I shot a look behind us and willed my legs to slow down.

“Chance,” Patrick said, his voice a bit wonky from the oxygen and the mask. “They’re gonna hear us.”

I forced myself to slow even more. Finally we eased to a stop and peered around the corner. We had only a slice of a view past the pharmacy. The ambulance was still there in the middle of the town square, but there were no Hosts around it anymore. They’d rushed the hospital—or at least I hoped that was where they were.

The siren was still shrieking. Somehow I’d drowned out the sound in my head, turning down the volume on all background noise as we’d run the gauntlet of the hospital. I was glad to hear the wail piercing the night, shrill and steady. That would cover the sound of our movement through the neighborhood as we headed back toward school.

We set out down an unlit street, pushing the gurney across the sidewalk, one wheel squeaking intermittently. We stopped every few driveways, using parked cars for cover.

We heard movements inside some houses and on the nearby streets, but we chose our path well, weaving through the neighborhood one cautious block at a time.

We were halfway there when Patrick took a knee behind the special van that the Dubois family kept for Blake and his wheelchair. Breathing hard, he held up a finger to signal that he needed a second to catch his breath. Sweat trickled from his hairline, and his face looked washed of color.

“Sorry,” he said. “Oxygen. Fuzzy.”

I eased him down so he could lean against one big tire, then sat next to him. In the darkness the combination of the mask and his cowboy hat made him look pretty scary. For a time he tried to catch his breath. Then he made a fist around the tube trailing up to the H tank on the gurney. Was he so loopy that he was thinking of ripping it out?

“What do we do when the tanks run dry?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

I couldn’t take my eyes off his fingers tensed around that tube. “We go back to the hospital and fill them up again.”

“How ’bout when the IV food is gone?”

“Dr. Chatterjee said he thinks he can figure out some kind of system to make more.”

Patrick gave a slow nod, but his face didn’t hold much hope. “And what about when the next kid turns eighteen? Or Alex? Or you?”

“Let’s worry about that later,” I said.

His fist tightened around the tube. “It sucks living like this. A mask clamped over my face. Being fed through tubes and needles. Forever.”

I watched his fingers turn white as he squeezed the tube, then released it.