Chapter X

Kate stirred in the front seat of Henry’s truck. She was uncomfortable from remaining in the same seated, upright position for hours and her head still hurt. During the daylight, she’d looked at her reflection in the truck’s rear-view mirror. Judging from the symphony of black and blue that had spread over her forehead, her head wasn’t going to stop throbbing anytime soon.
“Fuck me for being so stupid,” she thought. “How could I have knocked myself cold like that?”
She had pretended to be asleep for more than two hours before she’d actually drifted off. Now, the night was gradually getting lighter, she was wide awake and soon, she’d have to start dealing with her situation again.
Kate had no idea what to do or what to say to Henry. She’d been going over the events of the previous days repeatedly in her mind, and was no closer to any real conviction as to how to regard them … or him -- Henry -- this man she’d been traveling with.
After all, he had killed a man. Kate knew that was wrong, and that part was crystal clear to her.
But he’d also stopped that disgusting grunt from raping and killing her, and he’d kept her safe after she knocked herself unconscious back at the rest stop. He had even given her his jacket. She looked down and realized she still had it on.
“He couldn’t be bad, could he?” she thought.
Kate’s mind kept wandering back to how Henry had wrapped his arms around her when she‘d recoiled from her assailant in fear. His touch felt so nice and she wished …
She quickly snapped out of her daydream before it got far. She didn’t have time for that bullshit. Now was the time to get her head together. It was time to think.
Kate knew she couldn’t go on being silent forever. It hadn’t accomplished anything thus far, and even though she was confused about Henry, one thing was certain: As much as she hated to admit it, she owed him.
She decided that she was going to have to put her feelings about the killing aside and trust him. He’d protected her once, she just hoped that he’d do it again if it came down to that.
Kate unbuckled the seat belt and stretched her arms and legs. She looked to the back seat and saw that Henry was stirring. He opened his eyes and caught her gaze as he blinked. She turned away for a split second, but shifted her body to face him as he sat up. She felt nervous, and hid her shaking hands behind the seat.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Well, it’s about fuckin’ time,” he said with a wink and a crooked smile.
Henry’s gestures put Kate more at ease. She felt her hands stop shaking and she continued.
“Look, I’m sorry that I haven’t been more cooperative. I really do appreciate everything you’ve done for me so far. It’s just that … well … I don’t know exactly how to say this, but …”
“You don’t know if you can trust me because I killed that guy,” Henry interjected. Kate nodded, and Henry shifted closer to her.
“There’s no reason for you to fear me,” he said. “You haven’t done anything wrong. That child-molesting prick was worth nothing. There’s no possible way we could have taken him along, and he would have died eventually if we’d left him tied up there.”
Kate nodded again. She saw his point and mentally kicked herself for not thinking of it sooner.
“If we’d let him go, he would have found some way to hurt you,” Henry said.
“I know. I know. Can we just start over?”
Now, it was Henry who nodded.
“What are we going to do now?” Kate asked.
“Well, you were sleeping when we passed the last road sign, but we’re close to Lake Charles. We’ll get there today."
"So, I guess we’ll just go search for that cameraman, that Olaf guy, and see what we can find for supplies along the way?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Okay, why don’t we get out and walk around for a minute, and then we can be on our way.”
Kate reached for the door handle as Henry pushed the driver’s seat forward. They exited the truck from opposite sides and walked toward the tailgate.
Kate’s legs felt sore and she bent over to stretch them properly. As she grabbed her toes, she looked up to find that Henry was watching her, but she didn’t feel embarrassed this time. She wanted him to look.
Henry stretched his arms, popped the latch on the tailgate and let it fall open. He sat on the edge of the truck, and Kate walked over and sat beside him.
“So, Katherine, ready for another day?”
“It’s Kate,” she said. “Please … call me Kate.”

