Chapter 47
NOAH
The high doesn’t last long.
For the first ten miles out of that gas station, I couldn’t feel the cold.
My blood was running too hot, the visceral memory of Rue gasping against the sink, her nails digging into the ceramic, keeping the freezing New Mexico air at bay.
I was coasting on the pure, feral adrenaline of having her entirely at my mercy in that filthy bathroom.
But out here, the desert in late winter doesn’t give a shit about adrenaline.
As the hours grind on and the darkness swallows the two-lane highway entirely, the temperature plummets.
The temperature gauge on the bike has to be reading somewhere in the low thirties, but with the wind chill of us doing seventy miles an hour, it feels like single digits.
The wind turns into a razor blade, slicing right through my thin jacket and biting into my skin.
We’re not dressed warm enough for this. Fuck.
Behind me, Rue is shivering so bad I can feel the tremors vibrating straight through my ribs. About five miles back, she shifted her grip, shoving her freezing, numb hands up under my shirt just to press her palms against my bare stomach, desperately trying to steal whatever body heat I had left.
But it isn’t enough. We can’t keep going.
If we push through the night at this speed, one of us is going to pass out from the early stages of hypothermia and take us both down onto the asphalt at highway speeds.
Dammit. We have to stop somewhere and get warm.
I ease off the throttle, my eyes scanning the desolate, moonlit landscape. We are somewhere near the outskirts of Fort Sumner. There’s nothing out here but flat, sweeping scrubland, rusted barbed wire fences, and fucking ghosts.
This is Billy the Kid country.
A place meant for outlaws to disappear and die in the dirt.
I spot a rusted, dilapidated sign for a forgotten railroad spur and guide the heavy bike off the shoulder, our tires crunching onto a heavily rutted dirt road.
About a quarter mile off the highway, rising out of the tall, dead grass like a metal tomb, sits an abandoned BNSF boxcar.
Lucky, lucky us.
The car is completely derailed, sitting crooked off a set of rusted-out tracks that lead to nowhere. The massive sliding side doors are rusted wide open, revealing a cavernous, pitch-black interior. It’s a perfect cover from the wind.
I kill the engine. The sudden silence leaves my ears ringing.
“Let me check it first,” I mutter, my voice raspy and dry from swallowing the freezing wind. I rip my helmet off and head for the car, working out the stiffness in my muscles with every step.
And the moment I reach it, I see we’re clear.
“Okay, you can get off now.” I jog back to the motorcycle, just as Rue practically falls off the damn motorcycle.
Her sneaker stumbled on the uneven dirt. She wraps her arms tightly around herself, her shoulders hunched up to her ears as she shakes. “Why is it so freaking cold?”
“That’s just the desert for you,” I say, double-checking our shit strapped to the sissy bar.
“We should hide the bike,” Rue says through chattering teeth, her eyes jumping back to the road. You can’t really see it, but I get what she’s saying.
“Let me see if I can roll it up and inside with us.” I grab the handlebars and try to muscle the heavy, modified Harley up the slight incline toward the open door. The bike has to weigh over seven hundred pounds.
My boots slip on the dead, frosted grass. A spike of white-hot agony rips through my bullet wound, but I clench my jaw, refusing to stop. I heave the front tire up over the lip of the heavy wooden floorboards, dragging the rest of the iron beast into the dark belly of the train car.
Got it. No one will see our iron beast.
Rue follows me inside, and the moment we step fully into the boxcar, the biting wind cuts off. The air is stagnant, smelling heavily of oxidized iron, dry rot, old grain, and decades of undisturbed dust.
It’s still freezing. But it’s better than nothing.
“Take your jacket off,” I order, reaching into my duffel bag with my good arm to pull out the heavy, folded canvas motorcycle tarp.
“It’s f-freezing, Noah,” Rue stammers, her voice cracking over the chattering of her teeth. “I don’t want to take it off.”
“I know.” I soften my voice. “But your clothes are damp from the sweat and the wind chill. They’re holding the cold against your skin, and if you keep them on, your core temperature is going to keep dropping.
” I shrug off my own jacket, tossing it into the dark, and pull my shirt over my head, completely ignoring the sharp, tearing sensation in my shoulder. “Come here.”
I spread the heavy canvas tarp out in the far corner of the boxcar, as deep into the shadows and away from the open doors as possible. I sit down on the hard, splintered floorboards, leaning my bare back against the freezing corrugated steel wall, and pull Rue down between my legs.
She hesitates for only a second before unzipping her jacket and peeling off her damp shirt. The pale moonlight catches the goosebumps covering her arms and chest. She crawls into my lap, pressing her bare back flush against my chest, and I immediately throw the heavy tarp entirely over us.
It forms a dark, suffocatingly heavy tent that completely seals us off from the outside world.
I wrap both of my arms securely around her waist, locking her tightly against me.
Her skin is like ice. The initial shock of the cold against my bare chest makes my muscles lock, but I just bury my face into her neck, breathing warm air against her skin.
It feels like it takes a long time. But slowly, our trapped breath and the relentless friction of our bodies begin to generate a pocket of warmth beneath the thick canvas.
Rue’s shivering finally starts to subside into occasional, exhausted tremors. She lets out a long, ragged exhale, her tense muscles melting back into my chest.
In the pitch black of the train car, the silence between us gets impossibly heavy. And it leaves entirely too much room to think.
My mind drifts back to the fucking farmhouse.
“Noah?” Rue’s voice is tiny, muffled by the heavy tarp over our heads, but it’s enough to break through my thoughts, thankfully.
“Yeah, Rue.”
“So… What happens when we get to Maricopa?”
My chest tightens. The question hits me like a physical blow, knocking the little bit of warm air right out of my lungs.
What happens in Maricopa? A week ago, the plan was simple. Find the coyote. Find a way to pay the man to smuggle me across the scorching Sonoran Desert into Mexico and leave her behind with the dog and whatever money was left over so she could buy a bus ticket back to her normal, pristine life.
That was the logical, noble thing to do.
But the girl in my arms isn’t pristine anymore. She has the ghost of a dead man on her conscience. Two, actually, plus the loss of Bullet. And whatever remnants of the normal facade she was living in have more than likely shattered into oblivion.
My brain completely rejects the idea of letting her go. The thought makes me physically sick, bile rising up the back of my throat.
What the fuck am I gonna do?
I know the trek across the border is grueling, dangerous, and almost entirely run by the cartel. I don’t know if they’ll take her. I don’t even know if they’ll take me. But I don’t give a shit if I die in the desert.
Rue is a different story. I’ll do anything to keep her heart beating.
I’ve dragged her all the way down into the dirt with me, and I am far too selfish to let her climb back out alone.
“Noah?” She nudges me. “What are we going to do when we get there?”
“Um,” I clear my throat. “We find the guy Netty told me about.”
“And then?” Rue presses, shifting slightly so her fingers can find mine in the dark. She tangles them together, holding onto my hand. “What if he won't take us? What if we don’t have enough money?”
“I don’t know.”
“Noah—”
“We’ll figure it out when we get there, Rue,” I interrupt, my voice softening as I press a kiss to the crown of her head.
I tighten my arms around her, locking my hands over her stomach, holding her so tightly she couldn’t slip away even if she wanted to.
“I’m not letting anything happen to you. I’ve got you. Us.”
It’s a deflection. It’s a complete, delusional denial of the reality waiting for us in Arizona, but right now, under this canvas tarp, it’s all I can offer her.
I rest my chin against her hair, staring blankly into the pitch-black dark of our little canvas tent, and pray to a God I haven’t spoken to in years that I can actually keep that promise.
Because I just might kill myself if I break it.