Chapter 11
Eleven
The world didn’t end with a bang; it ended with the rhythmic, scraping sound of windshield wipers fighting a losing battle against slush.
But as he crossed the fall line, the rain changed.
It hit the glass like buckshot. Tick. Tick. Tick-tick-tick.
The temperature gauge on the dashboard dropped from 34° to 31° in the span of three miles. The spray from the semi-trucks ahead of him wasn’t misting anymore; it was sticking to his grill, his mirrors, his glass.
“Come on,” Jake pleaded, leaning forward as if his body weight could push the car faster. “Just let me get there.”
He thought about calling Wes, but he had checked his phone ten miles back. No Service. The ice was affecting towers and antennas, snapping the fragile infrastructure of rural Georgia like dry twigs.
He exited the interstate, hoping the back roads would be less crowded with fishtailing trucks. It was a mistake.
Hwy. 57 was a tunnel of gray. The pine trees, usually a vibrant, stubborn green, were encased in silver. They bowed low in places, like weeping monks praying to the asphalt.
Jake slowed to twenty. Then fifteen.
Every bridge was a trap. Every curve was a gamble. Jake white-knuckled it the whole way.
Around 4:00 PM, four miles from Spoon city limits, his luck ran out.
He wasn’t speeding. He wasn’t distracted. He was simply travelling on a road that had become a hockey rink. The back tires hit a patch of black ice on a gentle curve near Sun Hill Creek.
The car went silent. The steering wheel became weightless in his hands—a sickening, disconnected feeling that made his stomach drop through the floorboards. The vehicle didn’t skid violently; it floated, drifting sideways with a terrifying, slow-motion grace.
This is it, Jake thought, calm and detached. Sayonara.
The sedan slid off the shoulder. The world tipped.
Crunch.
It wasn’t a loud crash. It was the wet, heavy sound of plastic and metal meeting mud. The car nose-dived into the drainage ditch, sliding down the embankment until it hit the bottom with a bone-jarring thud. The engine sputtered, coughed once, and died.
Silence rushed back in, heavier than before.
Jake sat there for a moment, gripping the wheel, breathing hard. He checked his limbs. Fingers moved. Toes moved. Neck hurt, but it turned.
“Okay,” he breathed. “Okay.”
He turned the key. The starter clicked—a hollow, mocking sound. Click-click-click.
He pushed the door. It groaned, heavy with the angle of the car, but cracked open. Mud and slush oozed in over the floor mat.
He looked at the exhaust pipe in the side mirror. It was buried in the red clay of the ditch bank. If he somehow got the engine running, the cabin would fill with carbon monoxide in minutes. He couldn’t stay here.
He checked his phone again. Zero bars. The screen mocked him with a picture of the property deed he’d snapped earlier—success that felt completely hollow now.
4:15 PM. Sunset was coming.
Jake looked out at the road. It was empty. No salt trucks. No sheriffs. Just miles of frozen pines and a sky the color of a bruise.
He had a choice. He could huddle in the car, wrap himself in the floor mats, and pray someone came by before hypothermia set in. That was the logical choice. That was the banker choice.
But then he thought of Wes. He thought of the terror in Wes’s eyes when they talked about the 2019 storm. He thought about the vow he’d made. I’m not leaving you.
“I promised,” Jake whispered, his breath clouding the air.
He grabbed his leather weekender from the back seat, fishing out a thick pair of wool socks he’d packed, pulling them on over his dress socks.
He buttoned his suit jacket first, then pulled his heavy wool peacoat over it and buttoned it, too, all the way.
He jammed his leather gloves on and grabbed the heavy-duty flashlight he traveled with.
Jake forced the car door open and stepped out into the mud.
The cold was shocking. It wasn’t just the temperature, though. It was a presence, smelling of ozone and wet iron. The wind whipped the sleet sideways, stinging his cheeks like needles.
Jake scrambled up the embankment, his dress shoes slipping in the slush until he made it to the asphalt. Once there, he looked at the vehicle, thinking, if you were a horse, I’d have to shoot you.
He turned his collar up, put his head down, and started walking toward Spoon.
Holiday Pines Farm
5:30 PM
The farmhouse felt like a tomb.
The power had failed at 3:45 PM, taking the hum of the refrigerator and the whir of the furnace with it. Now, the only sounds were the wind howling around the eaves and the terrifying, erratic CRACK-POP of trees shattering in the orchard.
Every snap echoed like a gunshot.
Wes stood at the living room window, staring into the void. He couldn’t see the trees, but he could feel them dying.
“That was a big one,” Henry murmured from the darkness behind him.
“Sounded like a white pine,” Wes said, his voice flat. “Maybe near the barn.”
“Generator?”
