There’s this moment, crossing the parking lot at dawn, when you realize just how little stands between you and the rest of extinction. The ice, the dead cars, the way sound drops away in the blue twilight. It makes you believe—if you’re foolish enough—that something elemental might keep you alive just out of spite.
“What happens when Caruso catches up to us? When the FBI does?” Jade asked as we got to the car.
“I don’t know,” I said, unlocking the Civic. “I’ve only ever gotten this far by promising myself I’d solve it later.”
She looked at me like she might take a swing, or maybe cry, and I realized how tired she really was. How close all of us were to folding. I opened the trunk and started to rearrange the supplies—water jugs, power bars, the Med Kit, a plastic-wrapped brown package labeled “CAKE: Emergency” that Marco bought at the last bodega before the bridge.
Back in the car, Jade pressed her forehead to the passenger glass, watching highway lights zip by like halogen comets. “We could just turn around,” she said. “Go back to the city. Try to fix things. You always said you could talk your way out.”
“We’re past talking,” I said. “Only reason we’re alive is we zigged when everyone expected us to zag.”
Marco barked a soft laugh, a little loopy. “Like the time in Miami with the Lithuanian twins.”
I gritted my teeth and adjusted the mirror to glare at him. “That was a team-building activity. And we never speak of it.”
Jade let out a pained snort, one hand massaging the bridge of her nose. “You said the FBI’s all over your dad. Wouldn’t it be safer if, I don’t know, we went and turned ourselves in? Take the deal.”
“You don’t know what deals they offer people like us,” I told her. “Witness protection. Testimony against Caruso, maybe, but they’ll still lock us up. Me, at least. You’d never get to live normal again—not with my last name. Not with the baby.”
She considered that, lips drawing a bloodless line. “And the alternative is we keep running.”
“For now,” I said, accelerating toward the next toll.
She studied me for a long second, something new flickering in her eyes. “You’re scared.”
It wasn’t an accusation. Just the truth.
I swallowed, running a hand over the stubble on my jaw. “It’s not just me now. I never worried about dying, but you guys—” I stopped, the words sticking. “Anyway. Nothing is going to happen. We’ll be alright. Try to get some rest.”
Jade closed her eyes, and for one second I pretended she wasn’t still vibrating from shock. Pretended Marco wasn’t breathing inthese odd, truncated gasps in the back seat. Pretended the world and everything in it wasn’t a python tightening.
Maybe I managed to trick myself for a whole minute.
But when I opened my eyes, I was still breathing.
And I was so fucking scared.
Chapter 3: Jade
The drive was endless. The Civic’s backseat had turned my spine to wire, every pothole a jolt that kept me from forgetting how far we were from anything like safety. The doctor said the nausea would fade, but it hadn’t, and the constant motion made it worse.
Every hour, Dante checked the rearview, hunting for a tail he swore wouldn’t be there but watched for anyway. Marco twitched in and out of sleep, the pain and blood loss obviously making his dreams manic and weird. Sometimes he’d mutter, sometimes he’d laugh, and I realized how little of anyone’s personality survived two days of hiding in cars and gas station bathrooms. I dozed, but it was never real sleep—more like skipping stones than resting. If I let myself drift for even a second, I’d jerk awake, sure the next rest stop would be our last.
I kept my hands pressed to my belly, as if I could anchor the baby in place, keep it safe by sheer will. Sometimes I’d catchDante’s eyes in the mirror, watching me with a look that was half apology, half hope. That was worse than either on its own.
We cut west through Jersey, dumped the Civic for a mud-caked pickup at some trucker’s lot in Delaware Water Gap, then ducked north. Pennsylvania was all bowling alleys and shuttered strip malls, the world closing in the further we got from the city.
Sleep-deprived and half-crazy, I started making up stories for the people we passed in the dead hours: the Sheetz cashier with a wedding ring with “Lynne” written on her coffee cup; the gas station girl who curtsied when she handed back the change. In every story, they were running too, but from something smaller—a bad marriage, a failed algebra test, the weight of their own bodies. At a diner near the New York border, we swapped seats and I drove, letting Dante pretend to sleep. He didn’t. He just sat twisted in the passenger seat, gun jammed under his coat, watching the world blur by. Marco sprawled in the back, still alive, and all I could think was: if this keeps up, we’ll die of exhaustion before Caruso’s guys even find us.
The baby kicked for the first time just outside Binghamton. A weird flutter, like someone knocking from the inside. I didn’t say anything, trying to decide if it was hope or panic, but Dante must’ve felt the change.
He reached over and took my hand. We pulled off at a Tim Horton’s, where, for half an hour, we pretended to be just another sleep-starved family on a boring, ugly drive. Marco dumped three sugars into his coffee, and by dawn, you could almost believe we were just passing through.
“I think I puked up my soul back in Wilkes-Barre,” Marco groaned, using his sleeve as a napkin. He looked rough, butthe bandage was holding and his color was a little less corpse-like.“How far to the border?”
“Hour, maybe. Depends on traffic,” Dante said, his voice flat and steady, the kind that said: don’t push me, not today.
“And then what?” I asked.
