Total pages in book: 108
Estimated words: 104869 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 350(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104869 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 350(@300wpm)
She stopped her car in the middle of what could barely be described as a road, and curled her hands around the top of the steering wheel, before resting her forehead on her knuckles.
Her air conditioning had died just past Mossel Bay and she’d spent the last hour slowly broiling in this overpriced, useless hunk of metal. Driving with the windows down had become a necessary evil. As a result, Kenny was not only hot but also windblown, had probably swallowed a fair few tiny winged creatures, and now, thanks to this nightmare of a road that she’d been rattling down for the last twenty minutes, she was also covered in a fine layer of red dust, which was turning to mud on her sweaty skin.
“Fucking fantastic,” she muttered, lifting her head to glare at the road that still stretched ahead of her, without any end in sight.
She should’ve let Paul drive her. But she’d wanted to prove…something. She wasn’t even sure what anymore. Whatever it was definitely wasn’t worth this.
She glared at the car’s infotainment screen. The map had disappeared completely now, leaving only the blue line of her route on a white screen.
She stared at it in disbelief and horror before even that line disappeared and a No Signal sign popped up in its place.
“Oh my God,” she yelled at the screen. “You’re literally leading me to my death, you bastard!”
Recalling way too many horrific stories of people continuing on in situations like this before winding up stranded and/or dead, Kenny eyed her petrol gauge and then cast a look at her one bottle of water, before swearing and putting the car in reverse.
No way was she going to continue on without water, and on only half a tank of petrol. Better to get back to the highway, where at least she had signal, and regroup.
She reversed until she reached a suitable spot on the narrow road to execute a three-point turn. She managed that pretty efficiently and was about to pat herself on the back when the rear right wheel dipped and the car just…refused to move an inch farther forward.
“Oh no…come on, man! What the hell?” She revved the engine but the wheels simply spun, kicking up dust and debris which flew in through the open windows, caking Kenny and the car’s formerly pristine interior with even more of that annoying red dust.
She got out of the car, slamming the door shut behind her, frustrated beyond measure. A quick walk to the back of the car confirmed her worst fears. The right back wheel was stuck in a pothole filled with what looked like fine, loose sand.
She planted her hands on her hips and glared at the tire, before kicking it and then yelping when her big toe screamed in agony.
She hopped around on one foot, swearing like the proverbial sailor, while feeling like a beleaguered cartoon character. After a few minutes of more futile swearing while the throbbing in her toe lessened—that would teach her to kick at tires while wearing flip-flops—she glared at her car for a long moment, before looking up and down the road in the vain hope of seeing a car approaching. Or at least the dust trail of one in the distance.
No such luck.
The heat shimmered on the surface of the road, and the silence was broken by nothing but the occasional lonely call of a fish eagle, and the loud, persistent buzz of thousands of cicadas off in the distance. Well, she hoped they were off in the distance.
Kenny definitely wasn’t up to dealing with a horde of cicadas descending upon her like some biblical plague right now.
She got back into the car and sat there for a while, staring at the desolate road. She checked her phone. Still no signal.
“So this is where I die,” she intoned glumly. She wasn’t usually so prone to melodrama, but if ever an occasion called for it, surely this was it.
She considered her choices. She could go the route of wait and see, which wasn’t great. It was nearly half past six and the light would only last another three hours tops. She definitely didn’t fancy sitting here in the dark. There was bound to be wild animals out here.
She wasn’t too far from the town of Riversend, but her drive into this hellscape had been half an hour long, so her walk would back be twice that, or longer in this heat. No guarantee she’d make the town before nightfall.
Or maybe she could go in the direction the GPS had originally sent her down, in the hopes of finding Tina and Harris’s house. But since she wasn’t sure it was right, that would be a fool’s errand.
Or she could walk until she got signal again. It hadn’t been too far back that she’d had a signal, so the walk would be, what, five minutes? Ten? It couldn’t possibly be more than that.