Page 12 of Heartbeats Amidst Chaos: Part 3
As Elio swung the car onto the highway and accelerated, Rissa grabbed the handle above the door, feeling suddenly sick to her stomach.
This is it,she thought.This is where I find out that all the warnings and misgivings I’ve been trying to ignore are true and I have gotten myself into the deepest shit possible.
She glanced once more at Elio, who was driving fiercely, silently, his face frozen into a glare.
Who is after him?she wondered.Who is afterus? Was it the “shadow gang” he mentioned after someone opened fire at the police? But how could they have found them at the resort? Andwhywas this all happening? If the police had suddenly shown up and come after them, she would have understood. But she seemed to be caught in the middle of some mysterious war with sides and motives and agendas she couldn’t comprehend.
How did it all trace back to Elio—and the bomb?
For arguably the first time since she had laid eyes on him in the hospital, moments before he had grabbed her wrist and insisted half deliriously that he “didn’t do it,” Rissa found herselfcompletely mistrustful of her gut feeling about the man sitting beside her. What if she had been wrong—about him, about everything—all along? What if she was now on the run with an actual terrorist? Had aided and abetted him all the way till now?
“I’m going to throw up,” she said. This time when Elio looked over at her, his face softened slightly. She watched as his chest rose and fell with a deep breath.
“I’ll pull over,” he said.
There was a rest stop just ahead. He slowed the car as he pulled in, parking well back in the parking lot next to another beater, a rusted white Civic. He and Rissa opened their doors and staggered out at the same time, moving in opposite directions.
Rissa leaned over and lost her dinner on the cracked pavement, feeling wretched and empty and angry. She was a doctor. She had seen things that made other people pass out from sheer disgust and hadn’t batted an eye. Her entire job was based on the ability to make wise judgment calls. And here she was, turned physically inside out by a series of apparently very bad choices.
Behind her, she heard Elio tampering with the Civic, and she felt no surprise when it suddenly sputtered to life.
She straightened up and turned around, wiping her mouth with her hand.
“Stealing another car?” she said flatly, and Elio looked across the top of it, astonishing her with a sudden, rakish grin.
“Unfortunately, it’s something I’m good at,” he said. His smile disappeared into a frown of concern as he noticed, apparently for the first time, that Rissa had actually been sick. “Are you okay?”
“No!” Rissa exclaimed. Her heart was pounding with relief that Elio was emerging from whatever fugue state had gripped him since they ran from the resort. “We just got attacked out of nowhere by a bunch of masked men,” she hissed. “And now we’re racing off to who knows where in a string of stolen cars, and you won’t talk to me! I’mnotokay. Elio, what is going on?”
“Shh.” Elio suddenly held up his hand, and Rissa listened, registering the sound of sirens a long way off.
“Quick, get in the car,” he said. She found herself complying, scrambling into the sagging, cloth seat, and pulling her seatbelt on before she’d even finished her thought.
Why am I still running with him?
Elio turned out of the rest area and crossed the highway, heading back the way they had come. In a different car, in a different lane. It was smart, she realized. They would pass right by, leaving a trail that seemed to lead in the opposite direction.
A trail for whom? The law or the lawless? And what does that make us?
She wasn’t so blind as to not realize that it was the same thing they had been doing from the very beginning. Suddenly, it justall seemed too real, and it no longer felt right. There were too many false leads to keep track of, and she wasn’t sure which direction they led.
She didn’t have her cell phone, having lost her bag early on in the chase. But she thought of the last text Reagan had sent her, after dubiously providing them with the number of the taxi from the police footage.
Girl, the minute you want out of there, call me. I’ll come get you.
Glancing over at Elio, Rissa felt that she was looking at him over a chasm of the unknown.
I want out of here. I do.Her heart ached to admit it, but she knew it was true. If she called Reagan, perhaps she could get out without turning Elio in. She didn’t know what kind of trouble he had gotten himself tangled in. All she knew was that it was becoming more than she could reason away. It was time to let him figure things out for himself.
Maybe Reagan had even been right from the beginning. Maybe everything Rissa had felt up until now was pure delusion and he was not everything she had never known she wanted in a man. Maybe he was just bad news.
She felt hot tears gathering in her eyes as she let herself think about it, and she gulped them down silently, hoping that Elio would not notice that she was crying over him.
Chapter seven
The blur of highway darkness, occasionally slashed through by the blinding headlights of other cars, whizzed by outside the windows as they drove in silence. Elio’s mind was like a giant puzzle board, covered with upside-down and irregular pieces that he just couldn’t seem to reconcile. Rissa had withdrawn into herself, slumping against the door as far from him as she could get.
Elio wished he could rally himself to comfort her or give her some kind of explanation, but he wasn’t even sure what the explanation was. The attack cemented in his mind that Miranda knew he was at the resort. She likely had known they were at the restaurant and had let herself be seen to drive him back to the cabin where the attackers were waiting.
