THE NOMADS WOUND THROUGH THE BLACK ROAD, Agatha Christie’s tired headlights doing nil to illuminate the oncoming curves of the cliffside. Careful driving (which Jake had not) and the occasional rail, were the only things holding them back from a hundred foot dive of certain death. Had Clementine been feeling well, she may have protested—not for her, but for the safety of her friends' lives. Perhaps normally she might have asked Jake to slow down, that they needed to get better headlights, or reminded him that this was deer country, but right then she wished for it: death—quick and painless, please. And the pillow from the motel, in her lap, only helped to remind her of her failures.

  Ten minutes of winding, winding, spinning roads, and a bitter, unending battle of the comedown thermostat, resulted in Jake pulling over; in her using the crevice of a cliff as support as she expunged on the skinny highway; barren, battered guardrails, hair soaked to the base of her neck.

  Behind her retching—which was only made worse by the van spitting black fumes—an ensemble of crickets and frogs miles away (a few feet away?) whined in her ear like whining dentistry drills. The night air whistled through the dark-wrought canopy, gnarled white branches reaching for her, for light, as she expelled waves of stinging, acid-green bile. Heave after heave, twisting her abdomen, banging her fist on the side of the van as if, somehow, that would make it stop. To which Kid peeked his weasel face up to watch her from the window, curiously uncaring in the way a child watches a salted slug writhe on the cement.

  Between the brief respites, teeth aching from cavities, she ground them in drug-compulsory. That deep rot had begun to take root, eating away at her enamel. She thought it ironic that cavities started with the intention of enjoying the sweet things in life, but now that she could feel that thick molasses-like drug lining her teeth—an outcome that she surely brought onto herself by her own impulsive, greedy actions—all she desired was to never consume a sweet thing again. More than anything, though, she wanted to brush her teeth extensively, take a hot shower, and find a nice bed to hibernate as deeply as a bear in winter.

  As if by some cruel, preordained metaphor, a black sedan passed engulfing her in blinding cones before curving off into the hills, leaving pirouette patches in her vision, and thoughts trying to form in the loose gruel of her mind.

  With much strain, she wiped her mouth with her sleeve before stumbling into the van. Kid had taken the front seat, no surprise there.

  “Sorry, Ace,” he said, snake-skin boots on the dash. “Cockpit’s all full up. Be a doll and bring the co-cap’n a whiskey sour with two cherries, eh? Know what? Make that three.” Then he clicked his tongue and winked at her.

  Thankfully Noah was kind enough to hold out a hand and help her inside.

  On the way to Wild Wood, she pondered the night. She fell forward, holding her head to keep her brains from seeping out her eyes; through the cracks in her fingers, never tight enough.

  “We’ll get your necklace back, love,” Jake said to her. “We’ll give them the vials and we’ll get your necklace back.”

  “And what ‘bout my hat?” pouted Kid. She imagined his arms were crossed and his lips pursed, as he often did.

  “Buy a new one, idiot. The necklace is one of a kind. Nothing ever been made like it. Go into any gay bar and I bet you could find another hat.”

  Kid grumbled. She was too tired, else she would have hit Jake. And he had been right about the necklace, gifted from her father. A crystal clementine around the size of a gumball with a special locking mechanism. Inside being the last remaining token of home, something that belonged to Matty and carried more special meaning than any object she owned otherwise. A nomad had stolen it, Noah explained—Vertigo. A powerful one, far surpassing Clem’s own abilities. The others said she was a ‘fork-tongued demon with the face of a child.’ Vaguely, Clementine could see that face from within the remaining puddles of her murky brain soup, remembering those remote eyes of hers. Blighted islands. Devoid. Swirling. At first a blend of white, some black, all life blanched from the concoction like sun to bones in sweltering heat.

  But the face she remembered most was of the man: Jazz, they called him. A face like a leather tire. If Vertigo’s face sang of evil, what did his sing of? Dejection? Or perhaps something more sinister. Lust? Depravity? She couldn’t stand to recall either of their harrowing faces for another second; it was like stepping back into time when the world was a nauseating dream, stuck in a spinning cup at the fair without control of the handle.

  “Babe?” Jacob reached back awkwardly and touched her leg, as if reading her mind. “You good? Enough blankets?”

  She grunted, clenching the fleece tighter, her teeth chattering. She was burning, she was freezing—the world a shade of green death, and talking about it wasn’t helping.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  No, she thought. I feel like day-old roadkill. But all she managed was a meek, “Yup.”

  “Okay, well, uh, if you need anything–”

  “It don’t matter how I feel,” she snapped, “and asking ain’t gonna make a lick of difference!”

