(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 27

The woods looked much the same. Granted, the woods typically did, even if they were different woods. Trees, green leaves, thick, dark soil sprinkled with sawdust by caretakers. Variety was not what the woods were known for. But these looked the same as the day before, in a more specific way.
"Wait, is that... the car?" asked Patrick in some degree of disbelief. It was. The car stood there as if Vera had just parked it there, as if we had just left it to run to the house.
"Yeah, why?"
We had taken a cab to a spot nearby, the three of us. Patrick had apparently not been executed for treason by his dad, but merely been forbidden to ever use the car again without explicit permission. Others might think that his dad was a control freak, but both Mischa and I silently knew that he was just overprotective and didn't want Patrick to do anything risky. Patrick's dad was a mechanic, and he had been the one to drag Mischa's brother out of the ditch after his accident, so it made sense.
"Well," Patrick followed up, his words drawn out in an uneasy skepticism, "I don't want to be a grammar nazi, but are you sure you meant that this is the car, not that this was the car? 'Cause, y'know, doesn't look like a car anymore to me. Looks like it hasn't been one in a long time, if ever. Maybe it's been two or three cars at one point, but it would..."
"It's the car, Pat," I mildly snapped, using the one nickname he hated the most, just to shut him up on the issue. He had a point, and a very good one. I still had doubts that the car could ever work, even after having been an actual passenger in it!
"Why is there a cage in the back?" asked Mischa, sounding like the question was a perfectly normal thing for a person to say. He was looking at the rat cages.
"Decoy animal," I answered quickly, trying to bury the issue. "Vera made the trackers go for them instead of us."
There was a quiet moment as the two boys sent each other worried glances. The sound of birds could be heard so clearly that they sounded like a part of the wordless conversation between the two.
"You mean, Vera the time traveler sent a couple of, what, bunnies out to distract the invisible flying ships that..."
"Just roll with it," Mischa said, interrupting Patrick rather calmly. I had given the two a quick overview of the events as we waited for the taxi, but while Mischa had been uncomfortable with what I was telling them, Patrick had been visibly uncomfortable with me talking about those htings, at all. Mischa had tried to convince him none of it was a prank, but it had been hard, and it was yet to be entirely succesful.
"Also, they were rats," I remarked in a grumbling voice, seeing Patrick flinch away from the empty cages. "Big rats."
Without breaking sight from the cages, Patrick went around the car to the driver's seat, while I took shotgun and Mischa went into the back, rudely kicking the cages out to not have to touch them with his hands.

The road was long and lined with semi-wild growth and nicely kept hedges on either side. Patrick had not been too keen on the car, driving it at pathetic speeds in fear of some kind of total collapse. We had been debating for a bit if the rust and primer shell of it would stick out like a flare amongst the brush that was our only real cover, but in the end, our choices were severely limited. More than that, the question had been, what if we were too late?
"I could just casually stroll by, check if there was even a car in there," said Mischa, his voice showing a lot of uncertainty at the notion of a car, as he cast a subconscious glance at the one we were in.
"No, if they suddenly bolt, you'd slow us down and make them suspicious. Anyway, they were clearly getting ready to load up the car, and they've got a hurt one in there, so no way they got it all going just like that."
"A hurt one?" asked Mischa nervously. "A hurt what? Hurt time traveler?"
I nodded. "Yeah, apparently she got caught in the blast, but survived. She looked pretty messed up, though."
Mischa had another question loaded up, but he failed to ask it. He seemed to be thinking long and hard about something. There was never a chance to probe his mind on what he was thnking about though, as a greenish van suddenly drove out onto the road.
"That's them," I said, feeling a bit dumb when I noticed that I was whispering. Patrick suddenly looked very lost.
"What exactly do I do, now?" he asked, clutching the sterring wheel and looking at the two of us. Neither responded, at least not at first.
"Uhm, I think you wait a little, then drive after them," Mischa finally said.
"It's their car. Won't they notice?" asked Patrick back. Mischa threw me a look that begged for some kind of support, but all I could do was shrug my shoulder with a slightly terrified look in my eyes.
"It's a pretty open road," I added. "Just keep a good distance, I don't think we'll lose them." I waited for a moment, for any kind of feedback from either of the two boys, but there was nothing. "Right?"
Without any of them commenting, Patrick pressed the accelerator down and forced the complaining car slowly out onto the road again, starting its pursuit of the van.
