34. On Vacation -Libby
Thirty Four
On Vacation -Libby
About thirty minutes later, the highway reappeared, a long, straight line cutting through the trees ahead. It looked impossibly, blessedly clear.
I pointed through the windshield. “Finn—we can get back on. The road looks—”
“No.” His voice was rougher now, a ragged edge that told me every word was costing him. “We stay off it.”
I looked at him, really looked, something I’d been trying to avoid for the past several miles. It would only confirm what I already knew.
His jaw held its familiar tightness, but now it seemed to be costing him something.
“We need shelter before dark,” he added, the words slower than they should have been, the spacing slightly off, as if he had to locate each one before he could deliver it. “Not getting caught out in the open when the light goes; our headlights will be like a dinner bell.”
My mouth went dry, as if I’d swallowed a mouthful of dust.
“Finn—”
“I’m fine,” he said preemptively, before I could utter another word.
He wasn’t. The blood had long since soaked through his shirt, tracking down toward his elbow, dripping from his sleeve cuff in a slow, patient rhythm that had no interest in stopping.
“Pull over,” I said, keeping my voice even and direct, giving it no room to be ignored.
Nothing. His eyes stayed on the road, his hands on the wheel—grip loosening, then tightening, then loosening again, the cycle repeating.
“Finn. Pull over.”
“I said I’m—”
“Pull the car over right now.” No softness in it this time. No room for interpretation.
He exhaled through his nose. The Suburban drifted toward the shoulder and stopped in the gravel, the engine still running.
I was out of my seat before the truck had fully stopped.
“Out,” I said, reaching across him. My hands found his seatbelt, his arm, his side—a quick, brutal calculus of how to lever him from the driver’s seat without making the bleeding worse.
“Libby—” His voice had gone thin, the authority in it a pale version of what it usually carried.
“Out,” I said again, and opened his door from the inside.
Between the three of us, we got him out and into the backseat.
He weighed more than I’d been prepared for—not just his size, but the dead heaviness of a body that has stopped cooperating.
He kept his jaw clenched throughout, eyes sliding off whatever they tried to land on, fighting to stay present through what was clearly a significant effort of will.
“Easy—right there—I’ve got you,” Fiona said, her hands finding him, guiding his shoulders down as he settled across the backseat with his head in her lap.
The moment Finn was clear, I slid into the driver’s seat. The engine was still running. My foot found the gas—we couldn’t stay here, couldn’t risk attracting things to the smell of blood.
“Finn,” she said sharply, her fingers at his jaw, turning his face toward her. “Eyes. Look at me.”
His eyelids lifted with visible effort. “Still here,” he muttered, his words slurred.
Then they closed.
His eyelids fluttered, then settled, not opening again. The tension holding him together finally gave way, his face going slack against Fiona’s leg.
“Finn!” Lily’s voice broke on his name, splitting something open in the vehicle’s already charged air.
“He’s lost consciousness,” Fiona said, her tone stripped clean of everything except function. Her hands were already moving, carefully, deliberately peeling the blood-soaked fabric away from his shoulder. “That’s not the worst outcome right now. He’s still breathing.”
She pulled the shirt back and went quiet for a moment.
“Shit,” she said quietly.
“What?” Gripping the steering wheel, I glanced in the rearview mirror. “Fiona. What?”
“It didn’t pass through.” Her voice was flat. “The bullet’s still in there. Lodged deep—I can’t tell exactly where without better light and proper access, but it’s not something that closes on its own.”
The inside of the vehicle contracted around me.
“We have to get it out,” she continued, pressing the balled-up shirt against the wound with both hands, her weight behind it. “And close this up properly.” She looked at him then, just for a second, before turning back to the wound.
“I know,” I said.
“Libby, find something—a clinic, a pharmacy, a veterinary office, anything with medical supplies. Whatever you can find.”
I didn’t cry, because if I started, I was aware—at some fundamental, physical level—that stopping wasn’t going to be an option, and Finn didn’t have time for that. None of us did.
Behind me, Fiona held the makeshift compress against his shoulder with steady, unrelenting pressure. Finn didn’t react to it. Didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound.
