Chapter Twenty-Three #2
He’d glimpsed two other people inside. Who were they? He recognized the truck—it belonged to the Mendozas. But the two people were definitely not the Mendozas.
So he put on his hazards and stopped his truck in the middle of the road, ten feet from where she’d gone over.
He had encountered no other vehicles since he crossed County Road 122; no one was stupid enough to drive on the unpaved roads saturated with water and marked with deep ruts.
As he stepped out, he saw two people coming up the bank.
“Avery!” he called out before he realized the woman wasn’t Avery.
The woman had a gun in hand, and she pointed it at Ryan. “Keys.”
“They’re in the truck,” he said, keeping his hands in plain view, not wanting this woman to think he had a gun. “Where’s Avery?”
The woman didn’t answer him. “Move away from the truck.”
The man looked sick and he was bleeding. Oh, God, was Avery in the truck bleeding? Was she hurt? Worse?
“Now!” the woman screamed and fired the gun at his feet. She didn’t hit him, but he moved away from the truck.
The woman opened the passenger door, helped push the man inside, then slammed the door shut. She ran around to the driver’s side and climbed in. Thirty seconds later they were driving off.
Ryan watched until he was certain they weren’t coming back, then he ran to the ditch and looked at the truck stuck in the muddy water at a sharp forty-five-degree angle, only the rear wheels of the truck bed visible from the road.
“Avery!” he shouted.
He didn’t hear anything at first. The water in the ditch was rising—either because one of the many creeks that cut through the valley was filling it, or the drainage pipes couldn’t keep up with the rainfall.
Or both. Either way, if the ditch filled, the cab would be completely underwater and Avery would drown.
If she was unconscious, she may be drowning right now.
He screamed her name again and scrambled down the slope slick from rain. He slipped, swore, and thought he heard “Help!”
Then he saw her. She had her face against the window and when she spotted him she looked both terrified and relieved.
“Ryan! I need help!”
The two front doors would be almost impossible to open between the water pressure and being pressed against the ditch.
“Can you climb over the seat? I’ll get the back door!”
“I can’t!” she said.
“Are you hurt?”
Maybe he heard wrong because the windows were up.
“My hands! They’re tied to the steering wheel.”
He looked at the steering wheel, but the visibility was so bad he couldn’t see much of anything inside, plus the windows were fogged up.
He slipped and fell into the water, stumbled and his hands hit the side of the truck. The truck shifted toward the passenger side and Avery screamed.
It took all his strength to pull open the back door against both water pressure and gravity. The truck was aimed down into the ditch, but now was also listing a good twenty degrees toward the passenger side.
He put his body between the door and the frame. It hit him as gravity forced it down, but he held it open with his body.
“Avery, are you okay?”
“Ohmigod, I thought she shot you,” Avery cried. She held the steering wheel tight. Her wrists were red and bloodied. “I can’t get out.”
“They took my truck,” he said. He looked at the water in the front; it was up to Avery’s waist. “I have to lean over and cut the ties. Hold on.”
He pulled his knife from his pocket and had to let go of the door in order to climb over the seat far enough to reach the steering wheel. As soon as he leaned forward, the truck slipped forward another foot and Avery screamed.
Then they stopped moving. The water was up to Avery’s chest. His heart thudded so hard he could barely hear the rain anymore. He reached out and sawed through the zip tie on her right hand, wedging the knife between her wrist and the steering wheel. It took a good ten seconds, but it broke.
As he shifted to get the left wrist, the truck tilted more to the right. He screamed when he almost dropped the knife. He squeezed his hand tight around it, nicking his palm.
He waited a second until the truck stopped moving, then cut through the second zip tie.
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” she said.
He didn’t know if he believed her, but they really didn’t have time to argue about it.
“I’m going to get out and hold open this door. You need to climb over the seat and come out this way.”
“Okay.” Her teeth were chattering and she was as pale as a ghost. Both of her wrists were still bleeding.
He grunted as he pushed open the door. They were lucky that the truck had tilted toward the passenger side because there was no more water pressure forcing it closed, but the door was heavy and he was still fighting gravity.
As soon as it was open, he once again put his body between the frame and door. “Now, Avery.”
Awkwardly, she climbed into the back. As she did, the truck fell completely on its side and Avery slipped down into the muddy water and Ryan heard a thud as she hit the other side. More water rushed in and now was also coming from the driver’s side as the truck sunk farther into the muck.
“Avery!” Ryan didn’t dare move from the opening because the door would slam shut and he wasn’t certain he’d be able to open it again. But if she didn’t surface, he would have to.
She broke through and gasped. She reached for the handle above the door and used it to pull herself up. He grabbed her biceps with one hand and held the door with his other hand and his body. He strained and pulled her up, and she used the handle for leverage.
As their weight shifted, so did the truck, threatening to completely roll over.
“Hurry!” Ryan yelled, not sure Avery could hear him.
She pulled herself up, grabbed the top of the door with her other hand, and came through the opening. She fell into the ditch with a splash and hit her head on the undercarriage of the truck.
“Avery, get up! Get out of the ditch! The truck could fall back.”
Blood streamed down the side of her face as she awkwardly climbed up the embankment.
Ryan pulled his body away from the frame and the door slammed shut with finality.
He walked along the side of the truck and jumped to the edge of the ditch, then crawled up the side to the street. He and Avery lay side by side.
She was crying.
“Are you hurt?”
“We could have died.” He hugged her, then they sat up. She sniffed, holding on to him. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“They could have killed you.”
“They didn’t. Are you okay to walk?”
“Yeah.”
He examined her face, wiped blood away from her scalp where she hit her head on the truck. There was a huge bruise on the side of her cheek and he touched it lightly. Relief rushed over him. He kissed her, then helped her up. “Can we get to your house through the fields?”
“We need to stick to the road as much as possible,” she said. “The fields are too wet, it’ll be really hard to walk through them, and I don’t know if the creek has flooded yet. If it has, we’ll really be stuck.”
Ryan looked around. “They went south, probably toward the freeway.”
She shook her head. “They were heading to Privett Road.”
“Really? Why? They won’t be able to get through to the freeway.”
“That’s what they said, that’s where we were going when I saw you. They didn’t tell me where, but there’s not a lot of places they could go. There’s a third guy.”
“When we get to a phone, I’ll tell my dad, he’ll find them. Where’s the closest house?”
“Greg Baldwin.” She pointed north. “About a mile up to his driveway, then a quarter mile to his house from there. I know my mom and Greg had a falling-out, but he’ll help.”
“Greg’s in the hospital, in a coma. He was shot last night. You didn’t know?”
She shook her head. “I was at Gianna’s all day. Is he going to be okay?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan admitted. “But we can break in if we have to, get to a phone and call my dad.”
They held hands and started walking in the middle of the dirt-and-gravel road, the water up to their ankles.
The rain continued to beat down, the lightning and thunder battling it out in the sky, and Avery told him everything that had happened since she arrived at Gianna’s and faced a burly man named Brock.