“If we’re lucky,” I said, “whatever we find won’t know about us, either.”
Her face was right in front of mine, mere inches away. I could feel her hips and her legs; her feet and mine were almost laced together in the tight space. Even with Boy Dog falling asleep on top of us, it was too close, and I needed to move. I closed my eyes and ran through my number sequence: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four, two hundred thirty-three, three hundred seventy-seven …
Brooke exhaled, and I felt her breath on my face, warm and comforting like a pillow of air. I breathed deep, then shifted my legs and struggled to sit up, picking up Boy Dog with me. He flailed weakly in my arms, not fighting but simply looking for a new solid surface to replace the one he’d been sleeping on. I managed to maneuver him back into the slot I’d just risen from and crept toward the back of the truck, searching for fresh air.
The highway was full without being crowded, the cars and trucks and trailers moving seventy or eighty miles an hour at least, but nearly motionless in relation to each other. More vehicles were moving toward us from the side, another highway merging with ours, and I watched a bright orange semi glide toward us, growing larger and larger as it approached, until its road joined ours and we were right next to each other, barely three feet apart. I could see the pencil-thin scratches in the paint and read the tiny lettering on the signs and notices stuck to the side. The road behind us stretched out to the horizon line, a thousand cars in perfect formation.
An hour later they had all disappeared onto side roads and exits, and we were alone.
The truck drove for about five hours, all told, going deep into Arkansas. When he stopped again for gas and a restroom, we jumped out and hid, making sure he didn’t see us, just in case. After he drove away we took a quick pit stop ourselves, filling old water bottles from the drinking fountain by the restrooms. I waited while Brooke used the restroom again, and then we walked back out to the on-ramp of the northbound freeway, hoping to circle around and head back to Dillon. We stuck to the back roads, and spent the night in a town called Longbend, somewhere near the border of Missouri. It rained all night, and we huddled together under an old rail car, wrapped in our thin blankets and catching scattered bits of sleep whenever our exhaustion managed to overwhelm our discomfort. I thought about our showers from that morning, all that cleanliness and nonthreatening approachability washing away into the gravel. At least our clean clothes were still packed; I made sure to keep the bags dry.
In the end, though, I supposed it didn’t really matter. The people of Dillon had already seen us, if not at our worst then at least close to it. What would they say when they saw us? What would we say when we saw them? Hi, we saw that dead kid on TV and rushed straight back just in case you didn’t have enough suspects. We had a perfect alibi—the man at the gas station had seen us buy snacks and then hitchhike out of town the day before the murder—but would that be enough? Would they interrogate us anyway? If they asked for ID, and maybe even if they didn’t, they’d discover we were runaways. If they went so far as to fingerprint us, I was already in the system. Going back into this situation threatened to destroy every bit of secrecy and independence we’d managed to build up.
But staying away would mean letting a Withered keep killing. The local cops would be helpless—we’d seen that time and again. Killing a Withered took a different approach, soft and oblique, watching from the shadows until you discovered their secret and struck. Somehow we had prompted this Withered to kill after years of dormancy, and unless we could find a way to unprompt it, we had to assume it would keep killing. An object in bloodlust tends to remain in bloodlust. Cleaver’s First Law.
I didn’t like being the reason it had killed Derek. I refused to be the reason it killed anyone else.
“Do you think we can get all the way there tomorrow?” asked Brooke.
“Sorry,” I said, shifting slightly away to avoid bothering her. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I was already awake,” she said. “Scoot back, you’re warm.”
I had only moved a fraction of an inch, but now I moved back, as grateful as she was for the added body heat. We pulled the blanket tighter around our shoulders and listened to the rain clatter against the rail car above us.
“I think we can get there in one day,” she said. “If I’m remembering the map right, it’s not too far.”
“Kind of isolated, though,” I said. “But you’re probably right.”
“What’s your plan?”
I’d been puzzling over that myself. “If Attina is disguised as Corey Diamond, we need to find a way to talk to his friends.”