  Jake put his hands up defensively. “Okay, okay.”

  She felt a surge of shame about the reaction, and she didn't know why exactly it had come about. “Sorry,” she said quietly, tucking the blanket closer. “I know you’re only tryna help.”

  They hadn’t told Clementine much else about Whiteaker, just that Vertigo and Jazz would be in touch shortly on account of the vials. Jake and Noah concluded they were hired thugs of sorts from whatever shady organization they crawled out from under. Jake was hesitant to deem them ‘assassins,’ though Noah was positive that if they had wanted to kill them, Jazz could have sliced their torso from their legs without moving an inch. Sounded like an assassin to her. Jake seemed in denial about the level of danger they were in; he seemed to believe that because the world owed him something, nothing bad would ever happen to him until that debt was cashed in. Maybe taking the briefcase was enough to tip the opposing scales, she thought grimly. Now, to right the transactions of the universe, we have to be permanently cashed out.

  Jacob, after some time passed, asked her, “What did he do to you?” She knew who he was asking about because it was posed defensively, ashamed, like his pride was at risk by her answer. There was a great silence as she thought.

  “Nothing,” she lied. “I don’t remember.”

  They knew, though, she wasn’t telling the truth, and she knew they knew. She would talk about it when she was ready, and didn’t have time to process it herself yet, really.

  Quiet. Nobody made any efforts to turn on the radio or play a cassette. If the van’s engine wasn’t clunking, you could hear a feather fall inside.

  They exited the I-5 from Eugene, and traveled down the highway until they hit Wild Wood to find a cheap bed for the night, where they had stayed the night before: Wild Wood Motel. It was nothing more than a narcoleptic hollow of a town, more so a truck stop that snoozed when the sun fell behind the surrounding woodland mountains. In the day you could see big strips of forest taken for logging, like the bald patches of a dead giant. And in the evening you could hear the race track echoing across the entire town—and some crazed man on a loudspeaker rattling off the racers’ numbers and sermonizing on America and the constitution.

  She could tell the night was taking a toll on Noah, because if there was somebody continually talking after a disaster it would be him explaining how the magnitude eight earthquake could have been a magnitude nine. She at least expected him to give some sort of halfhearted pep talk in the drive, but no. His eyelids were heavy, and he rode in dead silence. He seemed upset with Kid, but she didn’t know about what. She wondered if Noah was still upset with her. He had every right to be.

  “Alls I gots to say,” Kid said as they entered town and passed by the countless fast-food restaurants, “is those freaky fucks were lucky I was under the influence, else I woulda put one between their eyes. Not that I woulda hit anythin’ but skull.” He laughed derisively, hocked a loogie out the window. “Brainless dolts took my damn hat, man.”

  “Kid, shut the hell up about the hat,” Jacob said, looking at him in the rearview just as McYellow light illuminated Kid’s twisted face. “You almost got us killed with your ‘heroics.’ You think you’re Sheriff fucking Grayhat? Be glad you still have your tiny brain resting in that scrawny rat head.” She expected him to fight back, start yelling, maybe crash the van if he could, but Kid did nothing. Maybe he understood there was some truth to the words. “Pull something like that again and you’re out.” Kid jeered, but to her surprise, looked out the window pensively.

  They parked outside the motel’s entrance, the vacancy sign, a muted red, buzzing like angry bees. The lot was as empty as the rest of this ghost town save for one antiquated, European-looking junker, but the calm, graveyard stiffness actually brought her a sliver of comfort. When Jake asked how much money they had, Kid groaned and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. Noah was the first one to spot it. He ripped the bill from Kid’s hand, looked at it with the light from the motel. “I knew it,” he said disappointedly, spotting the red residue on its edge. “We talked about this, man. You promised me. How long has it been since we messed with that shit?”

  “You act like it’s my fault,” he muttered, gaping out the window.

  “What?”

  “My addiction––you act like it’s my damn fault! As if I was the one who loaded us up full of tranquilizers and opiates and whatever else that miserable place could shit down our throats!”

  “Yeah well, man, I don’t know what to tell you. I decided not to be addicted.”

  Kid placed a finger on Noah’s chest. “Then you wasn’t addicted!”

  Jacob whistled, and when he whistled it deafened you. “Hey, hey, can the both of you shut the fuck up and tell me how much money you have?”

