Fic - Know Your Exits 2/7

[cj2017]

Title: Know Your Exits (2/7)

Rating: Hard R: violence, sex, huge amounts of bad language, discussion of adult themes, a pretty spectacular body count, casual slaughter of the innocent (including one minor series character), and scenes of a medical nature that might cause queasiness in those with a sensitive disposition.

Word Count: About 30,500 all told. This part 5,400

Disclaimer: Don’t own them. Wish I did. And I have shamelessly pinched some of their dialogue.

 

 

~ ~ ~

Know Your Exits 2/7

~ ~ ~

               “John? John?!” Sarah’s voice was barely audible, but she wasn’t aiming for stealth, she was just terrified of shouting loudly enough for him to hear but getting no response. Kneeling beside him, she tried to ignore the hot, sticky feel of his blood oozing into her jeans. His face was pale, cold, and beaded with sweat. Every breath he managed to take made blood froth and bubble at his lips. Splitting his T-shirt with her bare hands, she found a neat hole in his upper right chest and a larger, ragged one in his back where the bullet had exited. When she balled the material up and used it to try and stem the bleeding, he cried out, his hands reaching weakly in an attempt to push her away.

               “Try not to move, John. You’re okay. I’m gonna get you out of here. Just don’t move.”

               More gunfire, Sarah barely registering it as she used her own shirt to wrap his chest. When she pulled him up into a sitting position, he whimpered, his eyes flying open, the pain making him instantly alert. He stopped pushing at her, wrapping his hands in her tank top instead and holding on tightly. “I’m sorry, mom.”

“Don’t be stupid. Not your fault.” She hoped that he couldn’t see how badly she was shaking. “Can you stand?”

               His eyes were already closing. She took a deep breath, ducked her body low, and hauled him over her shoulder, using the counter for leverage as she dragged herself to her feet. She was halfway across the kitchen when gunfire exploded closer around her and she heard Derek yell out her name in warning. More shots, wild and frantic, and a sudden punch in her side that raced fire across her abdomen and forced her to drop down onto one knee. It stole her breath for a second, but she pushed herself back to her feet, hurtling through the kitchen door, leaving behind the clash of metal against metal and Derek’s attempts to draw fire away from them with a rapid volley of shots and a snarl of “C’mon, you motherfucker.”

~ ~ ~  

               The distance to the truck seemed insurmountable, but Sarah forced herself to take one step after another, grateful for the occasional burst of lightening that illuminated her path and stopped her from stumbling too frequently. The cacophony in the house grew fainter as she put more distance between them, and nothing gave chase. Her only fight now was against the elements and her below-par stamina.

Whoever, whatever had been waiting for them had approached the house from the rear, and the truck showed no signs of having been tampered with. Pulling the back door open, she laid John out across the seat, and then dragged the first aid kit from the trunk.

In the truck’s meager light she could barely see the wound on his chest when she cut her ad hoc dressing away, but she could hear the sucking noise as air was pulled into it, and the terrible rattling breaths John was taking as his lung slowly collapsed. Half the first aid kit was strewn over the floor by the time she found what she so desperately needed, nothing more complicated than a large, square piece of plastic and a roll of tape. With trembling fingers, she laid the plastic over the wound, smoothing it down to make a tight seal and taping three sides of it to his chest. The next breath he drew sucked the plastic against the wound, preventing any further air from entering it. It took a couple of minutes until his breathing became slightly easier; he still struggled and strained, but he didn’t deteriorate any further.

She was fixing a thick dressing across his back when she heard the rapid footsteps approaching. She was out in the rain with her gun in her hands before she saw that it was Derek and – slightly further away but closing the distance rapidly – Cameron. Sarah forced herself to wait and cover their retreat until they were both in the truck, before she returned to the back seat, crouching in the foot-well as Cameron spun the truck around with a screech of burning rubber and accelerated hard.

“The metal?” Sarah turned back to John, holding him steady as the truck bounced on the uneven access road and then turned right, picking up speed.

“Down an embankment. She threw it.” Derek sounded as if he had just run a marathon at a sprint.

“I estimate a distance of six hundred to seven hundred yards with enough damage sustained to the left primary motor core to necessitate a critical repair.”

“In English, Cameron,” Sarah snapped, but bit back on an expletive. Her son’s pulse was fast and faint where she gripped his wrist, but the fact that he had one at all was largely due to Cameron. 

“He’ll need to be offline whilst he restructures, but the damage is not irreparable.” Deciding that was straight-forward enough, Cameron turned her attention back to the road.

