Five survive, p.7
Five Survive, page 7
“Okay, good work everyone,” Oliver said, out of breath, like he’d had the difficult job there. A thanks would be nice. “Right, let’s get out of here. Reyna, where are the keys?” He held out his palm toward her.
“How?” Maddy asked him. “All the tires are blown out.”
“The RV will still move,” Oliver said. “Slowly, and it will likely cause irreparable damage to the wheels, but I think we have bigger problems right now.”
Why would there be gas on Red’s shoes?
“Reyna, keys!” He snapped his fingers impatiently.
She patted the pockets on her hoodie, at the back of her jeans, a look of horror dawning in her eyes.
“I don’t have them. I don’t know where they are.”
Red had seen her take them, after the four tires were shot out.
“What do you mean?” Oliver rounded on her. “You had them. You were driving!”
“I know, I know.” She ran her hands nervously through her black hair. “Maybe I dropped them when I was running, I don’t know.”
“Outside?!” Oliver was shouting again.
“Maybe, I don’t know, I’m sorry!”
“Well, who’s going to go outside and get them, Reyna?!”
“Nobody’s going outside,” Simon interjected.
“I’ve got them,” Arthur said. Nobody listened except Red. “I’ve got them!” he shouted over the others, pointing to the kitchen, behind the counter where Reyna had hidden. Arthur stepped forward and picked the keys up, rattling them to make the point. “Here,” he said, chucking them over to Oliver, who barely caught them, fumbling them against his chest.
“Okay, fine,” he said, shooting a quick “Sorry” over in Reyna’s direction. And Red couldn’t help but wonder: Who would Oliver have made go outside to get them?
“I’ll drive,” he said, passing his sister and his girlfriend on the way up to the driver’s seat. And Red hadn’t noticed before, but there was now a bullet-sized hole in the headrest, white stuffing escaping through the ripped plastic. Imagine if that hole was inside one of them. No, don’t, because then she’ll think of two bullets to the back of the head…right, see? And anyway, she needed to concentrate on thinking about why her shoes smelled like gas, and everything else.
Oliver settled down into the seat, cricking the bones in his neck. He cleared his throat. “I’ll get us out of here,” he said, like a promise or a threat. He pushed the key into the ignition and turned it.
The engine coughed, empty sputters one after the other. That sound you never wanted to hear.
“What?” Oliver said, staring down at the key in disbelief.
He tried again.
The engine gasped and spluttered, taking its dying breath.
“What?!” Oliver roared. He flicked his head to check the fuel gauge. “We’re out of gas. That doesn’t make sense. We filled up again at nine o’clock. It should be three-quarters full, at least. How is it empty?”
He punched the steering wheel. Again. And again. An inhuman sound in his throat.
“That’s what he was aiming for,” Red said, glancing down at her shoes, understanding now. “Not me. He was aiming for the gas tank.”
“What?” Oliver turned back, his face patchy and red.
“He shot out the gas tank,” she said.
“Why?” Maddy asked.
Red had an answer. The others probably did too, but Simon was the one who gave voice to it.
“So we can’t leave.”
The RV was going nowhere. And here they were, the six of them, trapped inside it, the wide-open nothing and the red dot waiting for them out there.
12:00 a.m.
Trapped.
Shut in.
Only thirty-one feet to share between them, that extra foot important enough not to round down.
“Why would he want to trap us here?” Maddy asked, her pupils too wide, dark pools eating away the color of her eyes. “What does he want with us?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver answered, pushing up from the driver’s seat, one more punch to the wheel for luck. “He probably lives around here, and we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I told you we should never have come down this road.”
“Like you predicted this was going to happen?” Simon said, a surprising note of anger in his voice, an unsteadiness to his tread. Red should get him some water. He needed to sober up, fast. His instincts were dulled, his reactions, and he would need those tonight.
“I said it was the wrong way and none of you listened!”
In the kitchen, Red opened the cupboard mounted high beside the microwave. She removed a glass and guided it to the shiny-clean sink, flicking on the faucet and filling it near full.
“We had no service. We were lost,” Arthur said, a forced calm in his voice that no one else had right now.
“Here.” Red handed the glass of water to Simon, telling him with her eyes to drink it. At least she didn’t have to hold the glass for him, like with her dad sometimes.
“It was Red,” Oliver said, not looking at her. “She insisted we come down this road. And you two.” He pointed at Arthur and Simon. “You three were navigating. This is your fault.”
Simon stepped forward, splashing some of the water on his shirt. The other patch had finally just dried. “By the same logic, I could say it was Reyna’s fault we got stuck here. Because she was driving and refused to turn around.”
“I couldn’t turn around!” Reyna said.
“Everyone, please!” Maddy slapped her hand on the dining table three times. “This is not helping. It’s no one’s fault we’re here. But we are, okay? And we have to work together to figure out what to do.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Simon said, near hysterical now. “Unless someone also happened to pack a rifle for spring break and we can snipe him back.”
Red mimed for him to drink up.
