Check out this installment of the thrilling chapters series, where we dive right in the middle of the action for a fun excerpt from one of my books.
This short sample is from REAGAN’S ASHES and it stars Reagan Darby, the hero of my very first novel.
It’s about a tense moment above treeline when a storm breaks out, and it’s the teaser prologue from the book.
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Reagan Darby waved her arms through the dense blanket of rain to get her cousins’ attention. On this mountain plateau, above the trees, twelve thousand feet above the level of the sea. Nothing to shield them from the lightning lashing the ground around them.
When Dalton and Charlie looked at her, with streams of rain cascading from their foreheads, she realized one errant strike could kill them all.
“Hunker down,” she yelled, and demonstrated by lowering herself, with elbows resting on her knees.
They all dropped to a crouch. “Shouldn’t we keep going, though?” Dalton said, his voice muffled under the splattering of rain on rock. “We’re almost at the part where it goes down again and meets the trees. Let’s run for it.”
All the survival blogs said you were supposed to hunker in a lightning storm. Make yourself low, and if a bolt struck, it might pass through without harming you. But how long were they supposed to stay like this? What if the storm didn’t pass?
She didn’t spend too much time debating and instead leaped to her feet. “Okay. Let’s move.”
They jogged, and the rope hipbelt of her backpack yanked at her flesh as it slipped underneath her shirt and rubbed against bare skin. Her shirt, pants, socks, and boots were thoroughly soaked. Her feet sloshed in the boots as she jogged, and the pack bounced around on her back, nearly toppling her with every step.
Priority one would be reaching treeline. Priority two would then have to be dry clothes. Wet clothes could kill.
A bolt crackled a few hundred feet to the right.
A thousand feet ahead, two rocks on either side of the trail indicated where the descent began. She focused all her energy on that marker, throwing the left pole as right foot landed, then the right pole as left foot landed. As they ran, the lightning and thunder still flashed and bellowed behind them, but each step took them further away from the worst of it. The rain still fell in sheets and blurred the world into a dark mess, but the danger seemed to be behind them.
At least, that’s what she hoped. Like a herd of moose, the storm could move at any time.
She closed the distance to the edge of the shelf, hoping her cousins were behind since she couldn’t hear them and didn’t want to risk another fall by turning around. When she reached the rocks signaling the beginning of the downward trail, she stopped and eased around to face them. Her cousins were only a few seconds behind her.
Charlie’s eyes bulged, his chest heaved, and his face twisted into a grimace. Dalton just looked angry.
Down the trail. A hundred feet this way, sharp turn, a hundred feet that way. Repeat. The ground was already becoming slippery with patches of mud and slick rocks. She wished she had boots with good tread, but too late for that now. At each sharp angle of the switchback, she leaned both poles on the outer edge of the bend, in case the extra weight she carried tried to yank her over the edge of the trail. She wouldn’t fall far, but a twisted ankle or bruised knee might strand them.
Sounds of rain and thunder drove her onward. To safety, if that even existed out here.
