Next month, Tor Nightfire will publish White Line Fever by KC Jones, a “harrowing thrill ride about friendship, trauma, and learning how to take the wheel of your own life”. To whet readers’ appetites, the publisher has provided us with an excerpt to share! First, here’s the synopsis:
THEY’LL BREAK MORE THAN SPEED LIMITS ON THIS GIRLS’ TRIP FROM HELL.
At a passing glance, County Road 951 is an entirely unremarkable stretch of blacktop, a two-lane scar across the Cascade foothills of Central Oregon.
But the road is known by another name, coined by those who’ve had to clean up after all those scenic detours went horribly wrong: The Devil’s Driveway.
When Livia and her long-time friends take the Driveway as a shortcut to a much-needed weekend getaway, what begins as a morning joyride quickly becomes anything but. Soon, they’re driving for their lives, pursued by a horror beyond anything they ever imagined.
The Devil’s Driveway might be only 15 miles long, but with danger at every turn, it will take the four women to the very limits of their friendships and their sanity.
And there’s no telling what else lies in wait just beyond the bend.
*
ROAD RASH
1.
Thirty miles.
Fifteen there, fifteen back—just shy of a hundred and fifty-nine thousand feet. Not so bad, when you thought of it that way. And like an Oregon driver in the fast lane, Drew Scott was going to ride the whole distance at five below the posted speed limit. His friends would give him plenty of shit, but Drew did not care. Brees rarely drove at all, so they had no business judging, and Julian’s only requirements were that it happened after dark, and Drew went alone. The way Drew figured it, shooting the footage from a motorcycle canceled out any perceived trepidation. Two wheels was a different beast. You were more exposed to the dangers of the road.
And the Devil’s Driveway was nothing if not a mean stretch of pavement.
You didn’t have to believe the ghost stories, but the numbers did not lie. A lot of commutes and Sunday drives had been cut tragically short out here, and Drew had no desire to become another statistic just for the sake of Julian and Brees’s channel.
“All right, man, I think we’re good to go!” Julian announced once Brees had set up and stabilized the iPhone gimbal. “You ready?”
They were parked at what, in passing, would appear to be nothing more than a turnout off the highway. But as they pulled in, the darkness had receded to reveal an unlit, largely unmarked junction with a pair of narrow lanes Maps identified only as County Road 951. You had to zoom way in before the words “Old Wending Hollow Highway” emerged from the little white line tracing the road’s path through the hills, as if the modern world were trying to forget it was there at all. Julian’s dad had called it the Devil’s Driveway when telling the story that had pulled the three of them out here on an otherwise stagnant Saturday night.
Of the road’s aliases, that last one certainly had the best hook for a ghost-hunting channel. The county sheriff’s department coined it back when the road was still open. A wider, nicer extension was eventually built to route cars around the hills rather than through, in an effort to reduce traffic—and wrecks—on the Driveway. CR 951 had remained open during the summer months, relegated to a low-speed scenic bypass up until a few years ago. It was currently closed to vehicular traffic altogether.
That its prime was well behind it had not dissuaded Julian and Brees, ever in need of fresh content to feed their growing number of followers. A quick Google search revealed that the Devil’s Driveway had somehow remained off the radar of paranormal adventurers, despite its history. Julian had lit up at the prospect of mining an untouched vein.
“Drew?” Brees said from the operator side of the camera rig.
“Yeah. Sorry. I’m good.”
Julian waggled his eyebrows: “Not too late to change your mind about this.”
Drew scoffed. He tugged at his gloves and readjusted his helmet for the third time. Julian directed Brees to pan the camera toward him. Drew returned a middle finger.
“Come on, give us a smile at least. It might be your last.”
“That’s bleak,” Brees said.
“That is called levity. Bleak is fifteen people burning to death in a tunnel,” Julian said, stabbing his index finger toward the darkness at the edge of his van’s headlights.
All three of them looked down the road.
This particular story was the top search result for Devil’s Driveway. The road was closed indefinitely after a fuel-truck accident in a tunnel—a stretch already infamous enough to have been dubbed “the Nightmare Mile” by emergency responders—left fifteen people dead and the structure terminally compromised. The comments were full of locals lobbying for the road’s permanent closure. Let it be returned to the wilds from which it had been carved. That was five years ago. No decision had been made yet, so the road remained gated off and quiet.
Waiting.
“But for real,” Julian said, looking back at Drew. “If you want to back out, it’s nothing. We’re going out there on foot anyway. We don’t need the POVs—they’d slap, but you already do us enough favors.”
“Do I look like I’m backing out?” Drew asked.
“You look like you’re stalling.”
“I’m not stalling!” Drew objected, the crack in his voice betraying the truth. He could practically hear Julian’s grin, singing like a drawn blade. He turned away from the camera.
He wasn’t stalling.
He was just noticing how extraordinarily dark the road was beyond the reach of their headlights. It was late, and though the summer sky above was cloudless and bejeweled with stars, the moon full and bright, none of the celestial night light seemed to penetrate the canopy of trees that had begun the slow work of reclaiming the roadway while the county hemmed and hawed over fixing it. Five years, it was probably in shit shape, fissured and uneven, pocked by potholes and littered with rocky debris sloughed off the flanking hillsides. Whole sections could be washed out for all he knew; it had happened across the region during the unseasonable storms of the past spring. It wasn’t as if anybody was doing regular maintenance.