Once they were well away from the house, Derek clambered into the backseat and stared at John, because that was far easier than looking at Sarah. “How’s he doing?”

She shook her head once, too exhausted and too scared to give a prognosis.

“His lung collapsed?”

A nod, tears shining in her eyes.

“You’ve done a good job here.” He double-checked the edges of the dressing; the tape was still holding despite the blood and sweat on John’s chest. “He’ll need a chest tube.”

“I know… I’ve never…”

He touched her fingers briefly and she stiffened but didn’t pull away.

“I have, I can do it. We’ve got all the kit. He’ll be okay, Sarah.”

More nodding, her teeth working fiercely on her bottom lip as she fought to hold herself together.

He looked away, turning to address Cameron. “Find us some shelter. Somewhere we can hole up for a few hours at least.”

Cameron had already been looking and her answer was immediate. “There’s an industrial complex thirty kilometers to the east. My GPS indicates a number of potentially secure buildings.”

“Good.” He dismissed her and turned back to Sarah. “Help me lift him a little. If we can put him onto his bad side, it’ll give his good lung a better chance to work.”

Relieved to have something to do, Sarah followed Derek’s instructions as they moved John onto his right side. He moaned but his eyes remained closed, and as Derek took one of his hands for IV access, she took hold of the other, content for the moment just to watch him breathe.

~ ~ ~

               “Easy, easy. Lay him on his back, for now.”

               Cameron placed John on the work bench carefully, and exactly according to Derek’s instructions, then stepped aside to allow Sarah to smooth his limbs out. It was obvious watching Derek select equipment from the first aid kit that he knew what he was doing, while Sarah certainly wasn’t going anywhere, which made Cameron surplus to requirements. Casting a brief, troubled glance at Sarah, who nodded towards the perimeter, Cameron selected an assault rifle from the weapons stacked on the floor and headed out into the night. She wasn’t sure what emotion she had felt on being given permission to leave, but she suspected it was probably relief.

~ ~ ~

               Derek tapped his fingers on the right side of John’s chest and frowned at the dull sound that resonated. When he rested his hand against it, the rise and fall of John’s breathing on that side was barely detectable.

               “Shit.” He swore under his breath, but Sarah looked up sharply, and he immediately regretted having spoken out loud. The look on her face strongly suggested that he not sugar-coat any of the details. “There’s blood in here as well, Sarah. That’s why he still looks like crap and he still can’t breathe properly.”

               She nodded, not trusting her voice.

               “We need to get the tube in, get everything drained out and hope the bleed seals itself off, or we’ll have to start thinking about hospitals.”

               There was no hesitation this time. “Get the tube in then.” She reached out to lay her hand on John’s forehead as he muttered and shifted restlessly.

               “You can leave me to do it…” Derek trailed off; she was already shaking her head.

               “No. I’m fine. I can help.”

~ ~ ~

               The morphine Derek gave John through the IV was enough to sedate him lightly, but – with his breathing already precarious – it wasn’t enough to stop him from reacting as the scalpel bit in across the top of his rib. He was too weak to make anything but a token attempt at moving away from the blade, but his eyes flew open and he looked desperately towards Sarah for help, before realizing that it was her hands that were holding him in place.

               “Mom?” He sounded utterly confused, unable to understand why she would be complicit in this.

She shook her head, tears running unchecked down her cheeks as her grip remained firm. “Just stay still for me, John.”

               “Sarah.”

               “I know.” She swallowed hard at Derek’s warning, but tightened her hold, feeling the jolt as he punctured the lining of the lung with a pair of forceps and pushed the tip of his finger through to clear a passage for the chest tube. John was sobbing freely now, pleading hoarsely with her, and straining against the mass of fluid and air that was suffocating him. She heard Derek murmur in satisfaction as John suddenly managed a more complete breath, and she looked across to see blood coursing down the tube into the drainage bottle. Derek tied off his second suture and watched the bottle fill, the tension in his shoulders easing slightly as the flow began to lessen, then slowed to a trickle. Sensing that something had changed, John took a cautious deep breath, his chest moving normally to accommodate the effort, and as he pulled in a second breath his lips gradually began to lose their dusky blue tinge.

               “Better?” Sarah asked him softly.

He nodded, relief stark in his eyes.

“You go to sleep now. I’ll be right here.” She felt him squeeze her hand in reply as Derek pushed a more substantial dose of morphine into his IV. Without speaking, they propped him up against a mess of dust sheets and discarded overalls.

Sarah sank down into the chair that Derek had pulled over.

