And I’d experienced more stress and adrenaline and fright and hell and trauma in the last twenty-four hours than I could recall facing—with the possible exception of that time I caught a bullet in the brain, and even that was debatable—maybe ever.
It felt like I was dying, like my legs were going to give out on me at any second, like my lungs were taking their last breaths. I was well conditioned for a human, maybe even for a meta, but my body had reached the wall and I was now being thrown back, hard. If I’d gotten a decent night of sleep last night, maybe—
No.
This was it.
I was crashing.
I’d had nothing to eat but what I’d raided from John’s fridge this morning and the sugary crap I’d taken out of the mechanic’s junk food stash since…hell, I’d been starving myself in Edinburgh yesterday, too. I probably hadn’t eaten a real meal since the day before, and exerting this many calories on a near-empty tank…
It was beyond unhealthy. It wouldn’t be fatal, because I didn’t think metas could die that way—I knew of high-level ones like me that had been asphyxiated and starved for years or even centuries that had somehow survived, albeit badly brain damaged—but it would mean the end of my run.
I had to rest. There was nothing else for it.
There was an agonizing stitch that had sprung to life in my side, screaming like someone had taken a knife and plunged it in. Rose sort of had, I guess, but that was more of a back wound, and not a literal one.
I scanned ahead, hoping for some sign of—
There.
In the distance was another farmhouse, this one well-kept and the fields growing sprouting, green crops that were about a foot out of the ground. I couldn’t tell what they were, and I didn’t care unless I could eat them as I went by. I might not even have had the energy to chew them at this point. There was a barn here, and it, too, was in good repair. And out from the barn a little bit…
Was a covered car port, with an old truck parked beneath it. There were no walls, and it was exposed to the elements, but the truck didn’t look like it had been moved in a long time. In fact, compared to the rest of the farm, it was in dismal shape, the hood all rusted and at least two of the tires flat as Iowa.
I belly-crawled over the distance between us, probably close to a mile, trying not to disturb the hay that hid me at first, and then keeping myself between the rows of the budding crops on the final approach. No helicopter sound echoed on the horizon, but my breaths were still coming furiously.
My hands were numb as I scraped along on my elbows and knees, like some sort of wounded dog. My brain had slipped into a twilight state, the corners of my vision blackening, a tunnel forming in my sight between me and my objective. My legs seemed to be seizing up, painfully, aches screaming at me as the muscles gave up the ghost.
I fought them back into action, always one more pull forward, always just one more elbow ahead. I swayed from side to side with each motion, always in danger of tipping over.
Somehow I made it out of the row of crops and onto the manicured lawn. There were only ten or fifteen yards between me and the old truck now, and I felt every single one of them. I tried to stand and failed, crumbling back to my hands and knees. Running had been a thing I took for granted this morning. Moving normally had been possible only an hour—had it only been that long since the call? I thought so—before.
Now I strained to get the last few feet. When I reached the concrete floor of the car port, I dragged myself across it, not caring that I was leaving a dirt trail, a blood trail. The next good rain would wash it all away, I hoped. Maybe that would even come tonight, if I was lucky.
Ha.
Me.
Lucky.
That was a good one.
I dragged myself beneath the truck, and just in time. My whole body quit as I did so, my neck muscles giving way and my face crumpling gently to the concrete. There was an oily smell lingering here too, but not as strongly as the automotive shop. The lingering orange, metallic flavor of Irn Bru was stuck on my tongue, and the pavement grain felt like it was burning at my brow.
I didn’t give a damn about any of that.
I was safe as I could be.
There were no choppers buzzing in the distance.
Every inch of me hurt, was sore, was tired, was shutting down from exhaustion.
I felt like I was forgetting something. To escape, maybe, but that was impossible now. I couldn’t have run any farther if I had to. My heart could have been pumping wildly—hell, it still was; I could hear it—and I couldn’t have traveled another inch right now.
I was in for the night. The grey horizon was barely visible beyond the shadow of the truck above me.
And as I lay there, mind almost blank from fatigue, from fear, from the complete and total mental exhaustion that went with the physical, a single thought came to me.
Reed.
And with that last, stray thought, I plunged into the darkness of sleep.
20.
Reed
The day was dragging, because there wasn’t anything else to do except call Peter every once in a while and let him know all the things I was working on doing for him. So I was doing that every hour or two, after having received his permission to do so, and offering food, and gently requesting—oh so reasonably—that he give us the youngest kid. Just the smallest. Make your life easier. Give us a sign of good faith, I would say, as I baked in the hot Texas sun, sweat rolling down my face in great rivulets.
And the answer was always, “No.”
Some thoughtful person who’d clearly been in Texas law enforcement for some time had set up a tent for us to hide under while we waited. It was just a simple canopy, but in the summer heat, the shade was appreciated by me and everyone else. Angel and I were sweating through our suits, and I had big ol’ beads dripping out of my thick hair every few minutes.
I wiped my brow with my shirt sleeve, admiring the new, translucent shade the white broadcloth had turned from absorbing all that moisture. It was not a trivial amount of sweating I was doing, and suddenly I wished Miranda had called Scott instead of Angel. He could have set up his version of a misting device, drawing moisture out of the air and blowing it over us to defray some of the life-choking heat.
But as Teddy Roosevelt said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
I doubted he’d been standing in a suit in the sweltering summer sun in Texas when he’d said it, but anything was possible I guess. Those guys were crazy back then. They wore suits all the time, and everywhere.
“Getting close to the hour,” Angel said, a quiet, tense reminder to me that the moment was coming up for me to place another call to Peter.
We’d managed to identify him, finally, after a little more coaxing allowed me to get his last name out of him. Peter Upton, age twenty-six, a troubled lad with a troubled life. He had a rap sheet for petty stuff, but I hadn’t seen the kicker until Angel pointed it out to me.
Peter Upton was five foot six, and as near as I could tell he had all the brains to match his stature—which was to say, in both these ways, he was below average.
Every one of his prior convictions read like something out of America’s Dumbest Criminals. Robbed a liquor store, no mask, using a squirt gun—that was yellow. When the clerk laughed at him, Upton proceeded to beat the clerk with the squirt gun, giving the man some serious contusions. But the clerk did fight back, and ultimately drove Upton out of his store and into the arms of a police patrolman who happened to be driving by just as Upton ran out with the offending squirt gun, wild-eyed and slightly bloody.
That wasn’t even the best highlight in the reel, at least in my opinion, but it was pretty emblematic of Upton’s history. Dumb, easily angered, cruel when he thought he had power over others. He felt like my worst analysis of humanity, all the regressive genes rolled into one person and illustrative of the least favorable part of our natures. He’d kept a somewhat even keel so far in his dealings with me, but he was not bright enough to realize how dumb he actually was.
Which made him extremely difficult to deal with.