  Noah only had five dollars and change. Kid the ten. Clementine had twenty. A fan had put it in her hand as she was being escorted out by Juan Quixote, the nickname Jacob later shamefully (but admittedly a tad funny) referred to Polo’s bodyguard as. “He even had the little donkey,” Jacob had remarked, wiping away a laughing tear. It was the only joke made that night, and only Jacob and Clementine understood the reference.

  Jacob stepped out of the van with their accumulated money, volunteered to haggle the front desk lady, and when he came back he regaled in his success by explaining how he used his bold chin, which was just cleft enough to give him a heroic cowpoke physique that for some reason he thought would do him well in this backward town. Nobody congratulated him, and the mood remained stiff. What Jacob failed to mention was that the landlady spoke little to no English and had the makings of dementia. Later that when he asked about the car in the lot the lady said—or he thought she said—it was hers: “Da da… Twenty-three versts per liter.” He also had a tourist pamphlet in his hand regarding the Umpqua National Forest, but nobody was interested in reading it or hearing regurgitated facts. Jake spouted a few anyway.

  One more night of comfort coming to the total of forty-five dollars and change. That was all she could think: what happens after tonight? Though comfort was a far cry from the reality of the pest problem and the black mold riddling their accommodations. She believed if comforts didn’t last far enough into the future that their end could be forgotten, then they weren’t comforts at all—just survival.

  The shower had limited hot water, and took more than twice as long to reheat. Kid raced in and locked the door behind him to take the first one. Everybody else was too exhausted to fight it, and went to bed coated in grime. She was the only one who failed to fall asleep, brain still wired from the drugs. She took a shower, a wondrous shower which was both cleansing and healing, and got into semi-clean clothes. She brushed her teeth next, on the toilet, and used the bath faucet to rinse her mouth—the sink was in the kitchen extension of the motel—and then brushed her hair, which was seriously knotted, barely manageable in her exhaustion. During this endless brushing, her stomach made a loud gurgling noise, which was then replaced by a sharp, gnawing pain.

  She was starving.

  And that was how she found herself outside, in the middle of the night, staring hopelessly into the vending machine, dingy fluorescents droning above, pondering how she could make a decision as twisted as this, and why she would be forever wracked with indecision. It was a simple decision to make, really. Chocolate or unsalted almonds? But it extended beyond that—all the decisions she had ever wrongfully made lingered just beyond this decision. She started crying, unable to decide, and unable to stop. She hadn’t cried since leaving Texas and so it spilled endlessly out of her here. Why here of all places? Why here?

  After she returned to herself, she made the healthy choice.

  She popped a couple of uninspiring almonds in her mouth, carefully chewing on the good side. They tasted peculiar, and hurt to swallow behind the bile-burned throat. As she headed back upstairs to the room, she stopped in her tracks when, on the doorstep one to the left of theirs, was a child no older than two playing with rocks. His hair was disheveled, and he had dirt splotches all over him. The worst atrocities were the pitch-black undersides of his feet, his phlegmy hack, and of course the fact that there was nobody around. Nobody. She ambled up to him, looking for his parents. There were only two vehicles in the lot, one being theirs. So how was it possible this kid got outside in the cold?

  “Howdy,” she whispered to him, and then cleared her throat and raised her voice when she realized that was sort of creepy. “Where’re your parents?” He blinked. “Hello? Where’s your ma? Pa?” The kid said nothing, but he did point to her bag of unsalted almonds. Her stomach grumbled, but his grumbled louder. She knelt and dished out a handful into her hand, and gave the boy the bag. She idly looked around the empty parking lot until her brain clicked on just as he went to put the first one in his mouth—realized that almonds weren’t child friendly—and snatched them from him. The boy looked as if he was about to cry, so she soothed him by rubbing his hair. “I’ll give you them in a second, no fussing now. I need to cut ‘em.” The boy seemed to understand because he calmed and continued on playing with his rocks between thick coughing fits. He sure was cute. A button nose, two doughy black eyes, a toothy smile.

  She looked around to make sure nobody saw her do this but she lightly grabbed the boy’s head to steady while she pulled down an eyelid; the boy barely reacted. The bottoms of his whites were beginning to yellow. A very clear sign of early fluttering-cough. She subdued a groan so as not to alarm him and then she looked around somewhat helplessly.

  “What to do with you?” she asked him, the world. The front desk, cutting through the night like a dying lighthouse, seemed her only option.

  The keeper was an elderly Russian woman named Mrs. Digby. Her white hair was flailing out in every which direction. Her scatter of teeth when she smiled, which was only once when she approached, were caked yellow by years of cigarette usage and appeared long eroded from gum disease. Mrs. Digby was tugging on two cigarettes—Clem figured she forgot about the first one which was straight down to the filter—and when she spoke, one to two words sounded phonetically like they could be distant relatives of the English language. Genuinely she was impressed Jake managed to haggle with the woman.

