The Line Between

by Tosca Lee

  Chase dons a seed cap from the back, palms the pistol, slides it down near the front of his seat.

  “Anything goes wrong, you know what to do,” he says.

  I nod.

  We’re met outside the main building by two men in surgical masks carrying shotguns. They look like medical outlaws. A black pickup is parked to the side, a series of pens beyond it. Cattle gather at long troughs in the middle, seemingly impervious to the cold. Buddy is frantic, alternating sniffing and barking in the direction of the cows.

  Chase pulls up his mask, rolls down his window.

  “Howdy,” the taller of the two says.

  I smirk beneath my mask. Howdy?

  “You folks lost?” one of the men asks, coming to peer inside the truck. Buddy swings around like a weathervane, barking straight at him.

  “No, sir,” Chase says, nudging Buddy back. “Just wondering if we could buy a few gallons of gas.”

  There’s a muffled sound coming from an outbuilding adjacent to the main one. Chase cranes his head as a third man comes to stand outside the building. The first man steps in front of him, cutting off his line of sight.

  “You got cash?”

  “We do,” he says. The sound grows louder. Someone’s shouting. Chase cranes his head. “You boys having some trouble? Need any help?”

  “One of the hands got sick, turned violent.” He shakes his head. “Had to pen him in. Sad deal. Where you folks from?”

  “Oklahoma,” Chase says. “We were up visiting some relatives when the blackout hit. They were kind enough to loan us a vehicle.”

  “Surprised you didn’t head back south,” the man says. But his eyes are on me. Buddy won’t stop barking. I pull him against my chest, his little body straining in my arms.

  “Thought we’d head west. No point going back to the city.”

  “Well, you pry got that right. Though you’d best be careful.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There’s checkpoints all along 76 into Julesburg. Some fugitive they’re after. Few dangerous crazies, too.”

  I fix my gaze on Buddy, heart thumping in my chest.

  Everything inside me says we need to turn around, get out of here. But the Bronco’s running on fumes.

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” Chase says. “We’ll keep our eyes out.”

  “You do that.”

  “So about that gas,” Chase says.

  The man comes to lean on the driver’s-side door, gaze roving over the interior of the truck. He glances in the back. “Sure. Why not. If you wanna come with me, we’ll get you taken care of.”

  “Thank you,” Chase says. “Appreciate it.”

  Chase pulls off to the side and parks, but leaves the engine running. After going around back for the gas can he stops by the open window. “Back in a minute, hon,” he says. But he flicks his eyes toward the road, and I know he’s telling me to go.

  As the three of them move up the hill, the taller man whistles to the one stationed at the side building where the banging has gotten louder, shouts sounding like a series of barks. The man bangs on the steel siding, yelling a string of obscenities, and I lower Buddy to the floor. Climb across the console to the driver’s seat as Buddy springs back up to the passenger seat. The bark issues again, muffled through corrugated steel. No, not a bark, but a word, repeated over and over: Help.

  Movement from the corner of my eye. The man’s crossed the drive and is closing the distance between us, shotgun over his shoulder. I drop my hand down, search for the pistol, unable to reach the grip.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” he says, coming to lean against the door. He’s got a piece of jerky sticking out of his mouth. His eyes are yellow where they should be white, his skin furrowed and leathery. He reeks of booze and dried meat. “We had some trouble with a local. People see a big operation like ours and, well, they get greedy. Been waitin’ on the sheriff but you know how it’s been, with that manhunt—woman hunt, I guess you could call it—and all.” He shrugs.

  I glance toward the building, positive now I heard that shout right. Buddy, meanwhile, is going nuts, growling and barking at the man, who just grins and tosses the rest of the jerky onto the passenger-side floor. Buddy leaps down, on it like a bad rash.

  “You with him?” He juts his chin in the direction Chase disappeared a minute ago.

  “No,” I murmur, searching for any sign of him. “He’s with me.”

