Carmichael held the stare for another minute, and then she left, the sounds of the station swallowing up her steps.

Hazard closed his eyes again and tried to figure out how to save his fiancé.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

JULY 5

FRIDAY

8:22 AM

SOMERS DIDN’T KNOW what time it was when he woke, disoriented, in a shadowy space that smelled like broken particleboard and wet cement. As his eyes adjusted to the morning light that made its way through the display windows, he examined his surroundings and remembered. He groaned as aches and pains from a night of sleeping on a sales counter manifested, and then he groaned again when he remembered why he was here and how truly his life was screwed.

He had spent the night in an abandoned cell phone store deep inside Smithfield. It was one of the center units in an empty strip mall; judging by the signs in the window PAY AS YOU GO – GOVERNMENT PHONES – SCREEN REPAIRS – CALLING CARDS – CASES – CHARGERS and by a few accessories with knockoff Apple designs, this had been one of the many business that catered to Smithfield’s poor. Somers didn’t know how to pick a lock, which normally he liked to hold over Hazard’s head as a sign of the high moral ground, but which was pretty inconvenient in a time like this. On the back of the strip mall, though, he found one door had a broken window, and it had been easy to let himself in. He bumped through the darkness doing a very, very limited search, and then he used two concrete blocks that he found in what had probably been the storeroom to barricade the back door. If someone pushed hard enough, they’d be able to force it open, but Somers hoped that the noise would be enough to wake him first. He tried not to think about Saturday mornings when Hazard sometimes had to rip the covers off to get him up. Then, after putting on his undershirt and the button-down shirt, he stretched out on the sales counter and, within moments, slept.

Now, in the morning light, his mouth tasted like what Hazard had once described as Limburger cheese smeared on a rat’s ass. His clothes were stiff with dried sweat, and he itched all over with bug bites. Somers gave himself a few lazy scratches as he moved to one end of the store, peering out the display windows at an empty street, the asphalt buckled and broken, weeds pushing up in every crack, sometimes in the middle of the road. He wandered to the other end of the store, checked his improvised barricade, and found it still secure. Then he tried to figure out how to be a smart fugitive instead of a dumb one.

The first thing he needed was to change his appearances. Since radical reconstructive surgery wasn’t an option—Somers kind of liked his face, and he was pretty sure Hazard did too—he had to think of some other ways to hide in plain sight. Clothes, of course. But also his appearance overall. He wished he had a mirror; sleeping on a sales counter in a discount phone store probably did wonders for the transformation, but he knew he needed more.