“What about our vehicles?” Rick asked.
“Two plows, one cargo truck go with us. But we’ll pay for them.”
“With what?” Mick scoffed.
“I’ll leave you a high-powered field radio. Maybe someday you’ll want to try to reach someone.”
“Doesn’t seem like a very fair trade.”
“You’re right. It isn’t. I could probably find a dozen plows within a mile of here, and twice as many cargo trucks. A good, working radio? That’s what’s hard to find. It’s worth more than all your vehicles combined.”
Though a sneer was still on Rick’s face, there was also uncertainty in his eyes.
Matt held out his hand. “So, do we have a deal?”
“For something you’d take anyway?”
“I’d rather do it this way, man to man.”
Rick looked at the proffered hand, and finally took it. “All right. It’s a deal.”
“Good.” As Matt released his grip, he turned to Ginny. “If you have anything you want to bring along, you should go get it now. We’ll be leaving soon.”
“Whoa!” Rick said, jumping up. “Ginny’s staying with me.”
“You think so?” Matt asked. “Ginny?”
She looked from her cousin to Matt and back. “We’ll die if we stay here,” she said, her voice not much more than a whisper. “Rick, please.”
“We’ve done fine so far,” Rick said.
“For a week,” Matt pointed out.
“We have to go with them,” Ginny said.
Rick stood motionless for a moment. “Okay,” he finally said. “That’s fine. Go with them. I’m staying.”
“What?” Ginny said. “No!”
“You want to go, you go. But I am staying.” He turned to Matt. “When do I get my radio?”
Brandon was missing yet again. They’d been packing up their things in their room when he said he had to check on something, and left. Josie ended up having to load not only her and her father’s bags, but her brother’s, too, into their Humvee.
When she returned to the room and he was still not there, that was it. Enough.
“Brandon!” she yelled as she stepped back out onto the walkway. “Brandon, where are you?’
Around her, the others moved in and out of the rooms as they prepared to leave. She asked a few if they had seen her brother, but no one had. She was about to start a room-by-room search when Brandon came out of the door to the motel office. In his arms was a blanket that appeared to be full of something.
She marched toward him. “What have you been doing? It’s almost time to—” She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at him. “What happened?”
Across the right side of his jaw were two thin lines of blood. Scratches.
“What?” he asked.
She pointed at his face. “That.”
He touched the wounds and looked at the blood on his fingertips. “Oh, uh, yeah. Nothing.”
“Nothing? That’s not nothing. Did you fall?”
“No. It’s nothing. I’m o—”
The blanket he was holding began to twist as if something were squirming inside.
Josie took a quick step backward. “What have you got in there?”
Looking defeated, Brandon said, “I couldn’t just leave him there.” He peeled a portion of the blanket back, and revealed the head of a tan, very scared-looking cat.
“Where did you find him?” Josie said, moving in for a closer look.
“Chloe and I found him yesterday when we searched the motel,” he said. “Please don’t tell Dad.”
“You think he’s not going to notice?”
“I mean, don’t tell him until after we get started. It’ll be too late then.”
Josie moved her hand cautiously over the cat’s head. Its eyes followed the movement, but when she began stroking the area between its ears, it seemed to relax some.
“Fine,” she said. “I won’t say anything. But if he gets mad, I don’t get in trouble for this.”
Brandon smiled. “No, of course not. It’s all my fault.”
She petted the cat a few more times. “Does it have a name?”
“I don’t know what it used to be called, but I was thinking Lucky would be good.”
She smiled. “No kidding.”
While the snowplows were checked out and the cargo truck loaded up with canisters of gas, Matt had one of his men take a spare radio into the room Rick was in and show the kid how to use it. When everything was set, the whole group gathered in the motel parking area.
“You can still come with us,” Matt said to Rick.
“I’m fine here,” the teen answered quickly, as if he’d been rehearsing the response for an hour.
Despite Rick’s words, Matt could tell the kid was terrified. “All right. You change your mind in the next four or five hours, give us a call on your radio, and we’ll send someone back to get you.”
Rick took a step back. “You’d better get going.”
“Rick, come with us,” Ginny said. “Please.”
Her cousin shook his head. “No reason for you to stay here any longer. Go on. Get out of here.”
He turned, walked back to his room, and shut the door.
Josie put an arm around Ginny. “Come on. You can ride with us.”
Tears rolling down her cheeks, the girl let herself be led away. Soon the only ones standing outside were Matt and Hiller, one of his men.
Matt pulled a zippered case out of his pocket and handed it to Hiller. “Hopefully you won’t have to wait long, but if it goes more than a couple of hours, use this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s vaccine in there, too. For after,” Matt told him. “Be careful.”
As Hiller hurried off, Matt walked over to his Humvee and climbed into the front passenger seat. They had quite a convoy now. Ahead of him were the two plows, and behind, the rest of the troop transporters and the cargo truck.
He grabbed the radio mic and clicked the talk button. “Let’s move.”
Rick paced back and forth through the garage area of Thorton’s Equipment Rental Center. In one of the bays was a pickup truck that had been in mid-repair when everyone started dying, and in another, a tractor with a busted axle. Tools and oil jugs and parts were scattered everywhere, all reminders that Rick was alone now, and that the only one who could finish fixing any of the vehicles or could put everything away was him.
You screwed up big time, he told himself.
What the hell had he been thinking? Stay here? Alone? That was suicide. But even if the others had still been out front, pride and the words his father had said not long before dying would have prevented him from taking the offer.
“You’re in charge now,” his old man had told him. “You need to take care of things.”
He’d already messed that up, hadn’t he? Ginny was gone. She was family. He was supposed to take care of her. He wanted to be pissed off at her for defying him, but did he honestly think she would have been safer here with him?
No. Not even close.
He’d always thought being a grown-up would be so easy. No one to answer to. All the decisions his own. And yet here he was, with the freedom he’d been hoping for, and he just wanted to go back home, curl up under his covers, and stay there forever.
He wanted to be a kid again
He wanted things back to normal.
At some point he realized he’d been crying, but he couldn’t stop. Back and forth he paced, his mind in turmoil as the minutes turned to hours.
“All right, that’s enough. You’re making me dizzy, kid.”
Rick thought the words were only in his head until the man stepped out from behind the damaged tractor. Even as the man walked over to him, he couldn’t quite process what he was seeing. The man was alone, but…