“Don’t.” Reese ground his teeth so hard it ached. “Don’t you dare use my words to argue this.”
“But that’s why you joined.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Dr. Dante. I’m not going to say I agree with your choice to work at the Utah facility, but I do think you believed you could save people.”
“I wanted to do more than save people. I wanted to make it so no one had to die.” Reese slumped in his seat. “But that’s a fairytale. Without death, we’d overrun our planet in a few decades. That kind of chaos would make an epidemic look benign. I knew that, but I kept telling myself I’d make a difference. It was a lie. And I chose to believe it.” Reese laid his head against the window. The glass pulled the fever from his skin.
“Is that why you don’t want to go through with the surgery?”
Reese closed his eyes.
“Punishing yourself solves nothing.”
“I know.” If it could, Reese would gladly suffer. “I meant it when I said you need me. And I think you agree. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have given me a choice to decline.”
Some hardness left the colonel’s gaze.
Reese offered the man a lopsided smile. “See, that’s what a good man does, Colonel. He gives choices. That’s something I never gave Koda.”
*****
The glow of a computer screen lathered the inside of the van in pale blue and cast Luca in hues of silver.
Nox stretched and his body protested being left in a seated position for so long. He never imagined he’d fall asleep. Let alone sleep from afternoon to night.
“You’re awake.” Luca sat cross-legged with a sleeping bag wrapped around him in the back of the van.
“I thought you were only going to drive a few hours?”
“I thought you didn’t have to sleep.”
“Normally, I don’t.” Twice now he’d slept far longer than normal. “You should have woken me and let me drive.”
“Come on, you’ve been driving since last night.”
Nox had been reluctant to stop for more than gas and bathroom breaks after the incident at the last motel. “And you need to rest.”
“I slept for ten hours.” Yet Luca still had shadows under his eyes.
“Alright, fair enough.” Nox sat up. “I thought you were going to stop at a motel?”
Luca shrugged. “I couldn’t find one without taking the main highways. And you did say to stay as far away from people as possible.”
“Where are we?” Stars scattered across the field of deep indigo all the way to the horizon uninhibited by manmade lights.
“The GPS shows we’re in the middle of nowhere, east of Hedwidge, Nebraska.”
A falling star streaked across the sky and winked out. The middle of nowhere was right.
“I stopped and got us something to eat.” Luca indicated the bag between the seats with a nod.
Apples, pears, homemade peach bread, and dried venison. “Where did you get this?”
“Roadside fruit stand about fifty miles back. I can’t believe you slept through that.”
Neither could Nox. He took out the jerky. “Did you eat?”