Savage Drift

^{CHAPTER NINETEEN} DEAN

Our backpacks were gone—they’d been in the truck.

Jake didn’t have a suit, but since he was type B, that hardly mattered.

The rest of us had our suits.

Drawing air through the mouthpiece was awkward, but it worked, even at a sprint. And the fact that you were basically holding the mask to your face by having the mouthpiece in your mouth meant the whole face mask/visor didn’t jar around too much. It was surprisingly stable. Even at a full sprint. Japanese design.

Jake was in the lead. He led us across a low field of brown grass into a residential neighborhood.

I ran behind Astrid and I did it on purpose. I thought I could block a bullet if the guy shot at her. Probably dumb, I know, but that’s what I did.

Small, nice-looking houses were on either side of the street.

Jake dodged behind a minivan and waited for the rest of us.

“Everyone okay?” he asked.

We nodded, all of us catching our breath.

The thing was, those mouthpieces made it hard to talk.

“You okay, Astrid?” he asked her. She nodded, clutching her belly.

She bent down and at first I thought she was going to be sick, then I saw that her sneakers were untied. She had pulled them on over the feet of her safety suit without tying the laces.

Thank God she hadn’t tripped.

“Follow me,” Jake said. “We’ll just, uh, we’ll find a car.”

He started edging down the street.

There was screaming, from one of the houses. A horrible, nerve-jangling sound.

I looked to Niko, Should we help?

He shook his head and followed Jake.

Then we saw a young woman in the street.

She was in front of a small white house that was nestled between two larger houses made of brick.

She was muttering to herself and carrying an armload of stuff, miscellaneous stuff to an idling Mazda sedan parked at the curb. She wore exercise clothes and her brown hair was coming out of a ponytail and sticking to her mouth.

There were things on the ground behind her—a picture frame. A tub of mayonnaise. Straw hat. Couch pillow.

She threw the armload into the back of the car and scrambled to retrieve the fallen items and shove them in, too. Then she saw us.

“Stay back!” she screamed. And I saw a big knife in her hand. A chef’s knife.

She’d been carrying it while she held the stuff, which was why she was dropping it everywhere.

Also, she was clearly type AB and fully, wildly paranoid.

We were a hundred and fifty feet away.

“No! No! No!” she cried. She backed away from us—from us—and then we saw a man behind her, moving fast.

I spat the mouthpiece out and shouted, “LOOK OUT!” and I rushed forward, trying, I don’t know, to save her.

But the man got her before we did.

He was broad shouldered, bald with a pot belly, and he was O.

He stalked toward her from behind, his arms and white button-down shirt splattered with blood. Head down, eyes gleaming with the call to murder.

O, O, O—I recognized it.

“Shoot him!” Astrid screamed, screaming to Jake.

But the O man had his hands around the woman’s throat, crushing the life out of her. Crushing her throat.

Her eyes bulging and it was awful, awful, awful.

I cried out in anger and wanted to fight him, then, but Niko was pulling me back.

The man got a hold of the lady’s knife and stabbed her in the chest.

He stabbed her again and again, like a kid lost in play.

Niko dragged me away, Jake was helping him now, and they got me back to the woman’s Mazda.

The man looked up at me. He was grinning madly, licking at his chin, where some blood had sprayed.

Astrid revved the engine of the car and then Jake pushed me into it as Niko hopped in the front passenger seat.

Astrid put the car in gear and we drove away.

Jake struggled to pull the door closed.

We were sitting on the woman’s stuff. Crammed in on top of piles of odd items.

I looked out the rear window of the car and saw the man resume stabbing the woman with her chef’s knife.

I shouted in despair.