novelraw Chapter 110: The Night Road
Chapter 110: The Night Road
Noah stood in the doorway for two long breaths, the porch light cutting a hard line across his face. The Hummer’s growl had already faded into the dark. Crickets. Wind. The soft drip of meltwater off the eaves. That was it.
He went back inside because standing still felt stupid.
The living room held the shape of them—the dent in the cushion where Alexei had sprawled, Elias’s mug leaving a wet ring on the table, Lachlan’s flannel tossed on the back of a chair.
The TV still showed the news crawl at the bottom, an anchor’s mouth moving around words he didn’t bother to hear. He walked past it into the kitchen and pulled a duffel from the pantry, dumping a bag of flour out of it before he remembered why they kept it empty.
He grabbed what made sense first. Can opener. Matches. Coffee. Tea. Honey. The last sleeve of instant oatmeal. He opened the fridge and shoved in a block of cheese, a carton of eggs, two bottles of water, the leftover tuna pasta salad in its dented metal bowl and the lid that never really sealed.
He eyed the chocolate in the top drawer, hesitated, then took all of it and tucked it into a side pocket because if he showed up without it, he was dead anyway.
He jammed his feet into his boots without socks and winced. Cold leather bit his ankles, but he laced them hard and quick. The cabin key went in his jacket pocket out of habit. The truck’s keys hung on the hook by the door, second set on the ring with the faded orange tag. He took them because it felt like a decision and decisions were better than empty hands.
On the porch, he stopped once more, listening.
The Chinook had softened the night, turned the air damp and almost warm. He hated it. The warmth made everything smell like thaw—rot and wet wood and the sour edge of melting snow. Somewhere down the slope, water ran in a thin ribbon, cutting through the driveway’s rut and away into the trees.
He should have stayed inside the cabin. The TV had said stay inside. He knew what "stay inside" sounded like when it was a bad idea. He’d grown up on those kinds of instructions.
Noah slung the duffel over his shoulder and jogged to the truck. He tossed the bag onto the passenger seat, checked for the little flashlight in the console, and flicked the radio on out of reflex.
Static. A snatch of the anchor, then music from some faraway station, then more static. He turned it off and listened to the motor instead.
Reversing, he listened to the sound of the gravel popped under the tires.
He backed down the drive crooked and then straightened at the road, headlights cutting a bright tunnel through the softened dark.
He didn’t know where they’d gone. The Hummer could have headed anywhere—up toward town, out toward the highway, inland. Sera had a reason, but she hadn’t given him one and now his brain was full of all the maps he didn’t have.
He turned right because right felt like running toward something instead of away.
Two minutes later, at the first intersection, the truck shuddered over a pothole and he swallowed a curse. He could feel himself sweating, the sting of it under his lower lip, and he wiped it with the back of his hand, all nerves and adrenaline and the sense that he was behind the eight ball again. The road widened ahead. Houses thinned. The night pressed in.
He had to find them. Everything depended on him finding the K.A.S team and keeping his eye on them. There was no other option.
He followed the curve that would take him down to the feeder for the main highway. That’s when he heard it—faint and wrong in the warm wind—the sound of metal meeting metal in a way that wasn’t an accident anymore than thunder was an accident: a hard, ugly crunch, then another smaller scrape like something dragging.
Noah lifted his foot off the gas, listening hard. The sound came again, then died into the general hush of the night. He didn’t know if it was ahead or off to the left where the road dropped toward the old service lane. He pointed the truck toward it anyway and went.
The service lane jounced his teeth and made the duffel slide on the seat. Branches reached in close, thin silhouettes in the high beams. He drove too fast for the gravel and not fast enough for his nerves.
When the lane climbed and spat him back onto asphalt, he saw fresh skid marks and a glitter of plastic like fish scales scattered across the road. He rolled through it slow, leaned forward over the wheel, and spotted someone getting out of the car, screaming at the road in front of them.
"Fucking bitch!!" the man screamed out before pounding the hood of his smaller car. When Noah pulled up beside him and slowed down, the man glared at him, too.
"Watch out for the crazy bitch in the hummer," the man snarled. "She clearly doesn’t know how to drive the fucking thing."
Noah nodded his head, pasting a smile on his face as he thanked the other man.
He didn’t have a plan, but he did have momentum. Following the direction where the man was pointing, he didn’t slow down.
He had to find them.
There was no other option.
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Sera didn’t brake.
The highway ahead of her was a mess of stalled cars, hazards blinking in red pairs and then not blinking at all because some batteries were already dead.
The Chinook had turned the evening slick, melt running across the lanes in thin sheets, and the city’s reflected sky made the world a dim, wrong kind of bright. It would have been faster to run—her creature said so with perfect clarity—but the Hummer would matter later.
People respected mass, and metal kept the bodies safe.
She threaded the big vehicle through the rightmost gap and clipped a bumper she hadn’t seen until the last second. The sound was a heavy punch, a wrenching grind, and then they were past it, the Hummer yawing and correcting under her hands. A parked sedan’s horn reflexively screamed into the night as if the car felt pain.
A door popped open in her peripheral vision. A man staggered out into the lane waving his arms, face split open with panic and anger. "Hey! Hey! You hit—"
Sera shifted up and kept going. The rearview caught his mouth still moving and his hands still waving and then it caught nothing.
Beside her, Zubair turned his head, the movement slow enough to carry the weight of the question he didn’t have to voice. "Is there something we should know?"
"Be quiet unless you are really, really good at swimming," she said, eyes never leaving the dark cut of the lanes ahead. "And hold on to something."