Page 26 of South of Nowhere

He glanced toward Sonja, who regarded him with an undefinable expression, and he had no desire to try to decipher it.

“Now, I need you all to move as little as possible. And take shallow breaths. It’ll feel weird but you have to.” He looked throughout the interior of the vehicle, the dome light was on. Did that use oxygen? He didn’t see how. And darkness would only lead to panic.

Examining the windows and doors, the dash. The seal was pretty good, but water was trickling in.

“We need something to seal us up better. Do we have any ideas?”

Having a task, even one as minor as this, seemed to calm everyone down.

Sonja spoke first. “Don’t you have that stuff in the trunk for tires? If there’s a flat you can spray it in to fix the leak? It probably has some goo inside.”

“Maybe.” He sent Travis to the back to see if he could open the trunk and get the Fix-a-Flat.

“Nail polish,” Sonja said.

Would that work?

He remembered the horn.

Honk…

“Try it, Kim.”

She glowered and remained still for a moment. Then picked up a bottle from the floor with shaking hands, opened it and applied a streak to a window seam.

Yes! It took a moment to dry but it did stop some of the trickling.

“Good! How many bottles do we have, you stylish ladies?”

Sonja smiled. Kim, of course, did not.

Six, as it turned out.

The three each took two and used the brush to slather on the sweet-smelling liquid. The scent reminded him of the happier moments—forever ago, it seemed—when he smelled the same aroma as they drove blissfully along Route 13, oblivious as to what was about to happen.

Who’s Bob Dylan?

Eerily, blood red was the most common selection of polish they had brought.

“I can’t get the trunk open!” Travis was calling.

George looked back toward Travis. In the Suburban—an SUV—there was a trunk of sorts, where the jack and other tools were kept, but it was not meant to be opened with the liftgate down. He called the boy back and handed him one of the fingernail polishes.

Travis’s hands too shook as he opened the bottle. He was still crying.

“It’ll be all right,” George said. “I know they’ll be looking for us. The man in the pickup? We had our lights on. He would’ve seen us.”

Not adding that just because they didn’t see him slide off the levee didn’t mean he hadn’t fallen in a few seconds after they went over.

And drowned minutes after that.

The polish bottles were nearly all depleted and the interior of the vehicle took on a psychedelic look—a thought that struck George hard; he realized that he was lightheaded from the lack of oxygen and seemed to be slipping into and out of a dreamlike state.

Honk.

The muffled sound seemed pathetic, probably audible no more than five or six feet away.

He had a ridiculous thought that every time he honked somehow a bubble was released and it rose to the surface and blared away for the world to hear.

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