Chapter 7: What She Saw

The road twisted back up into the forest, and Lily was so focused on watching for the water levels that she didn't see the washout ahead. The road simply disappeared, the ground giving way to a gully where the water was running in a torrent, undercutting the pavement. She hit the brakes hard, and the truck slid, tires losing purchase on the wet asphalt.

For a moment, she thought she was going over. The truck tilted dangerously, the right wheels dropping toward the gully, and Lily's hand went to the brake even though she knew it wouldn't help. But the tires caught again, just barely, and the truck lurched to a stop balanced on the edge of the washout, half on road and half on the crumbling shoulder.

Lily sat very still, her hands shaking so hard she could barely hold the steering wheel. Behind her, the gully was cutting deeper by the minute, the water from the ridge flowing down in a brown torrent that was rapidly becoming more dangerous.

She was, essentially, stuck.

She got out of the truck and tested the ground beneath her feet. The shoulder was holding, but it was wet and unstable. Water was flowing across the road in multiple places now, the runoff from the ridge turning the entire slope into a temporary watershed. If the washout got any deeper, the road would cave entirely.

Lily pulled out her phone. No signal, naturally. She got back in the truck, locked the doors, and tried to think logically. The road would eventually drain. The rain would stop. This was a temporary situation, and the truck was on reasonably stable ground, even if that ground was sloping more than was comfortable.

She pulled on dry clothes from her emergency kit, which she always carried because she was the kind of person who always carried emergency kits. Then she made coffee from her thermos and tried to settle in for what would probably be several hours of waiting.

It was still raining hard, the sound on the truck roof loud and persistent. The light was already fading into evening, which meant full dark would come in maybe an hour. Lily was not particularly afraid of the dark, but she was starting to be concerned about the level of water flow. The gully continued to deepen, and the road on both sides of the washout was starting to show signs of instability.

She was reviewing her maps and trying to think of alternate routes when the sound changed. The rain sound got different, more urgent, and Lily looked up to see something alarming. The water level in the gully had risen dramatically, and now it was climbing the slope toward the road itself.

Flash flood. A big one.

Lily started the truck immediately, deciding that back down the slope toward the bridge was her only option. She put the truck in reverse and eased back from the gully, watching her mirrors. She'd made it about twenty meters when the headlights caught something in the darkness ahead of her.

A figure, standing in the middle of the road, making no effort to move or get out of the way. Even through the rain, she recognized the shape. Ryder.

Lily pumped the brakes and opened the window, shouting, "Get out of the road!"

He didn't move. He just stood there, and even through the downpour and the darkness, she could see that his eyes had changed. They were bright amber now, glowing slightly in the darkness, and his hands were clenching and unclenching like he was fighting something inside himself.

"Get in!" she shouted.

He wrenched open the passenger door and threw himself into the truck, his clothes soaking wet, water dripping onto the leather seat. Lily didn't waste time on questions. She could see the water level rising in her mirrors, the gully becoming less of a gully and more of a chasm.

"Which way?" she demanded.

"North," he said, his voice lower than before, rougher. "There's a high route. Go north."

Lily swung the truck around, pointing it back up the road, driving faster than was probably safe. Ryder had both hands braced on the dashboard, and when the truck hit a pothole, he gripped the edge of the seat and she heard something that sounded almost like a growl come out of his throat.

"Are you hurt?" she asked, glancing at him.

"No. Drive."

She drove. The truck climbed the slope through the rain, and behind them, she could hear the sound of the water rising. Not a small creek anymore. A river trying to flow down a mountain.

"Turn left," Ryder said. "There's an old logging road."

Lily saw it just in time: a narrow cut through the forest, overgrown but passable. She swung into it hard, and the truck bounced on the rough ground. She could feel something very wrong with the situation, but she was trained to compartmentalize. Data first, panic later.

She drove for maybe five minutes, losing elevation and reaching higher ground, until they were clearly above the flood line and the forest was solid around them. Only then did she slow down, pulling into a small clearing and shutting off the engine.

Rain drummed on the roof. Neither of them spoke. Lily sat with both hands still on the wheel, letting her pulse even out, listening to the sound of water that couldn't reach them now.

Then she turned to look at him.

His eyes were amber again — just amber, the same unsettling color they'd always been, nothing glowing, nothing wrong. He was watching the rain on the windshield like a man who was very carefully not watching her.

She thought about what she'd seen on the road. The way the light had caught his eyes, or hadn't caught them, the way they'd seemed to generate something from the inside. She was a scientist. She catalogued what she observed and she didn't construct explanations before she had data.

But sitting in a dark truck in the middle of a flood with Ryder, she couldn't stop turning over the one thing she didn't have an answer for: if his eyes hadn't actually been glowing out there on the road, then what exactly had she seen?