“Now,” he said. The few other people in attendance turned and looked in their direction.
Ellie joined him in the aisle, and he ushered her quickly out into the lobby. The white van was still there. Scanning the parking lot through the wall of windows, he could see a black sedan parked in a spot beneath a lamppost. A second black car was pulling off the highway and coming up the paved roadway that led toward the theater.
“Come on,” he said, and grabbed her hand. They hurried toward the fire exit. David leaned against the arm bar, expecting an alarm to sound, but nothing happened. They shoved out into the side parking lot.
“What’s going on?” Ellie said.
“There’re people out front.”
“Cops?”
“I don’t know exactly who they are.”
Still clutching her hand, he dragged her around the side of the building. At the corner, he peered into the front lot. The van was still parked out front. There was someone behind the wheel talking into a cell phone. The sedan parked in the lot looked empty, though it was difficult to tell because the windows were tinted. The second black vehicle turned right toward a shopping center instead of left toward the movie theater. It could have been a ploy to disarm him or it could have been their tactic, circling around the opposite end of the shopping center only to come at him from the rear.
The guy climbed out of the van, stuffing his cell phone in the rear pocket of a pair of faded jeans. He looked young and blue collar, with a ball cap tugged down low over his eyes. He had a ponytail. When he entered the theater, David tightened his grip on Ellie’s hand and said, “Let’s go.”
They ran across the parking lot and made it to their car without anyone jumping out of the shadows and grabbing them. The engine growled to life. It was all David could do not to slam down on the accelerator and peel out of the parking lot. But he didn’t want to draw any attention to their escape. He pulled out slowly while Ellie whipped her head around, looking for signs of danger. The white van didn’t move. The parked sedan remained parked. The second black vehicle did not reappear from the other side of the theater.
They pulled back out onto the highway and drove.
33
Turned out the motel room back in Virginia that first night had been a fluke. David tried two motels in the vicinity of Harmony, but neither would let him pay cash without also showing his driver’s license. He might have risked it had he been in a less populated part of the country, but things in Harmony, Missouri, seemed pretty much on the ball, what with all the FOLLY FREE, COME AND SEE! signs in the shop windows. Nowadays, good, healthy places were also xenophobic places, suspicious of strangers snaking into their midst and spreading their poison. He didn’t want to risk someone recognizing his name or the picture on his driver’s license and putting two and two together. Instead, he drove out of the city, thinking he’d find better luck along the highway. But every place he passed was a Marriott, a Motel 6, a Residence Inn, or some similar chain where he knew he’d run into the same problem. Probably, those places wouldn’t even take cash. In the end, he settled on a seedy one-story cinder-block establishment that looked like it catered to prostitutes and had probably seen its fair share of homicides within its walls. The haggard female desk jockey did not disappoint, and brandished him with a metal key dangling from a plastic fob without so much as a glance in his direction.
While Ellie slept in the small bed beside him, her shoe box of oriole eggs on the fiberboard nightstand, David sat propped up on a stack of pillows flipping through muted TV channels. His heart hadn’t regained its normal rhythm since their escape from the theater.
After a time, he set the remote down on the nightstand and went into the bathroom. His hands were shaking, and his entire body ached. He still looked like death in the mirror, but he was thankful that his nose hadn’t gushed any more blood since the theater restroom. Leaning close to the mirror, he examined his pupils. His eyes looked okay.
You’re sick, David. Your last blood test. You’ve got it.
A thought occurred to him then—one worse than him dropping dead while on the road and leaving Ellie to fend for herself. He thought of Sandy Udell, the kid who had jumped out of the window of his classroom while shrieking about monsters, and of Deke Carmody’s madness, which had resulted in the man setting his whole house on fire while he was inside. He thought, too, of the countless horror stories he had heard on the news and read in newspapers since the beginning of the outbreak. All those terrible things people did to themselves. . . and to others.
What if it wasn’t a ruse, and that he really was sick?
What if he hurt his daughter?
Terror flooded through him at the notion of it. What if he awoke with his hands wrapped around his daughter’s throat? What if he . . . Jesus Christ, what if he did something to her with the fucking handgun?