by Kate Myers
Quinn snatches more things off the shelves, some things I recognize, some things I don’t. Saline bags, plastic tubing, empty syringes. Her eyes focused, her finger trailing each shelf, grabbing items as she finds what she needs. Sanchez holds his backpack open for her to drop her findings inside.
She stops abruptly. “Oh god, where’s the”—she cuts herself off—“oh, right there, good.”
Sanchez asks, “Is there anything else you would find useful, foreseeing any issues in the future, unrelated or not?”
“Ahh, good idea.” She allows her focus to return to the supplies. “Max, I need your backpack.”
I wiggle it off my shoulder and open it for her to put things inside. She takes packs of medicine, first-aid supplies, and turns to us. “Is anyone diabetic?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” I look to Sanchez and find him shrugging.
She studies multiple boxes of medicine, reading the contents, sometimes putting them in the backpack, sometimes returning them to the shelf.
“I just don’t want to take something someone else might need, ya know? But want to make sure we have what we need.” Her voice is slightly muffled under her mask.
“I understand, ma’am. I don’t want to rush you, but if you think we have everything, we should be on our way.”
It’s then that I remember the rest of our plan—we need bodies.
“We have to bring a body, my dad needs samples.”
“Ah, that reminds me.” An imaginary lightbulb flickers over Quinn’s head. “I’ll grab some evacuated collection tubes.”
“What?” It’s like trying to understand someone who speaks a foreign language.
“Nothing, hang on.” She takes more stuff off the shelf and shoves it into my bag. “All right, I’m good.”
“This way, ma’am,” Sanchez instructs, motioning toward the door and stepping out of the room first and making his way down the hallway.
As we’re about to enter the waiting room, he stops dead in his tracks, which throws us all off balance.
From the rear, I ask, “What’s wrong?”
He responds by taking a step in the area behind the front desk, allowing us to peer in around him and see the reason for his startling stop.
“We have another body,” he declares.
Quinn, watching closely from her spot barely outside the front desk area, concludes, “Yeah, but I don’t think this one is dead.”
13
Max
I lost the whole ‘shotgun’ thing—something I continue to suck at—so now I’m riding in the back with this half-alive woman we took from the clinic. To say I’m creeped out is an understatement. I mean, what the actual… Is this even safe?
We lowered the third-row seating, allowing room to put the woman in the very rear of the SUV. Lifting her body and placing it inside felt all sorts of wrong. The tension between the rest of us growing tremendously.
Quinn shifts in her seat to face me. “You all right?”
“Yeah, you don’t think she’ll wake up or anything, do you? I mean, how do we even know she’s infected?”
“It’s really the only explanation for her condition,” she reassures. “I checked her vitals, I cracked the salts—if she was going to come to, it would have been then, not now.”
My mind returns me to the lake, to the old, fragile woman lying on the floor in the bait shop, taking her last breath as I stepped over her and stole the keys to the boats. I thought it was my fault, I blamed myself. I somehow thought that my accidental touching her was what set her over the edge.
“Is she going to die?” I ask, partially meaning this woman, partially meaning Skylar.
She hesitates and then answers, almost analyzing the meaning behind my question, “I don’t know. We should get her to Keith before we make any judgments.”
Sanchez responds, not taking his eyes off of the road, “We should be there soon, ma’am.”
Quinn adds, “If the woman and doctor were alive at the same time, before whatever happened, happened, she may not have been this way for long.”
Our vehicle slows to a stop, distracting me from the woman positioned uncomfortably too close to me. “What’s wrong?”
“Up ahead,” Sanchez informs.
Through the windshield, I note the same thing we saw on the way here, the same corn, the same road, the same path we took not too long ago.
Except for one thing.
“Is that a truck up ahead?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That definitely wasn’t there on the way in. Are we on the same road?” The roads out here all look the same, farm fields lining both sides of the street.
“Yes, sir. I went the same way we came.”
“What are we going to do?” Quinn asks.
“Ma’am, I think we should continue ahead, but cautiously.”
“Why is it just sitting there, on the road?” I squint, trying to confirm whether or not the truck is moving.
“Maybe it broke down,” Quinn proposes.
I glance in the trunk of our SUV. So far, no visible changes; the woman hasn’t mysteriously come back to life and attacked me or anything. She simply lies there, fairly motionless, less the small amount of shallow, sporadic breathing. She almost looks peaceful, as if she’s purely taking a nap—a death nap.
We make our way toward the truck, which, the closer we get, appears to be blocking the majority of the road, parked sideways, right in the middle. Its stupid extended cab and oversized tires take up entirely too much room. The black paint and bright-orange flames remind me of those guys who try way too hard to be cool but end up looking like idiots instead. The guys who think getting wasted every chance they get is what turns girls on, and who can’t keep a girl because they can’t seem to stay loyal due to their overinflated ego, thinking they deserve multiple girls at one time. And to top it off, the overindulgence of Axe body spray and chewing tobacco—yeah, that’s the kind of guy who drives this kind of truck.
Quinn breaks the silence. “What kind of douche would drive this?”
“My thoughts exactly,” I laugh.