Chapter IX

Sixteen consecutive hours had passed since Emma Hillard had moved from the couch in her mother's living room. She hadn't eaten or slept ... she'd barely even stirred. Emma was familiar with depression, and when she got in these moods, she really didn't feel the need to do anything. She liked the dual feeling of slight delirium and total numbness that came with complete apathy. It was a way of dealing with life that she had repeated so often, it came as a second nature to her.
Emma couldn't exactly recall how many days it had been since she had left her apartment in Galveston, Texas to find a city of nothingness. At the time, she had panicked and gotten in her car to find herself weaving through Interstate 10, which was littered with empty cars, to get to Lake Charles -- her hometown, and the place where her son, Aidan, had been visiting her mother for the week.
However, her apprehension ... and her confusion ... and her fear as she navigated her Jetta through the swarm of vacant vehicles were still fresh in her mind. Not once had she dared to stop and examine anything. She was too afraid.
"Maybe everything will be okay when I get to Lake Charles," she thought. "Maybe I'll find out what's going on."
She had arrived to find the city looking just like Galveston in the sense that it was completely deserted. With tears streaming down her face, she pushed hard on the accelerator and didn’t let up until she found herself in front of her mother’s house.
It too, was completely empty.
After Emma had conducted a frenzied search around the neighborhood and come up with nothing, she had returned to her mother’s house and let her sorrow take over.
Now, all she could think of was Aidan.
Her beautiful son, Aidan. The light of her life. She’d never see him again.
A sob escaped her throat, and Emma’s body jolted with the intensity of it. She waited for it to pass and continued to lay, shuddering, on the couch. She bit on ther thumbnail and thought back to when she’d first found out about Aidan’s impending birth.
“Yes, once upon a time, I was really something,” she thought.
When Emma was 19, she was cheerful, nubile and on top of the world. She was engaged to the scion of an oil fortune, Allan Reynolds, and couldn’t have been happier. Allan was the kind of man that was strong, smart and responsible, as well as devastatingly handsome. Some nights, as she lay next to his in bed, she’d look at him sleeping and scarcely believe her good fortune.
But her fortunes ran out just as fast as Allan did when she discovered that she was pregnant.
She didn’t see him through the duration of her pregnancy. She called, she stopped by, she hoped and she prayed, but she never saw Allan. On the day of Aidan’s birth, a man in a suit came to the hospital with a bouquet of flowers, a check for $500,000 that was signed by R. James Reynolds, Allan’s father, and a note that read “You may keep the ring. - A.R.” After that, the only time Emma ever saw anybody in the Reynolds family was on the news.
That had been nine years ago. Since then, with the check from Mr. Reynolds, Emma had provided for Aidan and herself with moderate success and had fallen in and out of depression in direct correlation to when she fell in and out of love with men.
With each new beau that came and went, she felt as if she was letting Aidan down. She’d always wanted to find him a father, someone who would be as strong, smart and responsible as Allan had appeared to be. But, it seemed like the harder she tried, the more futile her efforts were. Men continued to slip through her fingers and her son was still a bastard child -- just as she’d been.
But, none of that mattered anymore. Now, Emma had no son. She had no mother, and she’d never had a father. She didn’t even know who he was.
Everyone had abandoned her.
Emma continued to sob and even though she didn’t want to, she realized she had to get up. She needed to dry her eyes and blow her nose. So, she feebly shifted her legs to the floor, slowly stood up and walked to the bathroom.
After she’d finished, Emma started to walk back to the couch. She didn’t know what she was going to do. After all, what was the point of life now that there was absolutely nobody else?
“Maybe I’ll die or disappear or whatever the hell else happened,” she thought bitterly.
And then, she stopped short, stopped breathing for a moment. Voices -- there were people outside. She moved quickly, too quickly, and crashed to the hardwood floor. She immediately paused, and held her position on the floor.
There were definitely people out there. Emma didn’t know whether to be afraid or ecstatic, but either way, she’d just stay put for now.
“I tell you fath … um … Sebastian. I heard someone in there,” Olaf said.
Sebastian looked toward the doorway with skepticism. He’d heard the crash from inside the house, but that didn’t mean that someONE was inside. It meant someTHING was inside, and if it was some kind of animal, they needed to be prepared.
“There’s someone in there. What are we going to do?” Olaf asked.
“We’re definitely going in that house,” Sebastian said. He went to the side of the house and picked up a heavy shovel that was leaning against it. He picked it up and turned back to Olaf.
“But we’re not going in without weapons.”

