Cruel World(151)

“Is he okay?” Alice screamed, not watching the road at all.

“I’ve got him!” Quinn yelled. “Are you all right, champ?”

Ty shuddered and coughed, spitting out the stilt’s blood that had found its way into his mouth. He vomited and Quinn held him, wiping at his face. There were several small lacerations on his cheeks and forehead that bled freely.

“Are you okay?” Quinn asked again when the boy had quit gagging. Ty settled into his arms and slowly nodded.

“I think so.”

“Any pain inside your stomach or chest?”

“Nuh-uh, not really.”

Quinn sighed and pulled him closer, kissing the top of his head. “You’re okay; I gotcha now.”

“I think I wet my pants,” Ty said in a small voice that barely carried over the wind and rain that lashed them.

“I think I did too, buddy,” Quinn said. The tiniest of laughs escaped the boy, and Quinn hugged him tighter as they flew down the highway through the storm.





Chapter 31



Up the River



They spent that night anchored in the center of the St. Croix River.

Quinn steered them to the middle of a broad expanse that could have passed for a lake, except for the constant current trying to bring them downstream. They cleaned their wounds, disinfecting the cuts on Ty’s face along with setting Denver’s leg as well as they could. The huge dog laid still through the whole procedure, snarling only once near the end when Quinn moved his leg slightly to wrap it tighter. Despite her assurances that she was fine, Alice had sprained her ankle in the ten-foot drop from the awning to the truck. She joked that it couldn’t have happened to the leg she’d gotten shot in and how Quinn was going to have to carry her most places from that point on. He said he would gladly oblige.

The following days were easy and quiet. They cruised north up the river, passing patches of dense forest and large suburbs alike. Once a group of stilts spotted them coming around a bend near a campsite. The tallest of the herd had waded up to its thighs in the water before roaring impotently at them while they passed well out of reach. Ty had at first shrank from the creature’s cries, but as they faded, he stood and stuck his tongue past his lips in the direction of the diminishing sounds.

They all shared the master bed at night with Ty curled peacefully between them and Denver lying on his own blanket near the mouth of the hold. On the third day, after they’d circumvented an impassable damn by scouting and finding a smaller boat on its other side, Alice sat next to Quinn as he guided them across a wide lake, all the while consulting the phone’s mapping application that miraculously still functioned.

“Why didn’t you just shoot him?” she asked after a time.

“Who?”

“Gregory. You pumped him full of the virus instead.”

Quinn chewed on his bottom lip. “I wanted to be sure. If I’d just shot him, there was no guarantee it would’ve killed whatever Rodney had become. I took a chance thinking that re-injecting him with the virus would dissolve the bone again. I couldn’t stand the thought of that thing controlling the stilts, having them do its bidding. I couldn’t leave Gregory like that either. Even though he probably deserved it.”

She nodded and wound a piece of stray fishing line around her finger before looking at him again.

“Where are you taking us, captain?” she asked, pinning him with one flash of sapphire eyes.

“I’m not a hundred percent sure yet.”

“Bullshit. You’re not fooling anyone. You know exactly where you’re going. You’ve known since we stopped at the marina.”

He hesitated but only for a moment. “When Harold Roman was dying, he said something to me.”

“Okay.”

“He said ‘I Royal’. I thought he was trying to tell me his name was Royal. But he wasn’t. He was trying to say Isle Royale.”

“Isle Royale? What’s that?”

“It’s an island off the coast of northern Minnesota in Lake Superior. That’s what most of the documents and maps were about that he had in his pack. You were right; he was planning a trip. He knew more about the stilts and their biology than most people, and he figured that that island would be one of the best places for refuge.”

Alice watched him for a long time and then glanced at Ty and Denver who rode on the floor together in the bow.