“Is there still no service?” Maddy said, answering her own question as she looked down at the lock screen on her phone. “Shit. Nothing.”
“Can’t you call emergency services without a signal?” Simon said, still not drinking. “I swear I’ve seen it in a movie before.”
It didn’t work like that, Red knew. She’d asked that question before herself, years ago on a family vacation in Yellowstone.
“Yeah, ’cause sometimes it comes up saying No service—emergency calls only,” Reyna added.
“That’s only if your phone can piggyback onto another network,” Red said, her mom’s answer now becoming hers. “There’s clearly no service from any network here.”
“Try it,” Oliver said, ignoring her. “Try, Maddy.”
Maddy unlocked her phone, her tongue tucked between her teeth as she concentrated. She brought up the keypad and carefully typed in 9-1-1.
She waited for a nod from Oliver, then she pressed the green button and raised the phone to her ear.
They waited. The seconds stretching into eternity as Maddy closed her eyes to concentrate harder. It was one of those things she did that made her Maddy. Like when they were ten and she thought you had to ring the doorbell every time you left or came home, even if no one else was in and you had the key. That shrill, insistent bell in one held note, standing outside the Lavoys’ house. Funny how Red could remember some things like that, yet she couldn’t remember to call AT&T. She wondered what were the things that Maddy thought made Red Red?
Maddy exhaled, her chest sinking. “Nothing,” she said quietly, letting the phone fall to her side.
Oliver swiped at her arm, grabbing the phone. “No network connection,” he read from the alert on the screen. “Fuck.” He dropped the phone back into Maddy’s hands, worthless to him.
Well, Red did say.
“Someone might have called the cops, though,” Maddy said, not ready to give up yet. “I know it’s late.” She glanced at her phone. “It’s four minutes past midnight, and most people are probably in bed. But someone must have heard the gunshots and called the police, right? There were farms and houses not too far back.”
“The shots weren’t loud,” Red said. “Even we couldn’t tell what it was at first. Just the sound of the tires bursting.”
“It’s a rifle?” Maddy doubled down.
But Red had heard these guns before, a memory she tried to push away. The three-volley rifle salute at the funeral. A line of officers in uniform, aiming over the flag-draped casket. The road beyond the cemetery blocked with what felt like every squad car in the city, top lights spinning, painting the world red and blue. Ready to aim. Fire. Three times. A crack like thunder, riding through the sky, shaking the bones inside you. And those had even been blanks. So loud. Unmistakable. Piercing through the bagpipes as they played “Amazing Grace,” which was funny in a way because her name had been Grace. The Lavoys should know; they were all there too. Catherine standing with one hand on Red’s shoulder, squeezing when the rifles went off. Red’s dad didn’t even cry, standing on her other side. No, he saved all his falling apart for after.
“Red?” Arthur said.
Oh no, they’d been talking without her.
“I think Red’s right,” Simon said, the glass in his hands only half full now. “It wasn’t even loud enough for us to know it was a gunshot. I think he must be using a suppressor.”
“A what?” asked Reyna.
“A silencer,” Simon explained. “And yes, all of my worldly knowledge does come from movies, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.”
“So you think nobody heard?” Maddy deflated even more, if that was possible. “Nobody called the cops?”
Simon shrugged. “I think we can’t count on it.”
“No, we can’t count on it,” Oliver repeated, picking up the sentiment, chewing on some silent thought. “We make our own luck,” he said to Maddy alone, a Lavoy expression that often got wheeled out. Which must mean that Red was terrible at making hers.
Maddy looked back at her brother, a new glint in her eye. “Make our own luck,” she said. “Well, if no one heard the gunshots, then maybe they’ll hear this.”
Before anyone could say anything, Maddy charged to the front of the RV, leaned across the driver’s seat and pressed her thumb into the wheel.
The horn screamed, rupturing the quiet of just-past-midnight. One long note, then four short bursts.
“Maddy?” Red said. She didn’t like her standing so close to that bullet hole in the driver’s seat. On the other side, the shade over the smashed window swayed in the wind, like a silent threat from the outside world. No, not Maddy.
Maddy leaned the heel of her hand into the horn, as though she could make it louder that way.
“Maddy,” Arthur said, a tension in his jaw as he eyed the broken window. “Maybe we shouldn’t—”
Three loud beeps cut him off.
“Someone will hear!” Maddy shouted, determined. “Someone will—”
Red felt it more than she heard it. A rush of air to her right. The shade shuddering, dancing against its fixings, a new hole ripped through it.
Maddy screamed.
“No, Maddy!” Red screamed harder.
The small window on the driver’s side must have blown out, a clinking of broken glass as it cascaded out onto the road, out of sight.
There was a hole in the black curtain hanging across it, at the top, only a foot above Maddy’s head. But she still had a head, eyes blinking at them all. It had missed her.
“Are you hit?” Oliver bounded forward, dragging his sister back from the cockpit.
“No, I…no,” Maddy said, shaking her still-there head.
