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Henry strides over and grabs the driver’s door. He pulls … and nothing happens.

“They locked it?” I say.

“Probably did it automatically.” He checks the other doors, rounding the car, and then calls over the roof. “Window’s broken over here.”

He reaches in and gets the door unlocked. When the driver’s door clicks, I open it and slide in. I find the red hazard light switch as Henry shines the flashlight.

“It doesn’t seem to be on.”

He grunts. I push the button, and the lights start blinking. Henry climbs out and checks both rear blinkers, flashing me a thumbs-up. Then he strides to his truck. He gets in, and a moment later, the hazards start flashing.

“So both yours and theirs stopped?” I say, walking over as he’s half in his driver’s seat, left leg still on the ground. “The electrical is fine otherwise, right?”

He puts the pickup into auxiliary mode, and the interior lights come on.

I’m not going to say it’s weird. We both know it’s weird. But considering the vehicles had been in a serious collision, we can find a logical explanation if we want it. Do I want it? No. I want Henry to say this doesn’t make sense, that something is very wrong. I want him to see that something is very wrong.

But he only flips on his headlights. They’re smashed, though, and nothing happens.

“I’m going to leave on the interior light,” he says. “That’ll drain the battery, but at this point, I just want to be sure no one else hits us.”

He backs out of the truck, shuts the door, and raises the crowbar. “You okay with me using this on your trunk?”

“Absolutely.”

We walk to the front of his truck, and he lets out a low curse as he sees the situation. The “situation” being that I don’t really have much of a trunk left. It’s crumpled and wedged under the front end of his truck.

“So this is what happens when a pickup strikes a compact car,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“I’m really glad I wasn’t in it. You obviously hit the brakes but…” I walk alongside the two vehicles. “I can’t even see where my trunk is supposed to be.”

“I think this is it.” He taps the side with the crowbar. “But I can’t pry it from this angle, and it wouldn’t open anyway, being under my front end.” He leans a hip against the wreck and sighs. “I actually had a hazard sign in my truck bed, but the topper started leaking, so I took it off and cleared everything out literally last week, getting ready for this trip.”

He looks down the road, the puddles strobing with the intermittent flash of red lights. “The hazards are both on, and at least one should stay on but…”

“It doesn’t feel like enough.”

“It really doesn’t. We’ve been lucky so far, probably because we could all barely see so we were driving slow. The rain’s completely stopped now, and it’s nearly two AM. Anyone coming along might not be driving slow or sober.”

I walk to the shoulder and look up and down the road. My gaze lands on the fallen tree. “What if we put something on the road to warn people. Something that’ll make them slow down but won’t total their vehicle if they hit it. Like scattered branches.”

“That’d work. There must be plenty of downed branches after that storm. Strew them across the road, and someone will either see them or hit them, and after hitting them, they’d notice the cars.”

I fight back the shiver of memory. “I just really don’t want anyone getting badly hurt because of me.”

“You struck a fallen tree, Ellie. During a storm. Whatever happens, it’s not your fault.”

I shove my hands into my pockets. “I just need to feel as if I’ve done everything I can.”

“And we will. Let’s start gathering and strewing.”

Henry wrestles with a limb still attached to a tree and then backs up, breathing hard. “It seems to be dead, but it is not coming off.”

“I see that.”

He looks over at the road, where we have, in the last twenty minutes, laid down two tiny branches, each maybe a couple of feet long.