Page 48 of Duty Preserved

He waited, his full attention on me, steady and quiet.

“Alyson and Daniel usually take the run, but they’re not. She doesn’t—” I was fumbling and I knew it, and knowing it made it worse. The noise was so loud in my head I could barely hear my own voice over it. “Would you want to come? With me. Tomorrow. For the meds.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a full smile. The start of one, held in check.

“What time?”

“Midday. Noon, probably. I have a few things I need to do first thing before we head out. It’s a little over two hours each way.”

I understood, too late, exactly what I’d asked for. A truck and a road and a long drive with nothing between us but the thing neither of us had said.

He looked at me for a moment, and whatever he saw, he didn’t make me wait on it.

“I’ll be at the truck at noon.”

Chapter 13

Sarah

The veterinary pharmacy in Nanyuki was a narrow building on a side street, wedged between a mobile phone shop and a closed storefront. Donovan had dropped me at the door and gone to pick up hardware supplies for camp. I’d told him twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was generous. I needed one drug.

The woman behind the counter typed my order number into a computer that looked older than I was. She scrolled the mouse wheel with one finger, reading something on the screen that was taking too long to be good news.

“I’m so sorry, but it looks like your order has not arrived yet.”

“What do you mean, it hasn’t arrived?”

“The shipment was delayed. A supply issue at the distributor.”

I waited for the part where she told me there was another option.

“It will be here first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“By eight o’clock. They are very reliable once the shipment leaves Nairobi.”

I put my hands flat on the counter. Two cases of xylazine. That was what I’d driven two and a half hours for. Two cases still sitting in Nairobi.

“Is there anywhere else in town that carries it?”

“For that dosage and concentration, no. We are the only veterinary pharmacy in the region with the license.”

I closed my eyes. Driving back empty tonight meant another five hours round trip tomorrow. That was a full day gone for meds I could pick up in the morning if I just stayed. We had fuel to think about, and the truck had been running rough on the drive in.

“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock.”

“We will have them ready.”

I walked out into the late afternoon. Everything felt too loud. Shops playing music, people bustling about, and vehicles using their horns like echolocating devices to navigate the streets made it difficult to suppress the panic building in my stomach. What was I going to do about us having to stay here overnight?

I stood on the sidewalk and pulled out my phone.

I needed to find Donovan and tell him we were going to be stuck overnight. But first, I needed to handle the overnight itself before I had to say the word out loud to him.

There was a hotel two blocks over. I’d seen it on the drive in. I walked there and went to the front desk.

The lobby was small and air-conditioned. The woman at the front desk smiled when I approached.