H10N1 (9 page)

After he climbed back down, he disappeared along the side of the van. Taeya decided not to push the surgical mask. Instead, she crawled over to the driver’s seat to see what he was doing. He was at the back wheel, taking off the air valve cap. He was going to let some air out of the tires. She fought the temptation to ask how far they could drive with under-inflated tires.

When he came back to the door, his top lip curled away from his teeth so she hopped back into the passenger seat. He turned on a small monitor in the dash console and called up the schematics for the van’s tire pressure. Then he was gone again.

Skittering from wheel to wheel, he’d let out some air, then stand back to see if the van was low enough. Now why couldn’t he just ask her to help?

Once Rick was satisfied that he had clearance, he drove slowly into tunnel. At one point Taeya heard the AC unit on the roof scrape along the tunnel ceiling, but it didn’t sound like it got knocked off. At the far side of the tunnel, he hopped out.

She felt like a kid tagging along. When he turned on her, she drew up short, then showed him the gun in her waistband. What was he going to do? Order her to stay in the van?

Rick blew a lot of hot air, but she didn’t imagine he could fill four tires. The next thing she knew, he was crawling under the van. He came back out with an air hose.

She couldn’t help laughing. “Are you kidding? They put an air tank under there?”

Rick snarled back, “They’ve made a lot of modifications since your old man got whacked.”

Now why did he have to be so malicious? Sure, he’d lost a wife; she’d lost a husband. For the rest of their lives, they’d both be encountering people with a story to tell. Rick needed to learn some tact.

“Why didn’t you just leave me back there with Bobby Ray and Lily?” she asked.

“I’ve been asking myself that same question.”

She thought about reminding him that he’d given away her transportation, but another thought niggled in the back of her mind. Why
hadn’t
he left her?

She could have ridden with Bobby Ray and Lily to Cape Charles and gotten a job on staff.

More significantly, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of that particular alternative. Maybe because the idea of subsisting in one of FEMAs canvas tents or temporary trailers didn’t hold the allure of the accommodations in Arizona. If she got that far.

She chased away her doubts with a flip of her hand. “Well, that’s water under the bridge. So why don’t you fill me in on your schedule so I understand what the rush is all about.”

He turned and cocked an eyebrow at her. “I’m expected at the D.C. Center at eight a.m. But the last couple weeks, I’ve been showing up late, so they won’t start worrying until maybe eight-thirty or nine. D.C will call New York to see what time I left. But Roger won’t know. So they’ll dick around, maybe think about rewinding the videotape. That could take until noon, if I’m lucky.”

“But then they’ll see both of us getting into the van and know what’s going on.”

For almost sixty seconds, he’d been civil. She knew it couldn’t last. Just like clockwork, his demeanor turned nasty again. “I was supposed to be on the parkway by six, but with all your bullshit finding a car, and then stopping to play Mother Teresa—”

“Hey, you wanted to help them as much as I did.”

“—I’ve only got about a two and a half hour lead.”

It took a second for Taeya to follow his train of thought. “Because they’ll come looking for you.”

“Yeah, right. I’m such a valuable employee.”

“I mean the van.”

“The brilliant doctor has figured it out.”

“But the last place they would look is on the Blue Ridge Parkway.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

“And you disabled the tracking device.”

He threw a hand in the air. “Jesus, no wonder you make the big bucks.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rick expected Sanchez to make some snarky comeback, but she heaved out of her seat and went to the back of the van. He could hear her rustling around, but she had her back to him, so he couldn’t see what she was doing.

A few minutes later, the aroma of food filled the van. Damn, what he wouldn’t do for a nice plate of beef stew. When he was fixing that meatloaf for Mountain Boy and his first cousin, he’d been tempted to help himself to a bite.

Sanchez dicked around in the back for a couple more minutes before she came back with a hot plate of something. Rick waited for her to sit down and eat it right in front of him. She held the plate right under his nose to torture him. His stomach growled.

“You’ve been driving all night,” she said. “You’re starving. Why don’t you at least let me drive while you eat? Then if you think I can be trusted, maybe you can get a couple hours’ sleep.”

