The Countdown (The Taking #3)(43)

My relief was short-lived as the sirens came closer and closer.

Then, right before I was ready to follow Thom out the passenger’s side door, I hesitated and turned back to Chuck, his mangled body. I told myself forget it, even as I climbed back over and stripped him of his watch.

I pocketed that, along with the wallet, and shoved the gun into the back of my jeans before hopping out of the cab as I half limped half ran into the thick brush that skirted the length of the freeway where Thom was already waiting for me.

Now, more than ever, we needed to get west . . . to safety.

If there was such a thing anymore.





PART TWO


Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants.

—Charles Darwin





CHAPTER NINE


NOTHING SCREAMED LUXURY LIKE A THREADBARE motel bedspread. But after being strapped to a rusting metal gurney for almost a week, I lay back and spread my fingers wide, running my hands over the green and yellow stripes, petting the polyester fibers like they were spun from gold. For the first time in days, my damp hair didn’t contain bits of other people’s brains, and even the scratchy motel robe was heavenly against my clean skin. I felt like I’d won the freaking lottery.

I was free. Not safe. Not yet . . . just free.

It was crazy how low my expectations had dropped.

At least I no longer hurt. The breaks in my right arm and wrist, and the cracked ribs—however many of them had been broken—had healed. I think my lung had been damaged too, punctured maybe by one of the ribs, but eventually even that had mended, and I could breathe just fine now.

The cuts and bruises were gone now as well, and I wondered when I’d ever get used to that, the remarkable healing abilities of this strange new body of mine. Also, when I’d get used to calling it “this strange new body of mine,” since I still felt like just plain old me.

If only that were true.

As soon as Thom and I had run far enough from Chuck’s “accident” to feel like we wouldn’t draw too much attention to ourselves, we’d stopped at a small gas station where I’d planned on using the pay phone in the lot to call a cab. All we really knew was we were somewhere outside a town called Umatilla, a place so small I was pretty sure even the gas station would qualify as a recreational outing.

Turned out, though, that phone booths these days were really just props. The phone itself wasn’t just dead; the handset was missing altogether.

So Thom and I had done our best to clean ourselves up in the dingy restrooms out back so we could go inside to see if there was a phone we could borrow. But there wasn’t enough cheap hand soap in the world to make Thom presentable and he’d had to wait outside.

The kid behind the counter had been cool about it when I’d asked to use his phone, not mentioning the smears of pink I’d made on my own shirt when I’d tried to blot away the blood. He’d passed me a grease-covered cordless phone that had a retractable metal antenna, circa 1990. But at least that phone had worked, and the cab had come for us within twenty minutes.

For an extra twenty bucks, the cabbie had even taken us as far as Pasco, Washington, which was back over the bridge Chuck had just brought us across, but it was also the closest place he said we could catch a Greyhound bus.

The bad news was that the next bus wasn’t scheduled until eight the next morning.

The good news was that Chuck’s wallet had been fat with cash; over three hundred bucks worth, which was partly why it had been like winning the lottery. If you could say “winning the lottery” after some guy blew his brains out while being hijacked by an interstellar transmission.

So, yeah, winning the lottery might not have been exactly right, but Chuck’s money meant Thom and I could get a motel room for the night while we waited for the next bus to Portland, where we’d buy our connecting tickets.

It also meant I was able to take a nice hot shower. It was crazy how hard I’d had to scrub to get all the dried bits of brain matter off, both Blondie’s and Chuck’s.

While Thom took his turn in the shower, I switched on the news to search for reports of the crashed semi.

What I was really looking for was anything that said the cops had known Thom or I had been there. I had no idea how—fingerprints or witnesses—whatever it was they did to locate people.

“Anything?” Thom asked, when he came out of the bathroom. He was cleaner after showering, but he’d already put on the clothes he’d been wearing before, the ones we’d had to “borrow” for him back at the asylum. The sweatpants were loose on him, and not his usual neat, khaki style. Made worse now because they were torn and stained.

Chuck’s cash would come in handy for more than just motels and bus tickets if we planned to go unnoticed.

I shook my head. “Not yet.” I turned the volume all the way down, but left the newsfeed on, just in case. “You look better.” And he did. The cuts on his face had healed, only a faint pucker remained to show anything had happened at all. With a little more time, those too would fade. Eventually there’d be no evidence at all.

He flexed his arm, nodding. “I feel better.” Then his eyes met mine. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I half shrugged and shook my head. “Don’t.” But then something heavy settled in my stomach. “Not about that anyway. Can I ask you something though?”