“Don’t look!” I told Mia.
“Trust me, I’m not!”
Barreling through the tunnel the headlights made, I cut left. In the sideview mirrors, which were iced over, I caught hints of the black creatures behind us, but they were shrinking. As was the theater and the few buildings comprising the small city’s downtown area.
A few minutes passed before I eased up on the steering wheel. By then, my fingers ached like they’d been slammed in a car door over and over.
Letting out a long overdue breath, I turned to Mia and said, “I think we’re safe for now.”
“Okay?” she gasped, bowing her head. The skin around her eyes bunched and wrinkled as she squeezed them shut. She was having another contraction.
I had no watch, no sense of time, but I thought the duration between this and the last one was dangerously short.
I gave the snowmobile more gas.
“Breathe,” I said. “Breathe.”
It passed about forty-five seconds later, the longest forty-five seconds I have ever experienced. Man, I couldn’t imagine how it felt for Mia.
“I’m still bleeding,” she said.
“It’s gonna be okay.”
I kept my eyes on the road—or the snow covering the road, rather—but I felt Mia’s stare boring into me.
“It better be, Grady. If it’s not…if my daughter is dead…I don’t think I can keep on goin’.”
Her words hurt worse than any slap could, but I gave no reply. I couldn’t.
I just clenched the wheel.
And I focused.
Ramsey’s map was crude at best, unreadable at worst, but I followed the road south for as long as possible. We were about an hour’s ride away from the theater, and my eyes kept drifting down to the gas gauge. Our journey had started with half a tank, but now it was below a quarter. Really, the needle hovered around an eighth, and if we didn’t get to the City on that, I feared we never would.
Mia had a handful of contractions, each one more intense and painful than the last. I gave her my hand to squeeze, and by the time she was done, the scabbed-over burn wound on the outside of my palm had split open and oozed a mixture of pus and blood. The lined material of my glove drank up as much as it could, becoming a swollen sponge, but in the end I felt those fluids zigzagging down my arm.
“Just hold on,” I said. “We’re almost there.”
Mia had shifted in her seat, ditching the safety of the belt for the ability to stretch her legs. The blankets covered most of her bare lower half, but every so often my eye caught spots of fresh blood.
She opened her mouth to reply, only no words came out. A scream erupted instead. I pegged this contraction at about three minutes from the last, which, according to Eleanor, meant Mia was in active labor. I had no qualms about trying to deliver the baby myself. I mean, I didn’t want to, but if I had to I would without hesitation and without question. The problem lay in the loss of blood and the cold and the monsters undoubtedly following us and/or nearby.
“Breathe, Mia! Keep breathing!”
She did. I lent my left hand, crossing it over my right clamped on the wheel, and she gripped it. A fresh trickle of fluids leaked from these scabs too, and I bit my tongue to offset the pain. With her right, Mia reached out and grabbed the first thing her fingers fell upon. The rearview mirror. Screaming, she ripped it from its spot on the windshield, and the glass tinked as the pressure of her thumb created a fresh webbing of cracks.
Then—it was all over.
The mirror fell from her hand, clattered on the rubber floor mats, and she leaned her head back against the passenger’s window and closed her eyes. Sweat plastered her face. Her cheeks weren’t red anymore, but a deep crimson, yet her lips were tinted blue and trembling. Even when you were burning up, you remained cold in this snow-ravaged world.
“Mia? C’mon, talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Anything,” I urged. “Keep yourself distracted.”
She opened her eyes; one of them was bloodshot, veins like lightning bolts branching in the whites. The look she gave me was classic Mia. Her I-don’t-have-time-for-this-shit look.
“Your childhood. Tell me about growing up in Canada.”
“I played with Barbies, dressed up like a princess for Halloween, went to school and did finger-paintings for my mom, who hung ‘em on the fridge even though they were complete dog shit.”
I glanced over and smiled.
“Then I got wise and grew up. Realized how shitty the world was—can’t believe it’s even shittier now. I dropped out of school when I was sixteen. Mom got mad, disowned me—you know, the usual B.S.”
“Okay,” I interrupted. “Let’s focus on the good things.”
“There ain’t been much good.”
“Your first kiss?”
“A poster of Zac Efron.”
“Can’t blame you there.” I laughed so hard I almost hit a buried car sticking out of the snow, and had to swerve to miss it by a hair. It didn’t help that the storm made it nearly impossible to see farther than twenty feet. Mia didn’t appreciate the sudden jostling.
“Christ, Grady, you need me to drive? I’d probably do a hell of a lot better than that, and I currently have blood pourin’ out of my vagina.” She chuckled, but the pain hadn’t left her face.
As awful as an image that was, I apologized and made a show of keeping my hands at ten and two. Besides the occasional buried object, there wasn’t much out here to crash into. Trees lined the roads. Sometimes a small building could be seen in the distance too. They reminded me of gravestones in a frozen cemetery.
I didn’t like that train of thought, so I said, “C’mon, first real kiss.”
“First real one? Hmm…” She tapped her chin. “A guy named John, at summer camp. He had silvery blond hair and sun-kissed skin. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, and he was