  To her not-so-shock, all Mrs. Digby did, and maybe she just didn’t fully understand the scope of the situation, or anything at all for that matter, was unlock the door. Then she shambled on with her bejeweled cane, puffing up a storm. Clem would have teleported them inside, but it was a rule she had established for herself not to do so into places she couldn’t directly see into—things could happen that way. Once, when she was still discovering her abilities as a child, she had teleported herself into a barn and nearly skewered herself on a spade fork. Never again she promised herself, and never again she had made sure.

  She slowly opened the door, afraid of what she might find, afraid that this situation would end like her dreams of Mr. Sh?fer. Lemons. Sickly odors. Dead men dragging me to Hell. What she found, however, was much worse than a dream—it was this little boy’s forever reality.

  Lying completely still on the bed was a gaunt woman. The air was freezing, the AC cranked, an Arctic crypt containing the perfect remains of the first men and entire wooly mammoths. Time seemed to have stopped here, like the entire world could zoom by in an instant and this room would remain untouched amongst the rubble, the AC going on forever till the world was met with its inevitable heat death. She turned off the AC; the boy only had a stained wife-beater and a soiled diaper on, no need for it to be so cold. She cautiously approached the bed, expecting to find his mother stiff in rigor mortis.

  “Hello?” Clem said unnervingly, touching her petrified arm with a prod. Cold. She gave her a hard shake; no response. She’s dead. She’s dead-dead! Her heart sank and Clem shook harder, nothing. Harder yet, she was practically wrestling her for a response. “C’mon,” she cried, “C’mon now. Wake!” There was a moan then but it was faint. She calmed her breath and looked at the woman more closely. Her bangs were choppy, her teeth awful, mouth crusted with saliva. Small lesions across her cheeks. She had the same stark black hair and heavy-lidded eyes the boy had.

  It didn’t take long looking around to find what she was using. There was crushed crystal on the table and a bubble pipe. By the burn marks on the glass, Clementine figured she did that quite often. She slid the drugs into its baggie, sealed it, and hid it under an ashtray to keep the boy safe.

  She knelt in front of the boy and watched him. His quietness reminded her of Matty. He came out such a stern baby; three months going on forty she would joke.

  She searched the fridge for food, finding nothing. Almost completely empty: a half-eaten can of moldy baked beans that she threw away; empty milk carton; half-empty condiment bottles. The freezer, however, had several frozen Slim Quicks inside. Chocolate flavor, yummy. She opened it and found a plastic spoon on the counter she had to rinse free of old Slim Quick. She sat the boy down at the edge of the bed and allowed him his chocolate excursion. While he ate, she took the almonds and, not finding anything to crush them, was forced to use the TV remote. Then she sprinkled the almonds atop his frozen treat.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Rocky Road,” she said to him.

  He smiled, dug in, appearing to enjoy it. She smiled back, but it took everything in her being to do so. For one, the smell of his flooded diaper was nauseating. She took his dinner from his hands, threw away his poopy diaper, wiped his butt clean with a wetted hotel towel, and changed him into a clean pair of women’s underwear; that was all she could find in the drawers. She got a blanket from the bed and wrapped him in it. She watched him eat contentedly for a while, and so he watched her. Then she stood. “You look great kid, but I gotta get.”

  The kid stopped eating, surprised she wasn’t staying. He coughed and wiped his eye. She turned on the overhead light for him and closed the door behind her as fast as she could. As the crack in the door had diminished, his face looked aimlessly into hers, innocent and afraid, and she remembered Matty’s dainty arm around her waist the night she left.

  Back in bed, time rolled by, slow and unforgiving. She couldn’t get that boy out of her mind. And she contemplated: Do I call somebody? The authorities? Thoughts racing from the drugs: death, tumors, devils in suits, rotting teeth, imprisonment, Franklin, her brother, their phone call. So much had happened in such a short time, creating in her a strange perception of the events, it was as if the words spoken only hours ago had actually been spoken years ago, and suddenly they were catching up with violent speed.

  The clock blinked: 3:02 a.m.

  She carefully got out of bed and crept over to the window, and looked at the front seat of the van, which she could see by the dim light of the umber motel sign. She closed her eyes, imagining herself in the seat. With a thump, she landed there, then crawled to the wheel well in the back. With the briefcase in her hands, she glanced out the window, coast clear, stepped outside, carefully closing the door, and began to walk with it in a direction. Cool. Casual. Exhausted. Just a woman with a strange briefcase at 3 a.m.

