He hardly had time to notice and count the eighth stop sign before Sabrina blazed through it like a fire ball. There were plenty of reasons he avoided fast paced amusement park rides and Sabrina flooring the gas pedal for the last ten miles was providing plenty of reminders of every single one of them. Maxwell's hands clutched the loose fabric on his seat, his body pushed firmly against whatever could support him.
A nervous glance over toward Sabrina made him take note of the intensity etched in her face as she raced down roads unfamiliar to her. "Hey," Maxwell's shaky voice dared to interrupt her concentration. "I don't suppose you have some type of experience in drag racing, do you?"
Sabrina kept her eyes on the road. Maybe once. But that wasn't his business to know. "I ride horses as a past time, nothing much different about driving a car."
"No? Does a horse explode too when it runs into a tree?"
The brunette, though annoyed, didn't respond to her companion's sarcastic response. Instead she took a hand off of the wheel to flip off her tape player. Maxwell had been easing his nerves to a cassette of Jethro Tull, a common interest he shared with Kelly. Now the closer they were getting to Bridge Grove, the more anxious and distracted Sabrina was becoming. The music was driving her crazy.
"Kelly must have left that in." She remarked absently.
Not appreciating the music being turned off so abruptly – as it was the only thing he had to keep himself in a sane state of mind – Maxwell snapped down the play button.
"Kelly has good taste." He said evenly.
Unwilling to take her eyes off the road for another second to deal with the now irritating noise, Sabrina's brows furrowed into a scowl. "If you want us to hit a fucking deer while doing seventy five, then please keep entertaining yourself."
The music played cheerfully on, a stark contrast to dark moods of the two angry passengers aboard. Maxwell sat stubbornly in his seat for a few moments before finally relenting. It was her car after all. With a sigh of defeat, he tilted forward, grabbed hold of the dashboard and ejected the tape. He slipped it in to his coat pocket, making a mental note to give it back to Kelly when he saw her in a few hours. Because she was okay, and would be needing it back. He knew it.
The two sat in stony silence, the quiet of the car now just as distracting as the music had been.
"I'm sorry, Max." Sabrina blurted out suddenly, blowing out a rush of air. "It's just... this is killing me. I should have gone with them today."
Maxwell idly traced the outline of the cassette through his pocket. "You didn't know." He offered back in a low monotone. His words did little to comfort her before a new noise in the car caught both of their attention.
Sabrina's recently installed CB radio had come to life and hidden in the static filled frequency was a recognizable voice.
Miles north of any well-equipped phone services, Kris gave up on a search for a much needed pay phone. She had slowed down to an easier on the eyes pace of twenty five miles per hour to search the wooded area but despite her efforts, nothing could be seen through the thick wild brush and trees on the outskirts of Bridge Grove. Gripping on her steering wheel, she pushed away the images of Kelly's car tipped over the side of the road, a mangled deer sprawled across the hood.
It wasn't possible they had walked away without injury.
For what wasn't the first time, she began to curse herself for not asking the man she had met earlier if he knew a place nearby that had a phone. Though how much his opinion could be trusted, she wasn't sure. He'd said there wasn't a hospital after all and according to Sabrina, that couldn't be right.
Unless he'd never seen it before.
"Oh, Jill," Kris sighed out loud in frustration. "What mess have you gotten yourself into this time?"
She leaned into her seat and arched her back, attempting to stretch her cramped muscles. As she did, her blue eyes flicked nervously to the rearview mirror as they'd been doing on and off for the past half hour. Driving in the foreboding darkness had begun to give her an eerie feeling of being watched. Impossible, since she was inside her car and moving, but to make sure, she glanced around her seat and swept the back area with her eyes. Pulling them back to the road, Kris squirmed anxiously and started to drum her fingers along the wheel to ease her paranoia. If she was in her own car, she'd have the radio on. Music could always calm her down.
She fretted a bit longer before the silence became unbearable.
"Fish don't fry in the kitchen. Beans don't burn on the grill…." Kris began to sing softly to herself. She tilted her head side to side along to the lyrics she was singing. Better than nothing.
A real FM radio would have been more appreciated in this case, but Ryan's cruiser lacked that entertainment and even if it didn't, it would still be useless unless she figured out a way to sing along to static. The mounted police radio had long since lost the annoying voice of dispatchers as there seemed to be no true law enforcement within frequency around Bridge Grove. It was still hard to believe Kelly and Jill had gotten lost so far ahead into an abyss of nothing.
"We finally got a piece of the pie."
