Heart in her throat, Tash sat very still as she waited the endlessly long five seconds before the lights came back on again. When they did, she moved deliberately carefully, securing the needle back in the plastic case—mostly because stepping on it with bare feet would suck, but also because a sewing needle was a limited resource, and each kit only contained one.
She stood up, moving toward the door, ready to open it at Thomas’s Lizzo-knock.
But the knock didn’t come.
And it didn’t come.
Do not open this door if it’s not our established knock.
Okay. She’d understood that very clearly. But the options were alwaysThomas doesn’t come back,orThomas comes back, then knocks in their established pattern,orThomas comes back, but knocks a non-Lizzo knock.
It hadn’t occurred to either of them to create a rule forThomas comes back, but doesn’t knock.
And the big question that popped up waswhy?Why wasn’t he knocking? Or perhaps more accurately, whycouldn’the knock?
And a scenario—a catastrophic one—immediately popped into Tasha’s head. One in which Thomas had been badly injured and just managed to crawl back to the pod and through the bulkhead door, only to fall unconscious once inside.
She opened the door.
It was heavy, but she wrestled it ajar enough for her to peer out and up the stairs. The dim lights were still on but the landing was silent and empty. So she pulled the door even further open—enough for her to slip through.
But before she did that, she stopped again to listen for a moment, and again heard nothing. No labored breathing, no regular breathing.
God, did she even remember how to do CPR?
She shrugged off the blanket that she’d wrapped around her shoulders, and went out the door and up the stairs, as swiftly and silently as she could manage.
Thomas wasn’t lying on the landing, thank God. He wasn’t standing there, either. He wasn’t there at all.
But his rifle was.
It was on the concrete floor, close to the bulkhead door, as if he’d opened the hatch only to put the weapon inside. A baggie he’d used to carry extra ammo in his raincoat pocket was beside it.
Tasha felt the blood drain from her head so swiftly that she had to sit down, right there next to the rifle.
Because now other possible catastrophic scenarios flashed through her head.
He was dying, and he knew that he couldn’t make it inside, but he’d managed to give her this gun and these extra bullets.
But there was no blood anywhere. Not on the rifle, not on the floor, not on the baggie, not on the bulkhead.
So maybe he’d been spotted, was being chased, and was on the verge of being captured so he’d come back here to give her this weapon.
No, wait, that didn’t make sense. Protecting her—he’d told her just last night that he still saw himself mainly as her protector. If he was being chased, there was no way he’d lead his pursuers to this bomb shelter. He’d definitely run in a different direction, leading them away from her.
Unless...
Thomas had said there were around twenty men in that camp he’d discovered. It was one thing to evade a handful of wannabe commandos, but twenty? And if they were all closing in? Thomas was a SEAL, and SEALs were good, but no one wasthatgood.
Tasha suddenly knew, quite clearly, what this rifle meant—what Thomas had done.
With that large of a group of men chasing him, his chances of evasion were less likely, although not impossible. Except, he knew that if he suddenly, mysteriously vanished—i.e. went through the hatch—those men would search this area hard until they found the bulkhead. And then Thomas and Tasha would be trapped. So instead, he’d dropped off this weapon, and now was purposely going out into the woods, unarmed.
But...
“Oh, hell no!” She pushed herself back to her feet and scrambled down the stairs to grab her jacket and her hat-towel, this time wrapping it around her throat like a scarf as she raced back up to the landing.
Outmaneuvering the small army of men wasn’t going to be enough. He’d look at the logistics and realize that he’d need to let those men catch him, so that they didn’t find the bulkhead.