  Play it cool, man, she heard Noah say inside her head.

  There was a vagrant leaning against a closed-down fast-food restaurant, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see him following her, gaining on her as he preached, “O weary traveler is He! Righteous is His path, Righteous is His solution! I have seen the light! For His gaze penetrates the depths of our inky well we call soul. And He sees you! Yes, you nomad! Run as you might but He sees and vilifies the sinner!” Nomad? How–? No, no he means a traveler. A vagrant! He doesn’t know you. “Yes, I know you!” The man yelled, as if he read her thoughts. “And God knows you!” Ain’t you heard, you crazy man? God is dead.

  He was still preaching by the time she was halfway down the block, but she only allowed herself to calm when she was clear away from that lunatic. Clem turned down a street, kept on. While she was restless in bed she had heard a train horn somewhere in this direction. By that logic, eventually she would find the track if she kept straight. Clementine, feeling something was following her, looked behind and saw a shrouded male figure about a hundred feet back. The preacher. She picked up her pace, the man was saying something to her but her heartbeat was in her ears and she broke into a dead sprint, fog enclosing her, coating the world in a milky haze.

  There was a police car that switched on its lights behind her, and she ran faster, not knowing who it was after. She glanced back, saw the cop take a turn. The preacher was scared off too, and she used that opportunity to get her distance. Dead houses rushed by, a dog slammed against a fence, the night-obscured impression of teeth and baying and rattling chain link. She stumbled backward, regaining herself. The first corner she rounded, she teleported onto an apartment complex balcony beaming with a putrid green porch light.

  She caught her breath, leaning on the railing. She could see the train tracks distantly, maybe five hundred feet to the east, and the red and blue trailing far down another street. She could smell it was going to rain soon, and she looked up at the stars. Most were drowned by light pollution. Seeing the stars, speckled and vast like looking at distant white fires in a pitch black field, made her miss home. Made the grief and guilt rush through her in sobering waves. She instinctively reached for her necklace, hoping for comfort, but only found stiff air. Now the distance between her and home seemed infinite, like the distance between her and those celestial bodies above, and growing every day. The stars twinkled, winked, gaped their disapproval.

  Yeah well, who cares, she told those judging celestial bodies. You’re long dead anyway.

  After she thought about it, she concluded that was Jake speaking through her, and she wondered then how many thoughts have ever been her own. How many thoughts were her father’s? How many her mother’s? Has she ever had an original idea or was she just somebody’s puppet to be pulled from a case to be spoken through when others deemed it?

  She closed her eyes to really concentrate, to try and sort her thoughts; assessing how much arcana she had left, and it wasn’t much at all. She stabilized herself on the guard rail. The iron smell left on her hands made her think of blood, upset her stomach. She gritted her teeth, and visualized herself on the empty tracks. When she opened her eyes, she was there; sweat dripping down her face, stomach eating itself ragged. She didn’t think she could teleport again even if she had to. Not unless she got some food in her, closed her eyes, and took time to refill her well.

  The railroad sat on an incline that appeared to split the town in half. On the other side, made somewhat visible by sodium-vapor streetlights, was a series of much nicer-looking houses, demure yards with fences and untrimmed hedges and skeleton trees, while this side of the tracks constituted impoverished apartment complexes, one-wheel tricycles and broken down Fords and cobwebbed tarps amok in yards all cloaked in dense shadow; warehouses with broken windows, and potholes in the roads.

  She placed the case down in the middle of the track’s beam and, expecting it to take a while for a train to arrive, looked for a place to sit. “Ow!” her hand caught a thorn from a bramble of little black and red berries. She hissed and sucked the thorn out of her finger; they weren’t as calloused as they once were. She bet Matty’s hands were no longer those dainty things if they were destined to become anything like hers. They were sort of big and manly, like Franklin had said. She hid them from herself.

  After what seemed a small eternity the train light came down the line in the newly formed fog, like a floating eye, burning through the phosphorus clouds of Hell. She picked herself off the tracks and waited, waited, waited. It was still a way out when somebody grabbed her arm. She tried screaming but he covered her mouth so only a shrill whistle could find the night air. He slowly released his hold when she realized who it was, and stopped struggling. She hit him a few times on the arms before he clutched her hands still. “You scared the absolute dung out of me,” Clementine whispered. “Dang you, Jake.”

  “I’m sorry, I was trying to catch up to you, but you didn’t hear me! Then that cop went after me and I had to use my hourglass. Then– I don’t know what– You were just gone—”

  “I thought you some perv, Jake. You can’t sneak up on a woman like that!”

