Takata spun back to face them, seemingly undaunted.
“Sorry about running into you,” Daniel said, his hand still holding his hat in place. “We have to get to DC to tell the dewar how to stop the plague. Can you drop us at the train station? The Weres are patrolling the roads.”
Takata’s exuberance didn’t so much dim as utterly vanish under a wash of intense concentration. “They stopped all outgoing trains this afternoon,” he said, turning to Ripley and telling her not to have a cow and that he knew all the back ways into Cincinnati. “Everything,” he added when he turned back to them.
“Great.” Trisk slumped into the boxed drum set to feel the road rumble all the way up her spine. “How are we going to get to DC? We can’t drive there dodging cops all the way.”
“Cincy is still running trains out,” Takata said, his pride at his hometown obvious. “They never stop, not for plague, or war, or worker strike. Ripley and I will get you there, and you can hop a boxcar to DC. You can be on the East Coast by tomorrow night, slick as Crisco.”
Eyebrows high in consideration, Trisk looked at Daniel, seeing by his shrug that he was good with it. “We’ll do that,” she said, and Takata bobbed his head, flicking his dreadlocks back as he turned to the front, his long fingers tapping out a complex rhythm that was hard to follow.
I can do this for five hours, Trisk thought as she settled back and closed her eyes. And maybe she could catch a few winks in the meantime. They’d be in Cincinnati by dawn, maybe sooner the way Ripley drove. There’d be a train leaving for the East Coast soon after that—and then everything would be fine.
34
The engine hummed through Trisk while she sat, wide awake and listening to the radio as they raced through the predawn. “Bang Bang,” Cher’s new single, was on, and Trisk felt the bumps the gun made in the pocket of her Chicago Police jacket as she thought about Kal. It wasn’t advisable to keep someone under a sleep charm this long, especially when they’d been knocked unconscious to begin with, but he’d cause problems the moment he was awake, and she couldn’t tell her future child that she’d shot his or her father dead—even if it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Her attention fell on Daniel, across the van from her. His features were soft in sleep, huddled in the jacket that Pelhan had given him. Seeing him next to Kal, it was obvious that he wasn’t an elf, his blond hair, slight build, and studious demeanor aside. The glasses gave him away, and his chin wasn’t angular enough. His blisters were gone, though, and she smiled at his slight snore. Takata was up front doing the same thing.
Sunrise was a few hours off yet, but she stretched, giving up on sleep. Orchid was sitting on the rearview mirror, and her dust coating the shrunken head dangling from it in a silver glow was decidedly eerie. Nodding her greeting to the pixy, Trisk stepped over Kal to kneel between the front seats and look out at the fading stars. She’d been on her natural sleep cycle for days now, meaning she was most alert at dusk and dawn. She kind of liked it.
“Bang, bang. My baby shot me down.”
“Morning,” Ripley said, her voice rising and falling to make the two syllables into a song.
“Morning.” Trisk coughed to get the cobwebs out. “You want me to drive? It’s nearly sunup.”
“We’re almost there,” the woman said with a yawn. “Orchid’s been keeping me awake.”
The pixy shifted her wings to invisibility. “Two hours, seventeen minutes,” she said, then added when Trisk’s eyebrows rose in question, “Until sunup. Pixies have great sun sense.”
Trisk’s gaze went to Takata as the kid mumbled something that rhymed in his sleep. “Thanks for taking us to Cincinnati,” she said, and Ripley’s gaze lifted from the teenager, going from an expression of fond protection to one more dangerous.
“Do you think you can really stop this?” the Were asked, her concern obvious.
“We’ve got a good chance.” Trisk’s knees on the cold van began to ache. “People are starting to figure it out, and that will help. It’s the little towns and the really big cities that are in the most danger. Too small of a population, and they can’t keep it together and make the right connections to save anyone. The really big cities are just as bad, imploding because of too many people and not enough resources or control. The middle ground has the best chance to survive, cities with a diverse enough population that can figure it out and have a big enough support structure to keep services going, but small enough to keep control. And that might be a problem.”