“Come on,” Fiona said under her breath, low enough that I almost didn’t catch it. “Stay with me, Finn. Stay right here.”
Lily sat pressed against the door on the far side, her knees drawn up, her eyes fixed on him with an expression that had moved past fear into something quieter and more terrible. She’d gone completely silent—an unnatural stillness for Lily, more alarming than any sound she could have made.
“Is he going to die?” she asked, her voice a thread of sound.
“No,” Fiona said, the word cutting through the fear in the car, leaving no room for argument. “He is not.”
I held onto that. Wrapped both hands around it and drove.
We kept moving. The light shifted from the flat gold of late afternoon into something longer and lower, shadows stretching across the road at angles that meant we had less time than I wanted.
Every building we passed was assessed and dismissed—a farmhouse with no visible supplies, a gas station already stripped, a hardware store that might have had something useful in another life.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The town materialized from the treeline, a place so small that Main Street took only thirty seconds to drive from end to end. My eyes scanned every storefront, every sign, every building.
“Come on,” I muttered. “Come on, give me something—”
And there it was.
A small building set slightly back from the road, with a sign above the door. A painted paw print in the corner.
“Vet clinic,” I said.
Fiona leaned forward from the backseat, her hands still pressing on Finn’s shoulder. She looked at it for exactly one second.
“That works,” she said. “It has to.”
I turned off the main road without slowing much and circled behind the building, tucking the Suburban between a fence and a dense stand of trees at the back corner of the lot, hiding it from view.
“If anyone from that bridge followed us,” I said, half to myself.
“Then we don’t want to be visible from the road,” Fiona finished, her gaze already fixed on Finn, assessing how much time we had before the situation changed in a direction that offered no correction.
I killed the engine.
My gaze swept the perimeter—the darkened windows of the clinic, the deep shadows pooling near the fence line, the empty stretch of road behind us. No movement. No sound but the ticking of the cooling engine.
I turned in my seat and looked at him.
He was pale, a grayness beneath the pallor. Blood had soaked through Fiona’s improvised compress and found new pathways, tracking across the leather of the seat in dark lines.
I reached back and put my hand against his face for just a moment. Cold. Too cold.
I picked up his gun from the center console. Checked the magazine. Chambered a round. My father’s voice surfaced—patient, Sunday-morning, slightly bored—talking me through the same sequence on a range I’d spent years resenting. I hadn’t thanked him for it then. I couldn’t now.
“Stay with him,” I said. “Both of you. Don’t open the doors for anything.”
“Be careful,” Fiona said, the two words carrying everything she didn’t have time to say.
I pushed the door open and stepped out into the evening, easing it shut behind me with barely a sound, the latch catching softly. The air outside had dropped several degrees since we’d last stopped—still and cold.
I advanced on the clinic with the gun up, shoulders close to the wall, eyes tracking across every window, every shadow, every place the remaining light didn’t reach.
Somewhere in the last several hours, I had apparently used up the part of me capable of fear, because my hands were steady and my breathing was even, and I kept moving.
Because if something waited inside that building, we had no alternative to offer. No backup option. No other doors to try.
Finn was bleeding out in the Suburban’s backseat, and this building was the only thing standing between him and a thought I refused to finish.
I moved along the back of the building, shoulder close to the wall, gun up, breath measured and slow, eyes tracking every shadow the fading light threw across the ground. I didn’t allow myself the luxury of considering what would happen if the door opened onto something we couldn’t handle.
The sign on the back door caught my attention first.
CLOSED—VACATION
And beneath it, handwritten in black marker, a date range: the same week everything had come apart. The same week the world had stopped being the world and become whatever this was instead.
I stared at it, my brain catching up in stages.
“Thank God,” I breathed.
No animals. The thought registered with a flicker of gratitude—one less horror to find inside this place. But it was a fleeting mercy. My focus snapped back to the locked door, to Finn, to the seconds we were losing.
The door still had to open.
I tested the handle anyway, already knowing.
Locked. Solid. The frame looked original to the building, which meant old and sturdy, and the hinges sat on the inside where I couldn’t get to them. No glass panel to break, no obvious weakness to exploit without making the kind of noise that carried in the dead quiet surrounding us.
