through her hair, rinsing any dust from it, then helped her back into the pickup, soaking and shivering. Dodge had already found a hose and sprayed water across the backseat of the pickup, flushing out any dust residue.
“Where’s Tyler?” Sam asked.
Dodge shook his head.
Tyler appeared a moment later, carrying a cardboard box full of food and drinks that he had appropriated from the gas station.
Sam helped himself to a chocolate bar and realized that he hadn’t eaten for hours. Vienna refused to eat, though, which worried him.
Dodge turned the heater to max as they swung around back onto the highway, and the air inside the car turned into a muggy soup within a few miles. Sam could actually see the steam lifting off his clothes as they slowly dried.
The questions in his mind about the events in the world since they’d been holed up in Vegas were answered, shockingly and severely, as they turned onto the interstate at Kingman. Both lanes were lined with vehicles, many of them with roof racks full of luggage, strapped under sheets of plastic or tarpaulins.
“What’s going on?” Sam wondered out loud.
“Refugees,” Dodge said, and Sam realized that he was right.
He had seen images like this many times before on news reports of wars or natural disasters in foreign countries. But never with his own eyes.
Never in America.
“What have we done?” Vienna whispered beside him. “What are they running from?”
Sam shook his head but said nothing.
It was after 10:00 p.m. by the time they reached Flagstaff, Arizona, crawling along with the rest of the refugees in lanes that were clogged and occasionally blocked.
It took just one car to break down, and the entire lane would stop while its occupants, sometimes with the help of those behind, would get it onto the shoulder.
There were still no airplanes, and the only reason that Sam could think of was the thunderstorm that raged above them. Mother Nature was protecting them from Ursula.
Almost all of the refugee traffic was exiting at Flagstaff. Looking for a place to stop for the night, Sam thought. After a short discussion, they also took the exit, staying with the crowd in the hope that it might make it harder for Ursula to find them.
Whether it was some herd instinct or it had been prearranged, the long lines of refugees all seemed to know where to go, and when they finally stopped, Sam could see why.
A huge, almost tentlike dome rose up behind a line of pines to their right, and as they followed the car in front of them into a large parking lot, signs on both sides announced the J. Lawrence Walkup Skydome stadium.
A sports stadium. Covered. With room for hundreds, if not thousands, of people. There would be toilets, and they could find a place to sleep. It was a logical place to head in a disaster.
The parking lot seemed full. How many lives had they disrupted? Sam wondered, and not for the first time asked himself if they should have just left Ursula alone.
But she was the one who had started this fight, and now they would have to finish it.
They parked next to a white Mazda station wagon. A woman was getting two young children out of the car with the help of another lady, possibly her mother. The women looked harried and tired. The children looked as though they had just woken up, and the younger one, a boy, was crying.
Vienna seemed tired and listless, and Sam had to help her out of the car, supporting her as they hurried through the driving rain to the stadium. Dodge followed them, carrying the cardboard box full of food and water, and Tyler trotted silently behind.
“Wait a minute,” Sam said as they neared the entrance. “We need to check for security cameras.”
“I think the power is out in the stadium,” Dodge said, gesturing at the entrance. “We should be okay.”
The entrance to the stadium was in darkness, except for a flashlight that someone had set on top of a ticketing booth, shining a meager light down a long, dark corridor.
If the power was off, then the cameras were off, Sam thought, and hoped it was true.
Inside the stadium, it was warmer than he expected. His first thought was that the heaters were turned on, but as they made their way out through the players’ tunnel underneath the bleachers, he saw the real reason.
Dotted across the artificial turf of the stadium were campfires, many ringed with small rocks, as if this was a camping ground instead of a refugee center.
There must have been thirty or forty fires, each surrounded by people, huddling together for warmth or cooking in metal pots that were suspended over the flames by all sorts of ingenious stands or tripods. There was something about adversity, Sam thought, that brought out the ability of people to cope. To adapt. To survive, no matter what happened.
Rain crashed and hammered on the roof of the stadium high above them, an intricate design of interlocking wooden triangles. The whole roof seemed to shudder with the explosions of thunder outside.
“We should change cars again,” Sam said as they found an empty area and sat down on the turf. “Ursula knows what this one looks like, and we can’t expect this storm to last all the way to Cheyenne.”
“I’ll go and see what I can find,” Dodge said.
“I’ll come with you,” Tyler said.
“Hide the pickup truck as well as you can,” Sam said. “If they find it, they’ll know we’re not really heading for Mexico.”
Dodge nodded and disappeared with Tyler back toward the tunnel.
Vienna shivered suddenly and violently.
Sam looked around. There was a campfire about ten yards away, and he would have liked to move Vienna closer to it, but it was already crowded with people trying to make the most of the warmth.
He took off his own jacket and laid it over her as a blanket.
The young mother with the two children and the grandmother were next to him. The two women were sitting facing each other, the children between them.
Both children were crying now, and he caught the word “hungry” in between the sobs.
He found a packet of Oreos in the box of food Dodge had carried in and picked up a bottle of water as well. He shuffled across to the small group and tapped the younger of the two women on the shoulder.
“Some water and some cookies, for your kids,” he said. “It’s not much, but—”
His next words were cut off as the young woman reached up and hugged him, sobbing at the same time.
She eventually let go, mumbled a thank-you, and took the items.
The older lady smiled at him, and he looked away, a little embarrassed. All he had done was give them cookies and some water.
Vienna began to cough, started choking, then hoicked up a gray mess of phlegm and grit. Her eyes fluttered for a moment, then closed. Her weight slumped against him, and he held her for a moment before gently easing her to the ground.
He found an old newspaper in a trash can and cleaned up the mess, then washed his hands carefully in one of the washrooms. The last thing he needed was a dose of radiation poisoning; he didn’t want to even think about what that dust was doing to Vienna’s lungs.
When he got back, the grandmother was hovering over Vienna, looking concerned. She pulled back one of Vienna’s eyelids and examined her pupil.
“What happened to her?” she asked.
“She”—Sam hesitated, not wanting to reveal too much—“swallowed some dust.”
“Dust?” The woman looked at him suspiciously.
“We came through Vegas,” Sam finally admitted.
“Vegas dust!” The woman looked shocked and said, “I’m a nurse, or I was for most of my life. Are you telling me you went through Vegas without protective clothing?”
