It got worse for everybody. The ruts vanished and we plowed into the heart of a thicket. Brush whapped against the windows and tore off the side mirrors. We collided with a tree and the rear passenger door crunched inward. I dropped the shotgun amidst getting flung around. Glass shattered, but I couldn’t see where.

Lionel cursed. The SUV launched into a starless void, its engine screaming. We glided for a semi-eternity before crash-landing. Dead stop. The airbags exploded up front. It felt surreal to sit there in the dark with the vehicle idling and the hazards ticktacking, yellow strobes illuminating nearby tree trunks. I’d covered my head; my arms had absorbed the punishment. In the morning, my body would hurt like I’d crawled into a barrel of rocks and gotten pushed down a ski slope. I wiggled my fingers and sat up, grateful that everything was in working order. Lionel swore again as he roused and deflated the airbag and shoved it flat against the steering column.

The Mercury’s headlights bounced way back there in the woods. Might as well have been on another continent.

Lionel shifted into 4-LO, or what old-timers referred to as granny, and drove up out of a ditch onto a paved road. The SUV’s undercarriage squealed in protest and the whole rig wobbled as it reached cruising speed. But it rolled. He whooped in victory. Frigid wind whistled through a missing side window. Giant ugly cracks starred the windshield. The dome light stuttered, revealing Lionel’s face in the mirror caked in gore. Blood poured from his swollen nose. I handed him a loose sock hat and he wadded it into a ball and pressed it tight.

“Some fun, even without a firefight!” he said. And not sarcastically.

I turned in my seat and scanned the darkness. Any second and I’d see the Mercury’s lights pop onto the road. That didn’t happen. Any second and the laboring engine would conk out, or the axle would snap. Neither of those things happened either. He navigated to the main highway and we headed east, weary, wounded, but alive and grinning like a pair of idiots. Made sense. We were idiots having a perfectly rational response to self-induced terror and trauma.

■■■

We eventually departed the tertiary roads and traveled the highway until we pulled into a service area. The other calamity I expected to happen, but it didn’t, was to get stopped by a state trooper. Lionel pumped fuel. I bought candy bars and bottles of soda. The spike of sugar and caffeine would see us across the finish line. My hands shook as I gulped the soda. The SUV was a surreal hulk bathed in the sodium light. Scraped, battered, and stove in on the rear passenger side, it resembled a surviving prop from the set of a Mad Max demolition derby. People glanced at it, then Lionel, masked in blood, and me, leaning against a register in obvious pain. As we prepared to mosey on, he winced and mentioned that he couldn’t raise his left arm. Broken collarbone would be the diagnosis at the doc’s office a day or two later.