Patrick, who’d been white-knuckling the entire journey since they’d left the highway, sighed with relief. “But it’ll get cold quickly. Have we got any way of keeping warm?”
He exchanged glances with Ellie, who burst out laughing.
“Oh, get a room!” Jodi snapped from the back seat.
It was an uncomfortable night for all of them. Jodi had moved into the front so Patrick and Ellie could cuddle—with strict instructions that no shenanigans were to be permitted—but she’d been given an old coat they’d found in the back of the station wagon to wrap around her. She said it smelled of oil, but took it anyway.
Ellie’s neck ached when she awoke, her head leaning against Patrick’s shoulder. He was looking out of the window at the gently brightening sky. “Well that was the crappiest sleep I’ve had in a long time,” he said. “Except for the company, of course.”
“The sooner we get back to Ragtown, the sooner we can sleep in a real bed. Hopefully,” Ellie responded, stretching.
They skipped breakfast and were on their way five minutes later. Patrick moved to the front and took his turn at the wheel, guiding the car up and down the track and across a landscape of rock, sand and small green bushes. But no people, thankfully.
He took a left when the desert track intersected with a slightly wider road taking a pipeline across country. “I reckon that follows the road,” he said. He was proven right an hour later when Ellie spotted movement to their left: a solitary sixteen-wheeler making its way east.
“That’s I-40, I reckon,” Patrick said.
Ellie pointed at the sign. “Yep, and Barstow’s behind us. Park up there and we’ll take a look.”
Ellie and Patrick climbed the slope, crouching down as they neared the top, then hiding behind the metal barriers. The big truck they’d seen was now far in the distance, and two or three other vehicles were moving on either side of the highway, but there was no sign of the checkpoint. “Either it’s not where Masterson said or we’re way beyond it,” Ellie said.
“I’d almost have rather seen it so we would know what to avoid,” Patrick said, “but I guess we’d better chance it. After our little desert expedition, I don’t fancy picking my way across the Mojave, even though it’s bloody freezing.” He hugged himself against the breeze blowing across the road.
They made their way back and Ellie took the wheel. “The safest thing to do would be to hole up somewhere until after dark, and make our move then, but we haven’t got the time. I’m fed up of feeling hunted—I want to be at Ragtown tonight.”
“That might be a bit ambitious,” Patrick said. “It’s got to be three hundred miles.”
“More like two hundred,” Jodi said. Then shrugged as Patrick stared in surprise. “What? I looked at the maps before we set out. One of us had to!”
Ellie glanced at them, one after the other. “Let’s go.”
Today, she thought, if she were lucky, she’d hold Maria in her arms and tell her what she’d truly understood when she’d been faced with death. A tear rolled down her cheek, but she swept it away as Patrick opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it.
He put his hand on her leg and squeezed. “Let’s go see Maria.”
DELUGE Book 6
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Lost: Deluge Book 5: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story) Page 21