Cabin Fever Daddy Trap
1. Kinsley
KINSLEY
The GPS screen flickers twice, coughs out one final "recalculating," and dies with a pathetic digital whimper that feels far too symbolic for comfort.
"No. No, no, no, no, no." I jab the power button with my thumb.
Then my index finger. Then both thumbs simultaneously, which has never once in the history of consumer electronics fixed anything, but my brain isn't exactly operating on logic right now.
It's operating on the kind of raw, frantic denial that comes from watching your only link to civilization blink out while you're sitting in a compact sedan that is sinking into what was a road.
Rain hits the windshield so hard it sounds like applause.
Mocking applause. Standing ovation for the woman who thought a solo "mental health reset" in the Blue Ridge Mountains was the answer to six straight months of sleeping under her desk at the office.
Bravo, Kinsley. Stellar planning. Really nailed the logistics on this one.
I drop the dead GPS into the cupholder and grip the steering wheel with both hands.
My headlights cut two weak yellow cones into the downpour, illuminating exactly nothing useful.
Just water. Brown, churning, frothing water racing across the gravel logging road like it has somewhere important to be.
The trees on either side are black columns, their canopy invisible in the dark, and the rain is so thick and relentless that my wipers have given up any pretense of keeping pace.
They slap back and forth on their highest setting and accomplish about as much as waving a napkin at a fire hose.
The car lurches. My stomach drops. I press the gas and the engine whines, a high thin sound that vibrates through the floorboard and into my bones, but the sedan doesn't move forward.
The tires spin and the whole chassis shudders and sinks another inch on the right side, tilting me toward the passenger door like the mountain itself is trying to swallow me at an angle.
I let off the gas. The car settles with a wet, sucking groan.
"Okay, this is fine. This is a situation, and situations have solutions, and I am a person who solves things.
I solve things for a living. I once reorganized an entire product launch in forty-eight hours because Derek in Marketing sent the wrong spec sheet to the manufacturer.
This is just... nature's spec sheet. Wrong road.
Wrong car. Wrong everything." I'm talking to myself.
I'm aware I'm talking to myself. I don't stop because the alternative is silence, and silence right now would be filled with the sound of water rising and gravel shifting and my own heartbeat doing something medically concerning against my ribs.
I pull my phone from the pocket of my lavender rain jacket, the one I bought specifically for this trip because the sales associate at REI said it was "perfect for glamping conditions.
" Glamping conditions. I want to travel back in time and ask that woman what exactly she thought glamping conditions entailed, because right now my glamping conditions include a flash flood and mud up to the hubcaps and mascara running down my face from the dash between the parking lot and the car three hours ago.
The jacket, for the record, is already streaked with brown from when I stepped out twenty minutes back to check the tires and immediately sank ankle-deep in what I can only describe as cold chocolate cement.
The phone screen lights up. One percent battery.
One. Because I'd used the maps app the entire drive up from Asheville after the GPS started glitching outside of Marshall, draining the phone while the charging cable, the one I'd specifically packed and placed on the kitchen counter so I wouldn't forget it, sits on the kitchen counter in my apartment two hundred and thirty miles southeast of here.
One percent. No signal bars. Not even the little triangle that means you might get a text through if you hold the phone above your head and pray to the right satellite. Just an empty space where bars should be, and the time reading 9:47 PM, and then the screen goes black and stays black.
I move the phone down next to the dead GPS. They look like a matched set. Useless technology bookends.
The rain intensifies. I didn't think that was possible, but the mountain has decided to prove me wrong with the enthusiasm of someone who has been personally insulted.
Water streams down the windshield in sheets so solid they turn the glass opaque.
Something heavy rolls past the driver's side.
A rock, maybe, or a branch, carried by the current that is absolutely, undeniably flowing over the road now, not just across it.
The car shudders again. The right rear tire drops into something.
A rut, a washout, a hole where the road was.
The sedan cants further, and my purse slides off the passenger seat and dumps its contents onto the floor mat.
Lip gloss, granola bars, a paperback self-help book called "Becoming Your Own Sanctuary" that the wellness influencer I follow recommended.
It lands spine-up in a puddle of muddy water that has somehow, impossibly, seeped into the footwell.
"I don't need a sanctuary," I whisper. "I need a tow truck."
The engine sputters. The headlights dim, flare, dim again. And the water keeps rising.
I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry.
I chant it like a mantra as I shove the car door open against the wind and the rain hits me with the force of a full-body slap.
Cold. Not just cold. The kind of cold that steals your breath and replaces it with a gasp that tastes like dirt and ozone and the particular flavor of regret that comes from ignoring every single weather advisory on the drive up.
My lavender trench coat, the one with the darling oversized buttons and the belt that ties in a bow, the one I picked out because it matched my hiking boots (suede, ruined) and my overnight bag (canvas, currently submerged in the footwell), balloons around me in a gust and then plasters itself to my body like wet tissue paper.
The water is ankle-deep on the road. Calf-deep in places.
I can feel the current pulling at my feet as I wade around to the trunk, and my suede boots fill instantly with gritty, ice-cold runoff that squishes between my toes and makes me want to scream.
I don't scream. Screaming requires opening my mouth, and opening my mouth right now means drinking the mountain, so I clamp my jaw shut and wrestle the trunk open and grab the first thing my hands close around.
The pastry box. Pink cardboard, tied with twine, stamped with the logo of that little French bakery in Asheville where I'd spent twenty-two dollars on six croissants and four macarons because the listing for the glamping retreat said to "bring a treat to share with your fellow nature enthusiasts.
" My fellow nature enthusiasts. I picture them now, wherever the retreat actually is, sitting around a bonfire under a tasteful canvas tent, sipping herbal tea and discussing their chakras while I drown in a ditch in Madison County.
The box is damp. Not soaked through yet.
I tuck it under my arm like a football, slam the trunk, and look up the road.
Or what's left of it. The logging path continues uphill, winding into darkness so complete it has texture.
I can't see ten feet beyond the dead headlights of the sedan, which flicker one last time and surrender.
The engine dies with a rattle and a hiss, and suddenly the only light in the world is the occasional white flash of lightning that splits the sky and turns the trees into skeletal photographs before plunging everything back into black.
In the last flash I spot something. A break in the tree line maybe forty yards ahead.
A wider section of road. The suggestion of a path cutting left and climbing steeply.
The rental listing said the retreat was a mile up the mountain from the logging road turnoff.
I'd been driving for at least ten minutes on this road before the car sank, which means I'm close.
Maybe. Possibly. The math is uncertain because math requires a functioning brain and mine is currently dedicated to the single task of not dissolving into a puddle of tears and French pastry.
I start walking. My boots squelch. The road is more river than road now, water braiding around rocks and fallen branches, and twice in the first hundred yards I stumble and catch myself on my hands and knees in the muck.
The pastry box gets crushed against my ribs both times.
I hold it tighter. I don't know why. It's croissants.
It's the most useless thing I could have grabbed from that trunk.
My overnight bag had a flashlight in it, a change of clothes, my emergency inhaler.
But the overnight bag is underwater and the pastry box is here and I'm not going back, because going back means admitting that I am stranded in a dead car in a flash flood on a mountain in the dark, and I'm not ready to admit that yet, so the pastry box stays.
The path veers left and climbs. Steeply, the way the mountains here don't bother with switchbacks or gradual inclines.
Just up. Straight up. Through trees so dense overhead that the rain actually lessens for a moment, filtered through layers of leaves and needles into fat, irregular drops that hit the back of my neck and slide down my spine.
The ground is softer here, clay and decomposing leaves that give under my boots and suck at my soles with every step. My thighs burn. My lungs burn.