Author: Sharon
Disclaimer: The following story has been written with no intention of claiming ownership or solicitation, nor does the author claim the movie character(s) as his/her own. The movie character(s) have been borrowed solely out of a love of the particular movie and is not intended for any other purpose but amusement and entertainment.
Chapter One
Chloe Navratil adjusted her windshield wipers to swipe away the first droplets of the rainstorm bearing down on her, wondering if she shouldn’t turn back and wait until it had passed. Blue northers in March were not to be confronted lightly and every nervous glance out of the window of her Nissan Frontier truck brought the dark behemoth closer. It hunched over the chamfered mesas of the Edwards Plateau like a dragon of wind and water, spreading swiftly through the skies in a mounting bid to pounce. She’d pulled into a roadside park to think.
Leaning forward to rest her forehead on the steering wheel, she weighed her options, considered the environment with which she now dealt. Here, the ancient Cretaceous seabeds had been carved by previous draconic forces into a sharp contrast of steep hills and jagged ravines, a world that largely tended to itself until modern man put thin ribbons of asphalt between the precarious cliffs, skimming the edges of multitudinous ‘devil’s backbones.’ In dry daylight alone, the hill country could isolate and confound. In rain, flash floods and uncertainty could make things much more…interesting.
Chloe reconsidered the one question she’d finally set aside this morning: did she really want to go? At the time, the ‘yes’ had been born of a desire to stop the cycle of indecision. Packing everything she could think of to cover any chance had put fire behind it. Five minutes down the road saw her singing at the top of her voice along with Missing Person’s “Destination Unknown.” Thirty minutes turned into nervous anticipation. An hour turned into doubt. After an hour and a half of choosing the least traveled roads of the Texas Hill Country, Chloe began to feel very foolish. The optimism she’d felt descended into gloom. No sign directing her to the road that would lead to the Point had made itself known.
She stared at the blue norther with stubborn defiance. To return to her apartment would be a moment of defeat she couldn’t bear, not when the ‘yes’ had been such a liberating decision. It had taken her months after her mother’s death to get to this point…and now she was going to let a little rain stop her?
If only she had decided to try for this when first invited back in the fall!
She’d just have to drive slower, she concluded. Driving rain would make visibility a nerve-wracking experience, but she’d been in worse. At least, that’s what she kept telling herself as she restarted the car, and pulled out onto the two-lane road. She knew the road well enough to remember it would be several miles before she would have to contend with a valley. Nature might force her back after all, but until that moment, she was going to push forward.
Perhaps it was that very stubbornness that blinded her to the danger. In spite of the thumping swish of the wiper blades, the rain came down in sheets, blurring sight of the lines on the road and refracting the lights of oncoming cars in a way that made it difficult to keep any sense of oncoming traffic. She crested a hill, scarcely aware of the guard rail to her left, and gripped the wheel with white-knuckled fear, feeling the physics of the tires struggling against the water action, and the wind howling around her. A pair of halogen lights flared in front of her, bearing down from the opposite direction, practically in her lane. Startled and panicked, Chloe jerked the wheel and the car slid into oblivion.