               “I’ll be back in a minute.”

               She nodded but didn’t look at him.

He lifted his arm to wipe the cold sweat from his face as he walked to the door. The machine was nowhere to be seen, but he headed away from the building, away from the range of her infra-red and into a dark corner, before sinking to his knees and vomiting quietly onto the concrete.

~ ~ ~

               Sarah pressed her hand against the dressing on the back of John’s shoulder, closing her eyes in relief when it came back dry. The exit wound had been difficult to suture and had continued to bleed despite their best efforts; two hours later and it seemed the pressure bandage had finally done its job. She snapped the seal from a fresh bag of saline and swapped it for the one just finishing.

               “I came to change that.”

               She turned abruptly, not having heard Derek approach, and wondered how the hell she was going to protect her son when she was so strung out she could allow someone to sneak up on her unnoticed.

               “I got it.” It came out harshly but she didn’t care. Derek wouldn’t have had to struggle to save John’s life if he had listened to her in the first place. She hung the bag up and set it running, then sat back down, suppressing a wince as something in her side pulled sharply.

               “This looks better.” Derek was checking the same dressing, trying not to be distracted by the flash of pain that had just crossed Sarah’s face.

               “I know. I think it’s stopped bleeding.”

               “We’ll need to move him soon. The cops are going to be all over the Dyson house. Three bodies, Sarah. Three people killed just to draw us there.”

               When they had finally gotten John settled, Derek had told her about the two security guards he and Cameron had discovered, who had been executed and dumped at the back of the house. Cameron had searched the remaining rooms, but they had found no sign of Danny Dyson. Derek was convinced that Danny had never been the intended target, that Kaliba had never switched their intentions away from Sarah; all they had done was alter their tactics.

               “Do you think they know who we are?” She shifted uncomfortably, too tired to work out the myriad possible ramifications beyond the obvious one, the fact that they had almost killed her son regardless of whether or not they had identified him.

               He hesitated, reluctant to pile more negative theories on the ones he had already put forward; he didn’t want to push Sarah any further than she was pushing herself. “I don’t know. They might. They knew enough to link you with the Dysons. They went to a lot of effort to set us up, and they sent metal this time.”

               “Yeah.” She didn’t sound angry, she sounded exhausted. “Fuck.”

               “Do you have somewhere we can go?”

               Knowing he meant another safehouse, she shook her head. If Kaliba really had gone to such lengths to flush them out into the open, their whereabouts had obviously been unknown to the organization, which left her the option of returning to the desert. But the safehouse there was now hours away, and she didn’t want to risk moving John so far.

               “I don’t…” She trailed off as a long-forgotten possibility occurred to her, and closed her eyes, trying to calculate distance and travel-time. When she spoke again, her voice was still uncertain. “There is a place. It would only take about three hours to get there.”

               “Charley.” Derek didn’t phrase it as a question – it seemed the most logical choice out of their increasingly limited options – but Sarah’s answer was immediate and unequivocal.

               “No.”

Charley had been her first thought, right before she thought about Michelle dying in his arms, and about the expression on his face when she had unlocked the front door of a lighthouse and he had realized that his life, as he had known it, was over. She knew that he would help them, she was certain that he would move heaven and earth to help John, but she also knew that – because of her – he was currently living in anonymous isolation, surrounded by a beach lined with Semtex.

“No.” The repetition strengthened her resolve; she wouldn’t drag Charley back into this maelstrom. “My mother. She owned a cabin. The first machine they sent killed her there.” Despite keeping the details spare, she felt the familiar surge of guilt, and gripped John’s hand tightly. “I couldn’t go back there, not straight away, but I knew that its location would’ve been erased when I destroyed that machine, so I never sold it. It’s the closest place I have, and we’re staying close.” She met Derek’s eyes then, daring him to contradict her. “We’re not running from these fuckers. Not after this.”

He made no attempt to argue with her, merely gesturing to let her know that John was stirring. “We should look to move in the next couple of hours.”

Sarah nodded, and Derek watched her stand and straighten herself carefully, holding a cup of water to John’s lips while she murmured soft words to him that weren’t meant for Derek to hear. He looked away, drawing morphine into a syringe and injecting it slowly into the IV until John’s face lost the lines of pain that were creasing it and he settled back to sleep.

Setting the cup down, Sarah looked around the workshop they had appropriated as their field hospital. “Does this place have a bathroom?”

