by Tosca Lee
His jaw tightens. “There’s no way I’m not seeing you to Fort Collins.”
“You’re aiding a fugitive!”
“As a Marine, I vowed to served this country, protect American people, and their way of life,” he says.
“You’re not a Marine anymore.”
“Once a Marine, always a Marine. Besides. Remember what we said back there—about having a purpose in this mess?”
“Ruining your life isn’t mine.”
“Let me see that map,” he says, nodding toward the folded mess on the dash.
I sigh, open it up, and, after a few seconds, point to where we are. He glances at it and then around us. The country is eerily quiet.
As much as I’m determined not to drag Chase into this any further than I have to, I’m actually grateful for his presence at this moment.
I’m also grief-stricken. Stunned.
Petrified.
I rub my eyes and then my temples. Try to banish the images of Jackie—bloodied, broken, and pale—from my mind. But I cannot not see her laying there, her eyes left open.
For the first time since leaving the Enclave, I miss those concrete walls.
We stop long enough to add some gas from one of the cans and then follow a single set of tire tracks down the two-lane highway till we see blue lights in the distance.
“Get down,” he says, turning south. I unhook my seat belt, crouch onto the floor.
“Think that was for us?” I ask, sliding back into my seat a few minutes later.
“Didn’t want to ask.”
We relegate ourselves to county roads, moving slower than before.
I root around in my bag, take half a tablet from my prescription bottle and swallow it with a sip of water. Wonder vaguely how much of a basket case I’m going to be when the last quarter is gone—or whenever the half-life of this stuff wears off.
Chase turns on the radio. It’s filled with reports of gridlocks on outbound highways from all major cities. National parks already experiencing the influx of those escaping the city as those in urban areas host impromptu block parties, grilling entire freezers full of defrosting meat.
And the search for Wynter Roth, last seen in south central Nebraska.
Outside, the landscape has started to change, the flat fields rolling into gentle hills. Shallow canyons rise up on either side of the road and cows wander sluggishly through the snow.
“What happened to the guy who ran out the back of the bar?” Chase asks suddenly.
I give him a blank look.
“The guy who followed you out of the bar?”
A brief flash of running for the Jeep. Slamming the duffle on someone’s head.
“I dropped him.”
Chase glances across the front seat at me in surprise. “Oorah,” he says. His gaze falls to the Styrofoam container in my lap. “All while saving the leftovers.”
I open the container that’s been torturing Buddy this whole time and feed him the last of my fries.
The paranoid voice in the back of my brain says he could turn me in at any moment—that the one good thing I have going for me can’t possibly be true. I go back again to the moment we met at the truck stop, searching, scrubbing my memory for any sign he isn’t who he says he is. That he was working in tandem with Redneck Grill Guy. Following me. I go back again and then again, and then wonder if my medication is already wearing off.
A few minutes later, we see police lights again.
“Okay, new plan,” he says, abruptly turning north. He drives faster, wheels chewing through snow.
“I didn’t know we had an old one! What are you doing?”
He grimaces as though preparing for a blow that’s going to hurt. “You’re right. We need a different car.”
We’re just south of Hastings when I point ahead to an old red-and-white pickup abandoned on the side of the road, gas door open. Chase pulls in front of it, gets out, and goes to peer inside the truck. He returns a few seconds later and opens the back of the Jeep. I put on my mask and get out in time to see him pulling out a length of cord and a screwdriver.
“Locked,” he says.
We go back to the truck where he ties a slipknot in the cord. “Can you get your fingers in there?” he asks, nodding to the top of the door. I do, just enough to push the cord in around the seal until we can get it down far enough on either side for it to feel like we’re flossing the door like some massive tooth.
“Just get that—yeah,” he says, as I twist the cord just enough to get the slipknot over the knob.
We pull on both ends of the cord until the knot tightens on the knob, then yank it up.
Chase gets in, pulls the cover off the steering column. I grab the gas can off the back of the Jeep, fumble with the spout. The truck’s ignition fires, or tries to. Chase seems satisfied.
“Okay,” he says. And then I’m tipping the can up, standing there for what feels like forever as it trickles into the truck and Chase starts unloading the Jeep. He’s murmuring under his breath—no. He’s singing. I don’t recognize the song, but he has a nice voice. For some reason that surprises me. I look down, pretend not to listen if only because I want to hear more.
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
I glance up at a distant sound: a truck coming down the road. I lower the can. “Chase.”
“I see it.” He comes around and takes the can. “Get in.”
I climb in, pull my mask higher up over my nose just in time to hear Chase curse through the open front door.
“Get down!”
Something isn’t right. I hear the erratic chug-and-go tread of tires in the snow.
The truck doesn’t even slow—if anything it accelerates—as it approaches. I lift my head as it passes, just in time to watch it plow straight into an electrical pole with a deafening crash.
I get out, frozen. Stare as the pole buckles and then breaks like a matchstick where the front of the truck has wrapped around it, wires snapping.
Chase grabs my arm, yanks me back.
“Someone’s still in there!” I say.
“I’ll go.”