He didn’t need her help driving. He had this trip planned for a single driver and that’s what he was going to do.

Her hip cocked out to the side like women do when they’re pissed. “Don’t you ever get tired of being Mr. Macho?”

Two hands gripped his stomach and wrung it tight. That was exactly what Michelle called him. Mr. Macho. He was getting waterboarded with all these memories.

His energy just seemed to drain away. And Sanchez made it worse by waving that hot food in front of him again.

“Fine.” He pulled over and let her drive. But he never took his eyes off the road while he tore into that meatloaf.

After a couple miles, the Doc settled in. “This isn’t much different from a med-evac truck,” she said. “A little tricky on the curves, but hey, no traffic.”

Fighting the urge to lick the last of the gravy off the tray, he set it on the floor and opened the bottle of water she’d given him. His eyelids drooped, and he kept slugging water to stay awake. At one point his head jerked and he knew he’d dozed off. Hopefully, the Doc hadn’t noticed.

He woke with a start again, completely disoriented because his seat had been reclined all the way back. Wiping drool with one hand, he fumbled at the seat lever with the other. According to his watch, he’d been asleep for over two hours. Sanchez looked over and smiled.

“Have you seen any choppers?” he growled.

“No.”

“Were you looking?”

“Every chance I got,” she said dryly.

He dug into a small compartment for the National Park Services map of the parkway. “Where are we?”

“I saw a sign a little ways back for James River.”

Unfolding the map, he started at the top and trailed down. Damn, she’d gone a pretty good distance. “So we’ve got another two hundred fifty miles. What’s your speed?”

“Sometimes I can get up to fifty-five, but usually more like forty-five.”

He checked his watch. Five hours. They were almost on target for his designated stop and it would still be light out. It didn’t seem possible.

“So, you hungry?” Rick asked.

“I dined on some meatloaf a couple hours ago. Remember?”

No, he didn’t.

“Oh, what?” she cracked. “I’m not allowed to eat before your royal highness?”

Why did she always have a burr up her butt? He rolled out of his seat and went in search of a granola bar and more water.

As soon as he was back in his seat, she started jabbering about seeing deer grazing along the side of the road. And how she’d love to check out some of the trails along the route. Then she was off on some story about camping in Yosemite when she was a kid. Her mom and dad and brother had hiked a trail that zigzagged down the face of a cliff.

“And did you all sit around the campfire at night, hold hands, and sing Kumbayah?”

Her head tilted to the side. “Now what brought that on?”

“Let me tell you about the only road trip I ever took with my family. My grandmother died and left an old beat-up Buick LeSabre to my dad, but he had to go get it. So he loaded up four kids and my mom and dragged us all to Cincinnati. We didn’t have any money, so we all slept in the car at a rest stop. My mom made bologna sandwiches from this huge pack she toted in a cooler. The whole way there, my mom and dad screamed at each other. We didn’t play games or sing songs. We all just sat like little statues in the back seat, hoping my dad wouldn’t turn around and whap one of us in the head.

“When we got to Cincinnati, my dad knocked on the front door, demanded the keys, told his stepfather to fuck himself. Then we turned around and drove back to Utica.”

“Wow.”

Rick lashed out. “And don’t give me a bunch of crap about how sorry you are. The only reason I’m telling you this is so you’ll realize that not everybody’s life has been peaches and cream, okay?”

He watched Sanchez shut down like his sisters used to do whenever their father was around. Muscles in the face relaxed to show no expression, the eyes blank and focused far away. Why had his old man been so bitter? It wasn’t like he’d lost his wife and a beautiful baby boy. Maybe he was mad because he
did
have a family holding him down. One thing was certain. His dad lived his whole life as an angry son-of-a-bitch. Is that what Rick would end up doing?

No doubt the Doc was calculating how many miles to Asheville, where she could find her own car and get as far away from him as possible.

Rick drove the last couple hours, stopping for the night at a large tunnel in an area called Little Switzerland. Driving all the way through to the far side, he parked where he could see out but it would be difficult for a chopper to see in. He had no idea how long the Army would search, or how wide a grid they would set. Or even if they had the manpower to try. But he’d be damned if he’d get caught now, after all the bullshit he’d been through.