Derek narrowed his eyes; every time she moved she caught her breath, and she was unconsciously favoring her left side. He gestured towards the far corner of the unit. “There’s one back there.” As she brushed past him, he caught her arm. “Sarah, are you hurt?”

Pulling free from his hold, she looked down at her hands, the palms stained with red, blood dried beneath her fingernails like a macabre fashion statement. “It’s not my blood,” she said dully, her stomach churning as the sweet, metallic smell suddenly hit her. “I’m fine. I just need to get cleaned up.” She walked unsteadily towards the corner Derek had indicated.

 He waited until the door to the bathroom had clicked shut. “Shit.” Out of options, he took out his cellphone, hesitated only briefly, and then hit the number listed as Metal.          

~ ~ ~

               Sitting on the closed toilet lid , Sarah drew in a deep breath and then began peeling her tank top up and away from the wound on her side, muffling a groan as the dried blood on the material stuck to her abraded skin.

               “Dammit.”

               Blood that had been trickling from the injury was now flowing freely. She looked around for something clean to try and staunch it, before giving up and stripping off her tank top to use that. Curling her hand into a fist, she pressed down hard, all too aware that the longer she was gone, the more likely Derek was to come looking for her. As if on cue, there was a knock at the door, and she swore quietly before realizing that Derek would almost certainly have attempted just to walk straight in.

               “Sarah?”

               Cameron, who would probably wait for a few seconds more and then burst the door from its hinges.

With a sigh, Sarah resigned herself to the inevitable. “It’s not locked.”

               Obviously pre-warned, Cameron had brought the first aid kit, and set it down on the floor, taking out a pad of gauze and looking to Sarah for permission before she did anything else.

               “Derek sent you.” If she hadn’t been able to feel her own blood running down into her pants, Sarah might have been amused by that concept.

               “Yes.” Pulling Sarah’s hands away, Cameron began to use the gauze to soak up the blood obscuring the wound. “You’re no good to John if you collapse.”

               “He said that?” It came out in a gasp. Having pinpointed the source of the bleeding, Cameron was attempting to stem it by applying direct pressure, necessity forcing her to ignore Sarah’s discomfort.

               “No. He didn’t say that.”

               Sarah leaned back against the toilet and closed her eyes. “I didn’t even realize.” She gestured towards her side. “Not until the last half hour.” It wasn’t an excuse, just the truth.

               “Adrenaline.”

               “Yeah, I guess.”

               Cameron lifted the gauze, gave a quiet murmur of satisfaction, and ran water into the sink, waiting until the first rusty splutterings turned clear. “John was badly injured. Your natural reaction to that allowed you to overlook your own wound in order to protect him.”

               Sarah bit her lip and nodded, no reply forthcoming. The machine’s hands were efficient but gentle, warm water sluicing the blood and dirt away. The bullet had torn shallowly through her side before grazing a path across her abdomen. She had a vague recollection of a shouted warning and a sudden impact stopping her in her tracks, but there was nothing more distinct than that, which lent a lot of credibility to Cameron’s explanation.

               “You’ll need stitches to close this.” Cameron indicated the deeper through-and-through, and picked up the needle and thread. “The rest is just going to sting like a motherfucker.”

               Eyes wide, Sarah let out a startled laugh. “Has John been teaching you to curse?”

               Cameron hesitated, the needle poised inches away from Sarah’s skin. “No. Derek said it earlier at the Dyson house, when he got shot.” She pushed the needle in, beginning to pull the tattered edges of the wound closed, completely oblivious to Sarah’s stunned expression.

               “Derek got shot?”

               “Yes.” Another tiny stab of the needle, another neat stitch. “Twice, center mass in the chest. He stepped in front of the Triple 8 as it rounded on you and John.” A jerk as she tied a knot off. “If he hadn’t been wearing body armor, he would have been killed.” She wiped a trickle of blood away, her face contemplative before she added, somewhat unnecessarily, “Instantly.”

               “Jesus, Cameron.” Sarah shuddered, unable to stop herself. She knew that Derek rarely wore body armor, disliking the hindrance of its weight.

               “Not his day to die.” Cameron paused, pleased with her first foray into philosophy, then pulled another stitch taut.

               “No.” Sarah shook her head, torn between despair at the machine’s nonchalance and disbelief at their own twisted and tormented luck. “Not his day to die.”

~ ~ ~

               Left alone again in the filthy washroom, Sarah soaked her discarded tank top and used it to clean the streaks of blood from her chest. She hadn’t lied to Derek; most of the blood was John’s, and her hands shook as she watched it swirl down the sink.