  He leans against my door, looks me up and down with a grin. “You’re feisty.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go see what’s taking so long.”

  “Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “I need to ask you to stay here. Policy.”

  Just then a shot rings out beyond the line of trees. My head jerks in the direction of the sound and I grab the gearshift.

  “Uh-uh,” the man says, sliding the barrel of his shotgun casually over the sill. “Hands on the dash, Beautiful.”

  Something inside me breaks. I throw my forearm under the barrel, send it flying upward. A shot punches through the roof, deafening my ears as I dive for the pistol.

  I come up shouting, pistol raised, unable to hear myself through the ringing in my head. He pumps the shotgun and then glances down at it. Lifts his gaze to me.

  It’s the look of a man who’s just made a horrible realization.

  I release my thumb from the safety. Reach for the gearshift instead.

  The shotgun clatters to his feet as he charges the driver’s-side door in a rage. I slam him across the forehead with the pistol grip, throw the car into gear, spit gravel up the drive.

  Just beyond the trees I see them—Chase and one of the men, brawling in the dirt as the second man gimps toward the house. I lie on the horn, closing the distance between us. Floor the gas as Chase rolls away, the Bronco bucking over the second man with a jolt as I speed down the other side of the hill. Skidding to a halt before I crash into a pen, I wrench around, spot Chase running toward us, two shotguns in hand. Buddy’s barking again, the sound dull, like a hammer through water, the ringing in my ears drowning out all else.

  Chase is saying something but I can’t make out the words. I gesture to my ear and shake my head. His head snaps up at something I cannot hear. In a single motion he grabs the pistol from my lap and aims it toward the trees. A moment later, he lowers it and then I see why: the black truck is speeding down the road.

  When we return to the fuel tank, the guy I ran over is nowhere to be seen.

  We start the generator. While the Bronco’s fueling, Chase comes to examine my ear and neck.

  He lets me go to study the pump, looking from the gauge to the generator. I see rather than hear him curse.

  “What is it?”

  I can’t make out what he’s saying, but I understand when he hangs up the pump and caps the Bronco’s gas tank.

  The ranch tank is empty.

  “There’s someone in the building shouting for help,” I say, not sure how loud I’m talking. We drive back to the side building and Chase reaches for his shotgun.

  He gestures with two fingers toward his eyes. I nod and follow him out.

  The handles to the outbuilding have been zip tied together. Chase snicks them with his knife and yanks open one side, slips into the darkness as I watch the yard for movement.

  He reemerges a few seconds later with an old rancher in a dirty coat with a felt cowboy hat on his head. I don’t hear every word though I’m catching more of them than before, can tell that he’s thanking us, saying something about his ranch hands and his wife being gone. He looks worried, worn, and surprisingly frail. Chase informs him that he’s out of gas—that we took a few gallons, all that was left. The rancher, whose voice is fainter than Chase’s, waves it off.

  He asks us to come inside but Chase says that we can’t stay. He makes us wait as he goes to another building and returns with a plastic bag with two frozen roasts.

  “There was more,” I think he says, “but those fellas took it.”
>
  “Sir, you don’t need to—” Chase says.

  But the rancher insists and walks us to the car where we thank him and take turns shaking his hand. When I do, I get close enough to see that he isn’t just ruddy cheeked as I first thought.

  He’s feverish.

  Those guys might have robbed the rancher, but they weren’t lying about the sick part. And I wonder if we did the right thing setting him free.

  • • •

  WE PULL OUR gloves inside out, throw them into a plastic bag. I dig alcohol wipes from the emergency kit and we wipe off our hands, the door handles, steering wheel. I can’t help thinking of that rancher, so gently confused. Even as we left, he turned and looked around as though he wasn’t sure which building was the house.

  “Wanna tell me how we got this hole in the roof?” Chase asks loudly. He’s back behind the wheel and though my ears are still ringing, I can hear the air whistling overhead.

  “Not really.”

