Chapter 27
Pav’s fingers flexed on his rifle as Harper paused for a second just outside the apteka. She glanced left and right before setting off toward him.
Every protective instinct he had—the ones he’d trained, the ones he’d been born with, and the new ones that had been multiplying since Harper crash-landed in his life—all fired at once.
Something had happened in that shop. More than empty shelves.
She was stiffer now. Her eyes fixed straight ahead in the way people look when they’re trying not to look at something else.
He tracked the direction of her gaze.
A man had emerged from the stolovaya. Stocky. Dark jacket. Moving toward the UAZ with unhurried confidence. Shoulders set, weight forward, the posture of someone with training.
Harper crossed the road to avoid him, keeping her face angled in the other direction as if she was just checking out what was in the store windows.
She cleared the last buildings and broke into a run back toward him. Her face had gone bloodless, her eyes too bright.
She reached the trees where he was waiting and her composure shattered. “One of them. From the camp. He was in the apteka.” She hissed out a breath. “There’s no antibiotics.”
He sorted them by priority—the enemy was immediate, the antibiotics were next.
Down in the town, the man was leaning against the UAZ, lighting a cigarette, phone to his ear.
One man visible. Possibly more inside the stolovaya. His gaze flicked back to the UAZ. Its owner was distracted.
His body was a wreck. Fever. Shoulder. Head wound. Infected chest. The timeline of his operational capacity was hours, not days.
He needed that vehicle. Even though leaving her here went against every instinct he had. But without it, she was walking back into that town. Back to them.
“Stay here.” He shrugged off his sling. His shoulder lit white-hot. He ignored it.
“No, Pav.” Her hair had come loose, tendrils framing her face. “You can’t—”
“Stay. Here.”
He moved before she could argue. Out of the treeline. Across the open ground. Not running—walking with the easy, purposeful stride of a man who belonged where he was. The fever made the world’s boundaries swim, but the center held.
He hit the town and moved down the main street. Past the produkty and the apteka where the brass bell still swung above the door.
Thirty meters became twenty. Fifteen.
The man by the UAZ was facing away, phone to his ear, cigarette hand gesturing.
Pav came up on his blind side—three o’clock, outside his peripheral vision.
Two meters. One.
His good hand hit the man once, clean and precise, the heel of his palm driving in behind the ear. Balance went first. Sound never got the chance. Pav caught the phone before it clattered on the ice, then grabbed the man’s weight and lowered him behind the UAZ, out of sight from the stolovaya.
The man’s cigarette rolled.
Twelve seconds from approach to completion.
Not his best time. The fever was costing him.
He patted the man down. Phone. Wallet. Keys.
Perfect. He blinked sweat from his eyes. One thing today that didn’t require bleeding for.
He opened the driver’s door and slid in. His vision flashed white. No blur or fade. Total whiteout—everything erased in a single pulse of heat behind his eyes. His hands were no longer connected to his brain—just hanging there, keys slack between his fingers.
One second. Two.
The sounds of the town reached him from very far away. Wind. A door slamming.
Three seconds.
The white receded like the tide, pulling back in a wash. The dashboard swam back into focus. He still held the keys. His hands were shaking—not the fine tremor of cold but the deep, involuntary shudder of a body burning through its last reserves.
He turned the key, and the engine revved. He shoved it into gear, angled the nose toward the treeline, and drove.
Behind him, the apteka door burst open. A shout—loud, abrasive, Russian. Then another voice from the stolovaya. Then a third.
Pav didn’t look back. He floored the accelerator, and the UAZ fishtailed on the icy road, straightened, then climbed the hill toward the trees. He brought it to a skidding halt.
“Harper! Now!”
She ran. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten. She threw herself into the passenger seat, and the door wasn’t closed when he floored it again, and the UAZ surged forward.
The town shrank in the mirror. For one sweet moment, they were clear. Headlights blinked bright in his rearview mirror. A second UAZ pulled out from behind the stolovaya, already accelerating, closing the gap.
“Pav.” Harper twisted in her seat, looking backward. “They’re following.”
“I see.” Headlights bounced on the rough road behind them, growing brighter, the distance shrinking.
He pushed the UAZ harder. The engine screamed in protest, and the steering fought him on every curve, pulling left, the suspension bottoming out on frozen ruts.
His vision doubled. Two roads. Two center lines. He blinked and it resolved, then it doubled again.
“How close?” His voice sounded distant to his own ears.
Harper craned over her shoulder. “Two hundred meters. Maybe less.”
The road was narrow and rough. Trees pressed in on both sides. The UAZ behind was gaining. Pav fought to keep reality from splitting in two.
“Pav, they’re closing.”
He knew it and hated the fear in her voice. The road straightened. He stomped on the gas, and the UAZ responded with everything it had, which wasn’t enough.