“Fuel line’s frozen. I can’t get it primed.”
Wes resumed his pacing. Eight steps to the fireplace. Eight steps to the window. He was wearing his coat inside the house, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, clenching and unclenching.
Henry was buried under a mountain of quilts in his recliner, pushed dangerously close to the fireplace. The orange glow of the embers cast deep, dancing shadows on his face, turning his wrinkles into canyons. He looked frail. He looked exactly as he had five years ago, the night Wes’s mother died.
“You’re gonna wear a hole in the rug, Wesley,” Henry said.
“He should be here,” Wes said, ignoring him. “He left Atlanta at noon. Even doing thirty miles an hour, he should have been here by four.”
“Roads are slicker than owl shit, son. Maybe he stopped at a motel in Macon. Or Jackson. Smart thing to do.”
“He wouldn’t stop,” Wes said, the words tearing out of him with a violence that surprised them both. “He said he’d be back.”
“Plans change, Wes. People get scared.”
“Not him.” Wes checked his watch for the hundredth time. 5:35 PM. “Something’s wrong. I can feel it.”
He grabbed his keys off the mantel. The metal was cold.
Henry sat up, the quilts rustling. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m taking the truck. I’m gonna look for him.”
“You’re going to risk the truck? In this?” Henry’s voice rose, sharp with disbelief. “We might need the truck. You’re going to wreck our only transport for a banker?”
Something inside Wes snapped. A tension wire that had been holding him together for a decade—through art school rejection, through cancer treatments, through strokes and storms—finally frayed and broke.
He spun around.
“He’s not just a banker, Pop!” Wes shouted. The sound rang off the low ceiling beams. “He’s not a guest. I love him, okay? I’m in love with him.”
Henry went still.
“I love him,” Wes repeated, his voice cracking. “And if he is in a ditch somewhere freezing to death while I stand here warming my ass by the fire, I will never forgive myself. I will never forgive you.”
The silence that followed was stark, irreversible, like the first crack in a frozen lake.
Wes stood there, chest heaving, waiting to fall through. He waited for the disappointment. He waited for the hateful slur. He waited for the medical emergency that stress could trigger.
Henry just stared into the fire. “Well,” he grunted finally, not looking up. “It's about damn time you said it out loud.”
Wes blinked. “What?”
Henry turned to look at his son. His eyes were clear, sharp, and utterly un-shocked. “I may be half-crippled, but I’m not blind. I saw how he looked at you at dinner last week. I saw how you looked at him when you thought I was watching TV.”
Henry sighed—a sound of resignation, but also relief. “Your mother... she always knew you had a big heart. Just took you a long time to find someone worth giving it to.”
Wes felt his knees go weak. “You—you aren’t mad?”
“I’m mad the power is out,” Henry grunted. “And I’m mad you thought I was too narrow-minded to see my own son.” He gestured toward the door with his cane. “Go on, then. Get him. And be sure to take the chainsaw in case trees are blocking the road.”
Wes felt a sob catch in his throat, hot and stinging, but he swallowed it down. He walked over and squeezed Henry’s shoulder. “I’ll be back. Stick with the fire. Don’t let it die.”
“Bring him home, Wes,” Henry said softly. “And hurry up. It’s getting cold in here.”
Hwy 68
6:10 PM
The world had become a glittering, deadly cathedral.
The headlights of Wes’s Silverado cut through the sleet, illuminating a tunnel of ice. Everything reflected the light—the power lines sagging perilously low, the barbed wire fences coated in glass, the asphalt that looked more like a frozen lake than a road.
Wes had the truck in 4-Low, creeping along at fifteen miles an hour. The tires crunched on the sleet, slipping every few yards before finding purchase.
Please be at a motel, Wes prayed, gripping the wheel until his leather gloves creaked. Please be safe in a warm room, drinking bad coffee, and waiting this out.
But he knew. In his gut, he knew Jake was trying to get to him.
He scanned the darkness, his eyes staring past the hypnotic sweep of the wipers.
One mile out. Nothing but ice and pines.
Two miles out.
Wes squinted. A shape emerged from the gray gloom ahead—not a deer, not a mailbox.
A figure.
It was a man walking on the shoulder of the road, moving toward the truck. His head was down against the wind, his gait stumbling and uneven.
Wes’s heart hammered against his ribs. He flashed his high beams.
The figure stopped. He lifted a hand, shielding his face from the blinding light, swaying unsteadily on the slick asphalt.
“Jake!” Wes screamed, the sound tearing from his throat.
He slammed the truck into park and threw the door open. He practically fell out onto the ice, scrambling for footing.
“Jake!”
Wes sprinted the twenty yards between them, boots sliding, wind biting his face.