“It's fine.” It wasn't fine. Dustin breathed through his nose until the stars cleared. “Just... go slower. It's not a light switch.”
Greg tried again. The truck crept forward. Dustin talked him through the turn onto the frontage road and thanked God, the universe, and—while he was at it—the flying spaghetti monster for the fact that they had the road mostly to themselves. They were moving.
Slowly.
“You're going twelve miles per hour,” Dustin pointed out.
“It seems like a safe speed.”
“You're going to get us rear-ended.”
Greg pressed the gas a little more. The speedometer climbed to twenty.
“Faster.”
“I don't like this,” Greg muttered.
“Then pull over and stop. I'll drive.”
“But you can't even use your left arm.”
“And if I let you drive, we won't get to the hospital before sunset, and possibly not without further injuries. Now pull over.”
Greg did, jerking the truck to an abrupt stop. “Sorry,” he apologized again. “This was not part of reaper training.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
They traded positions. Dustin bit the inside of his cheek getting back behind the wheel. The shoulder was a dull roar now, hot and swollen and deeply, structurally wrong. He'd dislocated it twice before. Once at seventeen, bailing on a landing. Once at twenty-two, in a bar fight that Tyler had started and Dustin had finished. Both times it had been this same sickening wrongness, the joint sitting somewhere it didn't belong.
It wasn't pleasant, but he could handle it.
An ambulance tore past them on the frontage road, lights blazing, siren splitting the air. Then another. Dustin watched them in the rearview as they screamed toward the interchange. Toward the pileup. Toward the silver sedan crumpled against the median.
A fire truck followed, and then a highway patrol car, and for a full minute the frontage road was nothing but emergency lights and noise. Dustin drove through the strobing red and blue and didn't say anything and Greg didn't say anything and the silence between them was itsown kind of loud.
When the last patrol car passed, the road went quiet again. Too quiet.
“Are you sure you can drive?” Greg asked. “Your arm looks bad.”
“I've had worse.”
“When?”
“When I fell eight hundred feet out of the sky onto solid rock.”
“That didn't hurt you.”
“Funny, isn't it?” Dustin pulled his phone from his pocket with his right hand and handed it to Greg. “Look up the nearest ER. My pin is 5498.”
Greg held the phone with both hands and stared at the screen.
“You tap the—” Dustin started.
“I know what a phone is. I've seen humans use them.” Greg poked the screen with one cautious finger. Nothing happened. He poked it again. “Why isn't it responding?”
“You have to turn the screen on first. There's a button on the side.”
Greg did and the phone lit up—as did Greg's face. “What now?”
