The shop is picked clean up front, except for lottery tickets and a rack of condoms that prompt a momentary episode of delusion when he grabs a box to shove into his pocket. He finds a first-aid kit in the office, along with a protein bar and a bottle of warm, expired Gatorade. He downs both quickly, hardly tasting them at all except for the sweetness that coats his tongue. His stomach threatens to reject it from the sheer shock of receiving something other than dust. He forces it down anyway.
It’s easy to let his mind wander to Addison and Emma as he patches up the cut along his hairline and the slice across his arm from the plane debris. Does she assume him gone forever now? Or is she watching the horizon as if he’ll manifest across the treetops?
He presses the gauze harder than necessary when that thought hits, his jaw tightening.
Their last conversation wasn’t exactly encouraging. Part of him worries that she may never be able to forgive his mistakes, of which he’s made many, especially when they fly so close to one of her biggest fears.
She’ll have to tell him that to his face, though. Because he ain’t giving up on getting back, even if it kills him trying. Which is a very real possibility, all things considered. He catches his reflection in the cracked office mirror. Blood in his hair. Dirt smeared across his jaw. Eyes a little too hollow.
“Still breathing,” he mutters to himself. It’ll have to be enough.
He used to think that the plane was his last tether to the world before. It served as an anchor to remind him of who he used to be, and as a last thread of hope for what might lie ahead.
Addison is his tether now. There might be thousands of miles between them, but Wyatt has never felt so certain of where he belongs.
And if he has to crawl those miles on shredded knees to find her again, he will.
* * *
There’s a tunnel between him and the largest, most ridiculous resort in the area.
It threads through a mountain like a thick snake, and Wyatt may as well be standing right in front of its open mouth. There’s no option to go around unless he’d prefer dropping to his death along the slick slopes. If he wants a fucking Jeep, then he needs to go through, except he can’t see what awaits him, and the last thing he has access to is a flashlight.
The air spilling from the tunnel is cooler. It smells faintly of oil and rot.
There are a few cars abandoned at the entrance, and Wyatt checks them all for supplies, finding nothing useful except a tire iron and a packet of sunflower seeds that he can’t even eat. He’d have to plant these to use them at all. He sighs, pocketing them anyway, before he stands at the very edge of where the light shifts into pitch-black darkness.
The temperature drops near the shadow. His skin prickles and his nerves vibrate.
His toes brush the line between light and dark while he considers turning around. There have to be more Jeeps elsewhere in Sedona, except he didn’t see a single one on his way here, and that’s more than unusual. Not even those hideous pink ones that used to dot this landscape like vermin are anywhere to be found.
Someone has gathered them or fled the area in them. Could go either way.
Neither option sits well.
He raises his hand as if to bang on a car hood to alert waiting rotters, but thinks better of it. He’s on a steep road with no way out except running in the opposite direction, and he’s so damn tired he isn’t sure he’s got enough cardio left in him to do that. His lungs still feel scorched from days in the heat.
Carefully, he takes light steps into the cavernous opening, holding up the tire iron he pilfered from the back of a truck, in case anything decides to jump out at him as he traverses a sea of dead vehicles. His boots crunch over broken glass. The sound ricochets around him, amplified by concrete. Every exhale feels like he may as well be yelling out his location to whatever might listen.
The car graveyard begins to give way to military trucks. All empty and looted, their crates on their sides, and blood coating the ground where drivers must have been dragged off and eaten. And that’s when the growls start to filter into the silence, closerand closer, the sound echoing off the tunnel walls and soaking right up into the concrete like they were never there at all.
The growls multiply and layer, bouncing off the curved walls, impossible to place.
Wyatt hops up into the cab of the nearest military truck, nearly losing his jugular to a rotter still strapped into the passenger side. Blood coats his face in a horrific splash as he smashes the tire iron into a soft skull, but the noise has already alerted the others, and soon he’s surrounded by the dead.
Hands slap against metal, fingernails drag down the doors, and teeth snap inches from the glass.
The truck rocks back and forth with the weight of the herd, and for a moment, Wyatt assumes this is the end of the road for him. That whatever chance he had of getting back to Addison evaporated the moment he entered this tunnel.
One wrong choice is all it takes out here. The wasteland offers grace to no one. Not even a man on a journey to reunite with the other half of his heart.
He can almost see her face if he lets himself imagine it.
Giving up was never his strong suit. He is nothing if not stubborn. So he pats down the man beside him, finding a lighter in his pants pocket and a fucking hand grenade in his vest. His fingers hesitate for half a second over the metal. This is reckless in more ways than one.
If he thinks about it too long, he’ll falter, so he snatches the soldier’s gloves off his hands and shoves them into his own, pulls the pin from the grenade, and leans through the door far enough to force it directly into a rotter’s gaping mouth.
For one suspended second, the creature just stares at him. Confused. Almost curious, as if there might be something left ticking inside its peeling skull.
