It wasn’t long before they came to the clear outline of an SUV. It had skidded off the highway and been unable to recover or had simply become overwhelmed pushing against deep snow. Nate scanned the horizon in all directions. There was no sign of any living creature—of the two- or four-legged variety—in sight. He dismounted, his feet landing in a cloud of deep powder.
“Whatcha doing?” Dakota asked, now experiencing the full brunt of the wind and not liking it one bit.
“Wanna see something,” he replied enigmatically. He used a gloved hand to clear the snow covering the driver’s side window. The glass inside was opaque with frost. He tried the door handle and found that it worked. He stopped short, shuddering when he saw what was inside. A young woman in her early twenties was curled up in the passenger seat next to her newborn baby. Both of them were frozen solid. Icicles dripped from the tip of the woman’s nose.
“What is it?” Dakota asked. Mercifully, her position on the horse meant she was too high to see what was inside.
“Nothing,” he lied.
The keys were still in the ignition. He turned them. The dashboard lit up, but the engine wouldn’t start. The mother had likely let it run until the tank had gone dry, waiting for a rescue that never came. Since leaving Byron, they must have passed over a hundred or more vehicles trapped along the way. How many more times had such a harrowing event played out along this stretch of road alone? He located two USB ports.
“Give me your phone and your charger,” he said, his hand out.
“Huh?”
He bobbed his hand impatiently. The sight not three feet to his rear had affected him more than he cared to admit. It could just as easily have been Amy as a stranger. “Do you want your phone charged or not?”
She handed him what he asked for. Nate plugged in both phones and saw the lightning bolt indicate the devices were powering up. They wouldn’t stay here more than a few minutes, but every little bit would count.
With Dakota sitting in the saddle, her head was a few feet higher than the SUV’s roof. Nate noticed her eyeing something in the distance.
“You see someone?” he asked, the blood starting to pump a little faster.
She shook her head. No, not someone, something.
Nate opened the SUV door a little wider and used the nerf bar to prop himself up. His eyes swept over the terrain before them for a few moments before he saw it. The distinctive back end of a yellow school bus, tipped over on its side.
Chapter 32
Somehow the muscles in Nate’s face, numb with cold, went completely slack. The phones had only been charging a few minutes when he ripped them out and stuffed them in his jacket pocket. He then jumped back in the saddle, digging his heels into Wayne’s sides, shouting, “Rah. Rah!”
Wayne whinnied in protest, but ultimately obliged, moving forward as fast as the animal could carry them.
They were still fifty feet away and Nate was already searching for reasons this couldn’t be one of the evacuation buses from the Byron Middle School. It was too small. Too clean. Too fill-in-the-blank. He needed something, anything to make it not be so.
Soon, through the blowing snow, he saw that the bus’s emergency back door was hanging open. An accident of some kind had occurred, causing the bus to tip over. But the door meant at least some of the people inside had managed to get out. That was all he could make out from this distance. As they closed with the vehicle, he hopped out of the saddle with practiced ease, charging through powder near waist-high. He fought through it like a man in a heavy diving suit walking along the bottom of a lake. When he arrived, he clambered into the vehicle, looking for more proof it was a convoy from another school, maybe even another town. Given the vehicle’s strange orientation to the ground, he found himself walking along the windows. Several of them looked to have shattered on impact, filling the compartment with small mounds of snow. Dakota climbed in behind him. She was smaller, nimbler and far better suited for this. She hurried past him and stopped about three quarters of the way to the front. She turned back, her eyes filled with surprise and maybe something else.
Is that sadness?
Nate hurried over and saw what she was glaring at so intently. A man in his seventies, maybe eighties, sprawled on his side. He must have died from the impact and been left behind. The scene must have been terrifying, chaotic. Two seats on, Nate found something else, something that looked familiar—a black duffel bag with the image of a man wielding two silver pistols. With shaking hands, he unzipped it, rifling through its contents until he came upon a black t-shirt stenciled with the words ‘Battle Arena.’ Nate held it in his gloved hand, a range of emotions welling up within him before he stuffed the shirt into his pocket.
“Belong to someone you know?” Dakota asked, her voice soft, almost reverent.
“To my nephew. My family, they were in this bus when it crashed. My pregnant wife too.” One of his hands went instinctively to his stomach.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Dakota said reassuringly. But even she couldn’t completely hide the sliver of doubt she was feeling.
Quickly, they continued searching the rest of the bus. The only other casualty left behind was the driver. The guy was lying on the folding doors, still decked out in his District 226 jacket.
“Anyone you know?” Dakota asked, her gaze shifting between Nate and the driver.
Nate shook his head.
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
He wanted to tell her yes, wanted it more than anything he’d wanted in a long time.
“How many other buses were in the convoy?” she asked.
“Ten, maybe a dozen.” His mind was too chaotic right now to think straight.
“I’m sure they made it,” she said, overruling her natural pessimism.
Nate appreciated the effort. But he also wouldn’t believe his family was safe until he saw them with his own eyes.
Chapter 33
Two hours later, they reached the outskirts of Rockford. The wind-battered sign along the side of the road told them so. For decades, this city of a hundred and fifty thousand had been one of the beneficiaries of the nuclear plant in Byron. And now it was also one of its victims. But passing that sign didn’t mean they were out of harm’s way. The exclusion zone included the bottom third of Rockford itself, which put the rendezvous point another five miles north of here. Cutting through a major city was not Nate’s idea of a good time, either, especially one with Rockford’s reputation. It had recently been ranked among the top twenty worst cities in America with a crime rate four times that of the national average. After the chief of police was arrested last year on charges of drug dealing and extortion, it became harder and harder to tell the good guys from the bad. To make matters worse, after the rot in the force had been uncovered, most of the good cops had moved out. Finding police in this city who weren’t tied in some way to a criminal gang was harder than finding fur on a rattlesnake. Still, right now, none of that changed the necessity of what they were doing.
The path northward did offer some benefits. For starters, it would lead them right past the Javon Bea Hospital, the largest in the area. If Evan had been taken anywhere by ambulance, this would be the place. Along every mile of their journey so far, Nate had kept a careful eye out for the big boxy shape of an abandoned ambulance. Mercifully, he had not seen any.
Over the past few years, Nate’s PI work had been conducted almost exclusively in Rockford. That meant he knew the city well, regardless of whether or not it was covered in a suffocating blanket of snow. It had also been a particularly profitable time for him with job offers pouring in by the bucketload. Not surprisingly, the vast majority had been for possible clients in Chicago—and why not with a city of nearly three million? But he had turned down each of those offers just as quickly as they’d come in. Life was too short to be humping up and down the mean streets of a major metropolis on a fast track to hell. Rockford was a tough nut, no doubt about it, but when your job was done you could still reasonably expect to return home in one piece.