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about it?”
    Alder veered onto an exit ramp. The road curved sharply, and Taylor braced herself on the dashboard, certain that the truck would flip. By some miracle it didn’t, and in a few seconds they were cruising down a winding back road at a breakneck speed.
    “I’ve been away,” he said, and it took Taylor a moment to remember what they’d been talking about.
    “Oh,” she breathed, still gripping the dashboard. “Hey, um, not for nothing, but do you know where you’re going? I mean, do you have a plan?”
    She glanced in the rearview mirror. There was nothing but woodlands and an empty road behind them, but she didn’t trust it.
    “We’re not going to lose them,” Alder said, confirming her fears. “We have too much of a lead for them to catch us from behind, but they will eventually cut us off from the front.”
    She was surprised at how quickly he’d assessed the situation. “Okay, so what do we do?”
    “We have to ditch the truck.”
    Her eyes widened. “Then they’ll catch us for sure.”
    “Not if we go into the forest.”
    It sounded like a ridiculous proposition to Taylor, but seeing as how she didn’t have any better ideas, she decided to play ball.
    “Even if they can’t track us by foot, they’ll hunt us down with dogs.”
    “Only to a point,” he said. “They won’t follow us into the mountains.”
    For the first time, Taylor realized where they were. The Appalachian Mountains loomed in the distance, looking like dark blue hills, but Taylor knew they were anything but. The Appalachians were not only a natural barrier between the east coast and the midwest, they were also notoriously dangerous.
    In the seventies and eighties there had been several large government campaigns to encourage impoverished city dwellers to populate the foothills. Real estate was dirt cheap and oftentimes acres of land would be given away to able-bodied men willing to enter the coal mining and logging industries. Families flocked to the foothills in droves, hoping to make better lives for themselves.
    Instead, they were met with underdeveloped housing communities, inadequate medical care, deadly mudslides, seasonal flooding, and frequent animal attacks. It wasn’t until the mid-nineties that the government actually stepped in to support the fringe towns, and even that only lasted for a few years. With the growing popularities of plastics and oil, as well as several foreign wars, providing aid to the mountain communities became increasingly unpopular in the cities.
    Nowadays, the foothills were littered with abandoned homes and buildings, whole towns swallowed up by the wilderness. The towns that remained were mired in poverty and superstitions, many believing the mountains to be full of werewolves and demon animals.
    Alder turned onto a narrow dirt road that curved and twisted deeper into the forest. Tree branches scraped along the side of the truck, and at one point the road dipped into a shallow creek. The entire time, Taylor kept her eyes glued to the mirror, expecting to see the blue and red lights, but it seemed that at least for the moment, they had evaded the police.
    The truck finally came to a stop in front of a long, rusty gate. Someone had wedged a warped stop sign in between the bars. Taylor noticed that the gate was attached to a barbed wire fence that stretched into the forest, and then the car lights clicked off and she saw nothing but darkness.
    “Grab your bag and let’s go,” she heard Alder say.
    Taylor complied, grasping her backpack and throwing it over one shoulder. Opening the truck door, she stepped out and onto the wet ground. Mud clung to her boots as she followed Alder to the gate. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she noted that he was carrying a backpack as well.
    There was a large open field beyond the fence, and if she squinted Taylor could make out a tree line on the edge of it, where the forest began again.
    “Do you think this is somebody’s land?” she asked as