Road Burn -Libby
Forty One
Finn stepped out first, favoring his still-healing left side, his eyes already scanning the alley and the street beyond with quiet attention.
“It’s clear,” he said.
That was enough.
Three minutes later, we were loaded: bags, bins, Fiona’s medical supplies, and Lily, who folded herself into the back seat with Doc Fluffbutt strapped to her chest like a small, indifferent general.
“Okay, buddy,” she whispered to him, adjusting the carrier as she settled. “We’re leaving now.”
The cat blinked at the back of the headrest, unfazed.
I pulled the door shut, unfolded the map across my knees, and within seconds, we were moving.
The town vanished in the rearview mirror, replaced by long, open stretches of road flanked by treelines that sat too still in the morning air. I didn’t trust the quiet.
Finn drove with one hand on the wheel, the other tapping an irregular rhythm against the gearshift, his gaze cycling between the road and the mirrors with practiced, almost unconscious, precision.
I watched him for a moment. He looked better. He still favored his shoulder, not quite back to his pre-bridge self, but the fever had never come, the wound had stayed healthy, and he was here, upright, driving us north.
That covered everything that actually mattered.
“Do you have a plan for a boat?” I asked, breaking the quiet.
He glanced at me. “Yeah. I’ve got one stashed at a marina up in Minor. About a hundred miles north.” He paused, his gaze returning to the road. “If it’s still there, we’re set.”
“Minor it is,” I said, circling the town on the map.
A few comfortable miles passed before Fiona leaned forward between the seats.
“We just crossed into Maine.”
I looked up in time to catch the sign blurring past. The tight coil behind my sternum loosened, just slightly. Not relief—not yet—but something.
Finn’s fingers tapped faster against the gearshift.
“We need gas soon. We won’t make the marina on what’s left in the tank.”
“There,” I said, pointing. A sedan was nosed into the ditch, its back end still on the shoulder. The driver’s side door was ajar, but the windows were intact. It was a risk, but our only option.
He pulled up ahead of it, leaving the engine running. “Fast,” he said, handing me the red plastic gas can from behind his seat. “Don’t get comfortable.”
I was already reaching for the siphon hose coiled beside it.
We stepped out together into the gray morning air, and I noticed it immediately—a stillness that held no peace. No birds. No ambient noise. Just the low tick of our engine cooling and the sound of my boots on the asphalt.
Finn moved between me and the road without being asked, weapon drawn, eyes sweeping constantly across the road, the treeline, the ditch.
I crouched beside the abandoned car, opened the gas cap, and fed the hose into the tank with hands that knew the procedure by now.I worked the siphon with clumsy hands.
“Come on,” I breathed. “Come on, come on—”
The gas began moving through the hose in a thin, acrid stream, the smell hitting the back of my throat immediately.
“Okay—good—nearly there,”
Something moved to my left.
Fast—not the stumbling drag I’d learned to listen for, but something explosive, registering in the body before the brain. No shuffle, no warning—just violent motion at the edge of my vision and then Finn’s voice cracking through the silence—
“Libby—!”
I turned.
Too late.
It hit me with the full weight of a grown man, taking me straight down. The hose ripped free, splashing gas across my forearm and face. My shoulders took the impact instead of my head by an inch. The air left my lungs and wouldn’t come back.
Then the weight of it settled onto me, and the real terror hit.
Up close, it was so much worse than distance ever prepared me for.
It had been a man—middle-aged, heavyset, still wearing a reflective work vest over a flannel shirt, the kind of clothing that suggested he’d been on his way somewhere ordinary when everything stopped being ordinary.
The skin of his face had gone the deep gray-brown of old bruising everywhere, splitting at the cheekbones and along the jaw where the tissue had dried and contracted, pulling his expression into something permanent and empty.
One eye had clouded to a flat, opaque white.
The other had ruptured at some point—a dark, collapsed cavity weeping a thin black discharge down the side of his face that had dried into a long streak reaching his collar.
His mouth opened above mine, and the smell that came out of it hit me like a physical thing—decay and something sweetly, horrifyingly wrong.
“No!” I jammed both forearms up against his chest, palms flat, locking my elbows to keep his face from dropping any further toward mine.
My arms shook with the effort. The angle gave me nothing—pinned flat to the tarmac, no leverage, the road surface offering no purchase for my boots as I tried to twist out from under his weight.
His fingers found my shoulder and dug in with a grip that had no restraint in it, no calibration—just pressure.
“Finn—!”
The weight vanished.