As she finished her comforting song, Kris sighed and slumped forward slightly. Unnerved by the quiet, she reached out for the radio, twisted a few knobs and listened to white noise filter through the speakers. And as that static filled her ears, an idea struck her so hard she swerved her car into the other lane in thrilled excitement. How could she have been so stupid!?
Sabrina had to be in a close enough proximity to signal out her frequency on her CB radio. Jill had informed her about Charlie's newest upgrade to all of their vehicles the last time they'd spoken and had laughed as she'd revealed their shared name and their amusement at hearing Bosley use it. Unusual as it was, and how stupid she might feel calling it out into hundreds of radios, Kris was desperate. There was simply no other choice. Unhooking the mouthpiece, she pressed down on the side, offered up a silent prayer, and released her voice into the open world.
"Busy Beaver, 10-62, Busy Beaver. Come in, 10-4."
She released her finger from the small lever and sat with baited breath. Fortunately, her wait for a response was a short one.
Unfortunately, the response did not come from Sabrina.
"Busy Beaver? Oh baby, I got a lonely dick that could use a friend. I'll keep your beaver busy all night."
A man who sounded like he'd been on the road far too long and smoked more cigars than his voice could ever recover from zeroed in on her channel. Rather than pull out the police card – which would only alert others around – she seethed openly.
"I bet your right hand is your dick's only friend, asshole." She fumed back at him. Another release of the lever, another silent prayer that Sabrina would pick up and she tried again. "Busy Beaver, this is Kris, do you copy?"
"The sound of your voice makes me wanna touch myself, sweet thing. Why don't you give daddy your location and see if we can get naked and leave it to beaver?"
Kris jerked her mouth away and looked disgustedly into the radio. A retort was on her lips but there was no time to do anything other than disregard the crude comments, though they had convinced her to drop Sabrina's handle all together. "Sabrina? Come in, Sabrina!"
"I would, just point me in her direction."
Another male pervert. Third time was the charm and she missed it. Kris slapped her forehead, all faith suddenly lost in the male population.
"Kris?"
A raspy female voice.
"Busy Beaver!" She shouted into her mouthpiece, almost in a complete scream of joy. Her love for that name Jill had given the three angels roared back. "Thank you, God! There's no phones out here!"
She heard Sabrina groan. "Okay, first thing don't use that name anymore. And I know, it's a wasteland out here. Any news?"
Sounding defeated, Kris' voice grew small. "No. I passed Kelly's car and it's totaled. I have to be going in the right direction, but this man was passing through and said he never heard of a hospital around here."
"Jesus, I don't like the sound of any of that. Do you think you're close? Because I haven't passed a car yet."
Sabrina forgot to release to allow Kris to talk and the young officer heard an unexpected male's voice next to her friend.
"If we passed a car, we were going too fast to notice it." The man's voice grumbled.
"Oh, shut-"
Sabrina released her lever, putting a stop to whatever argument was going on with whoever she was driving with. Kris furrowed her brows, confused by the man's presence. It wasn't Bosley, she noted, but thought it wiser not to ask. "Uh, maybe." She finally answered Sabrina's question after a few moments of thought. "The road's curving a little more now. I think there might be some crossroads coming up."
"Go as far as it takes you. We're behind you, just give us a little more time."
"I am, but this road –" Kris snipped off the end of her sentence as something suddenly caught her eye. "Wait! Hey, there's an off road here! I'm gonna try it. Looks more promising. And…way more dangerous. I bet you anything Jill would have turned here."
"Atta girl."
Kris slowed her cruiser and let the vehicle bounce gently from the paved highway onto a much more narrow dirt road. She drove steadily down the bumpy dirt road for the next five minutes, limited conversation with Sabrina and sometimes an occasional annoying truck driver the only thing keeping her from giving in to the instinctual urge to yank the steering wheel around and speed back towards the much safer highway and away from wherever this dark and ominous road led.
Just as all hope that Jill and Kelly had taken this road seemed to drain away, a faint glow appeared in the distance. A building possibly? The hospital? Renewed hope surging in her chest, Kris leaned forward and squinted her eyes, wondering if she'd only imagined it.
She hadn't. There it was, the faint glow that couldn't possibly be anything else. Kris dared to press the gas pedal down a little harder and the cruiser bounced along the dirt road, the glow in the distance getting brighter and brighter as she approached. Up over a slight hill and the gritty terrain underneath her car suddenly smoothed as she found herself on a newly redone concrete entrance for a hospital that looked only half complete.
Kris's blue eyes went wide.
Divinity's Reach Memorial Hospital.
She gulped and radioed in Sabrina.
"Busy Beaver?"
"Ugh," Sabrina answered in displeasure. "What is it?"
"Jackpot."