts drift back into the sorrow that had been my constant companion for the past two hours. But the slow throb of my oncoming sick headache drew me back to my current predicament quickly. No time for self-pity, old son. Got to see if you can dig yourself out of this hole that self-pity has put you in.

I tried the ignition first. The key turned easily, but the motor just made a grinding, metal-on-metal screeching that reminded me of a garbage disposal with a fork caught in it. I didn't think I hit anything that hard! Knowing it was useless, I gave up on the engine and reached down to unbuckle my seat belt, moving slowly to minimize the pain already present in my head. Then I reached into the passenger side floorboard to get my coat from where it had landed during my unexpected trip. I struggled into it before opening the door and stepping... well, okay, maybe that's not going to work.

The car had backed over the culvert and then dropped the tail section of the sedan on the other side of the concrete ditch. First one and the other rear wheel had dropped into the gap, turning the car into a bridge between the two sides. Because the car had switched ends, my door was now facing the far side of the culvert, but the edge was several feet away. On a good day I might be able to push myself high enough and far enough through the air to reach it. On this day, all I could see doing was hitting the sharply angled concrete wall and tumbling down into the ditch, and then having to clamber my way out. I shut the door, glad the car seemed to be perched so solidly across the edges of the concrete ditch.

Then I realized... there was no way I was going to be driving the car anywhere tonight, or maybe anytime in the near future, either. Neither rear wheel was touching solid ground, and there was no telling what damage the impact had done to the axle, the frame, or the rest of the car. I sat still, realizing just how far up shit creek I was. Alone, on foot, in wet conditions on a highway where no cars had stopped to see what had happened or if anything was wrong. My cell phone had lost its signal 30 minutes earlier, and I was about to be overcome by a monster headache that would have me in blinding pain one moment, then bent over and retching the next. Within a few hours, it would be all I could to do to put one foot in front of me, never mind actually seeing where I was going. The blue L.E.D. numbers of the dashboard clock showed 12:15 AM... nearly six hours to dawn.

It's dark, cold, and wet. I could stay in the car and wait for someone to find me, but no one seems very interested in stopping to check out my situation. If nobody stops, I could be here unable to move for a day or more. No food or water, either. I looked down at the various crumpled snack bags that littered the front of the car, wishing I'd had something more substantial at the last set of lights I'd found along the highway.