As he ripped the thing away, his sidearm, knocked from its holster in the struggle, clattered to the pavement. It skittered across the asphalt as I rolled clear, gasping, hauling air back into my lungs in ragged pulls that burned all the way down.
I scrambled to my knees, my legs shaking too badly to stand.
The thing had found its footing.
It turned back toward Finn with that terrible, unhurried reorientation they all had—no hesitation, no reassessment, just the same fixed determination redirected at the nearest target—and lunged.
Finn braced to meet it, unarmed, shoulder already compromised, and for one suspended second, the calculation was very, very bad—
The gunshot cracked through the morning air like the world splitting at a seam.
The thing’s head snapped back and to the left, a dark spray catching the gray morning light for just a moment before it collapsed—not stumbling, just a complete and instantaneous shutdown, dropping to the pavement and staying there in a heap of flannel and reflective vest with that black blood spreading slowly outward from beneath its head across the road surface.
Fiona stood at the passenger door with her arm still extended, the gun held in a two-handed grip that didn’t waver even after the shot. Her face had gone completely still.
Nobody spoke.
The gas on my forearm and cheek stung, its smell mixing with everything else into something I’d be tasting for hours. The road under my boots felt less solid than it had sixty seconds ago, my legs still weak with adrenaline.
“Libby.” Finn’s voice came out sharp and low, his eyes moving over me in a fast, confirming scan.
“I’m okay.” My voice thin. Nothing bitten. Just the road burn on my shoulder and the gas stinging my cheek and adrenaline doing laps through my system with nowhere useful to go.
He looked at me for one more second—long enough to decide the answer matched what he could see.
“Let’s finish with the gas. No telling who heard that shot,” he said.
Right.
I retrieved the hose and fed it back into the tank. My hands weren’t steady, but they knew what to do, and I let them do it, keeping my eyes on the gas can and nowhere else.
“Almost—nearly there—”
“Wrap it up,” Finn said.
I pulled the hose clear, fuel splashing across my fingers and pattering onto the road in thin drops. The smell of it cut through everything else, real in a way that helped, oddly, because it was something concrete to focus on while my hands refused to cooperate.
“Done.”
I grabbed the can by the handle, the fuel sloshing heavily inside, and moved back to our car.
Finn already had the gas cap off, hand extended for the container before I’d reached him.
I passed it over, and he lifted it with his good arm, tilting it carefully, the fuel gurgling down into the tank in a steady pour while I stood beside him and watched the road.
Thirty seconds of standing still had never felt longer.
The body lay where it had fallen. The road was otherwise empty in both directions—just treeline and sad sky and the distant sound of nothing at all.
I kept my eyes moving anyway.
“How much did we get?” I asked.
“Enough to make the marina,” Finn said. “Maybe a little over.”
The last of the fuel emptied out with a slurping sound as air replaced it in the can. Finn pulled it free, screwed the filler cap back on with two efficient turns, and tossed the empty container into the back without ceremony.
“Get in,” he said.
We didn’t discuss it. Doors shut, engine roaring, Finn accelerated before anyone had fully settled. The roadside disappeared behind us, and the trees closed in on either side, the body in the reflective vest shrinking in the wing mirror until a bend in the road took it completely.
I pressed my head back against the seat and concentrated on breathing at a rate that didn’t suggest I was imploding.
I watched the trees blur past and said nothing for a long moment.
Fiona spoke from the back seat. “From now on, we get gas from places that don’t look like the opening shot of a horror film.”
Finn made a sound low in his throat, almost a laugh given the circumstances. “Noted.” His hands were tight on the wheel, but I noticed the set of his jaw and the careful way he’d been holding his left shoulder since pulling that thing off me. He hadn’t said anything about it.
“Your shoulder,” I said.
“Fine,” he said immediately.
“Finn—”
“It’s fine, Libby.”
I looked at him for a moment longer.
The silence that followed was almost normal. It was the ordinary quiet of four people on a road trip. If you ignored the abandoned vehicles and burnt-out houses along the way, it almost looked like a normal day.
Then Lily’s voice materialized from the back seat, small and earnest.
“Doc Fluffbutt did not appreciate that at all.”
I turned my head.
The cat sat rigid in his carrier, back straight, orange face pressed to the mesh window, eyes fixed on some point ahead as though the world had simply stopped making sense mid-sentence.
I laughed.
It came out unsteady and real.
Fiona snorted.
Finn’s mouth moved at the corner. Just barely.
“Yeah,” I said, facing forward again. “Tell him to get in line.”