Henry patted his hand. “Good. Now, if you had gotten up, where would you have been?”
With one last shout, the guns fell silent.
He glanced right and his vision slammed into the dead body. It wasn’t a doll but a girl. Not much older than his sister.
“Manny.” Wheelchair Henry snapped his fingers.
What? He jerked his attention away from the girl, er, doll. He grasped onto the older man’s question. “Um, I would have been above.”
“You would have gotten shot for no reason.” Wheelchair Henry grabbed the bench and pulled himself up a little higher. “And the niños would have been without their protector.”
The medic pressed bloody fingers against his earpiece and looked at them over his shoulder. “Everyone stay down. There’s still a few trigger happy yahoos that need to be rounded up.”
He sucked cold air over his teeth. “I panicked.”
How could he have been so stupid?
“You acted better than most untrained folks.” Henry lowered himself back to the floor. “Actually many folks don’t act at all. They just stay there like dolls waiting to be posed.”
He refused to look at her again.
“You’ll do better next time. I just taught you the steps to survive.”
Sure he might be alive, but all he did was lay there. The soldiers did the work. “You did?”
“Yep.” Wheelchair Henry picked up a Skittle. “The first part, stopping, that’s instinctual. Everyone freezes when the world turns upside down.”
Manny nodded. He had frozen like a chicken on the chopping block. “But then I thought of the niños and tried to reach them.”
“Thinking of someone else snaps you out of the freezing real quick. But you skipped steps two through four and rushed right into five—the action part.”
Cold washed over his skin. That one thing… “That almost got me killed.”
“Acting is good. It’ll save your life.” Wheelchair Henry rolled the candy between his fingers. “But you have to take the time to get there.”
“Time?” In a gunfight? Was the old man crazy? No one had that kind of time when bullets started flying.
“In survival situations, the brain will process everything at once. It will seem like times slows down. You’ve just learned how to process all that information.” Wheelchair Henry palmed the candy and marked each point with a finger. “Stop. Observe. Think. Plan. Act.”
He replayed what he’d done inside his head. “I didn’t plan.”
“No need to in this case. The niños were safe.” Wheelchair Henry wiped the Skittle on his flannel shirt. “A word of caution about plans though.”
He popped the Skittle in his mouth and chewed.
It had been lemon yellow. He eyed the floor. Purple. Bleah. Green. He reached for the treat.
Wheelchair Henry grabbed it first, bounced it against his palm.
He watched it jump up and down before dismissing it. The old man could eat the dirty one. Somewhere he had a half-full package. “What about plans?”
“Take ‘em out for a spin but don’t marry ‘em. You’ve got to be able to kick ‘em to the curb when they start running around on you.”
He nodded. Wheelchair Henry had deliberately eaten his favorite favors to teach him a lesson. “I won’t forget. Stop, observe, think, plan and act.”
The medic stood up and wiped his hands on his pants. “All clear. You can move back to your seats now and I’ll be around to check your injuries.”
“Good.” Wheelchair Henry offered him the candy.
Manny waved it away. “No, thanks.”
“Green’s my favorite.” He tucked it into his pocket and patted it. “Now help me up.”
Help him? Cold snaked down his spine. Had the old man been shot? Or did the fall break a bone?
“Relax. I’m fine.” Wheelchair Henry thrust out his hand. “Helping each other is what will keep us alive.” He jerked his head to the three dolls posed on the bench. “Touching another human being, laughing with them, gives us the strength and courage to live despite a broken body. Those who look only after themselves, they merely survive and not usually for long.”
Crawling over the folded tent, Manny wrapped both hands around the man’s wrists. Muscles burned across his back as he pulled him into a sitting position. The pain was good. He felt good. Alive.
Around him, the mass on the floor began shifting and sorting itself into individuals. Connie and Mildred unfolded, revealing his brother and sister underneath. An Asian man and a woman with the face of a dried apple moved aside to free the five-year-old twins. Lucia began gathering crayons. José smoothed the coloring books pages. None of them were hurt. None. Whispers bubbled from the mass as people helped each other.
“The niños are your reason for being, for going on when so many give up.” Henry straightened his wasted legs.
Manny righted the wheelchair. He had done things he never thought he would to keep them alive. “Sometimes I couldn’t think straight, then I’d get this image of them in my head, and my path was clear.”
The surly teenage boy set his bag of arrows on the seat and picked his way forward. “You need help?”
“Sure.” Henry crooked his arms, holding them up like a bird preparing to take flight. “Between the two of you, you should be able lift this old bag of bones.”
He took the offered arm. Sinew played like molten steel against his palm.
“Bend your knees now,” Henry coached. “Wouldn’t want you hurting your back, you’re gonna have to be our eyes and ears. Worse things are still to come.”
Worse? They’d just been shot at. People had died. And people were still dying of this anthrax thing going around. And the dog had run off.
“We can handle it.” Henry winked at him. “Together.”
Calm blanketed him, stilled his racing thoughts. Stop. Observe. Think. Plan. Act. He could do it. Jose laughed. The noise dispelled some of the tension. He would do it. No, they would do it. Him. Wheelchair Henry. The soldiers. Even the surly kid.
Together, they would survive whatever came their way.
Thunder boomed. The vibration traveled through the truck, shaking the foundation he stood on.
Shit. What if God took that as a challenge?
Chapter Six
“The explosion could have another explanation.” Audra tasted the lie as the words left her mouth. The bullet holes and blood art on the side of the busses drew her attention.
Eddie’s snort sounded hollow in his respirator. “Didn’t you learn anything from Casa Grande?”
She straightened. The ambush at Casa Grande wasn’t her fault. She’d told them not to stop for hitchhikers. God, why had she listened to her mother? Why had she taken charge? For a teacher, she seemed incapable of learning.
On her right, Tina set her Louisville Slugger on her shoulder. Her blue-black pony tail wiggled down the back of her AC/DC tee shirt and scabby knees peered from under her shorts. “She told us to keep going. If we’d stopped like you wanted, we’d have been executed on the side of the road like the others.”
Aiming his shotgun at the ground, Eddie towered over the petite Asian girl. “My brother was on that bus! We could—”
“That is enough.” Audra’s soft word snapped like a bear trap, cutting off the argument. “We have only a few weapons and barely any ammunition. We would have been slaughtered just like bus four-five.”
Eddie swiped at his damp eyes. “My brother was fourteen. My responsibility.”
And sweet, with a smile that practically tucked the corners of his mouth into his ears. She sucked air into her lungs but the constriction didn’t ease.
“I knew everyone on that bus.” Jacob. Mary. Roddy. She’d nursed them all back to health. Then she’d pressed the gas down while they lined up on the side of the road, heard the bang of the guns, and watched them fall. “Every one. Every age.”