Chapter VIII

The sun was sinking, and Henry found himself wriggling into the backseat of his truck for the second night in a row.
The evening was so perfectly still that he thought he was surely losing his mind. The whole day, there’d been nothing but silence - long, awkward silences. The woman … Katherine, she’d said … hadn’t so much as muttered a single word since they left the rest stop. He’d tried to strike up a conversation with her several times, but she’d been completely unresponsive. His attempts were met with disregard had done nothing but stare out the passenger window. At a few intervals, Henry had glanced at her and seen tears sliding down her cheeks, silent - but very real.
Now, she was sleeping. She’d nodded off about an hour ago in the front seat, still held by her seat belt, which left Henry with no choice but to take the back again.
He stopped and thought about how many times this woman, in the few hours he’d known of her existence, had left him in situations with only one possible choice.
Henry wanted to be angry with her. In fact, he wanted to be furious with her, and he was working hard at talking himself into it.
“Who the fuck does she think she is?“ Henry thought to himself. “Why does she think that she has the right to judge me?“
After all, that fucker back at the rest stop wanted to rape her, kill her … and he’d probably have made sure she screamed the entire time. She’d have ended up just like the girl that she’d told him about, the one she found on the side of the road. Henry had saved her from that fate, and here she was - upset with him for doing what he clearly had to do.
What the fuck was her problem? Didn’t she understand?
He didn’t feel guilty, and he’d relished every moment of delivering justice to the sick, twisted prick. God, how he hated men of that ilk. And now that there was nobody looking over his shoulder, nobody to constantly harass him about what he should and should not do, he could deal with scum in the manner that he’d like.
He wanted to curse her for being an ungrateful bitch and throw her ass out. She certainly wouldn’t last very long fending for herself, seeing as how well she‘d done so far. But, even though his fury stuck with him, Henry still couldn’t make himself hate her - because even though he disagreed with it completely, he could see her point.
He wondered if he should, perhaps, feel guilty.
A soft moan escaped Kate’s lips as she slept, and Henry propped himself up to look at her. Her tangled, dark brown hair fell in long tresses along his jacket, which she was still wearing and had wrapped tightly around herself. Even though her forehead was badly bruised and her bloody knees were visible beneath her torn jeans, there was something about her that he found lovely. There was something there that drew him.
He could see her chest move slightly with the rhythm of her soft breathing. She’d looked exactly this way after she’d knocked herself unconscious, and again, Henry was tempted to touch her.
He immediately shook the thought out of his head.
After all, he was better than that piece of shit Harry Long. He chalked his thoughts up to the fact that he hadn’t seen any other people in what was going on a week now. She was the first woman he‘d encountered since the disappearances, and that was the extent of it.
“She’s just someone I ran into, nothing more,” he told himself.
But, despite what they thought of each other, they were stuck together now. They’d have to work together, and she’d have to be more responsive.
With any luck, she’d be in more of a mood to talk tomorrow. Maybe she’d have some idea of what their course of action should be once they reached Lake Charles. Henry had no idea what they’d find there, but he wasn’t afraid.
He wondered if she was … he wondered if she was afraid of him.
“Oh well, I’ll deal with it tomorrow,” he thought.
As he tried to make himself comfortable, Henry knew he wouldn’t be getting to sleep easily. He was uncomfortable, that was for damn sure. But something else was bothering him.
What if this woman … Katherine … hated him for what he’d done?
Henry wasn’t sure what bothered him more - the fact that it was a distinct possibility that he‘d earned her ire, or the fact that he cared.