I don’t know if he’s saying it to spare me or because he’s worried they might be conscious enough to recognize me. I pause as he jogs ahead to skid into the ditch beside the cab. Watch as he dons his gloves and then tugs at the door, finally reaching through the broken window. A second later he walks around to look in the back of the truck, climbs up, and roots around in the rusty bed. That tells me all I need to know about the state of the driver. By the time he returns with an old gas can, I’ve already started loading our gear. But it’s the thing in his other hand that has my attention.
A pistol.
He sets the gas can in back and digs in his pocket. “Here,” he says, handing me a cell phone and several bills—two of which are hundreds.
“You robbed him?” I say.
“Trust me. He doesn’t need it anymore,” he says, checking the weapon.
As I finish loading the truck, which is running now in an effort to warm it up, Chase goes to work on the license plates of the Jeep, which he removes, along with the decal off the window. It seems wrong, somehow, for him to do that. And I feel guilty, as though I’ve somehow caused it. But he does it, wordlessly, and I say nothing.
Finally he stands back, hands on his hips, and just looks at the Jeep that he’s stripped even of its spare tire. He exhales a long breath as I come to stand beside him. I wait for him to say that he really liked this Jeep. That it cost him his savings or that he worked for years to buy this particular tricked-out off-road model that, frankly, is far better suited to our purposes than the old truck behind us. But instead all he says is “Let’s go.”
I climb behind the wheel of the truck and follow the Jeep as Chase pulls away. We drive past the crash about a half mile to a copse of trees where Chase parks the Jeep out of sight. A minute later, he’s jogging back up to the road. I slide over without a wo
rd, if only because I can’t drive and duck out of view at the same time.
And then we turn north.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
* * *
Icrouch down in the front seat as we cross I-80.
“What do you see?” I ask.
“Cars in the ditch, few on the median—five total, more ahead. More traffic than I expected,” he murmurs, driving across the overpass. “No cops, at least. Gas station at the exit is empty. Sign says no gas.” He lays his hand on the edge of the seat between us, and I clasp his fingers. They curl around mine as we drive another mile.
“All clear,” he says, pulling me up. I slide the pistol off the seat to the floor and refasten my seat belt as we emerge onto yet another county road in yet another stretch of Nebraska that’s even flatter—if that’s possible—than before.
“Listen,” he says. “I don’t know what your plans are once we get to Colorado and I’m not gonna tell you what to believe. But if anything happens to me and you need to protect yourself or someone else, you’re gonna need to make friends with a gun.”
It’s the “someone else” that makes me look at him and say, “Show me.”
He pulls over and I spend the next hour learning how to hold the pistol. Inserting and ejecting the empty magazine. Thumbing the safety. Chambering a round. All things I never thought I’d do until the moment I considered what it might mean to choose between someone else’s life and Truly’s.
At one point I catch him studying me sidelong.
“What?” I ask, wondering if I did it wrong.
“I was just thinking that fate’s a funny thing.”
“This isn’t fate,” I say bitterly.
“Really? I told myself I’d follow the road in front of me. I took a training job. My fighter got injured. I hung out in Columbus trying to figure out what to do until this started happening and I decided to bug out. Buddy of mine deployed overseas said I could go out to his place and wait out the Crazy for as long as I needed. So I packed my gear and headed that way. And then this girl catches me head banging on the interstate . . .”
“Anyone driving by would’ve seen you.”
“Still, the minute I recognized you talking to that crazy down at the truck stop, I knew it had to be a sign.”
“That’s a coincidence, not a sign from God!”
“How do you know?”
“Because! A sign would look different. Be different.” All of this would.
What does he know, anyway? How many nights has he spent in a white cell combing his soul for sin? How many times has he searched the eyes of the closest thing to God on Earth, looking for a sign, any indication of approval, assurance—only to find that God had vacated the premises and something else lived behind those eyes?
He squints in the sun. “You ever hear the story of the guy stranded on his roof during a flood praying for God to save him?”
“What?” I ask irritably.
“Guy’s stranded on his roof and when a rowboat, a motorboat, and finally a helicopter come by telling him to get in, he tells them to go because God’s going to save him. And then he drowns.”
“That’s a horrible story.”
He holds up a finger. “When he gets to Heaven he asks God, ‘Why didn’t you save me?’ And God says, ‘I sent you two boats and a helicopter—what more did you want?’ Well, what more do you want, Wynter?”
I give him a weird look. “So you’re saying you’re a rowboat?”
“I’m saying you keep thinking like that you’re gonna drown.”
When I don’t answer, he shrugs. “Anyway, it’s my sign. A private message from God to me. It’s not supposed to make sense to you. It’s code.”
Such a thought would have been considered anathema in the Enclave. But I find myself wondering about what he’s just said . . .
And feeling strangely envious.
“Meanwhile, it just occurred to me that if this disease started with pigs, there’s a whole other application for what’s in that carrier than saving people or making them sick.”
I feel my eyes widen. It’s an implication I wouldn’t have thought of. “You mean farm animals. The meat industry.”
