A small orange light started blinking at the top right-hand corner of my visor, signaling that the van was trying to open a connection. Did I want to talk to any of the people who were in the van? No. No, I did not. Did that mean I could get away with ignoring the call?

Unfortunately, no, it didn’t. Smothering the urge to hit the gas and drive away from the trappings of responsibility as fast as I could, I said, “Answer call.”

Becks spoke in my ear a moment later, voice rendered irregular and crackly by the sound of the wind whipping by outside my helmet. “Shaun, you there?”

“No, it’s the Easter Bunny,” I said. “Who do you expect is going to be answering my intercom? What do you want, Becks? We’re a long way from Maggie’s.”

“That’s actually what I wanted. We didn’t have time to prep the vehicles for another road trip before we left the—” She stopped, choking off the sentence with a small hiccup. Her voice was softer when she spoke again, making it even harder to hear above the roaring of the wind. “I mean, we’re not all that good for gas over here. I don’t know what your status is, but we’ve got about another fifty miles, tops, before we’re going to have an emergency.”

Fuck. “What does the GPS say?”

“There’s a truck stop about twenty miles up the road that takes journalist credentials and has a good safety rating. Clean, reliable blood tests, no outbreaks in the past nine years.”

With our luck, we’ll fix that for them.

“Probably,” I said, my shoulders sagging with relief. George had been quiet since I told her I wasn’t in the mood, and I’d been irrationally afraid that somehow, the trauma of losing someone else who mattered to me had combined with my anger and managed to repair my brain, making me fit the normal standards for “sane.” Screw sane. I don’t want anything that makes her stop talking to me. That would drive me crazy for real.

“Shaun? What was that?”

“Nothing, Becks. The truck stop sounds fine. Why don’t you call ahead and let them know we’re coming?” If the truck stop was ready for our arrival, they’d have someone waiting at the gate to run the blood tests and let us inside. Much faster and more convenient than calling from the driveway and chilling our heels while some underpaid attendant tried to pull himself away from his coffee.

I was about to hang up when a thought struck me, making my stomach drop all the way to my toes. “Fuck—what about the Doc? She’s legally dead, and her only clean ID just went up with Oakland.”

She’s died twice in under a week, commented George. Even I never managed that.

“Hush,” I muttered.