CHAPTER 24

They took I-40 from Barstow and stayed with it all the way into Arizona. At Kingman, they turned south onto 93 and started seeing traffic fleeing north from Phoenix, a trickle of headlights going God knows where.

The news on the radio was grim. Along the East Coast, the outbreak was spreading up from Florida at a staggering rate, and people were fleeing west as fast as they could go. Out west, California was in complete chaos, and a military effort to quarantine L.A. had been abandoned when troops there were overrun. Efforts around the Bay Area were more successful, though according to CNN those troops were expected to be withdrawn within the next few hours so that efforts could be focused in defending safe areas in Colorado. He listened to the reports and shook his head. The country was sucking into itself, withdrawing into its breadbasket, abandoning its coasts.

Robin stepped through the partition and took a seat behind him.

“Hey,” he said.

She leaned forward and rested her chin on his shoulder. Despite spending the last eight hours or so on the road, she still smelled nice.

“How is he?” he asked. After Barstow, Colin had raved violently before finally regaining a measure of his composure. But with the calm would come embarrassment over the cowardice he had shown back in Barstow, which he compensated for with more violence. Several times, Jeff had been forced to pull over so he could help to restrain him. Robin had been taking care of him since then, and from what Jeff saw, she had pretty much taken charge of things on the other side of the partition. Katrina Cummz and the other two blondes seemed to be doing everything she told them without question. And there hadn’t been any more screaming from Colin in over an hour.

“He’s calm now,” Robin said. “He’s resting. He’d be better if he could get some sleep, though. How about you? You okay?”

“I’m okay,” he said.

“You sure? Driving’s not a problem?”

“I’m okay,” he assured her. “The acid’s pretty much gone now. The trick is to keep focused on the road. The trouble is, I’ll start thinking about stuff and I’ll tune out for a while.”

“You want some company?”

Her face was serenely calm, though the red rimming her eyes told a different story. Looking into her face, he got a sense that this woman had her act together, and he was a bit ashamed at himself for being surprised by that. He’d always resented Colin and his friends for their arrogance, the sense of entitlement that came with their money and guaranteed futures. It made him feel like a charity case, like every handshake and introduction was a patronizing pat on the head. He winced inwardly now with the realization that he had looked on Robin in much the same way that Colin and his friends had treated him.

“Jeff?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, and shook himself. “Yeah, some company would be great.”

She pointed out the windshield. “The road.”

The bus shook as the tires drifted onto the rumble strips.

“Got it,” Jeff said. “I’m on it.” He got the bus back on the road and put both hands on the wheel and gave her a wink in the rearview mirror. “Got it,” he said.

She chuckled. “Great.”

She moved over to the edge of the seat so he could see her without having to look in the mirror. The road rolled on beneath them. An occasional headlight beam would light up her face, then slowly slide away, leaving her in darkness again.

She said, “So what does Mr. Jeff Stavers think about while he’s up here all alone, drifting off the road?”

“Hmmm?”

“You said you start thinking about stuff and you drift off. I want to know what that stuff is. What goes on in Jeff Stavers’s brain?”

“Not much of anything,” he said.

“That sounds like a cop-out to me,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

He watched the road in the pool of light from the headlamps and he was tempted to tell her that it was complicated. That there was so much it was hard to put into words. But that wasn’t the truth. He knew that. What he was thinking was pretty simple.

“I’ve got this feeling like we’ve crossed some kind of threshold,” he said. “There’s the world like it was, and then there’s the world like it is now. Or like it’s going to be. It’s still changing, still evolving. I know that. But I’ve got this sense that…that—”

“That we’ve been cut free of our pasts.”

The frustration he had felt at not being able to find the right words cleared from his face, and he looked at her with renewed surprise.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it exactly.”

She smiled at him.

“Why don’t you find a place to pull over?” she said. “You could use some sleep. We both could.”

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