Or not.
“Pav, they’re closing?—"
Vibration. Low, deep, traveling up through the chassis of the UAZ into the steering column and through his palms into hiswrists. A frequency that didn’t belong to the road or the engine or the wind.
Train.
The crossing appeared around the bend. Basic. Rural. Two wooden barriers, half-lowered, a red light flashing in lazy circles. The track cutting across the road in a straight line, the rails gleaming dull silver.
And to the left, coming fast—a freight train, long and heavy, the locomotive’s headlight cutting through the gray like a single enormous eye. The horn sounded—a deep, sustained blast that shook the air and rattled the UAZ’s windows.
He narrowed his eyes, forcing his brain to do the math. The gap between the barrier and the train. The speed of the UAZ. Distance to the crossing. The margin measured not in seconds but in fractions of a second.
He tried to run the numbers.
The answer came back impossible.
He drove anyway.
“Pav.” Harper had seen the crossing, the barriers. The train. “Pav,no.”
He floored it.
“PAV!”
The hood smashed the flimsy barrier. Splintered wood hit the windshield as they blasted through. The rails jolted the suspension, and his teeth pinched his tongue. Blood bloomed coppery in his mouth.
The train was impossibly close—the horn screaming, the displacement of air hitting the UAZ like a shove from a giant hand, rocking them sideways. If he’d misjudged by a fraction, they would cease to exist.
The front wheels of the UAZ hit the other side of the tracks.
Harper screamed.
The train thundered past behind them, a wall of steel and noise, the UAZ shuddering in the turbulence.
In the mirror—nothing. Just endless train.
His grip on the wheel bordered on painful. Ahead, the road branched.
He blinked cold sweat from his eyes, half surprised.
No impact.
We made it.
Harper gasped beside him. Her hands were braced against the dashboard, her body rigid, her face drained of every color it had ever possessed.
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
She shook her head. “You?—”
He glanced at her. Her mouth was a thin slash. He was in no doubt she was going to kill him herself if the infection didn’t get there first.
He hooked the UAZ left.
The adrenaline withdrew all at once. Not gradually—off a cliff. One moment he was holding it together. The next—nothing was. The fever rushed back in like a tsunami, and every injury he’d been overriding announced itself simultaneously. His hands loosened on the wheel enough that the UAZ drifted toward the shoulder and the tires spat gravel.
“Pav.”
