Page 18 of Evolved
Knox swivels in his seat to look back at her.
“I’m okay,” she rasps before he can ask. “You two?”
“Fine.” Knox turns on me, the lights from the dash gleaming on his unspoken question.
“Good.” This time, my voice works enough to croak out a lie. We just crashed in a winter rainstorm on a freezing midnight after the end of the world, but I carry on lying because everyone else is. “I’m good. Airbags didn’t deploy so it can’t have been that bad.”
He tries to reverse, then to accelerate, but nothing happens except the whir of the wheels spinning uselessly.
We’re stuck.
“Stay here.” He opens his door, letting in a rush of freezing wind and wet spatter, and steps out into the gale, turning on a single frail blue flashlight beam that hits the falling rain like tiny blue-white sparks.
“Pothole?” Gran asks as we wait for him to come back.
“Not sure.” The car would have tipped if one wheel were in a rut, though.
“We had an opening,” she says. “If we’d held up in the Map Room, greeted them, three calm people with guns asking for a conversation, we might have swayed them. We might be back there right now, with however many armed people on our side.”
“That’s a bigmight.”I’m breathing hard, all the unvoiced anger rising up inside me that she thinks she knows. Did she think Gina would survive whatever mission she sent her on?
“We knew this wasn’t going to be easy. We knew there would be adversity, and at the first sign of it, we fled.”
My voice is thick as I say, “It’s too risky.”
“When did it become your decision to make?” she snaps.
It’s like I’m standing on a tightrope, the words perched on the edge of my tongue; one breeze would knock them loose and change everything.It became my decision when she killed Gina.
Knox comes back, saving me from unleashing those words,the flashlight revealing rain slicking down his jaw, ice-blue against the relentless black all around, as he ducks down under the roofline to talk. When he talks, his breath makes fog that holds the light like a ghost hovering between us. “Cinderblock sitting right in the middle of the road.”
“Christ,” Gran mutters. “Of all the things. Why carry a cinderblock into the road when you could be moving water or food or helping a family member? Was it a defense?”
“It was just the one. Maybe it fell off a supply truck? The wheel is done, probably the axis too.”
Gran begins gathering her things. “Backup house is only a few more blocks. We’ll go on foot.”
Knox and I lock eyes in the thin blue flashlight gleam.
Two blocks in an almost frozen gale, uphill, for a sixty-year-old woman with a bad kidney, is a terrible prospect. I look helplessly at the dark townhouses all around.
We could break into one. But any and every house likely contains corpses and the potential for unfriendly survivors.
We definitely can’t stay here in the middle of the road.
We have to move.
The backup house belongs to the Alwestons, a wealthy family that owned a housing development business. They self-isolated at their ranch when the plague hit, so we know their Georgetown home is empty, up high, set back, with a big brick wall that rims the property, solar panels, trees high enough to hide a smoke plume, a pool full of water. It’s a good spot.
Getting through this frigid rain to a place we know is empty is the best option.
I zip my coat a little higher up my neck. “Let’s go.”
Knox gets his backpack from the trunk, slings it over his shoulders, then tugs open the back door on Gran’s side.
She’s wearing a thick coat with a heavy hood. It’s made ofwool. Her shoes will get wet, but otherwise, she should stay mostly dry.
Two blocks, even in a gale, shouldn’t take longer than five minutes.