Page 46 of Five Survive

Red placed the walkie-talkie down on the dining table, leaving it on channel three, ready for the sniper. She reached into her pocket for her phone. No service of course but, hey, 51% battery, still pretty good for her. She knew that Maddy panicked whenever her own was below 50%, wouldn’t even leave the house.

She swiped down and clicked on the flashlight.

“Arthur, hit the lights. Reyna, headlights.”

Reyna leaned across the steering wheel and out went the headlights. Arthur reached up to the control panel by the refrigerator and twisted the lights all the way off. The darkness from outside found its way into the RV, disappearing them all, broken up only by the white swinging beams of their flashlights. A yellow glow from Simon’s headlamp as he readjusted it onto his forehead. Red lit up Maddy as she came to stand next to her, ready to take her position at her window. Her face was ghostly pale, almost blue, white dots in the pools of her eyes.

“Into your positions.”

“That’s what she said,”Simon whispered, walking past Red toward the window by the lower bunk.

Red turned, bumping into Arthur.

“Sorry, after you,” she said.

Arthur approached his window, resting one knee up on the sofa. Red took her place at the front door, waiting behind the closed shade. She watched over her shoulder as Oliver awkwardly spun the closet door to stand end up and he crouched beside the steering wheel. He shifted the gear into reverse, and the image from the rearview camera flickered into life in the center console. The road eerie white at the bottom of the screen, the sky molded from shades of black and gray.

Oliver shuffled the closet door against himself. A shield. A barricade. But could wood that thin stop a bullet from a high-powered rifle?

Red turned to her own window. She swallowed, fast-forwarding the next few seconds, to her putting her face and eyes up against the bottom of the glass to study the darkness beyond. She imagined the red dot floating right there on her face, joining the freckles on hernose, moving up to her forehead, or against her teeth, and she’d never even know about it. Maybe she’d hear the crack in her last moment, but she wouldn’t know, would she, as it hit its target? Dead too fast for the fear to live. Like how she imagined Mom had died, in those early days when her dad and the other officers spoke in jagged circles around it.Killed in the line of dutywas all some would say to her.Your mom was a hero,others.

In Red’s head, Mom didn’t have time to be scared, no time to think her goodbyes, she didn’t know it was her end, she didn’t know and with one blink she was gone. But she wasn’t afraid, and that was one good thing as the world fell apart. Except that wasn’t what happened. At all. Red looked it up, the night before the funeral. Multiple articles about the fatal shooting of Police Captain Grace Kenny of the Philadelphia PD, Third District. She shouldn’t have, because then she wouldn’t know. But it was too late. And the picture in her head changed. Mom on her knees. Begging for her life—the articles didn’t say that part, but Red filled in the gaps. On her knees, terrified, knowing what was about to happen. And then it did: two shots to the back of the head. Killed with her own service weapon. She had time to be afraid, all the time in the world, lifetimes in seconds, there on her knees.Executedwas another word the articles used, a word almost too big for thirteen-year-old Red to understand. It didn’t fit in her head, not in the same sentence as her mom.

She understood now, though, thinking about putting her face up to that window. Thinking about that red dot searching her out in the darkness. Even a fraction of the fear her mom felt, right there at the end of all things.

“Red, are you listening?” Oliver raised his voice. “I said flashlightsoff!”

“S-sorry,” she mumbled, pressing the button, and the pitch-blackclaimed the RV for itself, the others no longer full people, just shadows, nightmare figures on this nightmare night. No moonlight even, now that Reyna had pulled down the shade on the windshield.

“Now,” Oliver said, clearing his throat. “If you pull your curtains or shades just a little bit, from the bottom corner, so you can lookout.”

“Do we really have to put our fucking faces up against the windows?” Simon’s voice called behind her. “Sounds like a death wish to me.”

“Yes,” Oliver replied. “Because that’s the plan.”

Have to stick to the plan, Red thought. Always. Like she was doing right now. She just had to see through the rest of tonight, the rest of the plan.

“Oh, I know!” Maddy shouted, directly opposite Red at her window. Always side by side. “We can use our phones, like Arthur did before. Record a video of outside, then we definitely won’t miss the flash.”

“Okay, if you’d prefer,” Oliver conceded.

“Yes, I’d fucking prefer,” Simon said, a sound of clumsy rustling from his corner.

“Right, phones out!” Oliver called.

Red watched the dark shape of Arthur struggle with his, fiddling with the front of his jeans. Close enough to reach out and touch. To hold hands, even, if they didn’t need both hands for this plan.

“Put them up against the windows now, make sure they are facing your assigned angle.”

Red unhooked the shade, her fingers gripped hard around the clasp. Do not let it go. She raised it a couple of inches from the bottom and, with her other hand, pressed the camera of her phone against the glass. She shifted her body so she wasn’t directly behindthe phone, in the line of sight, and she watched the screen. There was nothing out there. Only black.

She checked over her shoulder at Arthur. His hand had disappeared beyond the lower corner of the mattress, out there in the night, the other still fiddling nervously with his jeans.

“Okay, start recording now!” Oliver shouted, and the dark RV was filled with a chorus of high-pitched bleeps, singing to each other, as they all pressed record.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds on the recording.

“Ready?” Oliver called, a shadowy arm reaching up behind his shield.

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