3. Madison
Madison
Madison
The headlights hit the cab like a flashbang.
One second the mirror is dark, the next it’s pure white — close, too close, the kind of close that compresses time into something thin and airless. My whole body goes rigid before my brain catches up, every nerve ending firing the same single syllable at once.
Run.
“Down.” Cole’s voice. Flat and absolute, no inflection, no room for debate.
I drop without deciding to. Pure reflex — my shoulder hits the center console and I fold myself sideways, one hand braced against the dash, the other gripping the door handle with the particular intensity of someone who knows grabbing it won’t help and can’t stop themselves anyway.
The seatbelt cuts across my collarbone. The cab fills with light and engine roar and the specific terror of something large moving very fast directly behind us.
Every stubborn, contrary instinct I own wants to sit back up.
I stay down.
This is not a situation I am equipped to manage by arguing about it, which is a thought so unfamiliar it takes up more space in my head than the fear does for approximately two seconds.
I’m aware of my own breathing — shallow, too fast, the kind that makes your vision go sparky at the edges if you let it keep going. I am not going to let it keep going.
I press my back against the seat and stare at the ceiling of the cab and make myself breathe through my nose. Four counts in. Hold. Out.
My phone screen is dark. One bar, then none, then the little icon that means you are on your own out here.
Cole doesn’t speak. He doesn’t reassure me or explain or do any of the things that would, frankly, make me feel worse.
He just drives, and the quality of his silence is different from the silence of someone who’s panicking — it’s the silence of someone running calculations, and the distinction matters more than I expect it to.
The truck rocks slightly as he adjusts. I feel the physics of it in my stomach — a controlled lateral shift, the kind that doesn’t happen by accident.
“Are we going to be okay?” I ask. My voice comes out steadier than the rest of me.
“Working on it,” he says.
Which is not a yes.
Which is, somehow, the most honest answer he’s given me all night, and I decide to hold onto that instead of the alternative.
Behind us, the engine roar surges.
The truck moves like Cole thinks — fast, precise, and without wasted motion.
He doesn’t jerk the wheel. Doesn’t overcorrect.
Every adjustment is measured, deliberate, the kind of driving that doesn’t come from adrenaline but from somewhere deeper and more practiced — muscle memory built on repetition, on situations I don’t want to think too hard about right now.
He takes the next curve at a speed that should feel reckless and somehow doesn’t, the tires holding the asphalt with a grip that feels intentional rather than lucky.
I know how to drive. I’ve driven these roads in rain and ice and the particular fog that rolls in off the creek in October and turns everything into gray nothing. What Cole is doing is not the same category of thing.
“You’ve done this before,” I say. It comes out less like an accusation and more like an observation, which surprises me.
“Eyes down.” He checks the mirror, adjusts, checks again. “Don’t give them a profile.”
I stay low but tilt my head enough to watch him instead.
It’s a journalist instinct — when you can’t observe the situation directly, observe the person navigating it.
His jaw is set. Both hands on the wheel, positioned at nine and three in a way that looks almost formal except for the absolute lack of tension in his shoulders, which is either the most alarming or the most reassuring thing I’ve seen tonight. I haven’t decided.
He’s not scared.
Or rather — he’s metabolizing the fear into something functional, which I recognize because I do the same thing, and knowing that about him does something inconvenient to the wall I’ve been building since he said his name in the bar two hours ago.
The pursuing truck hits a pothole behind us. The impact sounds like a gunshot in the dark and I flinch before I can help it, my hand tightening on the door handle, the seatbelt snapping taut across my chest.
“Still there?” I ask.
“Still there.”
“Gaining?”
“Slightly.” He doesn’t elaborate, which means he’s managing it and doesn’t need my commentary. I understand that logic even while resenting it.
We hit a straight stretch and I feel him make a decision — the engine note changes, drops into something lower and more serious, and the truck surges with a smooth, controlled acceleration that presses me back into the seat.
Not a panicked flooring of the pedal. A calculated deployment of available power at the precise moment it’s useful.