“The passenger door appears to be open, which is sort of strange,” Sanchez notes. “I’m going to go around it on the right side. I haven’t seen any people. Maybe they broke down and took off on foot.”
“But why are they parked sideways?” Quinn asks.
“There is a very real possibility that this is a trap, that’s why. I’m hoping I’m wrong, but this feels like a trap,” Sanchez concludes.
Quinn, open-mouthed in a panic, shrieks, “What—why would you drive us into a trap?”
“Sorry, ma’am. I ran a risk assessment and I feel confident we will be fine.”
“Please, stop calling me ma’am!” Still startled, she asks, “What do you mean, ‘risk assessment’?”
“It’s what I do. I assess the situation to determine the probable outcomes, risks, and alternatives. I feel comfortable, given our resources and situation, we will be fine.”
Quinn glances hopefully to me as if to back her up, but I shrug. I desperately want to be home. I may not trust that Sanchez is telling us the whole truth, but I trust that he will get us out of whatever this is.
We make our way off the road slightly, approaching the bed of the deserted truck, all of our attention shifting from one thing to another, and I frantically hope this isn’t a trap.
I let out a breath, realizing that I was holding it, as we get all four tires securely on the pavement.
“Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I say.
Quinn gives me a death stare and then lightens up. “I guess not.”
We pick up our pace along this back-country road, and I worry that we should have stopped to confirm if we could have offered our help. Maybe the people ran out of gas or got a flat tire—I didn’t even think to check for the cause of why they were stopped, although we didn’t see any people, not around the truck and not on the way toward it.
Then it hits me. Maybe
they walked this direction.
“Should we keep an eye out for those people or something? I didn’t see anyone on the way there, or at the truck.”
“Don’t be foolish, sir, we have more pressing issues to focus on.”
He’s right, I can’t play hero all the time, I can’t save everyone. Maybe that’s my problem, I try to help too many people and inadvertently help no one.
Right at that thought, something flashes across my peripheral. It takes a moment to register it’s a vehicle.
“What the hell?” I say, turning around in my seat to see behind us.
Sanchez stomps the accelerator. “Buckle up.”
The vehicle—a small, red Honda-something—fishtails before regaining itself, and then catapults the distance between us, bumping violently into our SUV. I glance down to the woman in the back of our vehicle, still unfazed by the current events, and then to the car driving erratically behind us. The driver, a middle-aged bald man, white-knuckling the steering wheel while doing his best to stay close behind us. The passenger, another middle-aged man, smoking a cigarette and yelling at his driver, what I’m assuming is to keep on our tail.
“This is bad, this is really bad,” I say to whoever is listening.
“I thought this might happen,” Sanchez announces.
I find myself unsure of how to react to his semi-emotionless declaration.
14
Quinn
“Shit, shit shit,” Max mutters from the back seat.
Sanchez, seemingly unaffected, continues driving, pushing the accelerator steadily, his amber-colored hands firmly gripping the steering wheel. I study his face for any type of reaction, his dark eyebrows, slightly furrowed but otherwise impassive. His deep eyes, soft but fearless, dart to the rearview mirror and then return to the desolate road ahead.
I shift in the passenger seat, straining to look through the rear glass at the small car tailing us closely. The car darts from right to left erratically.
“Can you lose them?” I ask.
“That is the plan, ma’am.”
I cringe. I don’t know why exactly it bothers me that he calls me ma’am, but although I’ve asked him a million times to stop, he keeps insisting. Maybe because it makes me feel old. And maybe because it’s weirdly unsettling that he remains heavily formal, leaving me to wonder if he’s hiding something. I know Max thinks he is, I see the way he studies Sanchez any time he speaks—he does it so obviously. But, I really can’t blame him. This guy manages to show up, wielding all this knowledge, single-handedly brings home someone they thought might have been dead, and is, obviously, military-trained. I think we’ve all been studying Sanchez, trying to figure out his secrets.
My thoughts are interrupted when Sanchez urges, “Hold on,” while almost simultaneously stomping on the brakes.
My seat belt locks, throwing my body forward, and I somehow know I’m going to have a bruise from the impact. Tires screech, and the idiots behind us miraculously maneuver scarcely quick enough to avoid slamming into us. I can only imagine how bad that would have been if they would have actually hit us.
“What the hell, man?” Max shouts, clearly unhappy about Sanchez’s decision.
“It was expected, sir. I said to hold on,” Sanchez commands, still maintaining eye contact on the rearview mirror. Without looking, he reaches forward and flips a switch. A sequence of sounds and metal clanking follows, and then something seems to lock in place.
“What if they would have hit us? I’d be dead!”
I interrupt his angry rant. “Is the woman okay?”
He seems to shake his head and sighs, turning to glance into the back of the SUV. “Yeah, she’s just all crumpled, and seems super uncomfortable.” He pauses for a moment, studying her. “She’s still breathing.”
“Good,” I say, temporarily relieved she isn’t dead yet.
Max’s voice slightly elevated. “What are we waiting for, Sanchez?”
“Their move,” Sanchez sneers, his eyes wild and yet somehow eerily calm.
“What?” we both say.
