Nothing happened.
Shit.
Then she realized she didn’t have the key fob. Vin must have it.
She exited out the van, walked back to Vin’s body, and found the key fob in the right front pocket of his sweat pants. With the key fob, she got the engine to start. However, now the flat tire indicator illuminated. She inspected all the tires, fumbling around in the dark. She located the flat tire and discovered a bullet hole. Damn.
Changing a tire in the dark seemed like a daunting task. She put that off now to take inventory of what she had. She turned on the inside lights and the heat to add a little warmth to the chill air blowing in through the shattered windows.
“Meeow.” Right. The cat. Realizing that the cat hadn’t eaten in a while, she looked around for its food and spied the bag in the back corner behind the third row of seats. The marauders must not be desperate enough to take cat food. She took a handful and pushed the food through the holes in the cat carrier door. The cat started eating and purring. What was the cat’s name again?
She inspected the rest of the van’s interior and found, to her amazement, that the marauders had left her sword where she had placed it—in its shoulder harness underneath the second row bench seat. What luck they had missed it! Or maybe they didn’t see the value in it. Either way, a little hope entered Jocelyn’s heart and soul.
She discovered she couldn’t find the map she needed to direct her to Colorado Springs. Even if she continued on to Bullhead City, and risked running into the marauders, she didn’t know the road to take from there. But she remembered that she would have to backtrack to at least North Valley to get there while avoiding Bullhead City.
As suspected, the marauders had taken her backpack which contained her haloperidol and other atypical antipsychotic medication she and Alexander had raided.
She was without medication, and there was none of hers in Beaver Park anymore.
She was also hungry, though not enough to eat cat food.
But she knew where she could get a map and food—Clinton. And it was up the same road she was on now. As far as medication, maybe there would be a pharmacy along the way to Colorado Springs? But if she didn’t see one, she wouldn’t stop—she didn’t want to waste any time getting to Colorado Springs.
This all assumed she could figure out how to change the flat tire.
She found the flat-tire kit under the back of the van and the van’s operator manual in the glove compartment. She began the described procedure, but she got tripped up when she couldn’t identify where to place the jack.
Vin was dying, her friends were missing, and Colorado Springs lay within her reach, but she just couldn’t revive the van until morning.
She was exhausted anyway. She thought that being dead and then unconscious would give her plenty of rest, but that was not the case. The cold night would have to be spent in the van, and Vin would have to spend it out in the elements. Well, he was going to anyway, wasn’t he? It would just take longer now to get him help.
She checked on Vin one more time. He was unchanged.
She shut the barn doors to the van from the outside, then climbed in and slid the side door shut, stretching out on the third row bench seat. Chill wind blew through the shattered windows. As she fell asleep, with only her blood-stained clothes to keep her warm, she glimpsed the almost full moon rising, reminding her that God looked over them, that he had a mission for her, that her purpose was to sacrifice her life to save the world.
But what if it got below freezing overnight? What if Vin turned into a draugar? She might not wake up . . .
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Day Ten
The “tattoo parlor,” if someone could call it that, was in an ordinary garage in an ordinary small house. Captain Brien and his men looked bored as they guarded Alexander, Marty, Janice, and Emily in the open garage. Brien handed papers to the skinhead in prisoner smocks sitting down on a stool next to a reclined chair. Alexander recognized them as the ones The Führer had given to Brien earlier.
It was easy for Alexander or anyone to guess that at least all three adults would get a swastika on their foreheads.
“You won’t tattoo the little girl, will you?” Alexander asked.
“Who are you addressing, Slave Williams?” Brien asked.
“Er . . . both of you?”
“Both of you, Sir. Remember to address everyone properly.”
“I’m sorry, Sir. I hope Slave Schumer needs no branding?”
“Yes, she does,” Brien said. “Those are The Führer’s orders. You wouldn’t dare question his orders, would you, Slave Williams?”
“No, Sir.”
“Okay,” said the skinhead on the stool. He got up and disappeared out the garage door and around to the side of the house. Several seconds later, the soft purring of a gasoline motor, coming somewhere from outside the garage, started up.
The skinhead came back. “Who’s first?”
“I am,” Brien said as he walked over to lie in the reclined chair. Alexander noted that Brien’s existing tattoo on his forehead—a swastika plus a vertical line crossed by two horizontal lines to the right as you faced him—was so sloppy an amateur must have drawn it. Alexander assumed the real tattoo artist was now a zombie, and Alexander wondered when the zombie and the others would return to Bullhead City. Brien grimaced in pain while the other skinhead added another vertical line, this time to the left of the swastika, followed soon by two crossing horizontal lines. Laver’s turn came next, the new Corporal, Alexander remembered. He already had a vertical line to the right of his tattoo, and the “artist” crossed it with two horizontal lines.
Alexander was to be the first one of them branded a slave. As the artist started to draw the swastika,
