I couldn’t blame him—other than poor Levi, he’d suffered the most in the wolf attack. “I’ll be there in a second,” I called after him as he stalked off.
Jolie clicked her flashlight and the first thing it shone on was a grinning skull. She made an odd noise, not really human-sounding, and dropped her flashlight. The rest of us shone our lights around and saw that this cave was deep, going into its rocky hill about a hundred feet. Besides the skull, still attached to its body, there were eight other skeletons, and they reminded me of the ones I’d found in the ghost town—dressed, sort of a matching group, apparently living here. They were lying on the ground, and two of them still had their skeletal hands entwined.
“So gross,” Ansel said with a shiver. He hung out by the cave’s entrance while Bunny went farther back.
“Look at this,” she said, showing us some ancient, pathetically small food stores and a pile of plastic water jugs, some still full.
Had these people been hiding? From what? Everything we’d found so far had pointed to a war of some kind, but these people weren’t set up for a siege.
A sudden crack of thunder made us jump, and then the cave was sealed off by torrents of rain that looked like a waterfall.
“Crap. Let’s make a run for the car,” I said.
Mills sighed.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, putting a bit of ice into my voice.
“I’m just beat, man,” he said. “It’s almost one in the morning. I say we just stay here, rest for a couple of hours, then hit the road toward dawn.”
“If they’re searching for us, they’ll assume that we went away from them,” Bunny pointed out. “Backward. But the truck went south; we’re going east.”
I mulled it over. “Yeah, okay. We can crash in the car for a couple hours.”
“I’m crashing right here.” Mills dropped to his knees and shut off his flashlight. “Car will be too crowded.”
“Ready to be a wolf snack?” I asked tartly.
“Not in this rain,” Bunny said, also sinking onto the dirt cave floor. “And we have our guns. We won’t be surprised this time.”
Jolie nodded, looking at me sympathetically, then lay down close to Bunny.
I jerked my head at Ansel, motioning toward the car, but he made an apologetic face and lay down also, as close to the entrance of the cave as he could.
I considered joining them rather than tramping through pouring rain to a fancy car full of legitimately paranoid Nate. With a sigh I pulled my hood over my head and left the cave.
The bastard had locked the car doors, and I smacked on his window to wake him up. I was soaked and shivering as I slid into the backseat. Nate rubbed his eyes and peered through the windshield.
“Where’s everyone else?”
“They’re crashing in the cave for a couple hours,” I said, snuggling down into the leather seat that was like the cushioned desk chair in the Provost’s office.
“Take off your coat,” Nate said. “It’s wet.” He got out of his own coat, clumsily because of the steering wheel, and then climbed in the back with me. “Press that button there.” He pointed, and I pressed the button on the center console in front of me. Seat warmers! Nate grinned at my wonder as he draped his dry coat over me.
We smiled at each other in the dark as we listened to the rain pounding on the car’s roof. It felt cozy and… almost safe.
70
I WOKE BEFORE FIRST LIGHT and found that I was coiled around Nate like a pea vine on a string. I must have been cold, I told myself. I must have thought he was Tim.
Or maybe I was just crazy. That was becoming more and more a likely possibility as the stress of our mission weighed on my shoulders.
Quietly I got out of the car and walked on sodden leaves to the cave. The squad was already awake and I prayed heartily that none of them had come to the car and seen me with Nate.
“Hey,” Bunny said, looking up. “We’ve been opening these supplies, and really there’s nothing worth taking.”
“Any idea how old they are?” I asked, kneeling down to see the split cans of beans, the dried-out jerky.
“This label says it’s good until 2041,” Mills reported.