  “What happened to ‘If this goes sideways hightail it out of here’?” Chase says. He sounds angry. “Did you not see me tell you to go?”

  “I tried. It didn’t work.”

  “Wynter, there is no ‘didn’t work.’ I tell you to bug out, you bug out.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “For what?”

  “For coming back for you.”

  “I don’t need you to rescue me! Your mission is to get to Fort Collins, whatever it takes.”

  “I don’t take orders from you. And this was my ‘mission’ before it was yours.”

  Meanwhile, the needle on the gas gauge has barely lifted off the red.

  “How far will that get us?”

  He shakes his head. “Twenty miles if we’re lucky. Probably closer to fifteen.”

  I grab the map, estimate the distance to Fort Collins. We’ve got at least two hundred miles to go, and that’s if we drop down straight into Colorado on the highway. Which, with the roadblocks, is no longer an option.

  I think about Kestral’s email. The one I told Julie about in case she needed a safe place to go.

  “Keep west,” I say. “We need to get to Sidney.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  * * *

  It’s twilight, the sky the color of faded denim, the snowy ground reflecting the anemic sunset.

  I wonder if Ashley’s given up on my arrival. If he’s heard the news about Jackie.

  If there’s a cadre of police waiting on campus for me now.

  I find my bottle of pills and take the half and quarter left over from last night.

  Three left.

  “You okay?” Chase says, glancing at me.

  “Chase, what happened to the guy I ran over?”

  “I’m pretty sure if he was dead, they would’ve left without him.”

  It used to be one of my fears when I first started driving: that I had run over someone and didn’t know it. I’d even doubled back down streets just to be sure. It got better when I went on meds and Dr. Reiker said it was actually a common obsession for people with OCD, but I still thought about it sometimes. And now here I’d done it on purpose.

  I try not to remember the way the Bronco bumped over the man, throwing Buddy and the suitcase briefly up off the seat. But then I only remember it in more vivid detail.

  “You’re not a bad person,” Chase says when I tell him about it. “You’re trying to do something to help people and he was trying to stop you. Not that he knew that. In his mind . . . I don’t even want to guess what he was thinking.”

  I don’t either.

  Headlights in the side-view mirror. I glance back at the black truck behind us and punch the dome light off.

  “Is it them?” I ask.

  Chase flicks a glance at the rearview mirror. “Think so. It’s the same truck.” He accelerates through snow that melted earlier in the day but is swiftly starting to crunch once more beneath our tires.

  The truck’s gaining, those twin beams coming closer. We speed faster, fishtail once, worn tires spinning through the snow. The sign ahead says the county road we’re on is about to turn to gravel. Chase slows just enough to turn a sharp right north. I grab the overhead handle, sure we’re going to end up pitched, headlong, into a canyon. When we don’t, he accelerates—not fast enough. The truck taps our bumper.

  Chase reaches for his shotgun. I grab the wheel as he rolls down his window. Unhooking his seat belt, he turns to fire. The headlights swerve, drop back. We speed up, the old Bronco laboring on the snowy gravel road. Canyons slope away from the left shoulder, which is hemmed in by only a guardrail.

  “There’s supposed to be a highway coming up that heads straight north,” I say, squinting in the darkness. “There—turn there!”

  Chase grabs the wheel and floors it. Shouts, “Get down!” and then slows as much as he dares into the turn. I scream, hunched over the dog, sure the truck is going to bash right into us. Chase leans low and fires again. A second later our back left window shatters.

  We barrel down the road, the truck creeping toward our back fender again, its front windshield a sinister spiderweb.

  Chase slings his seat belt over his chest. I grab it and click it into place.

  He taps the brake hard enough to let the truck surge ahead—and then turns our bumper into the truck’s rear tire. I scream as the truck spins to the right directly in front of us and then rolls into the ditch with successive crashes even I can hear.

  I swivel around, stare at the upturned truck through the back windshield.

