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“Well, anyway, I’d rather not waste time doing it. I’d rather work on stuff that matters.”
They rode along in silence for a few moments. The only sounds were the whirr of their bike wheels, the clomp of Shadowfax’s hooves as she ambled along behind them, and the sigh of the wind through the trees. Such a beautiful day.
They crested a hill and saw a car accident at the bottom—one car on its side that blocked most of the road and another with its nose crumpled against the bottom of the flipped car. Both were blackened by fire.
“Something’s not right,” Justin murmured. He scanned the area, searching for the source of the uneasy feeling he had. Sam seemed to feel the same way. He tossed his head back and sniffed the air, then gave a soft whine, but the wind was at their backs, driving away any scents from what might be ahead.
They climbed off their bikes to wheel them along the road’s shoulder, and Carly heard Justin gasp. She turned around to spot an arrow sticking out of his chest.
Carly let out a startled scream and dropped her bike with a clatter to the pavement. “Justin! Oh, my God!”
Justin fell to his knees, his face still blank with shock. He fell over onto his side, and blood saturated his shirt. Sam snarled, and Carly followed his gaze to find a man and a woman emerging from their hiding place behind the vehicles. Sam crouched to leap at them.
“Call off your dog, or I’ll shoot him, too,” the woman spat. She wore a long brown peasant-style skirt with a man’s suit jacket. The man she was with was tall and thin to the point of emaciation. His face was oddly narrow, as though his head had been pressed between two boards. He grinned at Carly and licked his lips lewdly. Carly’s stomach turned.
“Sam, stay.” Sam tilted his head and gave a bewildered whine as he shifted on his paws.
“Go unhook the wagon from the bike,” the woman ordered, and the man hastened to obey. She held her crossbow pointed at Carly’s chest.
“Holy shit, Jeanie. We hit the fuckin’ mother lode.” The man had peeled back the tarp covering the wagon and was admiring the things inside. “Booze! They got a shitload of booze in here! And drugs! All kinds of drugs! Oh-ho, baby!”
Jeanie grinned back at him. “Grab it and let’s get out of here.”
Carly saw her chance and took it. She whipped the gun out of the pouch on her belt and shot Jeanie in the chest before she whirled around and fired at the scrawny man. The impact of the bullet spun him around and off his feet, and he collapsed onto the gravel on the shoulder of the road.
Sam, sensing the command of inaction had been lifted, flung himself with a vicious snarl at the woman. She, too, had fallen, but she was trying to sit up and lift the crossbow with one hand while the other clutched at her wound. Sam sank his teeth into that arm, and the bite was probably what caused Jeanie to miss, but it was so close the arrow tugged at the sleeve of Carly’s T-shirt. Carly fired at Jeanie again when Sam darted back, and the top of the woman’s head disappeared in an explosion of blood. She fell back, twitching.
Carly trembled from head to toe as she walked over to the man. Always make sure, Justin had told her. Double tap. Remember that.
She stood over the blond man. He was trying to crawl under the wagon, babbling incoherently, and she turned her face away as she pulled the trigger twice. His body jumped and then fell still.
She spun away from him and ran to Justin. She knelt beside him, uncaring that his blood soaked through the knees of her pants. “Justin?”
He didn’t respond. His face was white and waxy.
With a trembling hand, Carly pressed her fingers to the side of his neck. She felt a pulse and nearly collapsed with relief. He was alive. Thank God. He was alive.
“Justin?” she whispered. “What do I do?”
Sam sniffed at Justin and whined. He looked up at Carly imploringly.
Carly looked up and around, as if the answer would suggest itself. She could feel panic clawing at the edges of her mind, but she couldn’t give into it. Not if she wanted to save Justin. She took two deep breaths and forced herself to think.
First, she needed to get him to safety. Away from that place, anyway. She dashed over to the wagon and shifted things around until she had a space large enough for him to lie down, though his legs would dangle over the end a bit. Carly hauled Justin upright and saw that the arrow went all the way through him. Heaving, groaning, and straining, she managed to get him up into the wagon, lying on his side. It reminded her, horribly, of putting her father in the bed after she’d killed him.
Carly left her own bike where it lay on the pavement, climbed onto Justin’s, and pushed hard against the pedals to get the bike going. She hadn’t realized what a load Justin had been hauling.
“You’re strong,” she told him. “That’s why you’re going to make it.”
Carly pedaled hard and fast. She turned down the first side road she came to and pedaled even harder. She didn’t know what she was looking for until she found the house. It was burned-out, with a long driveway leading to it. A perfect hiding place since no one would come to loot it. Carly turned down the gravel path, wincing with every bump and hole she hit. She was glad Justin was unconscious. She pulled around the back of the house and climbed off the bike. Justin hadn’t moved from where she’d laid him.
“Okay,” she said. She took another couple deep breaths and tried to force herself to think calmly, clearly. It was tempting to give into tears, to slip into panic, but she knew she couldn’t do that. “You can panic later,” she told herself.
Carly knew she needed to pull the arrow out. If there’d been a hospital anywhere nearby, she would have left it in place for the professionals to remove, but there was no one to help them. She hesitated on the edge of indecision for a moment, concerned it might be holding a blood vessel closed and pulling it out would cause him to bleed internally. It had happened to a boy she’d gone to school with who’d been in an accident at his summer construction job. When his panicked coworkers pulled out the jagged piece of wood that had been stabbed through his leg, he’d bled out before they could get him to a hospital. But Carly had no choice.
She set up a quick campsite, laying out their sleeping bags and covering them with a thick canvas tarp. She gathered firewood from the wood pile behind the house and lit it using his Zippo and one of the emergency fuel-soaked tinder blocks. She put a pot of water on to boil, though she couldn’t have said why she thought she needed it.
Carefully, Carly lifted Justin from the wagon, and dragged him toward the bed she’d made, her arms clasped around his upper chest under his arms. God, he’s so heavy...
