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“Depends how big a town it is,” I said to Eddie, still turning the map in my hands. “It’s late. Maybe nothing’s open. If we get lucky, we’ll find a gas station.”
“I don’t think it’s that small,” Eddie said. “There has to be something.”
“There’s a hospital there,” Rhonda Jean said.
Eddie and I both went silent. I felt a trickle of alarm move up my spine.
I looked at the girl in the back seat. She was motionless, her eyes still closed. Her hands clutched her jacket shut.
“Did someone hurt you?” I asked her, my voice low.
Rhonda Jean winced at that, though she didn’t open her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
In the driver’s seat, Eddie’s voice was as low and calm as my own. “Do you need a doctor, Rhonda Jean?”
“I don’t know.” Rhonda Jean’s eyes blinked open, and for a second they were unfocused. “I don’t think a doctor will help.”
I let the map slide from my hands, down to my feet. I kept my gaze on the girl in the back seat. Everything became clear and still in my head. I knew now that this was why she had looked at me at first like she recognized me. It was because she did. We’d never seen each other before, but we recognized each other. Women like us recognized each other all the time.
Two things happened at once. When I thought about it later, I was sure about it. The timing was very clear. Both things happened at the same time, like a switch had been flipped in my life, changing it forever.
The first thing was that I reached into the back seat and touched the edge of Rhonda Jean’s jacket. I gently pulled it open. It was unfastened, only wrapped around her like a robe, and her grip was limp now and unresisting.
Inside the jacket, on the front of her shirt, I saw the black wetness of blood.
At the same time, a pair of headlights appeared out the back window, a car on the road a mile behind us, light pinpoints in the dark.
I looked from the back window to Rhonda Jean’s face. Her eyes were open, focused now, and she was staring at me.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “He’s coming.”
CHAPTER TWO
For a second, I just looked at Rhonda Jean’s pale face, seeing the pain and exhaustion etched there. Maybe I should have felt surprised. I didn’t know. I only knew that I bypassed surprise and felt things I didn’t know existed click in my brain at those words.
I’m sorry.
He’s coming.
“April?” This was Eddie in the driver’s seat. His voice sounded stern, army stern. He knew something was wrong.
“Rhonda Jean is injured,” I told him, still turned around in my seat and looking at the girl. “Really bad. Under her coat. She’s bleeding everywhere.”
Eddie swore, just the one harsh word, and the car sped up. “She said there’s a hospital up ahead in Coldlake Falls.”
My gaze moved past Rhonda Jean to the back window again. The headlights were still there. They were getting bigger, as if the car behind us had accelerated. “Eddie, go faster.”
“The car behind us?”
“Yes.”
We sped up even more, Eddie fast and careful in the pitch dark, looking for the signs for Coldlake Falls. The blood on Rhonda’s chest and stomach was moving, soaking thickly into the fabric of her shirt and downward. I could see it staining her jeans.
None of this was real. It shouldn’t be real. But I knew it was.
I’d been in the passenger seat of a car once before, begging the driver to go faster. Please, faster. A long, long time ago.
“Who is he?” I asked Rhonda Jean.