  “None of that matters, Clem. Where is the briefcase?” He grabbed her shoulders and shook, shot a glance at the oncoming blinding train. “Clementine!” She tried avoiding his gaze, but when he yelled like that she felt forced to look. “We need it!”

  “No, we don’t! We can figure something else out. We can–”

  “You don’t understand! They know everything about us, Clemmy. Everything. Our addresses, your brother’s name, about Jane and the Diggerys. They knew intimate things they shouldn’t—couldn’t have known.”

  She looked into him to see the truth, and when she found it there she glanced shamefully towards the tracks. Jacob darted for the suitcase so fast that rocks shot out from under him, jacket flapping behind him. The train horn blared and engulfed him in screeching light, closing in fast. He wasn’t going to make it, the case was too far down the track. The horn blared again. She teleported in front of the briefcase, feeling the heat lashing at her back from the approaching mechanical beast. In one swift motion she grabbed the case and Jacob. In her panic and lack of energy, she couldn’t visualize properly, resulting in them teleporting harshly, falling farther up the track. They rolled off on opposite sides just as the train soared by. Her knee busted. Jacob landed into the bramble of berries with a sharp cry, heard even over the train.

  But the briefcase… where was it?

  The briefcase had broken open and it was on her side. She scrambled over to it, digging through the debris. The four vials. She took one in her hand; the silver liquid dancing in its container, cold to her touch. She contemplated breaking them. One by one… End this pursuit… Jake, bull-like image broken up by the gaps in the passing train, sinew in his neck nearly ripping out of his skin, tried to scream at her but it was barely a muffle over the bellowing horn. But she saw his fear and thought clearly about what he had said. They knew where Matty lived. Jane. Her arms fell to her side. The last train car, which carried jostling fog lanterns casting the trees and telephone poles into strange shadows, finally passed.

  What had she been thinking? What would destroying these vials have done? It must have been her tired delirium that thought this to be a viable solution to an unsolvable problem.

  She was sitting cross-legged when Jake reunited with her. He took the vial from her hand and kissed the glass passionately, staring at it as if he was in love. Then they both became aware of the faint green glow emerging from the rubble. The drop had opened a false bottom in the briefcase. Jake dug it out, and held the device in his hands; a small black box, no bigger than a matchbook. “How they tracked us,” he said, defeated. “They knew. They knew all along.” The discovery took all of Jacob’s celebratory expression with the wind.

  It was beginning to rain. A wave of explosive anger took over Jacob and he held the tracker high above his head to throw on the ground.

  “You ain’t thinking,” she said morosely. His chest was heaving, cheeks beet red. “What good would that do us now? We’ve already been found. You said it yourself, they know where our families are. All destroying that would do is warrant another visit to make sure we ain’t running off with their product.”

  His countenance softened, but his ego was still wounded. “So, what– what? This was all some test? They tracked us using this device but couldn’t find the vials while we were in Whiteaker. How does that make sense?”

  “I don’t know. It don’t, really.”

  “Maybe something about the wheel well was throwing off their frequency as they got close to it.” He was pacing now. “And because it was on the street they couldn’t exactly rifle through the van without causing alarm.”

  “They had a nomad, an extremely skilled one that could have taken the van at any point without drawing much attention.”

  “True,” he said, finger bouncing on his lip. “Say they took the van and didn’t find the vials. Then what? Someone would have taken our spot and they’d have no way to reset the trap.”

  “All I know is we need to give them the vials back.”

  “No. We lose all leverage if we do something stupid like that. For now– I don’t know, I guess the best thing to do would be to– Would be–”

  “Play it smart,” she said, mimicking something he would normally say. “Play along. You used to say that ‘he who knows when to wait will win.’”

  “It’s:‘He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.’ And Sun Tzu said that, not me.”

  “Sun who? You said you said that.”

  He stopped pacing, squinted. “I never said that.” She went to continue arguing but he erupted with, “It doesn’t matter! There’s no amount of waiting that will save us. No amount of outplaying, or conning. I mean how can you not see that? Am I the only one with a functioning brain here?” He aggressively tapped his skull.

  “I don’t know, Jake,” she said. “Maybe we oughta–”

  “No. Our families might as well be skewered on spikes by now.”

  This crushing realization hit her all at once. Her knees weakened. She sat back down, trying to breathe. “They know about our families. I mean—oh God. I’ve killed us all!”

