The Lair

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Lily

They made it less than an hour north before the snow started falling. At first, Lily didn’t even register what she was seeing. Yeah, she’d seen a lot of snow when they’d first gotten to Utah, but that had been almost two months ago. It was spring now.

She watched the gently drifting snow for several long minutes before saying, “It’s snowing.”

“Ya think?” Ely asked.

McKenna twisted in her seat to look back at Lily. “But we can still drive in this, right?”

How was she supposed to know? She was Texas born and bred. Just like McKenna. And Ely. How the hell were three kids from Texas supposed to drive in the snow?

“Let’s see if it stops soon,” she said to McKenna. And she ignored the snort of derision from Ely.

An hour later, the snow was still falling. Ely had slowed the Cayenne to a crawl. Finally, he pulled the SUV to a stop, the tires skidding on the slick road.

“This is bullshit.”

She had to agree. Just watching the falling snow made her skin crawl with frustration. She had to get out of the car. Do something. Move.

But there was nothing to do but sit here and watch the road ahead slowly disappear.

Damn it.

“Okay, genius, what do you want to do now?” Ely asked from the driver’s seat.

“I’m thinking.” But they were out of options.

“You wanna turn around now or should we just wait here until a snow plow comes to dig us out?”

“Okay, smartass, what ideas do you have?” Lily demanded.

From the front seat, McKenna was just looking back and forth from Ely to Lily like she was waiting for a bomb to go off.

Ely held up his hands in the universal sign for hey-this-ain’t-my-fault. “What do I look like, the world-renowned professor of making shit up?”

“No. You look like a guy who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, so he doesn’t open his mouth unless he can prove it.”

He gave a snort. “Hey, you’re the chica who wanted to drive up to Canada. In the middle of winter.”

“I’m a Texan. For me, winter is over after Valentine’s Day.”

“You wanna keep driving, I’ll be sure to remind you of that when we’re buried in a snowdrift in Montana.”

“Okay, if you’re worried about this, why mention it now?” McKenna asked. “Why didn’t you bring this up back at Base Camp?”

Ely smirked. “I didn’t think of it then.”

Lily wanted to argue, but what could she say. She hadn’t thought of it, either. “Okay, so what do we want to do? Turn around and go back?”

Ely muttered something she almost didn’t catch. “Gringa estupida.”

She leaned forward. “I had four years of Spanish in school.”

“So?”

“So, if you’re going to call me stupid, then don’t mutter it under your breath in a language you think I can’t understand. Say it to my face and be prepared to tell me why I’m being stupid.”

He met her gaze in the rearview mirror and she saw something in his eyes that might have been a stirring of respect. Or maybe the sun was just blinding him.

“You wanna know what I really think of this pendejada? I think you’re betting on the wrong dog.”

“What do you mean?”

He gave another one of those shrugs. “Hey, you wanna go to Canada? Fine. White people trust other white people. I get that. But come on, the Canadians? You really think they were able to keep the Ticks out? They didn’t even let people carry concealed there. There’s no way they could stop the Ticks.”

“Okay.” But it wasn’t okay, because her mind was racing. She hadn’t thought about it like that. Not precisely. “So what? Are you saying you do think we should head back to Base Camp?”

“Nah. I say we should head to Mexico.”

“Mexico?” both Lily and McKenna said at the same time.

Ely ratcheted up the smirk. “Yeah. Mexico.”

“Oh, so you don’t think the U.S. or the Canadian governments were able to stop the Ticks, but you think the Mexican government was able to stop them?”

“I didn’t say the government. The drug cartels in Mexico are better armed than the federales. Besides, your dumbass government built that wall all along the border.”

Lily’s mind was racing. “Why bring this up now? Why not say all this back at camp?”

“You were the one rushing to get out of there.”

Her gut twisted around the decision. It didn’t feel right, abandoning the plan she’d clung to for so long. But that was just her gut speaking. She needed to think. To process.

And maybe she needed to trust other people more. Wasn’t that the lesson she’d learned trying to get off the Farm? That she didn’t always know everything? That sometimes you had to trust other people? How much easier would that whole experience have been if she’d trusted Carter from the beginning? But she’d fought him every step of the way and it had created half their problems. Maybe all of them.

Yes, she was smart and she was knowledgeable, but she didn’t know everything.

And what were their options here, really? Either they could sit here in the snow, or they could go back to Base Camp, or they could head for Mexico.

McKenna turned to see Ely’s expression better. “Have you been there? To Mexico, I mean? Do you know for sure that the Ticks haven’t taken over?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I’ve been down to the wall. It’s still standing.”

That would be the ultimate irony, wouldn’t it? The American government had been so determined to control the flow of immigration. And now, instead of keeping the immigrants out, it was keeping the monsters in.

“I don’t know,” she muttered aloud. “The U.S. Army was the best supplied army in the world. I don’t care what kinds of weapons the drug cartels had, they still couldn’t match that kind of firepower.”

But that argument made it simpler than it actually was. The Ticks hadn’t won the war with weapons. The virus itself had done much of the damage, infecting and killing millions. But even that wasn’t the real culprit. No, if Sebastian was to be believed, the real reason the United States had fallen so quickly to the Ticks was because Roberto had had abducturae spreading fear and paranoia.

So it wasn’t about weapons or firepower. It was about what parts of the world Roberto wanted to control.

If he didn’t want Mexico, then maybe Mexico was still standing.

“Okay,” she said finally. “For the sake of argument, let’s say Mexico is still standing. If they’ve held the border against the Ticks, then how do we know they’ll let us through?”

“Guess we won’t know until we get there.”

“Great. That’s very helpful,” Lily said.

“What about medical care?” McKenna asked. “Will there be somewhere I can have the baby? Will they be able to take care of her?”

Ely muttered again, something about gringos. “A hundred million people. I think we’ve got childbirth covered.”

Lily knew he was right. At least about that. Ms. Rivera, her Spanish teacher, had lectured all the time that Mexico City was a thriving, major city. So, yeah, if they could get there and if the border had held against the Ticks, then McKenna would be golden. It was a lot of ifs, but she’d faced worse.

Lily looked at McKenna in the rearview mirror. “What do you think?”

“Mexico is a lot farther away than Canada.”

“Only four or five hours,” Ely argued.

Four or five hours didn’t seem like much. Maybe it wasn’t. But it was a drastic change in plans. Lily didn’t like change. But sometimes all the planning in the world wasn’t enough. Sometimes you had to rely on other people’s knowledge and experience. She would never have made it off the Farm if she hadn’t trusted Carter.

If Ely was right about Mexico, this could be the decision that saved all of their lives. Still, four or five hours was a long time. In this world, it only took a minute to die.