“Okay,” Alex says, her smile a mixed bag of joy and terror. Dee understands. Soon Alex will know whether or not her family is alive or dead. There’s no way to prepare for those kinds of answers.
It’s all Dee can do to keep from grinning like a loon. Her boys are alive. Only an hour away.
She can get to them. She will.
“Let’s go. Let’s find your brother. Come on.” She ignores their glances, their worry that the letter is another in a long line of false hopes. She can’t think that way now. Not after so long.
Things will be okay. The boys are okay.
Everything will be okay.
They have to be.
41
Then
We got into South Dakota before the weather stopped us again. The wind kicked up first, pushing the truck around on the already slick roads, and then the snow began, first lightly and then with increasing force. “We need to find a place,” I said, but it took thirty more minutes of increasingly bad weather before we were able to pull off.
We didn’t get as lucky this time as we had before. It was a gas station, and a small one at that. Isaac killed two of them trapped inside, their wasted faces and half eaten arms making my stomach feel funny. Had they gotten bored and torn into each other? Or had they been killed by someone else? Something else?
And where were they?
“I don’t think we’re alone,” I said. The place was small and we’d checked the backroom, but both doors were shut when we got there.
“Whatever did this probably left. Pushed their way out. We saw that one using a rock to try to break the car window, remember? It wouldn’t be hard for it to push its way out.” Dan let his backpack fall to one of two dining tables at the front of the store. The front window was soaped over, but I didn’t like all that glass. It wouldn’t be hard for them to break through it and then where would we be? I hoped the blizzard kept them away from us. I hoped we’d get out of here alive.
“I suppose,” I said, but I made another pass anyway, looking inside cabinets with extreme, ridiculous caution. We were alone. But the idea that we weren’t persisted.
There wasn’t room to put up our tents, but we still had several boxes of hand warmers and our sleeping bags. The gas station had pop in the cold cases, along with long-melted ice cream, and beer. We each got a beer and sat on the floor in a small circle, toasting the fact that we’d survived another day without getting eaten.
Not getting eaten was a wonderful thing to celebrate.
Isaac was first on watch and the rest of us cuddled up in our sleeping bags in the hopes we would wake in the morning to a brighter day.
It wasn’t meant to be, of course, but we didn’t know that until I woke sometime in the middle of the black night, aware that nobody had gotten me up for my watch shift. Dan and Paisley slept on beside me. Isaac’s bag was empty.
I grabbed my weapon and rose, fear a hot, tight band around my chest. I stepped over my companions and clicked on the flashlight I kept on a lanyard around my neck when I slept. The room was empty.
I went behind the counter, certain I’d be grabbed, certain I’d feel the dull, biting pain of one of their jaws, but nothing happened. The small backroom was tiny and it, too, was empty. The door creaked a little as I pushed it open, thunked against the wall when I pushed it all the way to make sure there wasn’t anything hiding behind it. Just to be absolutely sure, I looked behind it as well.
Still nothing.
Had Isaac gone outside?
Why?
And why hadn’t he come back?
I checked the back door, but it was locked, the deadbolt engaged. We’d found keys. Had he taken them? Why?
Why would he go outside?
I woke up Dan, putting my finger over my lips so he wouldn’t say something to wake Paisley. No reason to get her involved, not yet, not until we knew more about what happened.
I realized I was already thinking in past tense, thinking in terms of incidents, of events.
The keys were gone and the front door unlocked. It made me angry, very angry. He went without word to any of us and left us vulnerable. I hoped we’d find him so I could punch him.
The storm was still raging, and I knew the minute we stepped outside that we wouldn’t find him, not in this. “Let’s try the truck and then we’ll have to go back in.”
“Stick close,” Dan said, and he plowed ahead through drifts that were already almost up to my knees.
Isaac wasn’t in the truck. For whatever reason, he’d left us.
Dan slapped the door, then leaned on it for a moment, his look of despair evident even in the dark, even in the snow. Then we went back to the store and shut the door behind us. Without the keys, we couldn’t lock it, so Dan attached a tow rope we found in the back and secured it to the sturdy base of the counter.
We crawled into our bags, our hands and feet numb from the cold. Neither of us woke Paisley. We didn’t talk. We just curled up tight and pretended to sleep until morning, when Paisley was the one who said, “Where’s Isaac?”
Dan kept his eyes shut, putting the telling on me. I rubbed my forehead, still cold from the night before. “He left.”
“What?”
“In the middle of the night. He took the keys and left.”
“What? He wouldn’t.” Her eyes went to the door where we’d tied it closed. “Why did you do that? What if he
