Kasey Kennedy drove through a rain of dead leaves.

With each gust of wind, paper bullets swarmed out of the fog and slapped against her windshield, rat-a-tat-tat. Kasey flinched as they struck. She clutched the steering wheel and peered into the mist, but her headlights illuminated barely twenty feet of wet pavement. When she clicked on her high beams, it was worse, like shining a light into a mirror and having it bounce back in her eyes. The world was nothing hut a sheet of gauze wrapped around her car. No street lights. No signs. No yellow lines on the highway. Nothing to guide her. She was blind and lost.

'Where the hell are we?' Kasey worried aloud.

She knew she wasn't where she needed to be. Highway 43 zigzagged left and right as it cut through the farmlands north of Duluth, Minnesota, and somewhere she had made a wrong turn. Then, trying to correct her error, she had turned several times more. All she had accomplished was to lose her sense of direction entirely. She couldn't he far from home, but a mile felt like a hundred miles in the fog.

Her eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror, where she caught a glimpse of her own nervous face. Her shock-red curls draped limply on her forehead, moistened by sweat and rain. Her blue eyes were wide and glassy with tears. Her freckled cheekbones were flushed, the way a little girl gets when she's guilty and afraid. She tried to muster a smile, hut she couldn't pretend. She had made a terrible mistake. She had wandered off the face of the earth and had no idea how to get back.

Her cell phone was at home. She didn't own a GPS navigator. The only thing that made her feel better was the gun on the seat beside her.