When I stay in my seat a little too long, he adds, “We need Gus up here to navigate.”
I get out and pass Navarro on my way to the small camper door. So it’s me and Toby and Jinx in the back.
“We need to get going. Now,” Jinx says. She can’t stop pulling on strands of her hair. Or stop sounding and looking and seeming nervous as hell.
And...something’s way wrong with Toby. Not, like, in the sense that something’s wrong with me or Jinx. We’re scared and freaked out all the time, and probably all messed up by what we’ve seen, and we miss home, we’re worried about Charles, and we want our old lives back.
Toby is...different.
Like there’s an icy storm raging inside of him.
Always.
We’re totally smooshed in the back of this crappy camper, which, by the way, smells like an old man’s dirty socks. Almost every surface is covered in wood paneling that’s all scraped up. Like someone with freaky long fingernails used to be trapped in here.
Because the space is so narrow, I have to kinda turn sideways when I walk. Jinx and I move to the center and take a seat at a little table with a weirdly bright green top. Like a plastic lime.
It hurts my eyes to look at it.
Toby’s on the floor of the camper with his back to the bed where we stashed the weapons. He’s got his feet pushed against the tiny camper stove. He’s staring, the way that a normal person might look out the window.
Except there’s no window down where he’s siting.
And he’s not himself.
We play crazy eights for a while but, after about an hour, the ride gets so bumpy that the cards won’t stay in place long enough for us to keep the game going.
“D-d-d-d-draw two.” Jinx bounces up and down in her seat.
The truck hits a major bump, and the card pile spills all over the table.
“What’s the point?” I push the pile into a neat stack.
It hits me that it’s, like, way darker inside the camper than it was before.
I stand up. Or. I try to stand up. We take another mini hill, and I’m thrown back into my seat.
Okay. Here I go again. Up. Up. To the window.
Bracing myself using the sink, I make my way to the camper’s wide window. We’ve completely left the coast. Tall, tropical trees surround the truck, blocking out the sun. It is like a jungle or a rainforest, and I wish I’d paid more attention in school when they explained the difference.
We haven’t passed a house or a car or evidence of human civilization since leaving the beach. We could be the only five people on the whole friggin’ planet.
A couple palm trees whiz by. There’s something I recognize, at least.
Navarro didn’t want to come here.
I’m getting this sinking feeling he’s right. And I hate it.
I turn toward the cab. Toby’s still sitting there, bouncing and bobbing along like he doesn’t have any bones in his damn body. Like he’s a flipping blob of Jell-O. Through the small window, I see Dad hunched over the steering wheel while Navarro has his face pushed into the atlas. In front of us...
Well.
It’s like we’re deliberately trying to drive into a tree.
The road, or the dirt path—or the, like, whatever, that Dad’s trying to use as a road—is vanishing into a small point ahead of us. Navarro starts gesturing and pointing and yelling something.
Dad sideswipes a tree. He’s driving way too fast. I fall over again, and I’m pretty sure that we’ve lost the driver’s side mirror. I’m back in my seat.
Jinx gets up, but she moves with more purpose, heading to the supply bins.
My stomach bounces and lurches and drops.
And my brother is still...um...whatever.
Jinx is close to him, reaching above his head, into the bins. He takes to staring at her knees like he’ll need to describe them to a police sketch artist later on.
“Toby! What the hell!” I yell at him.
He jumps to attention. “What? What’s going on?”
“What’s going on?” I shout even louder. “What’s going on is that Dad is driving about a hundred miles an hour into the forbidden forest!”
He has the nerve to shrug. “What do you want me to do?”
“Act like you give a damn!”
Jinx is murmuring something to herself. She glances at the road ahead of us. “When we stop, we need to get ready to move!”
“Why are we going so fast?” I say.
She shrugs, too, but at least she has the decency to give me an actual answer. “I don’t know. Maybe they see something.” Jinx checks out the window again. “Maybe—”
Her “maybe” is cut off by a boom.
And then another.
A sound I’ve become too used to hearing.
Two shots. From a big gun. Like a rifle.
LEAD: The Opposition pursues family of fugitives through Yucatán.
Fact check: I can’t verify who was chasing us. Everyone wants us dead.
Jinx clicks into mission mode, and before I can blink a few times, she’s sliding into a holster with her Colt attached.
Boom again.
Dad hits the brakes.
Hard.
I pretty much face plant into the table.
That green tabletop realllllly sucks, and if I had any wind inside of me, it’s totally knocked out.
Seriously, MacKenna. Get a hold of yourself.
“They’re...they’re...shooting. At us.” I cough a bunch of times. That disgusting kinda cough that suggests I might have tuberculosis or something way truly gross.
Jinx is saying something in that high-pitched, semi-hysterical way she talks when she’s saying things like, We’re all gonna die or Run!
I catch only a few words here and there.
“Someone...shooting...tire...gunfire...blowout.”
I hear the clacking of plastic as the bins up on the bunk collide with each other. The truck turns and rocks and spins and skids before hitting something.
If I had breath, I’d scream.
By the time I’m able to push my face off the table, Jinx is wearing her utility jacket and passing M16s to Dad and Navarro through the small window that divides the cab from the camper. She wraps another holster around her waist and grabs her backpack.
I’m hyperventilating as she makes her way up the narrow aisle in my direction. She drops my pack at my feet and presses a loaded Glock 43 into the palm of my hand.