               “Too fucking close,” she whispered, no-one there to hear.

Too close for all of them, and John still wasn’t stable enough to be considered out of danger.

With a quiet knock, Cameron entered and handed her a clean shirt from the supplies they had brought with them. Sarah nodded gratefully then pulled it on. The fresh stitches tugged and burned, but she ignored the pain, accepting it as a fair trade-off for being rid of the clothing stained with her son’s blood.

Cameron had gone again, leaving a packet of Tylenol and a bottle of water behind as a none-too-subtle hint. Swallowing two tablets with a mouthful of water, Sarah pulled her shirt straight and headed back into the workshop.

~ ~ ~

               “Any change?”

               Derek had been sitting by John’s side, but was already rising and offering up his chair as Sarah walked towards him.

               “No change. No fresh bleeding. He seems comfortable enough.”

               “Has he been awake?”

               “No.” He looked at her, his face pale and drawn. “No, I’d have come and found you, Sarah.”

               She nodded, and he was about to move past her when she laid a hand on his chest. “Cameron told me.”

               “Told you what?” He sounded genuinely bemused.

               “That you got shot.”

               “Fucking metal.” He pushed her hand down, color rising in his face as he turned away from her.

               “Reese.” Her voice was sharp, stopping him dead, and she held her hands up as if to apologize for using the family name. When she continued, her tone was softer; they were in too much trouble to be fighting amongst themselves. “Derek, what happened here…” She looked at John, who had always been quicker to forgive and urge reconciliation than she had ever been. “What happened here, happened. It’s no-one’s fault.”

               “It’s my fault John was involved.”

               “Maybe,” she conceded. “But if we had split up, there’s a pretty good chance we’d be dead. It probably wasn’t expecting four of us, and I’m sure it wasn’t expecting metal.” She looked up at him. “It was waiting for me,” she said, her voice hollow. “If you’re looking for someone to blame, I started this when I put my fingers against three smudges of blood.”

               He shook his head, not convinced, still plagued by the consequences of his decisions, but didn’t resist when she took his hand and laid his fingers flat.

               “Here.” She dropped two Tylenol onto his palm. “Ribs broken?”

               “No. Just bruised.”

               “Stinging like a motherfucker?”

               He raised an eyebrow with the hint of a smile. “Anything the metal didn’t tell you?”

               “You know Cameron. She was quite comprehensive.”

               “I’ll bet.” Swallowing the pills dry, he stacked up a couple of their supply boxes and lifted them with a slight grimace. “He’s due a dose of morphine in forty minutes. That’d probably be a good time to move him.”

               “Okay.” She took her seat, touching John’s hand lightly. “Derek?”

               “Yeah?”

               “I’m glad you had the vest on…”

~ ~ ~

               Special Agent Auldridge stood in the middle of what had once been a typical family kitchen, and tried to visualize the sequence of events from the pattern of destruction surrounding him. Crime Scene Investigators were digging out bullets and shaking their heads over structural damage that they were at a loss to explain, while a photographer was busy taking detailed shots of blood splatter and of a larger stain where a body had lain and then been lifted.

The first patrol unit to respond to a neighbor’s frantic report of shots being fired had found the bodies of friends of theirs: off-duty policemen with a sideline in private security. Officers specializing in bereavement counseling were informing their families and making the requisite assurances that no stone would be left unturned during the investigation.

               Pushing open the door of the master bedroom, Auldridge nodded at the County Coroner’s official and watched as Tarissa Dyson was sealed up into a body bag.

               “Damn.”

               He patted his top pocket where his cigarettes should have been and swore with more vehemence when he remembered that he’d given up three months ago, right around the time he had first spoken to Tarissa.

The bedroom door opened again and a forty-something detective with a paunch and a regrettable moustache grinned happily at him.

               “I hope that grin means you found something, Tommy, otherwise,” he nodded towards the body bag, “It’s a little inappropriate.”

               The detective’s grin broadened. “New security system was installed six weeks ago; records everyone coming through the front door. We found something on last night’s footage that you’re gonna want to see.”

               Auldridge made a lead the way gesture, opened a packet of nicotine gum and followed the detective out of the bedroom.

~ ~ ~

               Cameron pulled the truck into an unlit parking space at the rear of the small convenience store and switched the ignition off.

               “Why are we stopping?” In the backseat, Sarah looked up, confused. She had been so focused on monitoring John’s condition that she hadn’t even realized they had left the freeway.

               “We need spare medical supplies, food. You both need to eat something. You –” this directed at Sarah, “– Were bleeding for several hours and need to replace the fluid you lost.” The inference was clear: you are not machines, you cannot keep going indefinitely.

