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vinyl seat between us. There was a gaping hole there now, a wad of yellowish foam scattered by his feet.
    â€œNo clue,” I said. I’d given up trying to guess the time and started tracking our progress by counting the number of moose-crossing signs we passed. Only two in the last hour. “Probably late afternoon.”
    â€œThis is insane. We could walk there faster,” Chris moaned.
    He was right. At this rate, it’d be morning before we got to the reintegration facility. Sure, it was snowing when we left, but things had gotten noticeably worse in the last hour. The lines marking the sides of the road were no longer visible; only a guardrail marked our route. That was it. No cement blocks, no breakdown lane, just a waist-high strip of metal designed to keep us from literally falling off the side of the mountain.
    The road narrowed, and our van slowed to a near stop as the driver navigated his way around a downed tree. I questioned why he just didn’t pull over and move it. It was a scrawny pitch pine no more than a few inches thick. Any one of us could’ve shoved it out of the way, the driver and security guard included. And given how desperate I was to piss, I would’ve gladly volunteered.
    â€œIdiots,” the driver mumbled as he eased the van around a second fallen tree, barely clearing it. “I deserve hazard pay for this.”
    His eyes darted to the window on his left, then back to the road before he used the rear-view mirror to signal the security guard behind us. Chris saw it too and craned his neck to catch the guard’s response.
    â€œWhat?” I mouthed to Chris.
    â€œSomething’s not right. The guard in the back is acting weird, and the driver is going way too slow.”
    â€œCrappy roads,” I offered up. With the wind whipping the snow around, there were times you couldn’t see more than three feet in front of you.
    â€œNah, that’s not it,” Chris said. “The roads are bad, but the van is heavy. Besides, it seems the driver is more focused on the woods than on the road.”
    We slowed to a crawl again, a third, larger tree encroaching on our lane. I leaned over the seat in front of me and peered out the windshield, focusing on the dark shadows looming ahead. The road had leveled off and the wind had momentarily stopped, giving me a clear view of what lay ahead. It took a few seconds, but I made out the shapes of several more downed trees. One on the right side of the road, the other on the left. It continued like that for as far as I could see, like a zigzag pattern forcing the driver to literally weave his way down the already narrow road.
    I flashed another concerned look at Chris. It was definitely windy enough for the storm to have knocked over some trees, but why like that? Why in such a weird pattern? And why so close to each other?
    The guard in the back row swung his head around to look at the tree we’d just passed. I’d bet my life we were thinking the same thing. The fallen trees were perfectly spaced, each one coming closer and closer to completely blocking the road. Like someone had purposefully dropped them that way. Like someone was trying to slow us down.
    Not wanting to draw attention to myself, I kicked Chris’s foot and tilted my head toward the window. “Trees. All down,” I whispered.
    Chris looked at me like I was insane—the same way everybody at school had looked at me when they found out my brother tested positive. But I wasn’t crazy then, and I sure as hell wasn’t crazy now. “Just look. No way the trees fell on their own like that.”
    A muffled curse drew my attention forward. The driver’s hands were wrapped around the steering wheel, his knuckles white, his eyes darting in a frantic pattern from the windshield to the passenger-side window. He muttered something under his breath, then leaned over and keyed in a code on the small lockbox resting on the center