The gap between us and the headlights stretches by twenty yards. Then thirty.
“Okay,” I say, mostly to myself.
“Don’t get comfortable.” He takes a right fork, gravel pinging off the undercarriage, trees swallowing the road on both sides. “They know these roads.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because they’ve been on them before tonight.” His eyes flick to the mirror. “This wasn’t improvised. Someone planned a route.”
The implication lands with the specific weight of something I’ve been half-knowing for the last twenty minutes and not fully letting myself articulate.
Someone planned a route. Someone who knew where I’d been today.
Someone who knew what roads I’d have to take home and what roads Cole would use instead.
The walls of the story I’ve been building in my head rearrange themselves around a new load-bearing beam.
This isn’t about property acquisitions anymore.
This is about what happens to people who ask the wrong questions.
“I need my notebook,” I say.
Cole looks at me for exactly one second — the kind of look that contains an entire response without wasting words on it — and then returns his eyes to the road.
“Later,” he says.
I want to argue. I genuinely, physically want to reach into my bag and pull out the notebook and start writing down everything — the truck’s profile in the mirror, the road markers, the timing, all of it — because writing it down is how I make sense of things and right now nothing makes sense and the only tool I have for that is a Bic pen and a spiral-bound reporter’s pad.
I don’t reach for the bag.
“Fine,” I say. “But I’m remembering all of it.”
“I know you are,” he says, and there’s something in his voice that isn’t quite wry and isn’t quite warm but sits somewhere between the two that I don’t have a word for yet.
The headlights behind us hold steady.
But they don’t close.
The road forgets it’s a road.
That’s the only way to describe what happens when the county asphalt runs out and the private access takes over — the surface changes under the tires from something maintained to something merely tolerated, patched and re-patched until the patches have patches, and the trees stop being a backdrop and become the actual walls.
Branches scrape the roof in places. The headlights cut maybe forty feet ahead before the dark swallows everything else.
I grew up in this county. I thought I knew its back roads.
I do not know this one.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Old forestry access. Runs parallel to the main lake road.” Cole keeps his eyes forward, voice even. “Adds four minutes but cuts two sight lines.”
I translate that automatically: harder for the truck behind us to anticipate our trajectory. Harder to set up ahead of us. Harder, also, to find us if we go into a ditch, but I file that particular thought under not useful right now and move on.
The journalist brain takes over because it’s the only part of me with something productive to do.
I catalog.
Landmark one: the split-rail fence running along the left shoulder, half collapsed, the wood gone silver-gray with age.
I’ve seen that fence in a county records photograph — it’s the boundary marker for the old Calloway property, which means we’re approximately two miles northeast of the orchard turnoff.
Landmark two: the creek crossing, a low concrete bridge with no railings and a reflector on each side, one missing its red cap.
I make a note of that in my head — the missing reflector — because it’s the kind of small detail that either means nothing or means someone was out here recently doing the same kind of deliberate subtraction as the shoulder markers on the main road.
Landmark three: a rusted gate, chained shut, with a forestry service sign I can’t read at speed. We blow past it.
My phone is completely dead now. Not low battery — dead.
The screen won’t light at all, which means either the battery finally gave up the ghost that it’s been threatening since Tuesday or something about being in this specific hollow is doing something to it, and either way I have no camera, no notes app, no way to call anyone.
I am genuinely on my own out here except for the man driving, and the man driving is still technically a stranger, and the stranger is currently being pursued by someone with a vehicle with a very clear sense of purpose.
The pothole hits us without warning.
The truck drops into it front-left and bucks back up hard enough that my shoulder slams into the door and my teeth click together and the seatbelt does its job with an enthusiasm I feel in my ribs.
Cole absorbs it with a slight forward lean and an adjustment that corrects our line before I’ve fully registered the impact.
“You okay?” he asks. First time he’s asked that.
“Fine.” Reflex. Same reflex as always.
He doesn’t push it, which means either he believes me or he knows I won’t answer differently regardless. I suspect the latter.