Sarah put a hand to her aching head, loath to dwell on the issue of her own injury. “Okay, fine. Make it quick.”

               “Of course.”

               The truck’s interior light came on when Cameron opened the driver’s door, and Sarah glanced down to where John’s head rested in her lap. He had slept for the duration of the journey, heavily sedated by a combination of shock and morphine, his only purposeful movement having been to struggle weakly when Derek and Cameron carried him to the truck. As the light dimmed again, Sarah rested a hand on his forehead, smoothing away the damp strands of hair and frowning when she felt the heat there.

“I think he’s running a fever.” She tried not to sound scared, but the fear was there in the way her words caught in her throat.

Derek stopped peering into the dark of the parking lot and spun around to face her. Reaching his hand out, he laid it on John’s forehead, and then nodded in agreement. “He feels slightly warm. It might just be a stress reaction.” Derek knew that was a long shot at best, but preferred not to tip Sarah over the edge that she had been teetering along for the past few hours. “Next time he wakes up, we can get some Tylenol into him. That’ll help. And as soon as we find somewhere to stop, I’ll check his dressings. Okay?”

She nodded, and even in the darkness he saw the relief in her eyes.

“He’ll be alright, Sarah.” He knew that he shouldn’t make her any promises. They had a critically injured seventeen-year-old lying in the back of a truck with his chest drain sitting in the foot-well, and an IV hanging off a seat belt. There was nothing right about any of this, but when he touched her hand, she curled her fingers around his for a fleeting moment, and he repeated his promise regardless.

“He’ll be alright.”

~ ~ ~  

Sitting in the cluttered cubicle laughingly referred to by his supervisor as his office, Auldridge leaned back in his chair, a troubled expression creasing his brow. He clicked his mouse twice and reopened the digitized file, enlarging the photograph of a young woman with a feral look in her eyes, who seemed poised as if she was about to launch herself at the unfortunate person behind the camera. On the television to his right, the same woman – not looking anywhere near as old as she should have – nodded to a male and entered the Dyson house. Both had guns drawn, both moved as if they were expecting, or at least prepared for, an ambush. His supervisor had dismissed the similarities between the two women’s appearances as a coincidence, pointing out with a sly grin that, even if she had survived a massive explosion in a bank vault eight years ago, it was too much to believe that she had also discovered the secret to eternal youth. The grin had vanished as soon as the DNA results had come back. One blood sample was a perfect match for Sarah Connor: Pescadero escapee and domestic terrorist listed high on the FBI’s Most Wanted. The second was a close enough match to the first to indicate that one of Connor’s immediate family had also been present at the crime scene, and had lost a large amount of blood there. To the FBI’s knowledge, Connor had only one close, surviving relative: her son, John.

               Auldridge looked down again at the press release he had been issued with. Sarah Connor was being implicated in the deaths of Tarissa Dyson and the two off-duty officers who had died alongside her. It didn’t matter that the Coroner had established time of death as being at least twenty hours before Connor had entered the property. There were no other leads to go on, and Connor was too big a potential catch to allow such trivialities as contradictory forensic evidence to prevent the Bureau from naming her as their number one suspect. Her photograph and description had been released to all the major news agencies, along with the offer of a one hundred and fifty-thousand dollar reward for information leading directly to her arrest. With a sigh, Auldridge checked his watch, clicked CNN onto his laptop and waited for the cranks to start calling.

~ ~ ~

The Tylenol had stayed down for about ten minutes before John had leaned over and vomited the medication onto the floor of the truck, along with the small amount of water Sarah had managed to get him to drink. Beneath her hand, his forehead burned, and she looked to Derek, panic vivid on her face.

               “We need to stop.” Derek watched John shivering uncontrollably and his guts twisted; he knew things were getting beyond the point where his limited skills, and their limited medications, would be able to make much of a difference. “Get us to a motel or something. The shittier the better. Somewhere no-one will ask questions.”

               Cameron nodded, one eye on the road, the other studying the truck’s GPS.

 Derek soaked a bandage in water before handing it to Sarah. “Here.”

               Taking the cloth, she cleaned John’s face and then rested it on his forehead. “It’s not going to be enough, is it?” she said quietly.

He knew she wasn’t talking about the cold compress, but about everything that they had at their disposal, and he shook his head once, beyond the point now of baseless reassurance.

               “No. No, it isn’t.”

~ ~ ~

TBC…

~ ~ ~