Books : Oblivion Road : Excerpts

Chapter 1

The dark-haired girl sprawled unconscious in the deep snow, the soft moonlight giving her pale features a fine glow, like an image from a fairy tale. Her hair fanned out around her head like folds of silk as the heavy snow continued to fall. Her clothes were already covered, as was one of her hands. The stark whiteness of the snow was marred only by drops of red that had come from her nose and ears.

Clutching his arm to his chest, as though it were broken, a teenage boy stumbled onto the two-lane road where the girl lay. He had struggled up from the ditch at the edge of the forest. Now he waded through the snow toward the girl, panting for air. Everything was white and silent, the road completely deserted. The boy knelt down by the girl's side and saw how still and quiet she was. Seemingly afraid to hurt her, he put a hand out and gently touched her snow-covered shoulder. Then he started saying her name.

When he first tried to wake her, the girl was still deep in a dream. She didn't want to wake up. Inside the dream she was safe, but she knew that if she woke up, she'd have to face the terrible thing that had just happened to her. She also knew somehow that outside the dream it was bitterly cold. The kind of cold that could suck the breath from your lungs and freeze the hairs in your nose. She would do anything to avoid feeling like that again.

But the boy's intrusive voice wouldn't stop calling for her. Over and over she heard her name, and she fought against it.

Suddenly, the hands touching her became rougher and she felt herself being pulled back into the harsh reality of her present surroundings. She curled up, keeping her eyes tightly shut.

"You're bleeding," she heard the voice say. "Your nose." Although she couldn't place the voice, it sounded familiar.

She supposed that now she was awake, she might as well give up and open her eyes. But when she tried, they wouldn't open all the way, like they were swollen or had sleep dirt in them. Eye boogers, she'd called the dirt when she was a little kid.

She finally got her eyes partway open and was somewhat surprised to see where she was. She was lying right in the middle of the desolate, snow-covered road. The snow was almost two feet deep.

"What happened?" she tried to ask as she sat up, but the words came out as a muffled burr. She reached a hand up and brushed snow and blood away from her nose and mouth. Her hand was shaking, and her left shoulder hurt like she'd been punched.

"Courtney, are you okay?" The voice was panicked, trembling with concern.

"Yeah," she mumbled. But she felt far from okay. Her head was aching like her brain wanted to burst out of the confines of her skull, and she felt dizzy, as though she'd drunk too much cough syrup. She brushed more snow off her face and out of her hair as she struggled to remember what had happened to her. When she looked down at her hand there was a lot of blood on it. "I feel sick."

Vague memories flitted at the edges of her mind. Some of them seemed silly, and some seemed important. She had been inside a car, an SUV. She remembered it had smelled like French fries because they'd stopped for fast food at a drive-thru a few hours earlier. She tried to focus her mind on more crucial issues: Where was the car now? Where had they been coming back from? Where had they been going? Most of all, she wondered what had happened to her, and if she'd be okay.

Courtney heard a noise as the boy sat down heavily in the snow next to her, looking dazed. In her confused state, she'd nearly forgotten about him. His tousled brown hair was matted with blood and dirt, and he had small cuts all over his face. They were tiny, like paper cuts. His eyes were very frightened, the pupils wide in the moonlight. For a second, she couldn't remember who he was, and it scared her. She knew she was supposed to know. Then his name came rushing back.

"Jeremy!" she said, relieved. He was her friend. From high school.

She moved sideways in the snow and hugged him, feeling his warmth. He put his arms around her, and she winced in pain.

"I thought you might be dead," he finally said. She could hear the emotion in his voice. "I couldn't get you to wake up."

"It's okay..." Her vision went all blurry for a second, but then it cleared again. "What happened to us?"

"You don't remember?"

She shook her head, but it hurt her neck, so she stopped. "No. I mean, sort of." Her memory of the event was slowly coming back. She remembered they'd been returning from a ski trip at Quail Ridge Run outside Pagosa Springs. They had spent a weekend there at a condo owned by Jeremy's father. It was now the tail end of Christmas break, and they were supposed to have left earlier in the day, but they'd stayed late. The boys had wanted one final run on a slope, a double diamond that had scared her.

"We had an accident," Jeremy said. "We crashed the SUV."

Courtney swallowed hard. "Oh my God." She turned to him slowly, trying not to make the pain worse. "Are we going to be okay?"

"I think so. You -- " Jeremy broke off. He looked away at the snow. "I think you got thrown out of the car. I just found you here on the road."

