Page 136 of Antihero

“Not dead?”

“Yes.”

“Unharmed?”

Evan kicked the hard earth. “Looks like rain.”

Templeton tightened her face against the cold, looked up at the dreary sky. Sighed. “Want me to open your door, too?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Oh, before I forget.” She dug in her pocket, tugged out a pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “To reciprocate. Y’know. Our ongoing courtship.”

She flipped him the pack.

He caught it against his chest. Looked down at the bright orange packaging. “Hey. One of these has been eaten.”

She shrugged. “Got hungry.”

“You suck at this, Templeton.”

She smiled, tucked a hank of bluntly cut hair behind an ear. “So they tell me.”

Evan retraced the off-road route, a long slow loop along the muddy path cut through the marshland to the south. It was hurricane weather, the air balky and constipated, a wet wind buffeting the luxury car, rocking it on its chassis. He’d rolled back the shade to the moon roof, keeping an eye on the sky in case Templeton’s superiors decided to reverse course and send a fleet of assault helicopters after him.

Anca clutched her book in her lap, her tote bag between her ankles. She hadn’t said much. Evan figured she was talked out.

Her eyes darted back and forth, and her hands made fluttering motions at her sides.

“How it feels,” she said. “I can’t shake it.”

“You don’t shake hypervigilance,” Evan said. “You use it.”

“Then what? You stop seeing threats lurking everywhere?”

“You still see them,” he said. “Clearly enough to meet them properly.”

Wind sucked beneath the undercarriage, a bestial howl.

She glanced nervously out her window. “This weather. What time will we get back?”

Evan checked the GPS. “Around three. Why?”

“I have my rapid HIV scheduled. So I have to go back to the hospital, Our Lady of the Holy Spirit and the Rending of Garments and the Gnashing of Teeth.”

Evan looked over at her. Her pug nose gave her a puckish quality.

“Is that a joke, Ms. Dumitrescu?”

She nodded pertly. “Yes. I love Catholics. They are so … charismatic.”

On either side of them, elephant grass thrashed ecstatically, and then the rutted road tailed west toward the boiling, infected bay. They carved between the wall of reeds and the noxious beach, that upended tree coming into view, its snarled roots blocking two-thirds of the road.

A flash of color on the ground before it caught his eye.

A man in a yellow raincoat, sprawled facedown. To his side, a felled mountain bike.

Everything slowed down.