Sanchez hadn’t said a word all afternoon, just stared out her window at the passing scenery. As soon as Rick turned off the van, she grabbed her gun and opened the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

She barked like some grunt in the military, “To take a walk, SIR!”

Then she slammed the door.

Swell. He slung the M-16 over his shoulder and hopped out.

The woman was off like a shot and Rick had to trot to catch up with her. He expected her to tell him to buzz off but she never broke stride.

He had to admit it felt good. His muscles were tight, his back ached. She picked up the pace, swinging her arms, rotating at the waist.

The road curved ahead. “Let’s not get too far from the van, okay?” he said.

No reply. But when she got halfway into the curve she circled back. At a stand of trees, she stopped. “I need to make a detour here.”

“What?”

He got the head-tilt that was becoming familiar.

“Oh, okay.”

He was getting the call, too. Probably that meatloaf at lunch. “I’ll meet you back at the van.”

He took off to find his own grove of trees. The van’s portable toilet didn’t offer much privacy. Not with two passengers.

Once Sanchez climbed back on board, Rick rummaged through cases for two packs of beef stew. There was an awkward moment when they met in the middle of the van. He wanted to get up front to close the shutters. She said she wanted a bottle of water. They kind of danced around each other, leaning away to keep from getting close.

The steel shutters for the windshield clanged and Sanchez jumped. Then she wandered up front to watch the smaller shutters enclose the side windows.

“Nice.”

He refrained from pointing out that her old man would probably still be alive if his mobile unit had had shutters like these.

“Yeah,” he said. “This baby even has covers for the wheel wells. Keeps the riff-raff from tampering while you sleep.” Rick demonstrated by turning the switch that lowered the wheel shutters. One of them made a whining noise as it dropped. Crap. Now he’d have to check that in the morning.

After she finished eating, Sanchez picked up the park service map. “So, are you taking the parkway to the end, or just to Asheville?”

“Asheville. I want to start heading west on Interstate 40.”

Rick tossed his empty plate in a small chute behind the passenger seat, then unlatched the cot on the right side of the van and folded it down. A mesh pouch held a pillow and blanket. He turned on an overhead light like they have on airplanes, just to demonstrate it for Sanchez.

While communing with nature back in his grove of trees, Rick had decided that maybe
he
was a shit. Did he really think Sanchez was personally responsible for Richie’s death? He’d been trying to punish her like he thought she did, ever since she’d climbed into the van.

The weird thing was, when she brought all those memories crashing down on him, he was glad to see Richie again. Like running into a long-lost friend you haven’t seen in ages. Maybe people were right—talking about a loss helped. But it was kind of like ripping a band-aid off your leg. You know it’s going to hurt like hell.

Sanchez opened her own cot across from him and sat Indian-style with the map book in her lap. Maybe it was time to cut her some slack.

“I figure I can make it to Arkansas tomorrow easily,” Rick said. “Unless you want to take a tour of the Biltmore Estate.”

Her mouth puckered. Instead of looking up, she flipped to Arkansas. So much for trying to lighten the mood.

“What’s after Arkansas?” she asked.

“That’s it.”

Now he had her attention. She tore those dark eyes away from the book and stared at him, waiting for information.

He told her that his friends Devin and Judith lived in Arkansas, then waited for a barb about him actually having friends. But she just nodded, her body rocking slowly as she went back to studying the map.

“Where?”

“Southeast of Little Rock.”

More rocking. “Through Memphis?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can we stop and see Elvis’s grave?”

Was it possible the Doc was ready to call a truce too, or was she just a dweeb? Her mouth loosened into a crooked smile, and her eyes rolled up to his. Damn, some poor sucker could get in a lot of trouble if he read that expression the wrong way.

Rick lay on his side facing her and propped his head on his hand. “Devin’s one of those computer wizards. The military got their hooks in him and the next thing I heard, Dev was dreaming up robotics and combat maneuvers like something out of Star Wars. He’s the one who put the kibosh on that whole Syrian mess.”