Chapter Five #3
They continued to follow the woman’s voice that gently chimed from the iPhone speaker for another fifteen miles, Chase absolutely certain at this point that something wasn’t right.
Maybe the GPS was just taking them on some expedited back route to avoid the highway?
Before she could finish the thought, a chorus of loud “dings” came from the jeep’s dash, followed by an array of orange warning lights.
“Fuck,” Norah muttered. As if saying “fuck” itself, the jeep sputtered and jolted before finally seizing up completely, and Norah calmly and carefully guided it to the side of the road as best she could.
They came to a gentle stop, and Norah kept both hands on the wheel, at ten and two, like always, looking directly into the pitch-black horizon. She seemed to take a couple of long, slow breaths and then let them go, turning to Chase.
“Okay. So, I don’t know the first thing about cars. I don’t suppose you took any auto-shop courses since we last met, did you?” Norah’s voice was steady and low, exactly what Chase remembered in a crisis.
“Can’t say that I did. But those lights don’t look good. That one has a big exclamation point in an orange triangle. The other one looks like a windy road with another exclamation point. And that one—”
“I can see them too, Chase.” Norah didn’t snap, and her tone remained even, allowing Chase’s increasing anxiety to ease a little. Norah tried to turn the key in the ignition several more times, but the jeep just sputtered and died, until finally, the engine stopped responding entirely.
“What do we do?”
“We call for someone to come get us.”
Obviously, Chase thought. Strangely for a doctor, Chase often tended to let her mind seize up during an emergency, not unlike the dead jeep they occupied. Norah took her phone out of the holder. The Google Maps app flashed a red “searching for network” warning on the top.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Norah closed her eyes and shook her head.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“No signal. Here. Check yours.”
Obviously, Chase thought. She reached into her pocket and plucked out her phone, tapping furiously on the screen, but the tiny LTE icon that normally sat in the upper right corner of the screen was nowhere to be found, and the little bars that usually occupied the space next to it were nothing but flat lines.
“Nothing.”
Norah went silent again, and Chase could practically see the cogs spinning at a breakneck pace.
She thought back to Brown, reluctantly remembering the time Chase had found a roach skittering through their kitchen.
Fueled by pure fear, Chase could think of nothing better to do than throw the biggest textbook she could find (she remembered it as Guyton and Hall, although really it could have been Dubins or even Gray’s Anatomy) at the insect as it made a break for one of the cracks in the floorboards.
Luckily, the landing stuck, and the roach was presumed a pile of guts under several hundred pages of disease pathology.
Then came the question of what to do with the thing.
Of course, Chase was far too freaked out to think that far ahead.
So she left it until Norah, who didn’t make it home until sometime after nine p.m. that night, sent Chase into the neighboring living room, removed the book, bug guts and all, and the rest Chase had no idea about.
Norah was so classically the hero. And not just when it came to exterminating pesky apartment roaches either.
She had always been Chase’s calm in the eye of the storm.
And it was apparent that nothing had changed.
“We could walk?” Chase suggested, finally. She could at least pretend to be helpful.
“A good thought,” Norah responded kindly, in a way you might congratulate a kid on a drawing of a cat that resembled a rodent.
“But I bet we’re a good distance from any kind of town.
The restaurant was at least twenty miles back the other way, and we don’t know what, if anything, is in front of us.
Plus, we’re in the middle of nowhere Louisiana.
We could encounter alligators, or cougars, or God knows what. ”
“Or crazy murderers,” Chase said, her mind once again playing flashbacks of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Norah laughed a little, although with a hint of tension behind the sound that hadn’t been there before.
“Or that. I imagine someone will drive by at some point. Our best bet is to sit tight until they do.”
“What about GPS? Isn’t this the army’s jeep? It must have some kind of, I don’t know, tracking device or something?” Chase jumped eagerly at what had to be the first intelligent proposal she’d had all night.
“I wish. This thing is about fifteen years old. The only thing it can track is dirt.”
Chase shrugged. “Tax dollars hard at work.”
“If no one comes by, we should be fine here for the night. It’s warm out, and I have a couple of blankets in the back. We have a few bottles of water left, and I think one of the privates left some beef jerky in the glove compartment.”
Chase suddenly wished she’d had more of an appetite at dinner. They were stranded on a back road in the middle of East Bumfuck with no idea when they’d be rescued. No. Chase rephrased the situation. She was stranded in the middle of nowhere with Norah, alone, with all the time in the world.