Page 17 of Smokin' Situation

“Fuck,” I groaned, laying my head on the steering wheel briefly before I tried to formulate a plan to get back to the right side of the ridge. There were some country roads that wound through the forest that only locals knew about I could use, but since cell service out here was spotty at best, I’d potentially put myself in the path of the fire and unable to get help.

If Reese were in this situation, she’d calmly have told me to go back to town and find someone working on the emergency dispatch for the fire service. But they were busy enough trying to keep things contained with the wind that had swept through the valley in the last few hours.

Fucking careless idiots. They knew there was a burn ban and still set off fireworks, because dumbasses who were probably drunk seemed to not give a shit about the consequences of their actions as long as they got some enjoyment out of it.

Pulling up the map app on my phone, I tried to zoom in far enough to plot out a path around where I was stuck. My anxiety rose with each second my eyes scanned the screen, not seeing a clear path through.

But as the smoke swirled in the air outside my windshield, the smell of burning pine drifting through my air vents, I knew I needed to just pick a path and hope it got me out the other side.

Putting the truck in reverse, I carefully turned it around, scanning the side of the road for the break in the tree line I knew was there. I just hoped the road that’d been a shortcut to save time when we were running late for curfew in high school was still there.

I almost missed it, but I navigated the cab carefully through the gap in the trees, following what had once been a bypass to the highway from other county roads. It had clearly seen better days, the truck rocking from side to side as I slowly disappeared into the dense forest.

The smoke thinned out as I got further from the main road, but the acrid scent of the fire lingered, reminding me I needed to hurry.

The jarring sensation of the truck crawling its way through the pockmarked trail kept my senses alert, hope springing in my chest as the trees thinned out slightly as I approached the road that’d get me home.

The road on the other end appeared so close, but then I felt the front end of the truck suddenly dip and an ominous crack echoed through the cab. The sound of metal snapping made my eyes widen before my teeth gnashed together with the impact.

The sound of my pulse rushing in my ears and the metallic tang of blood in my mouth were only secondary to the sudden sense of panic that was taking over. But I couldn’t let it pull me under.

“Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounded,” I whispered, knowing it was a lie.

Carefully unclipping my seatbelt, I shoved my phone in my pocket and reached for the handle on the door.

The cab of the truck was cocked at an awkward angle as I stepped onto the running board and looked down at where my wheel had once been inside the wheel well.

That was not the case anymore as I looked down in horror at the rubber of my tire visible in a place I knew it didn’t belong.

Leaning out further to assess the damage, the truck dipped, and an eerie creak rang out as I took in the deep, crater-like sinkhole that had come out of nowhere, snapping my wheel to the side like I’d been driving a Matchbox car and not an oversized pickup truck.

“Fuck,” I breathed, knowing that I’d taken a precarious situation and turned it into a fucking disaster. Not only was I still miles from the cabin, and my sister; I was now stuck in the middle of fucking nowhere with a broken axle.

A flat tire I could have handled, but now I was well and truly fucked.

And as the wind picked up, a powerful gust rocking the truck underneath me and threatening to toss me off my perch, I realized that maybe the voice of Reese in my head was right.

I should’ve headed back into town and let the professionals try to find my sister, because now they had two Thomas sisters to rescue.

Carefully leaning back inside the cab of the truck, I pulled the door closed after me, hoping my phone could still get a signal. Because I wasn’t going anywhere in this vehicle, and heading out on foot toward where I thought my cabin was located would be epically stupid. If I didn’t manage to walk straight into a fire, surely the smoke inhalation would kill me.

Dialing the numbers to 911, I swore as a set of beeps rang out over the speaker phone before the line disconnected. Squinting at the corner of my phone, I cursed again at the tiny letters in the corner sayingNo Service.

It was like the universe was mocking me for being an idiot.

“Think, think,” I breathed out, trying to remember what Reese had told me to do if the cell service towers were out of order.

Since it didn’t say SOS in the corner, I knew that meant there wasn’t any signal to call someone, but I thought texting sometimes still worked.

Scrolling past a text from a number I didn’t recognize, I pulled up Reese’s contact, hoping I could get through to her too. Or that she’d at least maybe wake up to a text and know what was going on.

Annie: Mandatory fire evacuation. Get out of the cabin as soon as you see this.

It took a few extra seconds to send, but it didn’t bounce back, so I opened a new text and hovered my thumbs over the screen.

Was I supposed to send this to the fire department? The sheriff’s office?

Maybe I should have paid better attention to my sister when she was trying to lecture me about safety procedures.

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