Courtney supposed she should be horrified, but she felt too numb to process his words. She looked down at her legs and made sure that she could move them. She could, although her body felt battered and bruised. She thought to herself: I could have died. She realized the snow had probably protected her and softened her landing. She felt glad to be alive, but oddly detached. She guessed the emotions would hit her later.

Courtney heard a strange choking sound and realized that Jeremy had started crying.

"Don't cry," she said. She had never seen him cry before, and they had been friends for well over two years, since the start of ninth grade.

"How are the others?" Courtney asked. She said it partly to distract him, because she didn't know what else to do. To be honest, she couldn't fully remember yet who had been on the trip.

"They're still in the SUV." Jeremy wiped his eyes. His hair was getting covered in snowflakes. "I climbed out my window to get help on the road. I found you first. We have to go back for them."

Courtney wiped some more blood from the corner of her nose as Jeremy got to his feet.

"Can you stand up?"

"I don't know." She gave Jeremy her arms, and he helped her up. The snow was so deep it came to her knees. Her ankles hurt, but the pain was bearable. She put an arm around Jeremy's shoulders for balance.

Courtney felt as though she'd taken a detour from real life and ended up someplace terrifying. She had no idea what stretch of road this was, only that it was cold and abandoned. Even though she was trying, she still couldn't remember anything about the accident. The last thing she remembered was laughing about some stupid pop song on the radio, turning around to look at Reyna --

Her thoughts veered off as she realized what that meant. It meant that Reyna Foster, her best friend since junior high, had been on the trip with them. And now there was no sign of her. Courtney gripped the sleeve of Jeremy's thin jacket.

"Reyna..." she said.

He nodded grimly. "Yeah."

There was nothing more for either of them to say. Courtney didn't want to give voice to thoughts that were too horrible to face. She told herself that if she was okay, and Jeremy was okay, then Reyna probably would be too.

Courtney and Jeremy began to hobble through the snow to the edge of the road, where the ditch waited. It was wide and deep, a massive crevice overhung by snow-weighted tree branches. Everything was white.

"How did we crash?" Courtney asked as they stumbled forward.

"We hit a deer. A big one." He paused. "We started rolling and I blacked out. When I woke up, the SUV was in the woods. My door wouldn't open and no one answered me. I didn't know what to do."

"So the others are still inside the car? You're sure about that?"

"I think so." It sounded like he was in shock.

Courtney wondered what the SUV looked like now. She knew it had to be bad if she'd been tossed from the wreckage. She was incredibly lucky to have survived.

Courtney and Jeremy paused at the shoulder of the road, where the earth dropped away. The ditch seemed impossibly deep, and there was no guardrail. The snow disoriented Courtney, and she couldn't tell exactly where the road ended and the edge of the steep slope began.

She was very conscious of the cold. Every part of her that was exposed felt the sting of the freezing night air. She didn't have a jacket on, only a wool sweater, jeans, and boots. She shivered, rubbing her aching, throbbing arms, trying to stay warm.

"We slid off the road," Jeremy said. He pointed back behind them. "Those are our tire tracks, but the snow's filling them fast. I don't even know how long it's been since we crashed." He stared into the ditch. "The SUV's down there somewhere."

Courtney and Jeremy began picking their way down the snow-covered slope. Courtney was afraid she might fall, but she knew she had to focus and stay calm. Everything still had the strange, dislocated feeling of a nightmare. She clutched Jeremy's arm.

As they got closer to the bottom, where the snow and foliage were deeper and thicker, she saw signs of the SUV. Ahead of them, a ragged gap had been plowed through the underbrush and trees, like a hole punched right through the pristine landscape. Courtney realized the SUV had slid down the embankment and kept going, into the forest beyond, and was now hidden.

What if the others are dead? She tried to push the thought out of her mind.

"We need to get to the SUV." Every word Courtney spoke sounded like it had a slight delay, like she was hearing someone else's words coming from her mouth. She wondered if she had a concussion. She brought a hand up to her head and found two separate lumps that were starting to swell. It hurt to even graze them with her numb fingertips. "I can't believe this happened to us," she murmured softly.

Jeremy nodded, but he looked distracted. Courtney noticed one of his hands was pressed up against his side.

"You okay?" she asked him.

"Sure." But he didn't sound okay. He sounded like he was in pain.

"What's wrong?"

"I got a stitch, or a cramp. Or something. I'll be fine."

