Plus, other than his poor nutritional choices, Chuck seemed like a decent enough guy. Nothing about him screamed ax murderer, so he had that going for him.
Thom and I had stayed hidden as long as we could, waiting to make sure my head count at the asylum hadn’t been off. That there wasn’t anyone left to come after us. Even as weak as he was, Thom had put up with my questions, managing to answer mostly in single syllables and groans.
During that time, I’d pieced together why Natty and the others had been torturing him, even while they planned to sell him to the Daylight Division.
Without Thom, Silent Creek had no leader. And after the massacre at Blackwater, the Silent Creekers were probably still trying to sort through their contingency plans.
Which meant they were weak.
And locked inside Thom’s head was a code word that would win the camp’s confidence.
If Natty could wiggle her way back inside now, she and Eddie Ray could hit them while their defenses were down. Hadn’t Eddie Ray said that’s what this was all about, business?
Through it all, Thom had held out, never giving them that code word despite their liberal use of Lucy on him. He was loyal to his Returned, and I was more sorry than ever that I’d doubted him.
I’d asked him about the watch too.
He’d looked at me, his eyes moving from mine to my wrist as if he’d only just noticed I wasn’t still wearing the cheap plastic wristwatch he’d given me as a gift—the one I thought he’d used against me.
I winced. “You weren’t the one who put the tracking device in it, were you?”
He reached over and squeezed my hand, giving a faint shake of his head. No, he told me silently. Somehow, Natty had done that too.
Probably to make sure she could find me.
The sun had only been up a couple of hours when Chuck had found us, wandering lost and alone on the side of the small road. He hadn’t questioned why I was propping Thom up, or why Thom had been so dehydrated when we’d finally gotten him into the cab of the truck. He also hadn’t commented on the way Thom had gone from looking like roadkill to your regular, healthy, normal-looking teen (at least if you didn’t know any better) so quickly.
Just add water!
At first glance, I didn’t have much to say about old Chuck either. There didn’t seem to be anything special about him. He was just your average-ordinary-nothing-special kind of truck driver.
But then he’d turned toward me, and I’d seen it . . . the way the left side of his face dimpled. The way it creased and sagged so much more than the right. He didn’t say why, but it wasn’t hard to guess it was sun damage, caused from years, maybe even decades of being on the road. From one side of his face being more exposed than the other.
It was like Chuck had been time-lapsed—a Before and After of him that had been cut in two and reattached down the middle.
But considering I’d just seen someone’s entire face blown off, my attitude was somewhere along the lines of it-could-have-been-worse. I barely blinked at ol’ Chuck.
My attention drifted toward the fields that ran along the freeway, punctuated with low mountains covered in soft grass. They were nothing like the harsh red deserts of Utah or the brown barren ones of eastern Washington.
“Where are we?” I asked Chuck absently.
Appraising the stretch of highway, Chuck nodded. “My guess is somewhere outside’a Channing.”
“Channing,” I echoed, trying to decide if the name rang any bells.
I glanced back to Thom who looked so much more like his old self again. He shrugged.
Turning back to Chuck, I tried again. “So that’s the name of the city . . . ,” I drawled, and then, because I knew this was going to sound weird, I bit my lip. “Which state?”
Chuck eyeballed me. “You kids pullin’ my leg or something?” And when he realized it was no joke, he did a full-on double take. I wouldn’t mind playing cards with Chuck sometime—he had the world’s worst poker face.
There was no point pretending. “We’re just a little lost is all.” I sighed. “And if you could help us out, that’d be great.” I smiled, hoping I looked sincere, and not like some crackpot who’d literally just shot her way out of an asylum.
My life got stranger and stranger.
It must’ve been pretty good because Chuck nodded a sort of, Sure, I guess so kind of nod, and answered. “Wyoming. ’Bout an hour south’a Gillette.”
Gillette—I had no idea where that was either, but Wyoming gave me a better sense. Geography might not have been my strongest subject, but I knew I was nowhere near Blackwater Ranch, back in Utah, and even farther from home . . . if I even had a home anymore.
“Can I ask you something else, Chuck?” I mean, why not, right? Might as well go for broke.