Chapter 12 - The Quarry Pass
The unmarked grey sedan bounced violently over the rocky, uneven terrain of the old iron quarry road, its undercarriage scraping loudly against protruding boulders and stubborn roots. The heavy pine trees closed in on both sides of the narrow trail, blocking out the moonlight and plunging the vehicle into near-total darkness, save for the piercing beams of the high-intensity fog lamps cutting through the swirling autumn mist.
Marcus gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled intensity, expertly correcting a sudden skid as the tires lost traction in a patch of thick, wet mud.
"Are you sure this road hasn't washed out completely?" Marcus shouted over the roaring whine of the overworked engine. "At this rate, we're going to snap an axle before we even hit the county line."
"Keep the revs high and stay in second gear," Julian instructed calmly, leaning forward to monitor the GPS coordinates on his smartphone screen. "The washout is another two miles ahead. We veer left past the rusted crane."
True to his word, the dense timber parted a few minutes later to reveal the massive, skeletal remains of an abandoned nineteenth-century iron extraction site. Rusted steel cables hung like cobwebs from towering wooden derricks, and the jagged pit of the quarry dropped off sharply to their right into a bottomless, fog-filled abyss.
Marcus swung the steering wheel hard to the left, the sedan fishtailing dramatically across the slick gravel before locking into the narrow logging trail that wound upward into the dense pine forests of the Adirondacks.
Suddenly, a pair of blinding, high-intensity LED headlights flashed in the rearview mirror, appearing out of nowhere from the main highway turnoff half a mile back. A heavy, armored black SUV surged onto the trail, kicking up a massive spray of mud and gravel as it closed the distance between them with terrifying speed.
"Company's here," Marcus muttered, his eyes darting to the digital speedometer as it climbed past sixty miles per hour on a treacherous dirt road. "They must have tracked our transponder through your old corporate phone."
"Toss the phone out the window," Julian ordered sharply, unbuckling his seatbelt for a fraction of a second to reach into his pocket, retrieve the burner device, and hurl it out the passenger window into the brush below.
May you like
The black SUV behind them didn't slow down. Instead, it accelerated, its reinforced front bumper slamming directly into the rear quarter-panel of Marcus’s sedan with a sickening crunch of metal. The impact sent the grey car spinning violently toward the edge of the quarry drop-off.
---