  “Hey, no, no, no. Clem.” He knelt, trying to rub her back, but she shook him off and started away. “Come back! Let’s get out of this rain!” he yelled after her. She couldn’t breathe. Her entire body was exhausted, she felt like a being without form, like she could fold over, and slink down into the drainage slits. If it was raining, she barely noticed it. “It’s gonna be okay,” he said softly, reaching for her. “It will.”

  “Give me a dang minute!”

  Jake put his hands up in surrender and watched her stumble off and lay in some grass. He paced alone in the dark. She alone with her thoughts, a million thoughts and a million more. Eventually he joined her—the vials comfy at his side. The rain pattered lightly on the two shadowy figures. Two lonely headlights drove by.

  “We’ll figure this out,” he said, squeezing her hand. “You’re afraid to die. I am too.”

  “I ain’t afraid to die,” she said. “Death don’t scare me. But watching my loved ones die before I do, I don’t think I can handle that again. That’s just unbearable, Jake, and I’d rather kill myself than live through it. Really, I would.”

  “Okay,” he said, but he didn’t know what to do with that information, it seemed. “Okay. I understand, love. I promise you, everything will be okay.”

  “You keep saying that. How d’you know?”

  “Because we’re the good guys.”

  Were they? Once, yes, maybe. At least not villains. But the line blurred at some point. They were vermin, pillaging cities for scraps. And there was little morality in a rat.

  Jacob sat up, something jutting from his pocket. He pulled it out and gazed at it. The Umpqua National Forest pamphlet. Something sparkled in his enigmatic eyes; a sparkle always scared her. He slapped the pamphlet in his hand, excited by a potential prospect. When Jake said something under his breath, she asked him to speak up:

  “I said whatever was jamming their frequency probably did a pretty bang up job, right?”

  Her head was pounding, rhythmic, paining the left side of her face. “I dunno,” she said. “Does it matter?”

  “It could,” he said, introspectively. “They got a phone call from somebody right before shit got ugly. Called the whole thing off. But why, it don’t make no sense?”

  “We need to give the vials back,” she said, carefully, knowing where his thoughts were headed.

  “Sure, in a perfect world, I’d have a hankering to agree. But there’s no guarantee for us or our families afterwards. That ugly bastard, Jazz, he could kill us all in one swift motion. The man felled a tree without even lifting one of those damn bratwursts he calls a finger. A tree, Clementine. They know everything, and do I need to state the obvious?” They’ll cut us to pieces in front of one another? Torture us? Rip our fingernails off one by one and feed them to our loved ones?

  Clementine wiped her wet face, the hair out of her eyes. “We’ve been caught with our hands in the cookie jar. It was bound to happen at some point. So, we put away our dang pride and we get down on our knees and apologize!”

  “This ain’t got nothing to do with pride,” Jacob said sourly. “It’s about principle! I’m not comfortable giving away our only failsafe and that’s the end of the story. If you want to risk your family on a gamble, by all means, but leave mine out of it.”

  “I was under the impression you didn’t much care about them anywho.”

  “You’re right. My parents can burn in Hell. But Jane’s still got a chance at a good life,” he said with a rueful smile. “Look. I know, it’s bad, but listen, I have a plan. You may believe my plans to be a gamble, but do you believe in me? Do you?” She nodded slowly. “Good. See? Everything will be okay. You’re our wildcard. They don’t know what you can do.” And why, despite it all, did she want to believe him so badly?

  “I don’t know, Jacob,” she replied quietly. “I don’t know how you could know. I say we shouldn’t risk it. We apologize and we go our separate ways. I want to go back home.”

  Jacob sighed deeply, combing his wet hair back. “You’re too damn indecisive, Clem.”

  But she had nothing to say. He returned to her side. She sat watching the stars absorbed by the brooding rain clouds. She could barely see any of them now, only in brief spurts would they appear like celestial lifejackets and then the clouds would engulf the Earth into a darkness so deep that she felt the need to hold her breath.

  Jacob was right. Most of her life she had never made any choices for herself, and she had expressed that to him several times in their first meetings. Their relationship started strong. He listened, and he listened intently. He told her the things she needed to hear and listened; to be an ear was all she needed of him. Her father was dead. Her mother was a blind tyrant and dying and wanted to take Clementine with her. Her younger brother was her younger brother. She never wanted to burden the boy with much; it was all too much. So when Jacob arrived as a farm hand, a practiced one, he quickly filled in the dusty boots her father left behind, and he became a vent. If Jacob was upset by this, he did well to never show it. Every day he would spend time with her, helping where he was needed, and allowing her to express herself freely.

