Lost Roads (Benny Imura 7)

Trócaire bent and kissed the top of her head. Her skin was cool. She reached up and took his hand and gave it a fierce squeeze.

“Now, come along,” he said. “We have work to do.”

20

ALL DAY AND WELL INTO the evening Gutsy looked for a mechanic. So far she’d asked a hundred people about fixing quads or motorcycles, and all she’d gotten were head shakes. Sombra trotted along, quiet but very much there for her.

It was close to nine at night when they headed toward the south side of town, where some of the older residents lived.

“Hey,” said a voice, and Gutsy turned to see Captain Ledger and Grimm walking across the street toward her. “Any luck?”

“Not yet.”

They walked together for a while, stopping to ask the same question, getting the same answer. Suddenly a voice cracked through the air.

“Captain Ledger!”

They turned to see Karen Peak come running toward them. She looked exhausted to the point of near fainting. And the look in her eyes made Gutsy want to cover her ears so she wouldn’t hear more bad news.

“I just came from the hospital,” Karen said in a quick, ragged voice. “Morton said he thought there might be some small amounts of the right chemicals at the hospital after all. He said that he just remembered. Whatever. There were some notes he wanted, too—step-by-step instructions for making the pills. He told Flores to get all of that from a locker in the maintenance room. Before you ask, no, we didn’t know that he had other hiding places. The locker was a dummy. Dial one combination and it opens like any other locker; dial a special combination and the whole thing swings out and there’s a safe built into the wall. Morton gave Flores the combination because there are special files in there. The most important stuff, actually.”

“And you’re going to break my heart and tell me that Collins got to the safe first,” said Ledger.

The wretched expression on Karen’s face was enough of an answer.

Ledger spent a few moments looking up into the nighttime sky. “Well, life is a juicy little peach, isn’t it,” the captain said after a while.

“How bad is all this?” asked Gutsy.

“Bad. With the formula, Morton thought he might be able to thin out the mixture to make the pills last longer without diluting the medicine’s effect. But it’s a really complex process. Dozens of steps, very precise measurements…” She shook her head in despair. “He said that without the formula it might take too much time, and…”

Her voice suddenly broke, and Karen’s facade of professional control dissolved into a mother’s terrified tears. She covered her face with her hands and leaned her head against Ledger. Gutsy stood by, feeling clumsy and helpless. She wasn’t all that close with Karen, but her heart broke for her. Sarah was an innocent in all of this, and Karen—as her mother—was helpless. The two dogs whined louder and nudged Karen with their wet noses.

Ledger gave Karen a gruff hug and then gently pushed her back. “Show me that safe,” he said. “Gutsy, you keep looking for a mechanic. I have a feeling that quad is just about our last, best hope.”

Ledger and Karen hurried off, Grimm trotting along behind.

“Well,” said Gutsy to Sombra, “I guess it’s up to us to perform an actual miracle here.”

Sombra wagged his tail. Gutsy smiled and gave him a piece of dried goat, which he chewed greedily.

Gutsy ran from house to house, from store to church to workshop, asking everyone she met in the hope of finding at least one person who still remembered how to fix motors.

Instead she found two: Jose Santamaria, who looked like he was a thousand years old, and a sixtysomething man wearing a faded tie-dyed shirt. She’d seen the second guy at town fairs, playing guitar and singing old songs about love and peace. His name was Sunny-Day Ray.

“Actual working quads?” gasped Sunny-Day.

“Well, damaged ones,” said Gutsy, almost apologetically.

“Most things that are broken can be fixed,” drawled Jose. The two mechanics grinned at each other, and Gutsy wondered how long it had been since either had found a reason to smile. They ran off to get their toolboxes, then Gutsy led them back to the hospital and down into the tunnel. They were absolutely delighted to encounter machines that had—until Collins’s sabotage—worked. They fell on the quads like hungry vultures.

There was the one quad in the tunnel, and two more were hidden in the car wash. Gutsy gathered the other teens—her friends and the California kids—and it took about a gallon of sweat apiece to bring the other two quads down to where the mechanics were working. Sunny-Day Ray and Jose seemed not to notice whether the teens were there.

So, they all left.

Gutsy said goodbye to the others and headed back home to wash and put on some fresh clothes. The ones she’d been wearing were stained with soot and blood. As she and Sombra walked through the town, she could feel waves of depression crashing down over her. They darkened the night sky even more.

Inside and along the walls, fires burned in oil drums set at regular intervals, and there were whole battalions of bottles filled with any kind of liquid that would burn, each with a piece of rag stuffed into them, ready to light and throw. It was the best line of defense they had left, because most of the ammunition in town was gone, used in the battles. It made Gutsy wonder if that was part of the point of the two attacks. If there was even one more raid, they would run out of bullets, and probably use up the store of firebombs.