Valerie Rousseau drove the rental car along the road that would eventually lead out to Sun Valley. It was a pleasant day in fall, with a mild sun trying to break through some lacy cirrus clouds high in the deep blue sky. To say that her job took her all over the country was an understatement. Valerie owned an apartment in New York but spent so little time there that even her cactus had managed to die of dehydration, while things left in her fridge had become sentient and walked out on their own.
And here she was, away again.
This time to a small corner in a rather picturesque part of the country. And there was the problem in itself. Picturesque. Born in New Orleans she had a weakness for beauty. After all she had been raised in an old plantation house, with its columns out front and massive windows to let in the wonderful New Orleans sun. It was picturesque and Valerie loved the word and everything it conjured in her mind. It was the reason she had chosen property assessment as her profession.
New York was a lot of things, but picturesque wasn’t one of them. How she missed the simple beauty of old areas, not marred by commercialism and human madness. Clean, simple, open. You missed things like that in the cities where everything was loud, run by money and no matter what anyone said about going green, cities were primarily dirty.
Perhaps she had just been on the road too much lately. Perhaps all this thought of home, of Mama’s cooking, of the place she grew up, was just her tired mind and body telling Valerie that it was time to recharge. She should complete this job and then put in for leave. She had vacation days so why not take them? She could go home. Home. The word hung in her mind and ached in her heart.
Valerie came to realize that she was lost. Google Maps had been telling her this fact for the last how long? She didn’t know, she’d tuned out the noise of the robotic, annoying voice telling her it was recalculating.
“Shit!” she said and pulled the car over onto the verge.
The road ahead was heading into trees, a lot of them and then up into the mountains. Was this the right way to Sun Valley? All the signs so far had insisted that she was going the right way. She looked at her phone and sighed. Google was completely lost. It suddenly thought she was in California and not Colorado. She turned the GPS off, what was the point of keeping it on?
So the last sign had been about a mile back? Maybe more?
“Dammit Val, why the hell were you daydreaming?” she berated herself, loudly thumping the wheel.
Maybe she should drive a little way down the road. There was bound to be another sign soon, right? There had to be. Surely people came to Sun Valley all the time. Right?
Valerie slowly depressed the accelerator and the rental eased back onto the road. She drove along for another twenty minutes as the trees grew up around her. Suddenly the road just ended in a wall of green branches and leaves. To her right she could see something that looked like a little dirt track that was cleared of branches, and to her left nothing but forest.
On the right a very small, hand painted sign proclaimed that it was the way to Sun Valley.
“Oh, but of course it is,” Valerie said aloud to herself and sighed. It was clearly going to be one of those days. The vampire pool at HQ, Valerie’s pet name for the sisterhood of personal assistants and secretaries, that stood guard on all the floors of the massive skyscraper Petersen-Snow called home, had rented her a sedan, not an SUV. So this was going to be a bumpy ride the car would never forget.
She drove slowly along the track. It was very pretty under the leafy canopy. All around her leaves tinted in red, yellow and orange tumbled lazily to the ground. Under different circumstances it would even be lovely. But Valerie was wound up. She was out here in the middle of nowhere and now she had no cellphone signal.
The light in the shadow of the mountain under the trees was a little dim, and Valerie was contemplating turning on her head lamps, when suddenly something ran across the road. It was a small something; a flash of fur and then it was gone. But it was enough to make her wrench the wheel and send the car off on a bumpy, uncontrolled ride down the embankment and into the trees.
The car came to rest, nose first in a heap of leaves and dirt about ten yards from the track. Valerie hit her head on the steering wheel. It was just a bump, so only hard enough to daze not to concuss. The engine died and, for a moment, Valerie was at peace slumped over the wheel. Then she pulled herself upright, brushed back her mass of dark, curly hair and looked around. Her hands were shaking.
She fumbled with the door mechanism. After a moment the door swung open and shuddered on its hinges. Valerie slid out of the car on weak legs and staggered back a few paces. The car was resting comfortably with its nose in the dirt. It was okay. After all, the secretarial vampires would have taken the insurance option on the rental, so all she had to do was find some signal and call a tow truck. A brief search of the pockets of her jeans reminded her that the phone was still in the car. Gingerly she touched the sore part of her forehead, checking in that stupid human way to see if it hurt, and knowing as her finger depressed the already blooming lump, that it did.
Finding the phone took a moment. It had fallen from its cradle stuck to the windshield onto the floor on the passenger side. Valerie was in no mood to move around the car and open that side, so she simply leaned into the car and leaving her booted feet hanging out of the open front door, she stretched to reach the phone.
With her head under the glove box she grabbed the phone and a sound filtered in from outside. It was a snuffling sound. Valerie pushed herself up but she couldn’t see anything, being too low to see out the window much beyond the branches above.
Suddenly the window became dark, as a snout, followed by the big shaggy head of a black bear, filled the space. Valerie blinked at the bear. The bear sniffed the glass and then set one oddly golden eye on her.
Oh crap!
Valerie panicked.