  Eventually, they kissed. It wasn’t a kiss either was expecting, and it wasn’t particularly romantic either. Jacob was leaning on a hay fork in the barn when it happened—the smell of horse manure gave a pleasant accent to their sweaty upper lips—yet, it was nice. From then on they became inseparable, but over time Jacob grew weary of her complaining about the life she dreamed of and worked diligently in instilling confidence in her to decide her own path.

  She expected the night she left to be one of her mother’s nasty ones. The kind where she would subtly belittle Clementine into feeling worthless; on those nights she would be left feeling drained of any energy, and only Jacob the next day could revive her spirit. No, the night she left was on one of her mother’s good days. Not her best, but a good day nonetheless, and her mother was sweet when she asked for this and that, and only rang her bell when it was necessary. On those days she could almost convince herself it was all worth it. Her mother held her hand that night as well—the hollow hand of a frail bird. She would never forget it. She didn’t thank her, never did that, but in the gleam of her cataract-clouded eyes, the way her lip trembled ever so slightly (medicinal scent clinging to the moth-eaten curtains, only a hope of light ever breaking in from that one miserable window), she was saying thank you.

  For her and for Matty. That’s what she repeated to herself over and over in those first days and weeks and months of leaving. Following Jacob was the only way. For her and for Matty. But it wasn’t enough.

  She still vividly remembered the night she left, though she often forced herself not to think of it. Her and Matty had been riding Taboo under the stars as she prepared to tell him she was leaving. Stars that didn’t look so dissimilar to the ones that shone above them now—black, covered by a dense mass, cloaked and coated by night and nothing for what seemed an eternity.

  She asked Jacob something that had been rolling in her mind ever since he had said it. “What makes us the good guys? I can’t fathom how we could be.”

  “Intention. Our intentions are right, just. All we want is a chance. That’s not so much to ask, is it?” He propped his leg up, turned over to face her. “I understand you’re afraid for your family, but there’s no such thing as a correct choice. All anybody could do is make an educated guess and hope to God it doesn’t explode in your face. Hell, there are people out there making every right choice possible. I mean law school, top grades, no debts. Boom, a construction worker accidentally drops a cement block right on their cranium on their way to their dream job. Splat. Sometimes, life, it’s just like that.”

  “How in the Sam-loving-heck is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Because you can’t keep second-guessing everything I do! If you do that then Noah and Kid are gonna do the same. Without a leader to lead there is no unification and everything falls to hem and haw.”

  “If I don’t then who will?” she asked spitefully. “Noah? He don’t care what we do as long as his belly gets full. Kid Black? Hah. The boy basically idolizes you and you treat him like dirt.”

  Jacob scoffed. “The only thing Kid idolizes is the male anatomy, and himself.” He shook his head, spit into the grass. “You know, when you want to, you are quick with your tongue, and it’s helping nothing. If you want to truly help then, by God, will you just– just back me up on something? It feels every choice I make comes with opposition.” She tried swallowing but her throat was shredded.

  “Sure,” she said, bleakly. Talking of Noah made her wish he was here to help convince Jake he’s wrong. Or maybe she just wanted to see him. Somehow she knew he would make her feel better about all this in some way or another. “Sure.”

  There was no stopping Jacob. He was going to do exactly what he wanted to do, and there was nothing she or anyone could do about it. As if to confirm that, he put the vials back in the broken case, the tracker in his pocket. “Come now. Let’s get this back in the wheel well.” He helped her to her feet, squeezed her shoulder, but that was the extent of his comfort. He basically raced back to the motel, mumbling, plotting all the way. “Damn Kid, always getting high at the most important moments of our life!” And: “I’ll squeeze the little rat's neck till he shits blood!”

  While being left in the dark (knee shot to heck from the fall), the last of the train’s horn could be heard screaming far down the depths of Wild Wood, and it reminded her of wood burning, crackling in a fire, and in turn, taking her back to a memory of tonight when she first started coming back to consciousness, the prototype still distorting her mind. Dreary, wavy.

  Vertigo and Jazz sat near the fire, remaining watchful of the other Nomads. Something loud was whipping around her, a hysteria of leaves and dirt and a mass of invisible energy, when slowly waking, on the outskirts of the fire’s range where shadows were wavering orange and black, was a tumor-riddled black dog staring at her from the forest’s border. Only she could see it. It was there for her. To take her. Then it unhinged its fanged mouth revealing bloody, bruised gums, and it began to laugh.

  She could hear the dog so vividly even now, cackling like the wood of her father’s pyre, whaling into the night like the stories he had told her of those lost Texan Apaches who danced and screamed and sang and cried, barefoot and under the moon.