  “Anyone getting out?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  Buddy trembles in my arms. Or maybe that’s me.

  We drive a mile in silence.

  “How far off do you think we are?” Chase says, glancing at the gas gauge. The light’s on again.

  “Maybe ten miles.”

  At last we pull onto the highway, turn the Bronco north. We’re the only car in sight.

  We have to search longer for a radio station. When we finally find one, there’s no more music; it’s all news. Overcrowded hospitals, makeshift wards. American travelers quarantined in Hong Kong, Canada, Australia.

  And in local news, a reward being offered for information leading to my arrest or that of the man with me.

  Last seen traveling in a black Jeep.

  We drive in tense silence, our gazes flicking between the gas light and the speedometer as the needle flutters downward. A few seconds later the engine shuts down and we coast toward the side of the road as the Bronco dies.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  * * *

  The stars are out, strewn against a black ice sky, and it feels as though the temperature has dropped twenty degrees since the sun set. I pull the hood of my coat down over my stupid pom-pom hat, the duffle bag bumping against my thigh with every step.

  “You good?” Chase asks. He’s carrying the food and as much gear as we could make fit into his backpack, including water and the six pounds of meat the rancher gave us—one of the best bargaining gifts we have. The rest we had no choice but to lock in the Bronco. Buddy, who walked the first half mile on a makeshift leash, peeks out from an equally makeshift sling fashioned out of Julie’s sofa blanket around Chase’s torso. It makes him look like some village woman carrying her baby and despite every horror of the last forty-eight hours—and who knows, maybe I’m finally losing it—every time I look at him, I can’t help a small laugh.

  “Go ahead, laugh,” he says. “But there’s a reason he likes me best.”

  We’ve been walking for nearly an hour and a half—an hour since he stopped at the first farmhouse we came to to ask for gas and then, when that was refused, for directions to the Peterson place while I hid in the trees. The farmer there directed him north, saying it was west of Gurly, about eight miles as the crow flies. Which I figure means we have maybe four more miles to go. We’ve already cut across two square-mile sections, eating protein bars as we go.

  Adrenaline has left me; eac
h step feels like my feet have frozen into blocks of ice.

  “You sure about this?” he asks for the third time.

  I had to convince him to take a chance on the mysterious Mr. Peterson—who has to have heard about me on the news by now, assuming he has a working radio. Which I assume everyone out here does.

  “Yes,” I say, as much for myself as for him. Because I’m banking on Kestral, that she’ll vouch not just for me but for Magnus’s sociopathic character and the lengths he’ll go to get his way.

  I stumble over cornstalk stubble, the rows the best indicator of our direction since the moon drifted behind a bank of clouds as we trudge staunchly northwest, scanning the horizon for any hint of light.

  “You never said why you left,” Chase says.

  “Left what?”

  “New Earth. From what I saw just briefly on your phone, it doesn’t seem like many people leave.”

  “No. They don’t.”

  “So why did you?”

  “Because of Magnus.”

  He glances at me sidelong.

  “He had a ‘revelation’ that he should take another wife.”

  “You.”

  “Yup.”

  “Ah, straight out of the David Koresh handbook.”

  I know who David Koresh is only from all the reading I’ve recently done on cults.

  “Wait.” He stops and looks at me strangely. “Are you . . . married? Not that it would be legal. I mean, if you are, you aren’t. Unless he divorced your sister to legally marry you. Then . . .”

  “No.” I keep walking and he catches up in three strides.

  “So what happened to the ‘revelation’?”

  I blow out a breath. “I got caught trying to escape. With my niece, Truly. The siren woke everyone up, they all saw it, and Magnus had no choice but to cast me out on our wedding day.” I shrug.

  “Wow,” Chase says. And then: “Wow. So you planned all that?”

  “No,” I say quietly. “Jackie did. She set me up to get me out. Because she knew there was no way we’d be able to escape together. So she saved me instead.”