I slid off the gurney, groping on the cold ground, finally coming up with the tube. My hands chased it to the end. Patrick waited for me, his breath still held.
I shoved the tube back over the hissing nozzle. Patrick pulled his mask away from his face until the oxygen shot up the line, fluttering his hair. Then he snapped the mask into place, blew a big exhalation through the one-way valve, and started breathing again.
I started breathing, too.
We didn’t pause to celebrate.
He took one side of the gurney, and I took the other. Side by side we hurried up the alley, wheels rattling like crazy over the bumpy asphalt.
As we neared the edge of the alley, Patrick said, “Slow up, slow up.”
I shot a look behind us and willed my legs to slow down.
“Chance,” Patrick said, his voice a bit wonky from the oxygen and the mask. “They’re gonna hear us.”
I forced myself to slow even more. Finally we eased to a stop and peered around the corner. We had only a slice of a view past the pharmacy. The ambulance was still there in the middle of the town square, but there were no Hosts around it anymore. They’d rushed the hospital—or at least I hoped that was where they were.
The siren was still shrieking. Somehow I’d drowned out the sound in my head, turning down the volume on all background noise as we’d run the gauntlet of the hospital. I was glad to hear the wail piercing the night, shrill and steady. That would cover the sound of our movement through the neighborhood as we headed back toward school.
We set out down an unlit street, pushing the gurney across the sidewalk, one wheel squeaking intermittently. We stopped every few driveways, using parked cars for cover.
We heard movements inside some houses and on the nearby streets, but we chose our path well, weaving through the neighborhood one cautious block at a time.
We were halfway there when Patrick took a knee behind the special van that the Dubois family kept for Blake and his wheelchair. Breathing hard, he held up a finger to signal that he needed a second to catch his breath. Sweat trickled from his hairline, and his face looked washed of color.
“Sorry,” he said. “Oxygen. Fuzzy.”
I eased him down so he could lean against one big tire, then sat next to him. In the darkness the combination of the mask and his cowboy hat made him look pretty scary. For a time he tried to catch his breath. Then he made a fist around the tube trailing up to the H tank on the gurney. Was he so loopy that he was thinking of ripping it out?
“What do we do when the tanks run dry?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
I couldn’t take my eyes off his fingers tensed around that tube. “We go back to the hospital and fill them up again.”
“How ’bout when the IV food is gone?”
“Dr. Chatterjee said he thinks he can figure out some kind of system to make more.”
Patrick gave a slow nod, but his face didn’t hold much hope. “And what about when the next kid turns eighteen? Or Alex? Or you?”
“Let’s worry about that later,” I said.
His fist tightened around the tube. “It sucks living like this. A mask clamped over my face. Being fed through tubes and needles. Forever.”
I watched his fingers turn white as he squeezed the tube, then released it.
“Actually, not forever,” he added. A bitterness I didn’t recognize had crept into his voice. “Just till the mask slips some night when I’m sleeping. Or a tank malfunctions. Or I sneeze wrong and blow the tube out.”
“Look,” I said, “we just bought you more time. For the particulates to dissipate.”
“For a miracle,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “For that.”
He squeezed the tube again, kept it compressed. His eyes looked hazy, his gaze loose, though whether from the oxygen or not, I couldn’t tell.
I stood up and offered him a hand. “Alex is waiting for you.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he released the tube and took my hand.
I knew that would do it.
Our progress felt like torture, every rasp of our boots against asphalt amplified tenfold, every creak from a shadowed porch amplified a hundredfold. But even with that squeaky wheel, even pushing a gurney loaded with seven giant tanks and one portable one, we made it through undetected. At last we came up on the edge of the teachers’ parking lot, halting behind a row of hedges.
Leaving the gurney, I crawled through the hedges and signaled at the front gate with a blip of my flashlight. Then I waited for Alex’s signal that the coast was clear.
No signal came.
I waited and waited and then flickered my beam again and waited some more. Only darkness stared back through the bars of the gate.
I crawled out to where Patrick crouched by the gurney. “No signal,” I whispered. “Maybe Alex took a bathroom break.”
“No,” he said. “She’d be there. Something’s wrong.”
Carefully, he lifted his H tank off the gurney. “Let’s head for the gate. We’ll come back for the other tanks later.”
We slithered through the bushes to the other side, cast glances around us, then bolted across the parking lot. Panting, we reached the gate.