Courtney could tell he was trying to be stoic, like boys were supposed to act. But she'd already seen him cry, so she wished he would just be honest with her.

The two of them walked through the snow at the bottom of the ditch until they reached the gap in the trees. It appeared as though the SUV had possibly crashed through on its side or on its roof. Courtney didn't allow herself to wonder what kind of shape her friends were in. Her fingers were feeling so numb it was scaring her, so she blew on them and rubbed them. She didn't know where her gloves had gone.

The hole left by the car opened onto a spectral, crystalline world, and Courtney peered inside, caught between awe and terror. Trees that had been sheared by the impact were already getting covered with snow again. There was dead, utter silence

"Look," Courtney said. In the distance, thirty yards or more into the white forest, were the remains of the SUV. The car had come to rest at the base of a thick pine tree. It was right-side up, but looked half crumpled, like a discarded piece of construction paper. Random items from inside were scattered on the forest floor atop the snow, black shadows in the half-light. Courtney could see shattered glass and bits of metal glistening along the path to the car. Most of the windows, except the front windshield, looked completely broken out.

Courtney's first thought was that it didn't look like the kind of accident people could survive. She glanced over at Jeremy, and he looked as stunned as she felt.

"Fuck," he said, the word coming out in a breathy exhalation. She noticed he was still holding his side. "It's worse than I remembered."

Without saying another word, they began moving toward the car as quickly as they could. Courtney pushed branches out of her way as she stumbled forward, getting covered in even more snow. The snow infiltrated her sweater and her jeans, yet she barely registered the sensation.

She reached the SUV first, a moment before Jeremy. "Reyna!" she called out. And then, her memory returning in a final burst, "Harris! Melanie!" Courtney remembered now there had been five of them in all. She, Reyna, Jeremy, and then Harris and Melanie: two friends of Jeremy's from his church youth group who happened to be a couple. They'd come along on the ski trip too. She didn't know them that well, but they'd all had a good time together, skiing and partying in Pagosa Springs.

I just can't believe things ended up this way, Courtney thought.

Jeremy moved behind Courtney and went past her, starting to yell out names too. At first, there was no response from inside the SUV. Courtney was trying to think about where everyone had been sitting. She knew Jeremy had been driving -- it was his parents' Ford Explorer -- and she'd been sitting next to him up front. But Reyna had been in the backseat with Harris and Melanie.

Courtney tugged on the doors and tried to get inside, but couldn't. The car had been reconfigured by the accident, all the doors and windows jumbled into one another, like it had been through a trash compactor. Automatically, Courtney kept calling the names of her friends over and over. Jeremy was doing the same, a distant echo now at the far side of the vehicle.

Courtney was almost startled to hear a voice suddenly answer from inside the SUV. "Court?" she heard it say weakly. "Is that you?" The voice belonged to Reyna.

"It's me!" Courtney said, the words tumbling out in relief. Even if Reyna was injured, at least she was still alive, and that was what mattered most. "You're going to be okay. We'll get you out. Are you hurt?"

"I can't tell," Reyna's voice came back. "But I think I'm trapped in here."

"Reyna, don't move," Jeremy said from the other side of the car. "I'm going to pry open the door."

"Do it fast. It's kind of hard to breathe."

Courtney still couldn't see Reyna even though she was looking through one of the broken passenger windows. The interior of the SUV was just too dark. She heard Jeremy grappling unsuccessfully with the door.

"Harris and Mel are in here with me," Reyna managed to add. "They're knocked out, but they're breathing."

Courtney supposed she should be relieved everyone was still alive, against the odds, but she was scared. They were in the middle of nowhere, off some rural road cutting through the countryside from Pagosa Springs up to Denver. It was a thin, winding road between two mountains, a shortcut that Jeremy had seen on the map and insisted they take for some reason. They'd been lost before they crashed, she now remembered that much. Harris and Jeremy had been arguing over which road would get them home fastest.

Jeremy came over to Courtney, gripping trees for balance. His face was very pale. "I can't get the door open."

Although Courtney was in pain, especially from her throbbing head, she forced herself to ignore it. She knew they had to get Reyna and the others out of the SUV, that their friends were depending on her and Jeremy to rescue them. She looked at Jeremy, his hand still clutching his side. Neither of them were in good shape, but Reyna, Harris, and Melanie probably had it worse. She swallowed back fear, trying to think of the right thing to do as she stared at the SUV.

"Listen," she said finally. "I have a plan."