He nods. “It wouldn’t be hard to infect entire herds of commercial animals in one country just to drive up the value of meat in another. It’s market sabotage. And not to be all conspiracy theorist-y, but I wouldn’t put it beyond . . . well, a lot of countries. And while I know you won’t understand this, I have an emotional relationship with bacon.”
“Okay then,” I say. “Save the bacon, save the world.”
He nods. “Doing it for the bacon.”
By the time we get back on the road there’s a statewide search for my sister’s killer.
For me.
Watching Chase squint at the gas gauge on the dash, I realize we may have a more immediate problem.
“How much of that tank did you put in here?” he asks.
“All of it.” I lean over to peer at the gauge, wavering just above E. “That can’t be right.”
He pulls over and we get out. I crouch down as Chase crawls under the front of the truck. And then he’s digging for his pocketknife.
“Fuel line’s rotten,” he says and then curses.
“What now?”
He slides out and gets to his feet. “We either get a new hose or find a new vehicle.”
“Okay. We do a gallon at a time till we find something else.” I grab the other can.
We go as far as we can—which turns out to be about ten miles—before we have to stop and refuel again. Of course now, when we need a new car, there’s nothing to be found on these back country roads.
We turn south, get back onto I-80. By now the traffic has picked back up, steady but cautious.
We finally spot an old Ford Bronco on the side of the highway and pull over behind it. Chase gets out to peer inside the window and then opens the door—it isn’t even locked. A few minutes later, I’m following him to the next exit where we unload the truck and reload the Bronco. The inside smells like sweat and BO. There’s a cup of some dark substance that definitely isn’t coffee in the console that Buddy finds fascinating. Chase chucks it out the window as we turn northwest.
Meanwhile, we’re down to our last four gallons.
“What we need,” Chase says, craning his head as we pass an old, sagging barn, “is a farmer. One with a big enough operation to sell us some gas.”
We peer down county roads at cross sections, scan the horizon for silos, grain trucks, farm signs. Just south of Tryon, we pass a sign for Foster Farms, spot a cluster of silos up a gravel road a hundred yards from three large Quonset buildings. I pull my mask up, tug down my stupid ski hat.
“Maybe I’d better wait by the windbreak,” I say, pointing to a line of trees.
Chase shakes his head. “A couple is a lot less intimidating than a man my age traveling alone.” He turns up the drive and parks a short distance from the main house. Hands me the pistol. “Anything goes wrong, you hightail it out of here.”
Buddy whines from the back as Chase gets out, grabs the empty gas can, and heads toward the house where a figure is already moving behind the transom window.
A minute later, he and another man with a mask over his mouth head out from the house and off between a couple sheds. I slide behind the wheel and glance at the clock, laying the pistol on the seat beside me.
For the first time since I left the Enclave, I wonder what Magnus is doing right now, this very minute. Knowing, as he must, that the samples are in my possession. I imagine that smolder snuffed from his eyes as he paces his office, hand passing over the whiskers on his face.
I hope he’s afraid. I want him to be—as afraid as anyone terrorized by fear. Of death, of retribution for some real or imagined sin. Of being forsaken, or worse, forgotten by the God whose voice he claimed to hear.
But I also know Magnus. Which is how I know he isn’t afraid. Not of God, or of losing the samples, or being tied to th
em.
And definitely not of me.
Not while he has Truly.
It occurs to me then that he knows. Not that someone else is Truly’s father—I fear for her life if that day ever comes—but that I will come for her. And that he will continue to exercise power over me, no matter where I may go, because he still has her.
And so that glint hardening his eyes as he paces in his office isn’t fear at all, but anticipation as he waits.
I’ve made two promises since the lights went out: one to Jaclyn and one to myself.
I’m coming for you.
Chase comes jogging down the drive, gas can in hand. I turn on the truck, put it in gear. Thirty seconds later, we’re speeding down the road.
• • •
THE EARTH HAS sprouted ridges and undulating hills that turn into shallow canyons. We stop to buy gas from two more ranchers. One of them sells us a couple gallons. The second just points his shotgun at Chase, who lifts his hands and climbs back into the car.
Chase is back in the driver’s seat, and I’ve been glued to the map for the last fifteen minutes. We’ve just skirted the sandy south shore of Lake McConaughy, a place that looks more like an expanse of wintry beach than something in horse and cattle land. It reminds me of our trip to Indiana Dunes, which seems like a year ago. Meanwhile, it’s threatening twilight and we still haven’t made it to Colorado.
“We’re thirty miles north of the border,” I say. Never mind that every highway and interstate in the area seems to converge just south of us near Julesburg.
I measure the mile ruler with my finger. “Twenty more miles west and we can drop straight south.” I flip to the Colorado map. “If we stay north of 76, we go into Fort Collins from there.”
He shakes his head. “We need fuel.”
I don’t have to look to know. The light’s been on for miles.
“How much do we have left?”
“Not much.”
We travel five more miles through rolling wasteland until we come to a drive with two posts on either side, an overhang across the top: Sandhills Cattle Co.
