“He went out,” Vida said, not looking up from her work.
“Out,” I repeated, the word tasting like blood on my tongue. “Out where?”
“To walk around for a while,” she said. “He said he couldn’t sleep.”
“You let him go alone?” I scrambled for my boots, hands shaking as I pulled them on. “How long ago did he leave?”
“What’s going on?” Chubs mumbled.
“Liam left,” I said.
“What?” His hands smacked around on the ground until they found his glasses. He shoved them onto the bridge of his nose. “Are you sure?”
“I’m going to bring him back,” I said, tugging on the navy sweatshirt and an oversize dust-smeared black peacoat they’d grabbed by mistake as they left the warehouse in Nashville. “Vida—did he tell you where he was going?”
“Leave him alone, boo,” she said, not turning around. “He’s a big kid. Wears the underwear and everything.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, “he’s not coming back. He’s leaving for good.”
Vida’s lips parted as she glanced around, the full weight of realization knocking the breath out of her. “Well…you have the flash drive, right? It’s not a total disaster.…”
“Are you kidding me?” I shouted. Jude sat straight up, blinking, but I didn’t have time to answer any of his questions. “Where would he go? He’d need a car or a bike—did he mention anything to any of you?”
“No!” Chubs said. “I would have told you!”
“Definitely not,” Jude said. “He kept talking about all of us going together tomorrow. Maybe…I mean, he could come back, right? If we give him a few minutes?”
He could be right. I forced myself to gulp down a deep breath. I pressed a hand, hard, against my chest, trying to ease the fluttering beat of my heart. He could have just gone down to the falls. That was possible, wasn’t it? Liam would never have left without Chubs or some kind of—
I stopped mid-thought, noticing for the first time the tiny sliver of paper sticking up out of his shirt’s front pocket. The button there had been undone, making room for a folded note. I reached over and plucked it out before Chubs could stop me.
Gas station off highway, 2 miles south. Come by 6.
I crumpled the note in my fist, throwing it back at him.
“I didn’t know!” he said before he’d even read it. “I didn’t!”
We had a total of two guns that Vida and I traded off carrying, since both Chubs and Liam refused on moral grounds. The revolver was on the ground at Vida’s feet, and the black semi-automatic was resting on top of the deflated backpack. Which meant Liam had neither.
Of course—of course he would go to the one place he had the best chance of being spotted by someone else. What was he thinking? That he’d be fine under the cover of night?
I took off at a stumbling run, shoving the tent flap open. The thick soles of my boots smashed through the snow.
“Wait for me!” Vida shouted. “Ruby!”
Outside of our small shelter, the freezing air hit me like a bat to the face. In the precious few seconds it took for me to get my bearings and head toward the small road Chubs had pointed out earlier, large flakes of snow had already managed to work their way along my loose hair, down into the collar of my coat. But they weren’t nearly heavy enough to cover the careless footprints he’d left behind.
I ran. Through the flurries of snow, the morning misty haze, the overgrown trails, until I found the highway. The blanket of snow on the road wasn’t nearly as thick-skinned as the layer covering the forest floor. I lost sight of his trail just as I skidded onto the icy blacktop, the stitches pulling so tight in my back it momentarily knocked the breath out of me. I staggered forward, lungs burning. The sun was rising in the east; it was the only reason I knew how to set my feet toward the south.
It was another twenty minutes, a whole lifetime of poisonous terror, before the small strip of businesses took shape down the misty highway and I spotted the gas station they must have passed on the way in.
I was out of breath, my lower back screaming in pain each time I swung my leg forward. The paved road disappeared into slushy dirt that splattered up onto my shins. The half dozen gas pumps had been knocked face-first into the torn-up pavement.
There were a couple of vehicles parked behind the station, one—a truck—with its hood propped open, as if someone had just taken a look. If he had found something wrong with it, there was a chance he was looking for a part in the service garage. Or food, I thought, turning back toward the building. Stocking up before he runs.
The back door of the station was unlocked; if I were being technical about it, the lock and handle had both been blown right off. It creaked as I opened it, and I slipped inside.
The store was bigger than I was expecting it to be but in worse shape. Someone had done a fairly thorough job of cleaning the joint out, but here and there were jumbo bags of chips, and a soda dispenser was still glowing and buzzing with last gasps of electricity. The gun stayed in my hand, cold and solid, trained on the glass doors of the drink refrigerators and the endless graffiti tagging that masked from view anything still inside.
I followed the line of the shelves as they flowed past the cash register and empty cardboard candy containers, around the front of the store to a fairly new-looking section of the building labeled FULL SERVICE.
The short hallway between the store and the mechanic garage was decorated with photos and posters of old cars with bikini-clad girls perched on top of them. I took in a slow, steadying breath. It was all rubber, gas, and oil; no amount of time or bleach was going to scrub that stench from the air.
There was another entrance into that section from the outside. The sign on the glass door was still flipped to OUT—BACK IN 15, and it directed visitors to kindly inquire at the back garage if it was an emergency. There were chairs, photos of vacant-eyed employees lining the wall, and model tires—but no footprints, no noise, no Liam.
A spike of fear cut through me as I shouldered the door to the mechanic shop open. I turned, trying to catch the heavy thing before it could slam shut, and that was the mistake—I knew it even as I turned, even as Instructor Johnson’s favorite saying rang out in my ears: Don’t turn your back on the unknown.