Red took her hand, held on to it. If Maddy had been standing up straight, or a few inches back…well, it didn’t bear thinking about. And Red was good at not thinking about things like that.
“He really didn’t like you doing that,” Simon said, another wet patch on his shirt, the glass empty as he placed it back on the counter.
“No, he did not,” Red agreed.
“Right, okay, everyone,” Oliver said, pushing Maddy down to sit on the booth. “New rule. No one does anything without checking with me first. Not one thing unless it has been discussed with the whole group, okay?” He looked around at each of them for confirmation.
Red nodded.
“I won’t even take a piss without preapproval,” Simon said, holding up his hands. Red should refill that glass for him. She wasn’t sure there was a worse time to be drunk than right now.
“Right.” Oliver pushed himself up, half sitting on the table as the others gathered around him. A determined set to his jaw, like he knew he was the only possible leader here. Twenty-one years old, prelaw, a sister and a girlfriend to protect, a mom who would soon be DA. “We’ve already lost two windows, which is not good news. So, the first thing I want us to do is to board up those broken windows, for extra protection.”
“With what?” Reyna asked, shrugging her empty arms.
“We must have something. Everyone, check around the RV and in your bags and suitcases. Look for any resources we can use and bring them back to this table.”
“Resources?” Arthur asked.
“Things to help us survive. Something to cover the windows. Anything that could be used as first aid. Or as a weapon.”
“A weapon?” Simon snorted. “Yeah, that sniper won’t know what’s hit him when I slowly charge at him with my Gillette razor.”
Oliver ignored him. “Now. Five minutes, guys.”
No one protested, shuffling away from the table in various directions, knees bent, keeping their heads low. Simon and Arthur headed toward their bunk beds—Simon on the bottom, Arthur on top—and the bags they’d dumped there this morning. Oliver and Reyna pushed past them, drawing to a stop outside the closed bedroom door. The queen-sized bed beyond it, where they were supposed to be sleeping tonight. Red wasn’t sure anyone would be sleeping tonight.
“The window at the back is still exposed,” Oliver said to Reyna. “You crawl into the room, take cover against the back wall and lower the shade. I’ll hit the lights and close the door so the sniper can’t see anything.”
He wasn’t speaking to her in that soft voice anymore. But that was the first rule of leadership, wasn’t it: delegation. Still, Red couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked her or Arthur or Simon to cover the window for them instead, or gone ahead and been the hero himself. Reyna stared back at Oliver, like she couldn’t believe it either.
“Fine.” She swallowed.
“Okay, three, two, one.”
Oliver pulled open the door, and Reyna slipped inside on her hands and knees. She disappeared as Oliver reached in to switch off the light, closing the door after her.
He caught Red’s eye, watching, and gave her a grim nod.
A few seconds later, Reyna’s voice called through, “Okay, done!” and Oliver followed it back into the bedroom, flicking on the light, heading toward the closet and out of Red’s view.
“Red, come on,” Maddy said, pulling at her shirt and jolting her back.
Maddy stopped short of the sofa bed, her eyes up on the large overhead cupboards, where Red and Maddy had stored their bags. Getting them would mean standing right in front of the broken window. The shade was still breathing in and out, wind whistling through the ripped bullet hole, a faint trace of gasoline finding its way inside. Maddy’s hand shook as she studied the hole, looking back to where she had been standing to re-create the path of the bullet. Or that was what Red imagined she was doing; she knew Maddy and Maddy knew her.
“I’ll get the bags,” Red said, pushing Maddy aside, back into the safety by the table. She walked forward, crunching through the fallen glass, then raised one foot and stood up on the sofa bed. The fake leather squeaked against her shoes as she pushed up, her other leg hovering behind her. She opened the first cupboard, grabbing the dark purple side handle of Maddy’s new bag and swinging it out, muscles in her arms straining.
“How much did you pack?” she said, dropping the heavy bag onto the sofa, scattering more glass. Maddy darted forward to retrieve her suitcase, holding it in both arms, almost like a shield.
Red opened the other cupboard and reached for her bag, only noticing now that the seams were breaking at the side, loose black threads tickling her skin as she grabbed it. Dad wouldn’t like that; this was her mom’s old suitcase, Grace Kenny—Philadelphia still scribbled in the luggage tag at the top. One of the last pieces of her handwriting they had left. Not the time to think of that, though. Not ever the time.
Red stepped down with the bag in her hands, turning back to Maddy, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor between the door and the kitchen counter, unzipping her stiff, new bag. The zipper snarled as she pulled it around the corner.
Red brushed some glass aside with her foot and settled down beside Maddy, her back arching as she leaned against the door, buttressing the side of her suitcase against Maddy’s.
She unzipped it, pushing the top flap open so it slapped the floor of the RV.
“No sudden noises,” Simon called over his shoulder, annoyed.
“Sorry,” Red called back over hers. She stopped; Maddy was staring at her.
“This is crazy,” Maddy said quietly, shaking her head, pausing to bite down on her lower lip. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
