“Only girls,” Rangan replied.

Earl Miller chuckled at that. “Well, I hunt deer,” he said.

Something flew at them abruptly. Rangan cried out and twisted to avoid the blow. Miller turned the wheel hard. A massive tree limb slammed into them on Miller’s side. The truck shook. Pain jolted through Rangan’s side and up through his guts. Something else struck the window above Miller’s door window, leaving a spider web of cracks. Zoe took the chance to pummel them from a new angle, turning the windshield into a massive sheet of water, with augmented outlines of the road superimposed on it, and pushing the left side of the truck so hard that Rangan feared the wheels would come up off the ground. Then somehow Earl Miller brought them back onto the flooded country road, headed straight into the wind again.

Miller took a deep breath, and then another. A while later he spoke again. “At night, you hunt deer with infrared, son. You can see em clear as day, a thousand yards out. Unless you got thick fog.” He glanced at Rangan and nodded. “Or a heavy rainstorm.” He turned his eyes back to the road. “And a truck runnin’ on battery, with the heaters turned off.”

Rangan shivered, and huddled even deeper in the blankets.

Rangan lost track of the twists and turns Earl took. He was so cold. So tired. Everything hurt so much. His shirt was definitely wet above the bandage where the bullet wound was.

Earl forded a flooded low point in a road, deep enough that water started to come in through his door, through some leak from where the tree limb had struck them. Then they were out the other side. They drove over tiny roads that were just mud now, mud raked up by wind to splash into their windshields. They drove across a field that had been flattened by Zoe, the tires just barely getting enough traction to pull them back onto the road at the other side. Earl pulled them up onto an overpass, then slowed and took them down an embankment instead of continuing on the road they’d been on.

Lights appeared ahead, moving lights, and Earl pulled them off the side of the road again, and behind a row of trees, until a different pickup passed their hiding spot, heading away from town, out towards where they’d come from.

Finally, more than an hour after they’d left the farm, they crawled slowly, carefully, into Madison, taking the smallest roads possible, until finally Earl pulled them into an alley a block from St Mark’s.

The wind was still fierce in town, but weaker. It had grown weaker even out in the countryside in the hour it had taken them to drive this circuitous loop around the town. Zoe was dying, bit by bit.

Earl Miller pulled out his phone, dialed, said a few words into it, listened, and hung up.