Driftwood - The World Serpent

Chapter 4 - Lost In Silence

Chapter 4 - Lost in Silence

The dirt bikes blazed across the backroads at full speed, the rising sun breaking on their left as they crossed the border into Louisiana. They hadn't seen hide nor hair of Hale's men since the gas station, and neither of them had said a word in hours. Kaylee could practically feel the anxiety radiating from Evan, though she herself still felt oddly numb. Was something wrong with her, she wondered? She'd killed at least some of those men, done it so quickly and without a second thought, and she didn't feel much of anything. A part of her felt broken, monstrous for the things that she'd done, while the rest reasoned that she'd only done what was necessary to survive. They would have killed her, they would have killed Evan, they murdered Midge and who-knows how many other people. Guilt could wait for when they were somewhere safe, it was a luxury she couldn't afford right now.

They continued to ride until dawn had long since passed, the sluggish weight coming over Kaylee's mind as exhaustion set in. Neither had slept in over 24 hours, but they needed to put as much distance between themselves and their last known position as possible. It'd be crawling with Hale's men by now, and cops. Without knowing who they could trust, dodging authorities and staying off the radar was all they could do. The woods they stuck to hugged close to the side of the Mississippi river, taking care to not drive headlong into the increasingly treacherous bayou as the wooded terrain gave way to a patchwork of small lakes and mud. The ground was getting worse the further south they travelled, making progress slow. Soon their cover would be gone altogether, leaving an open sprint to the city proper. The bikes were already low on fuel, reserves long depleted from the jerry can. Best as Kaylee figured, they had about five more miles left before the engines were dead.

She gave a sharp whistle, pulling up onto a rare rise of dry ground a small island that was bone-dry in their surroundings. Foul-smelling mud clung to the wheels and her shoes as she brought the bike to a stop, engine idling low before she turned it off. Evan circled around, pulling up to a stop beside her, leaving them an uneasy silence, the drone of the engines still echoing in their ears after hours of riding.

"You okay?" Kaylee asked quietly, trees overhead shading them from the midday sun.

"Yeah," Evan said, even though they both knew he was lying, "What's the plan? We're almost out of fuel."

"It'd take us the better part of a day to walk into Baton Rouge," Kaylee replied, "That's a day of walking through open ground with cops undoubtedly looking for us. Hale's men won't be far behind them."

"So, we wait until nightfall," Evan said, "Make the trip into the city. It's still a risk, though."

"Not much we can do that isn't risky," she shrugged, "But we might be able to slip through unnoticed if we take the train."

"Buy tickets? They'll have our descriptions by now."

"Freight trains run south to Baton Rouge from towns a little east of here," she explained, "I fucking memorised the train routes in case we ever needed to catch a ride on the sly. They'll be watching the highways, maybe even the smaller roads, but each of those trains takes over two hundred carriages. They can't search them all. We just need to slip by some security guards in the middle of the night, sure as hell beats some trigger-happy cops or more of Hale's killers."

"And where exactly would we catch the train?" Evan asked, dismounting from the bike, picking up a stick and starting to scrape mud off from his boots.

"East Feliciana Parish, little town called Slaughter," Kaylee replied with a wry smile, pulling out an old road map of northern Louisiana from her backpack. It was among a dozen others, for each state they visited or could ever conceivably end up in, "There's a thousand people, tops. Local police won't have enough manpower to find us under the cover of night."