“Okay,” he said, “we need to stop.” Jake was too exhausted to offer any disagreement. The adrenaline-fueled night on the run and the gunfights had taken almost everything from him both physically and emotionally. He pulled the truck off the road, killed the engine, and fell back in his seat. Cal did the same, after looking behind to see Louise fast asleep on the back seat. Closing his eyes, exhaustion soon took him too.
Saturday 10 a.m. – Outside Newark, New Jersey
Cal woke with a start, dragged from sleep by something he couldn’t yet figure out. Looking over at Jake, he saw that their driver was still asleep and slumped against the window. He realized that the sound which had alerted him to something being wrong, which had dragged him from unconsciousness, was the panicked clicking of the rear door handle and rapid breathing with it.
Spinning in his seat, he startled Louise who was trying desperately to open the door but uncomprehending that they were locked, and Jake was sat in front of the controls to release them. On seeing Cal, Louise snatched up the compact pistol next to her, Jake’s backup weapon which he had never taken back from her, and pointed at his face.
He threw both hands up in a movement so rapid that he woke Jake with a start and prompted him to swing his head left and right looking for a threat outside the steamed-up glass of the cab, only to realize that Cal’s eyes were fixed on the back seat. Spinning to look, he froze as the terrified face of Louise stared at them over the top of his own gun as she switched her aim in turn. Both men started to speak at once.
“Louise, it’s okay—” said Cal.
“What the hell?” was Jake’s response.
Louise said nothing. Her mouth moved as though she wanted to speak but hadn’t done so in so long that the ability to converse was evading her. Her brow furrowed in what looked like severe confusion. The little finger of her right hand, clamped so tightly around the stubby pistol grip that her knuckles showed white, twitched involuntarily. She glanced around, looking out of the windows to try and make sense of what she saw. She still couldn’t speak and looked more and more like her panic and frustration would cause her to squeeze one pound of pressure too much on the trigger of the compact Glock in her hand. Her skin was pale but appeared wet with a sheen of sweat over her face, and the shakes competed with the twitching of her fingers to totally transform the woman they had fled with—that Cal had spent two days with—into someone they didn’t recognize. Nor, did it seem, that she recognized them.
Slowly, Jake opened his door and activated the central locking to produce a click from all four doors. Louise didn’t register this other than to look at the source of the noise, which made no logical sense if she wanted to escape the confines of the truck. Jake slipped his legs and body from the open door, never taking his eyes off her, but she didn’t react to him. Cal glanced at Jake, then did the same out of the passenger side. Louise stayed staring forwards, not responding. Both men stepped carefully away from the truck, neither of them understanding the sudden change in her behavior. She had been distant ever since the hotel, but then she had shot and killed someone about to kill Cal. She had been quiet throughout their adrenaline-fueled flight from New York, and was almost catatonic when they had reached the far side of the Hudson River, but now they were faced with what seemed like a completely different person. Jake snapped his fingers for Cal’s attention, then motioned for him to go to the rear side door which was furthest away from her. He stepped carefully toward the side she was sat on, and spoke to Cal.
“Open it, carefully,” he told him.
He did, and Louise’s eyes turned slowly toward him as she still held the gun tightly pointed forwards at the windshield.
Jake stepped close, snatched the door open and clamped a hand hard over the top of the gun, trying to block the topslide from working even if she pulled the trigger. He pulled the gun easily from her grasp as she turned her head toward him and recoiled, letting the gun be taken from her hands. She still seemed utterly bewildered about what was going on.
“Louise!” Cal said, making her slowly turn her head back toward him and stare with seemingly unseeing eyes. “What’s wrong?”
She didn’t answer, just stared at him blankly wearing a confused look of anger.
“She doesn’t look so good,” Jake said. “Has she got any medical conditions?”
Cal had to admit that he didn’t know. Hell, he barely knew the girl having only just met her.
“Louise,” Jake said as he checked the chamber of the Glock and worryingly found it charged with a reflective piece of brass before holstering it back under his arm, “can you understand me?” he said slowly as though talking to an infant or a non-English speaker. She stared at him without responding. The two men looked at each other and Jake shrugged.
“Could be something medical,” he said, “could be shock…”
“It’s like she’s sleepwalking,” Cal said, seeing an instant reaction to his words on Jake’s face.
“Wait here with her,” he said, turning on his heel and jogging toward the rest stop. He stopped at a vending machine and dug in his pocket for change, then stopped and—for the first time in his life—knowingly committed a crime. He put his heavy boot straight through the glass front, and used the barrel of his pistol to knock away the shards sticking out at sharp angles. He grabbed a handful of candy bars. Jogging back to the truck he spilled the contents of his arms onto the driver’s seat, unwrapped a candy bar and handed it tentatively to the girl.
“Eat something,” Jake said, “please?”
Almost zombie-like in her twitching movements she took the bar, but glanced back and forth between Cal and Jake as though she still tried to understand what had happened. She ate, small bites and slow chewing, taking tense minutes to finish it. Jake unwrapped another and handed it to her, this one going down in half the time.
“Where are we?” she asked in a small voice, finally.
Cal and Jake glanced at each other, the relief evident on both of their faces that she seemed to be coming out of whatever state she had lapsed into.
“Newark,” Jake said. Cal realized he didn’t know where Newark was.
“My bag,” Louise said quietly, looking left and right forlornly.
“You left it at the hotel, we had to run,” Cal told her.
“I need my bag,” she said again, “my insulin kit.”
Both men sagged with sudden understanding. In their flight from Manhattan in a wash of adrenaline, of the gunfights and the fear of bombs and mushroom clouds, they had run with the clothes on their backs. Realizing now that her blood sugar must have dropped dangerously low, but was masked by the adrenaline, and had fallen far beyond even low levels for normal behavior when she slept, Louise had fallen into a hypoglycemic state and woken up without the first clue where she was and what had happened.
As her faculties slowly returned, the sugar in the food being absorbed into her bloodstream, they filled her in on the events of the last few hours. She listened in silence, glancing between the two of them as they picked up the story from their own perspectives, until the events caught up to where they were now: tucked away from the main streets of Newark having caught a short sleep.
“We’ll find a pharmacy or something,” Cal reassured her, “first priority.”
But the first priority was now escaping. Muted crumping noises battled against the barely perceptible changes in air pressure, but the flashes of light on the eastern horizon was unmistakable. Cal instinctively looked up, sensing more than thinking that the explosions were falling from the sky rather than detonating at ground level, but he could see or hear no planes. As New York city on the far side of the distant river was ravaged first, the bombs then fell on the western side of the Hudson, and began dropping closer to them.