“I CANNOT BELIEVE you fucking cut that thing out of me,” I say, panting. We’re making our great escape. Slipping out of the WMC was easy enough, even on a crutch. But now we’re out in the heat, and I’m lurching up Raspberry Street, the heel of my crutch clacking against the sidewalk. I’m practically dragging my casted leg across the ground, and it hurts more than the original break did. I’m struggling to breathe, dripping with sweat. Higgins had left my tattered clothes from the wreck behind last night, so Gabe used the scalpel, after he’d used it on me, to cut the left leg off my jeans and help me into them.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Gabe says, looking over his shoulder for the hundredth time. “You’ll get over it.”
“Easy for you to say,” I protest. “You got to leave yours in.”
“Yeah, well, we had to make it look realistic. It made sense for us to leave your tracker back at the medical center and take mine with me. I’ll let you cut it out later if it’ll make you happy, honey.” He blows me a kiss, and I’m tempted to trip him with my crutch.
“Nobody’s following us,” I say. “If the army suspected anything, Higgins would be on top of us already.”
Gabe trudges onward, helping me along as best he can, pressing a wad of gauze to my arm to soak up the blood. “After everything Reed told us, it’s not just the army I’m worried about.”
“Yeah,” I huff. “You’re telling me. You didn’t have that thing in your room with you.” I shiver in the ninety-degree heat.
“No, but I’m pretty sure he was in the kitchen with me and my mom this morning,” Gabe says.
“What?” I slow down, looking at him.
He nods. “I thought it was just my concussion, but … the army aren’t the only ones watching our every move.”
We keep going, despite the fear that sentence instills in me. The sun bakes off the concrete in soupy waves of heat. I wade through them, fighting against my bad leg the whole way.
“What do you think it wants with us?” I ask after a moment. When I look around, the medical center is out of sight, and some of the tension releases between my shoulders.
“I don’t know,” Gabe says. “Maybe nothing. The better question is what does he want with Kimberly.”
I ignore the fact that Gabe has clearly decided this thing is a person, even though Dr. Reed never said that was the case. Something terrible is what she said. That doesn’t conjure the image of a human being. To me, that sounds like a monster.
We shuffle the rest of the way in silence, occasionally glancing around to make sure no one’s watching us, army or otherwise. At last, we cut down a familiar alley toward Gabe’s street, ignoring Mrs. Beaumont’s yappy terrier, George, who barks at us from behind her fence.
Gabe’s Chevelle is parked in the driveway behind his mom’s Oldsmobile. Gabe puts a finger to his lips, and we creep around either side of the Chevelle, watching the windows of his house to make sure Mrs. Albright isn’t looking out at us. Carefully, we pull our doors open and slide in, which is a struggle for me. I wince when my busted leg bangs into the footwell and wince again when my crutch makes a metallic crang sound against the doorframe. Gabe drops his visor, catches the spare set of keys in his hand. He turns the ignition, but only so far. Before he starts the engine, he puts the Chevelle in neutral, lifts off the brake, and lets us coast backward out of the driveway in silence. I can see the muscles flexing in his arms as he struggles to spin the wheel. The tires make a rubbery squelch against the hot asphalt. When we start to drift forward again, Gabe straightens the wheel out, needing just as much force to do it, favoring his injured left arm.
When the car has rolled down the hill to the end of the block, Gabe finally twists the key and fires up the engine.
“That was incredibly smooth,” I say.
“Why thank you,” he says, doing a mock bow in the driver’s seat.
“Now what?” I ask. We’re both sweating, in obvious pain, and I can’t speak for Gabe, but I’m also pretty terrified.
“Now … I don’t know,” Gabe says. He’s navigating down side streets, avoiding the main roads, heading in the general direction of the Triangle but without any real conviction. “I wanted to go talk to my dad, but…”
“You’re afraid.”
He shrugs. “Not of getting in trouble for leaving the house. He can only ground me for so long. I’m just afraid he won’t believe us.”
“I’m almost more afraid of what will happen if he does,” I say. “If he finds out the army put trackers in us, that they really are trying to cover up what happened…”
“He’s gonna freak.”
“What about Sonya? It sounds like her dad was maybe trying to help, and she doesn’t know she’s being tracked, either.”
“We don’t know that Sonya’s dad told Reed to help us, though,” Gabe argues. “She could have done that on her own.”
“Yeah, but if there’s even the slightest chance that Sonya knows something about what’s going on, and she starts snooping…” I trail off, letting the implications hang there. Gabe doesn’t know that I know how he feels about Sonya. It’s not like he came right out and told me. The poor guy tries to act tough, but he wears his feelings way down on his sleeve like the rest of us. Maybe that’s why he never really fit in with the jocks.
“She could already be in trouble,” Gabe mutters, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel anxiously. “Shit.”
At the last second, he makes a sharp turn onto Houghton Avenue, cuts across King Street, then heads south until Houghton connects with Route 24 and we’re headed for the Heart-to-Heart Bridge.
“This is probably a bad idea,” Gabe says after a while.
As we come to the old covered bridge, tattooed with graffiti and littered with beer cans and cigarette butts and condom wrappers, I say, “Probably. But she’s our friend. We help her first, if we have to. Then maybe we can all help Kimberly.”