The men, parked not even a car length behind us on the passenger side, appear to be having a heated discussion. The passenger waves his gun and points to it with his other hand, and the driver shakes his head and mouths something. Finally, the driver shoves the passenger hard in the shoulder and hisses loud enough for us to hear, “You do it!”
At that cue, the passenger huffs, muffles something to the driver, and stomps out of the car.
“Dude!” Max hollers. “Dude, they’re coming, get us out of here!”
But Sanchez doesn’t move, doesn’t really do anything other than keep his eyes on the rearview mirror.
I swallow the lump forming in my throat and decide to put my blind faith in whatever plan Sanchez has formed, but not told us.
As the passenger—a disgusting-looking man, belly protruding and snot-nose—places both feet onto the pavement, Sanchez says quietly, almost to himself, “There we go.”
Before Max or I can even ask what he meant, he pushes onto the accelerator, lurching us forward. The gross man shoots his gun, poorly, in our direction before barreling like an idiot into his vehicle, clearly pissed off. In a matter of seconds, we’re easing off the road, heading straight into a field full of corn.
The men, following closely, have a harder time maneuvering over the small ditch on the side of the road. Their car’s low-profile front end hits the embankment and splinters their bumper, lodging it under the driver’s side tire. I become thankful for the higher clearance of our SUV, watching intently as it plows through layers of corn the height of mailboxes. We turn right, into the corn, and continue to make our way farther into the field.
As each moment passes, we get a little farther from the car. Right when I feel like we might actually get away, I’m jolted in my seat by an abrupt stop, followed by the thrusting motions that the SUV is making.
“Only a minor disturbance,” Sanchez cuts himself off right as he was about to say ‘ma’am’. Maybe all the dirty looks paid off.
Sanchez rocks the SUV back and forth for a few moments, trying to ease us out of the hole. Max and I turn our attention to the car closing in behind us, now missing the front bumper. The car picks up speed and unnaturally jerks from front to back as it hits minor bumps in the terrain. Barreling toward us, they don’t let up, and just when I’m certain we’re about to get smashed from behind, our SUV somehow lurches out of the hole and shoots forward, freeing us from impending doom.
“Step on it,” Max asserts from the back seat, eyes still fixated on the car behind us.
The car takes the identical path toward us and slams violently into the same hole we were stuck in. The passenger tire somehow dislodges and projectiles itself simultaneously as the passenger, who isn’t buckled up, smashes into the dashboard. We watch, fixated on the vehicle and men becoming smaller the farther away we get. Sanchez remains steady on the accelerator, pushing us through the field, continuing to pummel the premature corn stalks.
“I think they’re stuck for good,” I say.
Sanchez shifts his eyes to the rearview and nods in agreement.
“A little heads-up would be nice,” Max deadpans.
“I could not be certain, so I did not say anything, sir.”
“You could have said something,” Max reiterates. “You’re going to get us killed. We’re a team now, and the whole team needs to know what’s going on.”
Surprisingly, Sanchez replies, “You’re right.”
By this, Max seems unsure what to say next.
“The lady still all right?” I ask.
“Yeah, for now.”
It’s utterly insane that we have an unconscious woman in the vehicle. An infected unconscious woman. She could turn on us at any moment and either become deranged or simply die. I can’t imagine she’ll easily snap out of whatever comatose state she’s in and be like “Hey guys, who are you? Where are we going? What’s for lunch?” My fingers are crossed that
she will pose to be some kind of help for figuring out what’s going on with Skylar and what is happening to the world around us. Keith is a smart man, and I believe he will be able to figure something out. He has to—the whole world is counting on it, at least that’s what I’ve gathered from overhearing his conversations with Sanchez.
We head toward the street in the distance, the sound of our breathing and the crunch of the corn stalks filling the space. We cross the ditch with ease and enter the road, only to come to a brief stop. Sanchez flips a switch, and the familiar metal clanks again.
I raise my eyebrow in his direction.
“Four-wheel drive,” he elaborates.
“Ohhh.”
We start driving once more, and Sanchez notifies, “We’re going to have to take an alternate route.”
“Why,” Max questions.
Sanchez’s eyes shift to the rearview. “We’re leaving a trail.”
I look in the side mirror to see the mud path our SUV is leaving in the road.
“Crap,” I say quietly.
“I can’t imagine they’ll find it any time soon, being stuck in the field and all, but if they were with others, or there are others, I don’t want it to lead them straight to the cabin,” Sanchez says.
“So, what’s the plan?” Max probes, rubbing his chin.
“Do you have any ideas?” Sanchez asks, clearly doing his best to be a part of a team. He adjusts the rearview and watches Max, waiting for a response.
15
Max
I’m caught off guard by his response, and it takes me a minute to let my mind process the information. This is progress, this is good. He’s being inclusive instead of exclusive. I can work with this. Quinn stares at me, and for a second I think I feel the heat from her glare, waiting for me to speak, to say anything.
I quickly scan the road ahead, trying to figure out where we are.
“Up there, not too far up ahead.” I point. “There’s an old farmhouse. We could spray the mud off and be on the road in no time.”