It was a lot to consider is all.
And that was before your imagination got loose and bared its teeth. Before you started thinking about all the people who had been killed in accidents out there—and hearing your friend’s dad, in a cringey sinister voice, claiming that they were still around, stranded eternally on a road to nowhere, ghostly hitchers hoping to catch a ride home with anybody who might come by, unaware that home was no longer a place to which they could return.
Drew adjusted his helmet again. Tugged at his gloves. Fucking ghost stories. Boos Run better get a million new subs for this.
“I still can’t believe you’re doing this on a dirt bike,” Brees commented unhelpfully, resetting the camera’s position.
Drew regarded the four-stroke Yamaha. It was a hand-me-down from his older brother. Gabe had lost his love of two wheels, and the dirt bike had been gathering dust in the garage. Drew earned his endorsement along with his license so that he could still get around while saving up for something more practical. It ended up getting him through high school, but college was starting in the fall, and it was time to start thinking about making good on that original plan. Mom would be happy, and not just because it meant he’d stop needing to borrow her car when more than one seat was required, or the roads hadn’t been plowed. She hated bikes in general, especially after Gabe’s accident left his crotch rocket in pieces, Gabe with a hand that never worked quite right again, and his girlfriend Danielle in the hospital. If Drew hurt himself out here just so that Julian and Brees could make a video about some haunted road, well, all the horrors of the Devil’s Driveway would not compare to her wrath.
“Not much choice unless you want to ram the gate down,” Drew said.
They all looked at the muddied gate barring access to the Driveway, the one that used to be for winter closure but was now a permanent fixture. Its yellow paint had peeled away in big strips to reveal rusting metal underneath. A sign bolted to its center was so caked in dust and grime and streaks of dried bird shit you could hardly read the bold proclamation—road closed—stamped across its jaundiced surface. A padlock and thick latch secured the gate in place. Somebody had tagged one of the crossbars with a black Sharpie witticism: TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED.
Drew could not help but chuckle.
History aside, as far as supposedly-haunted places go, the Devil’s Driveway left a lot to be desired. Its stage name promised a spiderweb-laced corridor of terror, a serpentine length of bloodstained asphalt, geysers of hellfire spewing through ruptures in its scorched surface. But it was just another unremarkable backwoods byway. Most people probably blew right past without even noticing it was there. Even when it was open, it was the kind of road you drove on autopilot. Nothing to really look at out there but the same dry forests and dusty hills you saw everywhere else in central Oregon. People got distracted, bored, tired, took corners too fast in their hurry to get from one end to the other. Driver error, that was the devil on the driveway.
And yet, a flutter of anticipation had been building in Drew’s chest ever since they arrived.
Every town had its own unique version of the boarded-up old house or the crumbling cemetery or the condemned hospital that lured adventure-seekers like hooked worms. Places where bad things had left dents in the world, where spirits were said to stir and strange energies coalesced into frightening shapes with malevolent intent. As often as Boos Run’s “investigations” amounted to little more than gags, laughs, and the occasional orchestrated jump-scare, there remained an undeniable primal thrill in the possibility of, well, more. In the idea of walking right up to that unknown with your spine straight, to show whatever might be lurking there that you were not afraid. It was a rite of passage. Even if the reveal always turned out to be nothing more than wind howling through a broken window or moonlight catching a piece of sheet-draped furniture, if you never pushed yourself to find out, did you ever really live?
“You fall asleep on us, man?” Julian asked, clipping his mic to the inside of his shirt. Drew looked away from the road and blinked moisture back into his eyeballs.
“No.” He rolled his shoulders to loosen the knot of tension forming at the base of his neck, then gave the bike a rev and tugged gently on the phone mount to make certain it was secure. He opened the camera and the road ahead of him emerged from the chaos of squirming pixels.
“Get this,” Julian said to Brees, stepping aside to grant the lens an unobstructed view of the gate and road beyond. “That’s our thumbnail.”
Brees moved closer for better framing. Julian looked at Drew.
“Mostly I just want lots of sexy headlight-shining-down-dark-road shots. But if you could get a couple takes of going fast—like something’s chasing you—that’d be fire.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Drew said. “It’s not a sport bike.”
“We really should have bought that drone,” Brees mumbled.
“Hey.” Drew looked at Julian and found, for maybe the first time since they started the channel, a serious expression on his face. “Be careful, man.”
Before he could think too much about it, Drew urged the bike forward and around the gatepost, tires churning up clouds of dust. He tapped his phone’s screen to begin recording and glanced at his mirror. Through the brown haze, two dark figures stood in the twin starbursts of the van’s high-beams, watching him go. Drew’s shadow stretched out ahead of him, dividing the weaker cone of his own light, until it joined with the oppressive darkness that bound together the road and woods with the void between the stars.
He twisted the throttle.
The four-stroke rapped up agreeably, pulling him forward and away from the highway, from Julian and Brees, and into forgotten territory. Drew focused on the familiar rhythms of the bike, reassured by the confident buzz of its motor as he climbed through the gears.
Just take it easy and pay attention, he told himself as the dread coiling around his stomach began to squeeze.
It was only a road.
*
KC Jones’s White Line Fever is due to be published by Tor Nightfire in North America and in the UK, on March 18th.
Civilian Reader 