“One hundred meters, Pav.”
He was aware, distantly, that he loved the sound of her voice.
That was probably the fever.
Or not.
“Pav, they’re closing—"
Vibration. Low, deep, traveling up through the chassis of the UAZ into the steering column and through his palms into his wrists. A frequency that didn’t belong to the road or the engine or the wind.
Train.
The crossing appeared around the bend. Basic. Rural. Two wooden barriers, half-lowered, a red light flashing in lazy circles. The track cutting across the road in a straight line, the rails gleaming dull silver.
And to the left, coming fast—a freight train, long and heavy, the locomotive’s headlight cutting through the gray like a single enormous eye. The horn sounded—a deep, sustained blast that shook the air and rattled the UAZ’s windows.
He narrowed his eyes, forcing his brain to do the math. The gap between the barrier and the train. The speed of the UAZ. Distance to the crossing. The margin measured not in seconds but in fractions of a second.
He tried to run the numbers.
The answer came back impossible.
He drove anyway.
“Pav.” Harper had seen the crossing, the barriers. The train. “Pav, no.”
He floored it.
“PAV!”
The hood smashed the flimsy barrier. Splintered wood hit the windshield as they blasted through. The rails jolted the suspension, and his teeth pinched his tongue. Blood bloomed coppery in his mouth.
The train was impossibly close—the horn screaming, the displacement of air hitting the UAZ like a shove from a giant hand, rocking them sideways. If he’d misjudged by a fraction, they would cease to exist.
The front wheels of the UAZ hit the other side of the tracks.
Harper screamed.
The train thundered past behind them, a wall of steel and noise, the UAZ shuddering in the turbulence.
In the mirror—nothing. Just endless train.
His grip on the wheel bordered on painful. Ahead, the road branched.
He blinked cold sweat from his eyes, half surprised.
No impact.
We made it.
Harper gasped beside him. Her hands were braced against the dashboard, her body rigid, her face drained of every color it had ever possessed.
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
She shook her head. “You—”
He glanced at her. Her mouth was a thin slash. He was in no doubt she was going to kill him herself if the infection didn’t get there first.
He hooked the UAZ left.
The adrenaline withdrew all at once. Not gradually—off a cliff.
One moment he was holding it together. The next—nothing was.
The fever rushed back in like a tsunami, and every injury he’d been overriding announced itself simultaneously.
His hands loosened on the wheel enough that the UAZ drifted toward the shoulder and the tires spat gravel.
“Pav.”
He corrected and locked his grip.
The road ahead rippled. The trees on either side were a continuous wall of dark and white, the detail bleeding away, the world reducing to the center line and the sound of Harper’s voice.
“Pav, you need to pull over. Let me drive.”
Her hand moved from his arm to his face. Her palm against his cheek. Warm. Soft. She was fuzzy, but there. Her eyes were bright with fear and something tender he didn’t have a name for.
“I’ve got you,” she said. “Let me drive.” She didn’t wait for permission, she took the wheel.
The road split again. Pav blinked—and it didn’t come back together. He couldn’t keep them on it. He released the wheel.
“Brake. Now. Pav—brake.”
He stamped on the brake pedal and the UAZ skidded to a halt. Harper was already out of the passenger seat, running around the front, opening his door.
The rush of the world abated.
“Slide over. Don’t get out. Just move.”
The passenger seat received him, as his vision swam, came into focus, and swam again.
She was in the driver’s seat. Adjusting the mirror. “Pav. Tell me where we’re going. The directions. All of them. Now.”
He dug his hand into his pants pocket and pulled out his map. He spread it on his knees. Squiggles danced across the page. Hell. He squeezed his eyes shut, gritted his teeth.
Focus.
He opened his eyes, and the world popped in lurid technicolor.
He ran his finger across the paper, locating their position.
Fifty miles to the border. But Katya. Only thirty.
He stabbed with his forefinger, marking the spot with a smudge of blood.
“Here. My friend Katya. Her guesthouse is unmarked, but left at the birch fork. Yellow door. She’ll have meds. ” He exhaled. “If anyone does.”
The gears ground as Harper found first, and the UAZ lurched forward.
She looked over at him and grimaced. “Sorry. It’s been a while since I drove stick.”
He almost laughed. The sound died in his throat, but the impulse was there. He was half-delirious from infection in a stolen car, and she was apologizing for her clutch work.
“You’re doing fine,” he thought he said. The words might not have made it out.
The UAZ grumbled beneath him.
“Stay with me, Pav.”
He tried to hold on to her voice the way he’d held on to the steering wheel. The road faded to nothing and everything else with it as his eyes closed.
The last thing to go was her voice saying his name as if it mattered.
Like he might not answer next time.