Page 1 of South of Nowhere

Wednesday,

June20

1.

Three vehicles had the bad luck to be atop the Hinowah levee when it gave way.

At the front was a late-model Chevrolet Camaro, nicknamed Big Blue by the woman driving it, Fiona Lavelle.

She was twenty-six years old and had recently left a teaching job and was using the newly allotted time to devote herself to her passion: writing a fantasy novel.

Traveling from Reno to Fresno, for a spa getaway, she had taken this more demanding but picturesque route through the mountains.

In jeans and a red crop top under a gray sweatshirt, Lavelle gripped the wheel firmly, her car countering the lashing wind. The vehicle’s engine was big, but the body light.

The highway, Route 13, was two-lane asphalt except for the hundred-yard stretch on the dirt levee, where it was surfaced with cinders, gravel and—today—mud.

Guardrails, she thought, mentally putting sardonic quotation marks around the words. They looked like they wouldn’t stop a bike, let alone a muscle car like hers.

A sign on her right, where lights and the outline of the town ofHinowah were visible a hundred feet below, saidSlow Unpaved Road.

As if one needed the warning.

On the left, where the river raged:NoFISHINGfrom Levee.

Odd capitalization.

As the car progressed, bits of stone clicked as the tires tossed them into the undercarriage even at this slow speed. It was an odd counterpoint to the powerful drumbeat of the rain on Big Blue’s roof.

“Well,” she gasped, as a wave splashed from the river into the air and spattered the windshield.

The Never Summer was relentless, racing downstream, south, a speeding train, nearly even with the top of the levee. The rain had been torrential for the past hour. The velocity of the river had to be twice hers, which was about twenty miles an hour or so. On the opposite bank was a steep cliff, craggy and dotted with small caves.

She noted an old graffitied heart, in red. In the center:LM + DP. 4EVER…

What are you doing? she thought. Concentrate on the road!

A flash of light appeared in her rearview mirror. The headlights of a vehicle behind her.

Was the driver irritated at her slow pace? She was in a sports car, for heaven’s sake. The underbelly was inches away from the messy ground.

Be patient, she thought to him, automatically assigning a gender.

Unfair, she reflected.

And then noticed that she was wrong altogether. He wasn’t flashing the lights at her. The pickup had hit a pothole and the beams dropped and rose.

“Sorry.” She actually whispered the word aloud.

As she approached the end of the levee, where the slick but dependable asphalt resumed, she began to relax.

The clock on the dashboard read 6:14 a.m.

—

The second vehicle on the levee was an F-150, piloted by Louis Bell, the self-described “best drywall man” in the town of Hinowah, California, if not all of Olechu County. He was listening to Taylor Swift and admiring the bright blue Camaro in front of him. Some Cams came with 600 horses. Man, to hit the Hawk’s Canyon straightaway behind the wheel of that beautiful machine…

Take your time, he thought to the driver. Driving over this crap in a car like that?

---