Cruel World(65)

“He was in the Navy,” Alice corrected him, but the timbre of her voice wavered on the last word. Quinn threw her a glance before focusing on the road once again.

“And when we find them, they’ll protect us, right, Momma?”

“Yes, they will.”

“From the monsters.”

“Yes, from the monsters.”

“You’re not scared of them, though, are you, Quinn?” Ty asked. He could feel the boy’s small hands gripping the back of his seat to pull himself as far forward as his seatbelt would allow.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Quinn said. “But we can learn from the things that scare us.”

“Like what?”

“We can learn how to beat them. We can learn about ourselves.”

Alice shot him a look that he couldn’t quite interpret.

“You mean like what makes us scared?” Ty said after a pause.

“Something like that, yes.”

“Momma’s scared of fire.”

“Ty, that’s enough,” Alice said, turning in her seat. Her voice cut the air of the vehicle like a knife, and Quinn heard Ty sit back. Alice shifted again, her eyes staring out the windshield at the road that spooled away from them.

Quinn cleared his throat. “We should stop sometime soon for gas and water.”

“Yeah. Next town is Belford. It’s coming up in three miles,” Alice said, consulting the map on her phone.

“Wonder how long the towers will hold,” Quinn said, motioning to the device.

“Not sure. The power might stay on for weeks, but when that goes, I’m guessing the service will too.”

“Then we’ll have to consult an actual paper map.” Quinn gave an exaggerated shiver.

Alice chuckled. “Where the hell are we even going to find something like that?”

Quinn reached out and tapped the glove compartment. “I put one in there before we left the house.”

“You were thinking ahead. Were you doing that for us or had you already planned on coming with?”

“For you.”

Alice nodded and smoothed her hair back behind her ear. “We still haven’t talked about what’s going to happen.”

“Happen?”

“I know you’re here now, and maybe you think you’re some kind of knight or something…”

He glanced at her then back at the road. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means we were supposed to part ways in Portland.”

“Not sure you noticed but Portland didn’t really go as planned.”

“No, it didn’t, and I already thanked you for what you did but…”

“But now you want me gone.”

“We don’t know you, Quinn. You seem like a nice guy, but we do better alone.”

Ty began singing under his breath, an airy rendition of another popular song Quinn couldn’t name. His stomach roiled with hunger, and something else.

“I’m not in this for anything. I’m living in the same world you are. If you really want me gone, I’ll find another car in town.”

Alice wouldn’t meet his gaze, and Ty continued to sing.

“In any case, it was smart thinking to bring the map,” she said finally.

Quinn shrugged, begrudgingly. “My dad liked to plan; guess he passed it down to me.”

“What did he do?”

His mouth began to dry and he tried to swallow what felt like grit on his tongue. Not yet. The sign for the Belford exit appeared beside the road and he gestured at it.

“We’ll have to be careful,” he said, curving the Tahoe onto the off ramp. “We can almost be sure to run into one or more of them in town.”

Alice watched him for another span, but he didn’t meet her gaze. Finally she focused again on the landscape and slid the AR-15 beside her into her lap.

Belford appeared with a lone gas station beside the road, a dizzying amount of plastic pinwheels made to look like flowers spinning in the grass apron before the store. A county dump truck was parked beneath the tall awning along with a red Volkswagen Rabbit. The Rabbit’s door was open, and something dark lay on the ground beneath it. It was only when they pulled to a stop near one of the pumps that they saw it was a man’s severed leg, still covered in dress slacks, the end that should’ve attached to a hip, a ragged mess of red tissue and white bone.