The road snaked sharply ahead of him, the two lanes carving into the edge of a rocky mountainside that tumbled down to a river below. Twisting through a tight bend, Pitt could see the roadway a mile ahead, where the highway nearly doubled back on a parallel facing. He caught a glimpse of a white sedan parked in a turnout. It was the same vehicle that John Booth had climbed into at the Co-op. Pitt lost sight of the car as the roadway bent and twisted once more.
Rounding through a tight S curve, the road straightened again for a short stretch. To Pitt’s left, the hillside plunged in a steep drop-off, falling several hundred feet to the river below. As his rental car gained speed on the straightaway, Pitt heard a faint pop, like the burst of a distant Fourth of July firework. He glanced ahead but noticed nothing, as a deep rumble followed the initial noise. A movement caught his eye, and he looked up to see a house-sized boulder sliding down the mountainside above him. The huge rock was falling in a perfect trajectory to intersect with Pitt’s car two hundred feet down the road.
Pitt instantly stomped on the brakes, mashing the pedal to the floorboard. The tires chirped and shimmied in protest, but the car’s antilock braking system kept the vehicle from skidding uncontrollably. In the brief seconds Pitt waited for the car to stop, he observed that a full landslide was now under way. In addition to the huge rock, a whole wall of rocks and gravel was chasing the boulder down the mountainside. With seemingly half of the mountain barreling toward him, he knew he would have only one chance to escape.
His quick braking slowed the car just enough to prevent him from being flattened by the first mammoth boulder. The huge rock hit the asphalt just twenty feet in front of him, splintering into several smaller sections. Most of the rock pieces continued their downhill slide, smashing through the guardrail and tumbling down the steep precipice toward the river. A few large chunks died on the road, soon to be buried by the impeding landslide that followed.
Pitt’s car skidded into one of the chunks, a flattened slab of granite that instantly stopped his momentum. Though it mashed the bumper and grille, the car’s mechanics were undamaged. Inside, Pitt felt only a strong jolt, but it was enough to inflate the air bag, which ballooned in front of his chest as the vehicle bounced backward. Pitt’s quick senses had beaten the air bag, though. He had already jammed the automatic transmission in to reverse and stomped on the accelerator at the moment of impact.
The rear tires smoked as they spun wildly before gripping the pavement and propelling the car backward. Pitt gripped the steering wheel and held it steady as the car tried to fishtail from the sudden rearward torque before settling on a stable line. The transmission screamed beneath Pitt’s feet as the low-ratio reverse gear fought to maintain revolutions with the floored engine. Pitt glanced up the hill to see the sliding mass of rocks and gravel already descending upon him. The landslide had spread across a wide line, extending well to his rear. He quickly realized there was no way he could outrun it.
Like a slate-colored tidal wave, the sliding wall of rock cascaded onto the roadway, spilling first a few yards in front of him. For an instant, it appeared as if the speeding car might slip past the deluge, but then a separate cluster of boulders broke free and crashed to the road behind him. Pitt could do nothing but hold on as the car barreled into the moving layer of rocks with a screeching peal of twisted metal.
The car scraped over a large boulder, snapping off the rear axle and sending one of the drive wheels careening down the hill. Pitt was thrown back into his seat as a secondary wall of falling rocks smashed into the passenger side, lifting the car up and over onto its roof. Pitt was flung to his left, his head striking a side air bag as it inflated. Seconds later, he was jarred again to the side again, his head banging through the deflating air bag until striking the driver’s-side window. A great battering roar filled his ears as the car was pummeled across the road, slamming hard to a sudden stop. Inside, Pitt teetered on the brink of consciousness as the sound of rushing gravel surrounded him. His vision went blurry as he was buffeted in his seat, he vaguely felt a warm wetness on his face, and then all feeling vanished as he dropped into a silent void of blackness.
38
Pitt knew that he was alive from the jackhammer-like pounding that wracked his skull. His auditory senses kicked in next, detecting a rhythmic scraping sound nearby. He wriggled his fingers, finding a heavy resistance but confirming that they were still wrapped around the steering wheel of the rental car. Though his legs moved freely, his head, chest, and arms felt completely restricted. The realization that he couldn’t breathe suddenly struck his foggy mind and he struggled to free himself, but he felt like a bound mummy. He slowly pried open the lids of his eyes, which felt as if they had been glued shut, but all he saw was black.
The grip on his lungs grew tighter and he thrashed harder, finally freeing a hand and forearm from their mysterious hold. He heard a voice and a frantic scuffling sound, then a scraping sensation skinned his face as a burst of light blinded his eyes. He sucked in a breath of dusty air, then squinted through a thick surrounding haze. Staring back at him was a pair of affectionate brown eyes, affixed to the tiny head of a black-and-tan dachshund. Most confusing to Pitt, the dog appeared to be standing upside down. The dog inched closer, sniffing Pitt’s exposed face before licking him on the nose.
“Out of the way, Mauser, he’s still alive,” came a man’s voice from nearby.
A pair of thick hands appeared and scooped away more of the dirt and gravel that had buried Pitt’s head and torso. Pitt’s arms finally broke free, and he helped push the small mountain of dirt away from his body. Reaching up with his sleeve, he wiped away the matted blood and dust from his eyes and finally took a look at his surroundings. With the seat belt tugging uncomfortably across his chest, he finally realized that he was the one upside down, not the dachshund. The helping pair of hands reached in and found the release button on the seat belt, dropping Pitt to the ceiling of the car. Pitt shuffled toward the driver’s-side window, but the hands yanked him toward the open passenger door.
“You don’t want to go that way, mister. The first step is a doozy.”
Pitt heeded the voice and crawled toward the passenger door, where he was helped out and onto his feet. The pounding in his head eased as he stood upright, but a light trickle of blood still rolled down his cheek. Looking at the damaged car, he shook his head at the good fortune that had saved him.
The sliding mass of rock and gravel that had battered the car and flipped it on its roof had also pushed it across the road, to the very edge of the steep chasm that fell to the river below. The car would have easily gone over the edge, taking Pitt to his death, but for a firmly cemented mileage signpost. The slim metal post caught the car just behind the front fender, pinning it to the edge of the road, as tons of loose rock plunged down the hill around both ends of the car. The road itself was buried under a mound of dirt and rocks for a stretch of fifty yards.
“Must be some clean living that kept you from going over the edge,” Pitt heard his rescuer say.
He turned to face a robust older man with white hair and beard who stood gazing at Pitt through a pair of jovial gray eyes.
“It wasn’t clean living that saved me, I can assure you,” Pitt replied. “Thank you for pulling me out. I would have suffocated in there if you hadn’t dug your way in.”
“Don’t mention it. Why don’t you come on back to the RV and let me patch you up,” the man said, pointing to a motor home parked on unblemished asphalt a few yards away. It was the same motor home that Pitt had passed earlier on the road.