Lorde’s ears tipped back, then forward. The road dust had painted her black coat grizzly bear brown. She hopped down to the floorboards, and scooched past my legs to stick her head out the window. Nothing but farmland beyond the railroad tracks on our right and more farmland beyond I-55 on our left.
The air in the cab was warm enough even I could feel it, maybe somewhere in the high nineties Fahrenheit, which was no surprise since it was July in Illinois.
I guess one of the only good things about not being alive was that humidity wasn’t much of a bother. It was a dry death.
“Too hot to walk with all that black fur,” Lu said. “Let’s see what I can find.”
She reached across me, stretching for the glove box. I inhaled out of habit, wishing I could catch the deep rose and honey scent of her perfume.
The glove box popped, and she dug out the cellular phone she’d dropped in there just a couple hours ago.
For all that the world didn’t seem to notice my existence, and I couldn’t smell it or touch it like a living man should, everything else about me felt a lot like what living had been like. Or at least what I remembered.
I certainly had my share of fatigue, hunger, and stiff muscles from too much sitting.
But I didn’t need to open the door to exit the truck. It was easier to just drift through it.
Lorde shifted out of my way so I could ease out of the cab to stretch my legs.
I’d only drifted through living things a handful of times when I was first trying to get the hang of Unliving. It was not an experience I enjoyed, and Lorde seemed to know that.
I gave her a pat on the head, then did a once-around the truck. The sky was still blue as a bachelor button, not even a lint’s worth of cloud from horizon to horizon. The sound of faster vehicles, modern vehicles, hushed and growled and huffed down the freeway.
An entire modern world that Lu and I had discovered was a no-man’s land for us.
Stepping too far off the Route didn’t do either of us any good. Because it wasn’t just our souls we’d snipped and traded. Somehow that old road had a say in just how alive we could be.
Close to Route 66 was good. On the Route was best. Getting too far off it, stretching out into the modern world, was bad.
The Route threaded us together, stitched us to this world with an asphalt needle. Neither of us knew why, we just knew it was true.
I leaned against the bumper again and tipped my face up, imagining I could feel that sunlight on my skin, in my muscles, feel it soaking down to my cold, cold bones.
The truck dipped and Lu stepped out. “Yeah, just north of McLean, below Funks Grove on Route 66. If you hit Shirley, you went too far. It’s a big ol’ silver Chevy. You can’t miss it. Yeah. Okay. Good.”
She pocketed the phone in those tight jeans she wore because she knew it drove me wild to see her in denim. “Come on, Lorde, let’s stretch our legs.” She snapped her fingers and Lorde jumped down out of the truck, her black tongue already lolling. She glanced at Lu, glanced back at me.
I made with the shooing motions. “Get your walk in. No telling how long it will be until they send a tow truck. I’ll come get you when they arrive.”
Lorde sniffed at me, sneezed, then shook her head and trotted over to Lu. Lu had been doing this long enough to know I was near the truck.
She held up one hand in a wave, even though her eyes were focused over my shoulder.
I held a couple of fingers up to her, watched her turn and walk down the road with her hand resting on Lorde’s head. The way she filled out those jeans, Wranglers should pay that woman for carrying their label over her back pocket.
She must have felt me watching her, ’cause she paused and gave her hips a little extra wiggle before striding off. I chuckled, closed my eyes, and went back to wishing for sunlight.
Chapter Three
Lu had found a water bottle in her knapsack and was sipping from it. She sat cross-legged on the hood of the hunk of junk, her sunglasses on, but not a hat. Sunlight was hard for her in quantity, but a few hours out in it wouldn’t do her any harm.
I knew she was tracking the tow truck long before it was in sight, knew she could tell how many people were in it by the heartbeat—one man—and that he was in his early thirties, in good health.
I could tell all that stuff, too, because I’d drifted over to the oncoming truck and had taken a look with my own eyes.
When the driver pulled through a neat turn to back the tow to the front end of poor broken down Silver—which was never gonna be its name—I knew something about the man interested her. It was in the tip of her head, in the elevated speed of her breathing, in the pause between swallows as she watched him through narrowed eyes.
And if Lu was interested in a human being, then so was I.