“Think, Libby,” I muttered, stepping back and running my eyes across the entire rear face of the building.
I moved along the side wall, scanning upward, and that’s when I saw it—a small window set high up, maybe eight feet off the ground, pushed open a few inches on its hinge. Just enough to let air move through. Just enough, possibly, for a person willing to be undignified about it.
I stopped walking and looked at it for a long moment.
“No way,” I said under my breath.
But there it sat. Open. Waiting. Completely indifferent to how impractical it was going to be.
I looked around the area for anything to stand on—a crate, a bin, a stack of pallets, anything.
Nothing. Naturally.
My eyes moved to the Suburban and then back to the window, and then to the Suburban again.
“That will work,” I said flatly, to no one.
I walked toward the vehicle, climbed in, started the engine, and inched the Suburban forward along the side of the building until the roof sat positioned roughly beneath the window. Close enough to matter.
I cut the engine, climbed out onto the hood—the metal flexing slightly under my weight with a sound I felt more than heard—and from there stepped up onto the roof, which dipped under me with a low metallic groan that made every hair on my arms stand up.
I went completely still and listened.
Nothing moved. Nothing responded to the sound. The evening continued its perfect, indifferent silence.
I reached for the window, fingertips brushing the bottom of the frame. Not enough purchase to be useful. I stretched further, rising onto my toes, the roof shifting beneath me.
“Come on—”
I jumped, caught the frame, and hauled myself upward. Muscles burned in my shoulders, elbows scraping the ledge until I had enough leverage to climb through.
Up close, the window was smaller and sharper than it had appeared from the ground. I twisted, forcing one shoulder through the gap, then the other, the frame pressing into my ribs. My hoodie snagged; I yanked hard, heard fabric tear, and kept moving.
“Do not get stuck,” I whispered with considerable feeling. “Don’t get stuck, don’t get stuck.”
I shoved forward. Gravity finally committed, and I dropped.
I hit the floor on the other side with a dull, graceless thud, rolling instinctively to land on my back in the dark, staring up at a ceiling I couldn’t see.
I lay still, listening with everything I had.
Dark. Quiet. The air carried the scent of antiseptic. No breathing but my own. No shuffling. No indication that anything in the building had registered my entrance.
I let out a long, shaky breath and pushed myself upright.
Something wound itself around my ankles.
I made a sound that wasn’t quite a scream, lacking the air for it. I stumbled back a step, heart attempting to exit my chest through my throat.
A cat. An enormous, thoroughly unimpressed orange tabby, winding through my legs with the serene confidence of something that owned the building and considered my dramatic entrance mildly interesting at best. It pushed its head firmly against my shin, rubbed the length of its body along my calf, and circled back for another pass without acknowledging my near cardiac event.
“Holy fuck,” I pressed my hand flat against my sternum, standing for a moment. “You scared the shit out of—”
The cat head-butted my ankle.
“Okay,” I said to myself, to the cat, to the general situation. “Okay. Fine.”
I continued to check the building. The cat maintained its orbit around my feet, winding between my steps with practiced ease, its routine apparently unchanged by the end of the world.
A reception desk lined the front wall. A hallway branched off to the right, exam rooms visible through open doors.
Cages lined the far wall, all doors hanging open, all clean and empty.
In the corner was what appeared to be the cats water and food and a large back tipped over and food all over. Smart cat.
I checked the hallway room by room. The cat padded alongside me with an authority that would have been funny under any other circumstances—pausing when I paused, sitting when I stopped to listen, and watching the corners I watched with an attentiveness that was either genuine or an extremely convincing performance.
I reached the back door, checking through the small window to ensure nothing stood on the other side before unlocking it slowly and deliberately. The mechanism turned without protest.
Keeping my voice low and carrying, I raised my hand toward the Suburban. “It’s good.”
My heart still raced faster than I would have liked.
The cat appeared in the gap of the door behind me, sat down in the sliver of light from inside, and regarded me with the calm, evaluating patience of something that had survived considerably worse than this by virtue of not particularly caring about anything it couldn’t eat or sleep on.