Chapter 31 - Zero Time

Jack’s internal clock told him that it was pretty fucking late at night, or early in the morning depending on how you looked at it. His instinct told him that he had to get rid of the van as quickly as possible. He could sense that the sky was slightly lighter on the distant horizon. He realized that he must be at some elevation if the horizon looked lighter somewhere lower in his field of vision. There would not be a lot of time to ditch the van and find out where in the hell he was or how to get back.
He poked around the cab for a few minutes looking for anymore clues as to his present location. A wad of poorly folded paper in the passenger side door pocket caught his eye after lingering on the open tool box full of oddly shaped surgical tools. He grabbed the stack of paper and was glad to see the lines and locations indicating some type of map. Unfortunately his hopes for discovering anything useful faded when he started reading the maps and found out that they were from several different places.
There was an old boat compass mounted on the dashboard of the van. He tapped it gently and the inner float bobbed slightly and resumed pointing east. He guessed it was somewhat accurate if the sky was in fact getting lighter in front of him.
Then Jack noticed a small folded piece of notebook paper in the center console between the driver and passenger. He set the stack of maps down on the seat next to him and unfolded the paper. In a scrawled handwriting he read the following directions:
“Highway 12 east to exit 337.”
“State Route 1539 exit right 15 miles.”
“Gravel road entrance on left after 3rd cattle guard.”
Jack thought for a minute and cursed under his breath. If he was going to get out of this place, he would probably have to go back the way he came because he did not know how far his current direction would take him or where it would take him.
“Entrance to what?” Jack thought.
Slowly, a plan formed in his mind. He would ditch the van and hike back through the woods using the gravel road as a guide.
It was getting noticeably lighter and the first rays of sunshine were coloring the clouds behind him shades of purple and pink. He looked for any sign of food or water inside the van, but nothing was there of any value except for the surgery-in-a-box tool kit. He grabbed the toolbox and set it outside the van. He started the van again and drove it into the woods a little. He then noticed a steep drop-off into a canyon below. Not wanting to cause a lot of noise at the present time he decided to rig up a crude time-delay brake system that would allow the van to roll out over the cliff after giving him a chance to make some distance between him and the van.
After setting up the van at a downward slope and setting the parking brake, he figured out a way to use some of the blocks of ice and snow around the base of nearby trees to brake the van. Later, when he was certain that the ice wheel blocks would hold, he slowly let out the parking brake and let the full weight of the van rest on the blocks of ice. Because the van’s engine was still running and relatively hot to the outside environment, he fashioned an exhaust tube system out of spare items from the van and a roll of duct tape he found underneath the passenger seat. Jack took a moment to observe his contraption and wondered if it was smart to spend so much time doing this when he had no food or water and several miles to travel before he might be safe.
Jack hoped that the re-directed exhaust fumes would melt the ice blocks and release the wheels and allow the van to travel at a high rate of speed over the nearby steep slope down toward a canyon below.
He abandoned the whole mess and picked up the box of weird surgical tools and headed back toward the spot where he gave his former captors the split.