The door flies open. Guards pour in like insects. They’re coming.

“Come on!” yells Rayburn, looking in the rear view.

It’s a swarm of guns and arms and angry faces. And black gun barrels. Hands reach out and grab Betsy’s pudgy arms and legs. They drag her backward into the mound of guards. Rayburn hits the gas.

“Betsy!” I scream.

I drag Clay into the van as we bounce out of the storage room and into the parking lot. I get a glimpse of Betsy’s terrified face in the sea of guards. So frightened. Then Rayburn takes the corner.

She’s gone.

I scramble toward the van doors. I gotta go back for her.

Ethan’s hands grab my waist. I turn my tear-filled eyes toward him. “Let me go!”

Then I see them, Clay and my mama both unconscious on the van floor. Ethan’s terrified face is speckled with blood. “Riley,” he says quietly. “We need your help, too.”

I fold into his arms. He holds me as we speed through Albuquerque’s darkened streets.

Now it’s my turn to cry.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight

We drive for eight straight hours.

Rayburn and I take turns driving and tending to the wounded. Clay is in the worst shape. He’s lost so much blood. Rayburn stops the bleeding and administers antibiotics, but without blood to give, it’s hard to tell if he’ll make it. When I’m not driving and gripping the steering wheel so tight my fingerprints embed in the wheel, I’m sitting in the back of the van holding Clay’s and Mama’s hands. She has yet to wake up. Rayburn just shrugs, but from what Dr. Vandewater claimed, Mama’s life is in as much jeopardy as Clay’s now.

We run out of gas next to an abandoned church down a long driveway. I look up at the bleached adobe building as Rayburn pulls slowly behind the back wall with the last of our gas. Some of the colored glass windows have a few panes intact. The giant wood cross aims skyward from the roof like a conduit straight to God. I sigh. It’s as good a place as any to see who lives and dies.

I hobble through the old church, scouting out a room for Mama. In the sanctuary, with rows of sagging wooden pews, I scare a flock of birds out of the nest they’ve built in the organ pipes. They fly up out of a hole in the roof. Two tattered banners drape from the walls on either side of the little stage in the center. One says Peace with a silk dove sown below it; the other says Hope with a large brown cross. I grab a few crusty pew cushions and carry them down the hall.