The motion of the bus makes me sick.
It’s moving downhill, bumping and swaying over things lying in the way.
The ground flattens out. Outside the windows is black. All I can see are the reflections of the last few people to get out of the camp. We’re driving through the tunnel that will lead us away. Enid stands at the front, peering over the driver’s shoulder. Pain pulses through me with each rumble and jolt of the old bus.
I force myself up. My stomach roils with nausea. Pat kneels in the space between the seats and checks my eyes, gently pushing one eyelid up with his thumb and then the other. I can hardly see him in the low light of the bus, but his face is tense, and the line between his eyebrows makes him look like he’s about to cry.
He’s knotted something round my arm, a piece of fabric, in a makeshift tourniquet. My sleeve is wet all the way to my hand, and even in the dark I know it’s blood. My blood.
We hit something big, and the bus rocks from side to side, the headlights swinging through the dark. Roots or vines slap into the windscreen and flick back. The driver dodges round a massive pile of rubble beneath a hole where the sunlight leaks in.
I clear my throat, trying to speak. Enid looks back over her shoulder. Without a word, she takes a bottle of water from a bag and holds it out to me. I glug. It’s icy – its only effect is to sharpen me to the pain radiating through my arm.
‘I left him,’ I whisper to Pat.
Pat presses his lips into a line. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he says.
Enid tramps to the back of the bus and leans over the back seats, glaring into the darkness behind us. ‘No sign of them following yet.’
‘Another mile and we’ll be clear of the tunnel,’ the driver says over his shoulder.
‘That’s when the fun starts,’ Enid calls back to him. She takes a seat on the opposite side of the narrow aisle and eyes me. ‘Your boy Patrick insisted we wait for you.’
Pat presses a syringe into the crease of my uninjured arm. Two beats of my heart and the relief floods through me.
Up ahead, a faint smear of sunlight picks out a ramp climbing upwards.
‘Dylan?’ I ask.
‘Wasn’t looking good. He went into cardiac arrest, but Corp managed to get him going again. You should sleep,’ Pat says.
I rest my head on his shoulder and wish I hadn’t made it this far.