I slid Shepley’s backpack over my shoulders and then followed Reyes outside, under the stormy sky. My hair still damp, I twisted it and then knotted it into a bun, away from my face. My feet slid against the wet soles of my sandals, my toes already aching from the chilly air.
“Where are you from?” Reyes asked, pressing the keyless entry on his key ring.
We both settled into our seats. The fabric seats felt warm and soft.
“I grew up in Wichita, but I go to school in Eakins, Illinois.”
“Oh, at Eastern State?”
I nodded.
“My brother went to school there. Small world.”
“God, these seats are like memory foam and velvet.” I sighed, leaning back.
Reyes made a face. “You’ve been uncomfortable for too long. They’re more like toilet padding and tweed.”
I breathed out a laugh through my nose, but I still couldn’t form a smile.
His eyes softened. “We’re going to find him, America.”
“If he doesn’t find me first.”
Shepley
Rain spattered on my eyelids, tapping me awake. I blinked, covering my eyes with my hand, and my shoulder instantly complained … then my back … and then everything else. I pushed myself upright, finding myself sitting in a field of green plants. I guessed it was soybeans. Debris was all around me—everything from clothes to toys to pieces of wood. Fifty yards ahead, light glinted off the twisted metal of a bicycle. I grimaced.
My shoulder felt stiff as I tried to stretch it, and I growled when the sting turned into fire shooting through my arm. My once white T-shirt was soiled with mud mixed with crimson at the site of the pain.
I stretched the collar with my fingers to see a dirty mess of a laceration that spanned six inches from just above my heart to the edge of my left shoulder. When I moved, a foreign object moved with it, stabbing me from the inside. I touched the skin, sucking in air through my teeth. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but whatever had sliced open my skin was still in there.
With clenched teeth, I spread the skin with my fingers. I could see layers of skin and muscle and then something else, but it wasn’t bone. It was a piece of brown wood, about an inch thick. Using my fingers like tweezers, I dug inside, crying out while fishing the huge splinter from my shoulder. The squishing sound of blood and tissue combined with the discomfort made my head swim, but an inch at a time, I extracted the stake and let it fall to the ground. I fell back, looking up at the weeping sky, waiting for the dizziness and nausea to subside, still trying to wade through my last memories.
My blood ran cold. America.
I scrambled to my feet, holding my left arm against my side. “Mare?” I screamed. “America!” I turned in a circle, looking for the turnpike, listening for tires humming along the asphalt.
Only the songs of birds and a slight breeze blowing along the soybean field could be heard.
Sunbeams cascaded from the sky to my right, helping me get my bearings. It was mid afternoon, meaning I was facing south. I had no idea which direction I’d been thrown.
I looked up, remembering my last words to America. I’d felt myself being pulled, and I hadn’t wanted her to see it. I’d thought it would be the last thing I could protect her from. Then I had been launched into the air. The feeling had been hard to process, maybe something like skydiving but through a meteor shower. I had been pelted with what felt like tiny rocks, and in the next moment, a bicycle had rammed my legs and back. Then I had been slammed on the ground.
I blinked, feeling panic rise in my throat. The turnpike was either in front of me or behind me. I didn’t know how to find myself, much less my girlfriend.
“America!” I yelled again, terrified she’d been sucked out as well.
She could be lying twenty feet from me or still tucked in the crevice at the overpass.