Chapter 307: Two Minutes.
"Professor’s going to be fucking thrilled." A voice from the front, riding high on it. The words came through the seats muffled, almost cheerful.
The car was moving. That was all we had. No windows, no light, just the vibration of the road coming up through the metal into my shoulder and the smell of bodies packed into a space built for luggage. Sweat. Blood. The sour edge of whatever Trapper had been drinking.
The air itself felt used up, recycled between us in short, shallow pulls. My bound wrists pressed into the small of my back. The wheel arch dug against my other shoulder every time the car took a corner.
"I honestly thought we were coming back with nothing," another one said. "A whole hour. I was already working out what I’d tell him."
"And you tricked that fool as well."
They all went, the whole front of the car laughing at once. The laughter bounced around the confined space of the boot and came back thinner, uglier.
Beside me, Trapper shifted his shoulder.
Then made that sound people make on their way back up out of unconsciousness—thick and confused, somewhere behind his broken nose. A wet, involuntary noise. His leg twitched against mine once, then again.
"Bram," Venna whispered. The word was barely air.
"Shut the fuck up, bitch." Linn didn’t even let her finish the word. The hostility in it was absolute, the kind that had been sitting ready since the street. "Can you not keep your mouth shut for one second? One."
"Hey. Hey—"
"Don’t say a single fucking word, zombie."
She screamed it, and the car stopped.
Both of us went quiet. The sudden absence of engine noise made the dark feel larger. Trapper’s wet breathing continued, uneven, filling the small space between the rest of us.
"I fucking told you to tape her mouth, bro." The voice came through from the front seat, tight with irritation. "I said it when we picked her up."
"We didn’t have tape."
"Then a shoelace. Anything. Tie that pointed mouth shut." The tattooed boy, and his voice had gone flat in a way I didn’t like—the particular flatness of a man who had already decided how much more noise he was willing to tolerate. "She’s been screaming at us for thirty minutes. She might be worse than the one Professor’s already sick of."
A door opened. Boots on the road, coming down the side of the car. Soft, deliberate. The sound of someone who expected the four of us to still be exactly where he’d left us.
They stopped at the back.
The boot came up and the street light poured in on all four of us, and after that long in the dark it went through my eyes like a blade. White. Absolute. Tears started before I could stop them. The light turned the interior of the boot into a small, overexposed stage—Venna’s blue hair, Linn’s furious eyes, Trapper’s blood-smeared face, the tight press of four bodies against metal and each other.
The tattooed boy stood over us. The street light behind him turned his silhouette hard-edged. The ink on his neck was a dark, dense shadow against the brightness.
"I’m saying this once." He looked at Linn and nobody else. The stake was back in his hand, hanging loose at his side. "Behave."
He reached up for the lid.
"Fuck you."
The boot came down hard enough to bounce. The metal rang. The sound of it went straight through us and brought Trapper all the way up.
"Where am I?" His legs came alive against mine, kicking, hunting for a floor that wasn’t there. The motion was pure panic, no direction, no control. "Where the fuck am I—"
"Calm down, you zombie prick." Linn lost whatever she’d been holding. The words tore out of her. "You’re kicking my tits, you absolute—"
And then all of it went at once.
Trapper shouting, Linn shouting over him, both of them thrashing in a space with no room to thrash in. Elbows found ribs. Knees found soft places. The boys in the front hammered the back of the seats and screamed at us to shut up—threats coming through the metal from three directions, overlapping, none of them landing. Nobody listening. Nobody stopping. Everybody’s dignity riding on being the last one still yelling. The boot became a single continuous noise with four throats and six fists in it.
Then the car moved again. The engine note rose under the shouting and the motion pressed all of us harder against the metal.
Can you hear me?
Venna’s thought arrived clean through the middle of it. She wasn’t speaking to me. She couldn’t. She was thinking at me and hoping the thing I’d told her about in the afternoon was real.
I couldn’t answer. Speaking meant shouting over four people, and I’d rather nobody in that car remembered I existed. My bound wrists flexed once against the rope and found no give.
If you can hear me, move your leg against mine.
We were packed in so tight I could barely find the boot. I worked my knee sideways an inch at a time—slow, deliberate, fighting the press of Trapper’s weight and the angle of the wheel arch—until my shin came against somebody’s calf and pressed. The contact was small and absolute.
Good. You can hear me. A pause. The channel stayed open. So what do we do?
It was a good question and I didn’t have an answer.
We were folded into the boot of a car being driven by boys who had just put a stake unto a man’s face for the price of a coin, and at the end of the road was Bagins. Building an army. Collecting people by the hour, in hunting shifts. The vibration of the road continued through the metal into my shoulder. Trapper’s wet breathing continued against my left side. Linn’s anger continued in short, furious bursts that no longer had words in them.
King said he’s raising a force to fight the infected. That’s not an army. That’s a delivery.
And he’s seen my face across a classroom for days.
The car slowed. Then stopped.
The noise came down with it, everyone reading the same signal at once. We’d arrived. The sudden absence of motion made the dark feel heavier. Outside, new sounds—voices, footsteps, the particular organised chaos of a place that had been running all night and was still going.
"Two minutes." One of them, and there was real panic in it. The voice cracked on the second word. "We’ve still got two minutes—"
Doors flew open. Feet hit the ground running, three sets of them, moving away from us fast. The sound of boots on asphalt receded in a hurry. They didn’t come to the boot. They didn’t even think about the boot. Whatever the clock was, being late for it frightened them more than four tied people did.
Then the remaining doors opened, unhurried this time, and boots came down the side of the car toward us. Soft. Measured. The particular patience of someone who already knew what he was going to find when the lid went up.
The boot opened.