Chapter 7
Rachel woke with a crick in her neck and the foil emergency blanket bunched against her thigh.
She’d drifted off sometime before dawn without meaning to.
In the morning light, the highway looked less chaotic than it had in the dark, as if the long line of dead cars had already settled into a new reality.
The county SUV sat crooked in the ditch behind her.
Its rear quarter panel had been the only barrier between her and the cold ground overnight.
Sophie was curled on her side several feet away, her backpack wedged between her body and the grass.
Dark blond hair covered part of her face, and her breathing stayed steady, so Rachel let her sleep.
Her body protested when she stood. Her right shoulder ached where it had hit the window frame during their dive into the ditch, and her lower back had stiffened from the slant of the ground.
She folded the foil blanket, set it on the tailgate, and faced the highway.
The scattered confusion from the previous evening had hardened into something more deliberate.
Families remained inside their vehicles.
Some kept the doors open for air, while others sat sealed inside as if the dead ignition might still answer if they waited long enough.
Two vehicles down, a man in a gray work jacket sat behind the wheel of a pickup and tried the key.
Nothing happened. No starter, no dashboard light, not even a click.
He tried again, then again. Whatever had killed the vehicles had left his pickup as dead as Rachel’s SUV, and he hadn’t accepted it yet.
Near the overpass, four or five adults stood in a loose circle.
One spoke with flat, steady confidence and kept facing east. Rachel couldn’t hear the words, but his posture said enough.
He was offering the kind of certainty people reached for when nothing else made sense.
Rachel walked along the shoulder and stayed close enough to keep Sophie in view.
The signs of poor planning were everywhere.
Bottled water and soda cans left on dashboards or in cup holders were gone.
A woman with two young children was explaining why they couldn’t use the bathroom in the roadside grass where other people could see.
The smaller child wasn’t convinced, and the mother’s voice had tightened from repeating herself too many times.
A boy around Caleb’s age sat on the hood of a sedan and kicked his heels against the fender.
Beside him, his father checked the same dead phone again.
The motion looked automatic now, more habit than hope.
Rachel found the minivan where she’d left it.
The sliding door had been pried open, and the bent frame rested against the side of the vehicle.
Inside, the driver’s seat held a blood-soaked towel.
A child’s stuffed rabbit lay on the floor mat.
Rachel walked to the nearest group and asked about the injured woman.
“Got her out around midnight. Three of us worked the door until it gave. She’s over there,” a middle-aged man said.
Rachel crossed toward the cluster of vehicles near the median and found the woman lying across the backseat of a sedan with the doors open.
Her left arm was immobilized with a makeshift splint made from a plastic cutting board and strips of fabric.
Her shirt had been cut away below the shoulder, and the wound beneath it was packed with darkened gauze.
She was awake but distant, her eyes moving over Rachel without recognition.
“Has anyone checked her pulse?” Rachel asked.
“Twice an hour. It’s fast but steady. We’ve been giving her water when she’ll take it,” someone said.
“Any fever?”
“Hard to tell without a thermometer. She feels warm, but so does everyone else when the sun’s up.”
A man Rachel didn’t recognize approached from the overpass with a backpack slung over one shoulder.
Dust clung to the cuffs of his jeans and marked the creases around his boots.
The morning air smelled of hot asphalt and spilled coolant.
His footsteps scraped over loose gravel, loud enough that the people nearest the sedan turned before he reached them.
“We’re moving the injured toward Crestview. That’s the nearest town, about four miles east. There’s a medical clinic there, or there should be. Anyone who can walk is coming with us. We’re leaving in twenty minutes,” he said.
Rachel studied the woman in the sedan and knew the woman couldn’t travel four miles without a stretcher or a working vehicle.
Neither was available. The group had made a carrying sling from a folded tarp and two broom handles.
They lifted the injured woman onto it carefully, moving together because they’d already accepted it as the only choice.
Rachel considered joining them. Four miles east might tell her whether anything worked beyond the highway.
It could give her information about the nearest town, medical supplies, and maybe some confirmation of what had happened.
Then she looked back at the SUV. Sophie was sitting up, watching the highway.
Rachel knew she couldn’t leave her. She couldn’t abandon their supplies, and she couldn’t ask Sophie to walk four miles and back for information that might change nothing.
The woman on the tarp would reach Crestview or she wouldn’t.
Rachel would hear about it from someone returning, or she wouldn’t learn it at all.
The choice was simple, and that made it cruel.
Rachel returned to the SUV as the group carrying the injured woman moved east along the shoulder.
Other travelers were making the same choice in smaller groups.
A family with two young children packed what they could carry into backpacks and a wheeled suitcase.
The father kept adjusting the suitcase handle and looking down the road, measuring the distance against what his children could endure.