Page 57 of Chaos

One hits the rear window, and it shatters.

The car fishtails, venturing perilously close to the steep craggy decline on one side of the road.

She wheels us around.

Right into a patch of ice that has us skidding the other way toward a sharp drainage ditch, before she sluices us back, nose straight, down the center of the road.

“What the hell was that?” Jacquetta barks. “Yorke? Why’d you make us go in there? What did you find?”

Clutching my shoulder, I swivel in my seat, pop my head up over the rear seats to look behind us.

The glass is shattered, a network of fine lines too tight to see through on the right side, but the left side is open to the empty, icy road, swallowed up by barren tree limbs, and the occasional glimpse of a moonlit mountain vista through gaps in the trees.

“The solar panels were new,” I say, my voice ragged. “Someone put them in after the plague. There were at leastfifty houses in there. Shitty little houses. With brand new solar panels.”

She’s silent, stirring through the obvious questions. How could you tell? Who cares if the panels were new? Why would they install panels out here? She settles on. “Who?”

“Not sure.” The light was too quick to see if they were wearing gray caps, and even if they weren’t, it doesn’t rule them out.

I grimace down at my arm which is still burning, press a hand over the spot. “Got to be Butcher … or Raiders.” When I hold my fingers up by the window in a shaft of moonlight, they’re slick and streaked dark. “Or Ben’s crew who left … the farmhouse.”

We absorbed town. There’s no one else with that kind of presence in this area.

We’d know.

“It was the power cords I noticed,” Rey pants in the front.

“All new,” Kelly adds, across the backseat from me. “I searched this area myself when we were looking for Frankie. We’d have seen the panels. And those cords. They were rigged up from one house to the next like—” She glances at me, pauses mid-sentence. “Fuck, you’re hit.”

Jacquetta’s eyes shift in the mirror. “How bad is it?”

I shake my head. “Not.”

“Can we risk a light?” Rey shrugs her jacket off and passes it back to me

“Thanks.” I press it against my shoulder. “Don’t.”

“You sure it’s not bad? Don’t lie,” Jacquetta says, hands steady at the wheel. “We can pull over and slow down the bleeding if you need it.”

“Just drive. I won’t die.” I rotate my shoulder experimentally, wiggle my fingers along the thick, slick back of my coat over my shoulder. “It can’t have hit the bone or broken anything major. My fingers work.”

Rey’s teeth flash. “Jesus, people say you’re fucking crazy. I didn’t really believe them.”

I grunt when we hit a pothole that jars my shoulder, and try not to wonder if I am actually crazy. It’s been a weird night—sex with Frankie, strangling the fucker in his hospital bed, what he said about Lavinia Hope, him knowing my last name, now a bullet hole.

“Hold that jacket tight to slow the bleeding.” Jacquetta shakes her head, but drops it, and makes Rey, Kelly, and me repeat everything we saw the whole way back to Thornewood.

Once, twice, a third time.

But it only begs more questions than answers.

What do they need all that power for though?

And why there?

Questions I keep repeating as we go back through the gate, up the drive, park under the overhang. By then, my vision is spotting and my fingertips tingling.

Rey’s anxious face slides into view as she tugs open the door.