As it turned out, following the van was easy. The open land and straight roads made it easy to either see or predict its route, and we gave it plenty of space. As we drove farther up north and there was little but fields around us, we could keep a calm eye on the dot far down the road with no problem. After about half an hour, Mischa even started to seem restless, disappointed at the lack of drama. Patrick, as always, seemed to dread that drama could arrive, clutching the wheel and staring unblinkingly at the road.
It was close to an hour before the van stopped.
"There's nothing here," mumbled Patrickas his face tore itself away from almost touching the sterring wheel.
He was right. There was nothing. We had passed through a few of the northern hamlets, just small clusters of houses, more and more of them empty these days. But now, we were surrounded by the late harvest, growing everywhere but in the tiny groves of trees and dense brush. There wasn't even a lonely farmhouse to be seen, anywhere.
As a small group of dots left the bigger dot that was the car, I urged Patrick to slowly move closer. At that distance, it was hard to be sure, but the lot of them, four from what could be counted, seemed to simply be walking into the field. They were carrying something large between them, but it was impossible to tell what it was.
"You think the colony is underground or something?" asked Patrick, and the sight of the unfolding floor a tthe school suddenly flashed before my eyes.
"Maybe," I answered, doing my best not to let the distant quartet out of my sight, even as Patrick slowly, very slowly, drove closer.
Why would anyone build a secret lair beneath a field?" Mischa chimed in. "I mean, sure, lots of space, but you could just as easily build it under something in town, be easier to get to."
"She called it a colony," I found myself mumbling. "It might be, you know, really big."
"Well, depends on what you m.... Where'd they go?"
Patrick abruptly stopped the car as Mischa leaned forward in between the two front seats, pointing out the window. The late afternoon sun lit up the landscape like a theater stage, but as he pointed out, the four distant figures had completely vanished. The car was still there, now a big enough dot that some simple features could be made out, but the rest had gone.
"No more sneaking, Patrick, get close to them," I said in a hushed, yet commanding voice. He reacted promptly, getting the crappy car going again at a slightly more natural speed, causing their abandoned car to close in a bit more rapidly than before. There were no signs that anyone was in it, all had apparently gone out into the field. Gone into the field, and disappeared.
Once we got near enough to their car, Patrick parked. While he stayed in the car, keeping it running, Mischa nad I disembarked and walked up to the van. It was ugly, very ugly, the greenish paint flaking badly and many parts having completely different colors, although most of those had faded into a grimy, muddled grey or brown. Parts that were not entirely essential were missing, among them the covers of various lights, and window wipers. One of the long, thin windows on the side had been crushed, looking like a gaping wound. Vera had brought me into town in the exact same van, but I had never really looked at it from the outside. It looked barely even roadworthy. And as predicted, it was empty, at least of people.
"Ida," Mischa called out. "What is, uhm, this?"
He was pointing into the van, through the passenger seat and into the back of it. The passenger door was wide open, the four having apparently not cared to lock it. If it even could be locked, which was in no way certain.
Looking inside the vehicle, I had to wonder the same question. Long tubes, long boxes with rounded corners, were stacked in the back of it, looking like carrying cases for some kind of high-end sports gear. It looked like a few had been removed from the pile, but there were still quite a few left in there.
"I don't... I don't know."
Looking back at him, I met eyes that screamed for more concrete answers, answers I couldn't give.
"I don't #*@!ing know," I growled, not at him but at the string of unanswered questions that seemed to just keep growing, although that distinction might not have been clear to him in the moment.
"I think there's a lot that your new friends haven't told you," he commented in a dry, emotionless tone. My reaction to it was washed away by the sound of loud pops, followed by intense rumbling, so much so that it could be felt in the ground beneath our feet!
"What was..."
I held a hand up to silence him, my eyes scanning the fields around us. I had a rough idea of where the four of them had disappeared from sight, but there was nothing concrete to fiate on. It was fields as far as the eyes could see.
Then, a few loud pops again, and a set of dull flashes in the air. The rumbling came quickly after that. Then another pop and a flash in the air.
"What the #*@!..."
I started walking towards the spot that the flashes had hovered above, but before I could take more than a few steps, Vera and Elmer appeared out of nothing in the field! Flashes, looking like large, transparent clouds of light, went off behind and above them as they stumbled hastily across the field, struggling with blades of unripe grain and the bad footing that the grain covered up. Vera went down twice, scrambling desperately to get up again, while Elmer more stomped than ran, no doubt pounding every bit of treacherous soil flat as any sidewalk.
"Start the car!" came the shouts from Vera as she fumbled her way through the field. She had barely shouted it before a streak of smoke cut through the air, spinning out of control and going over everyone's heads, only to explode with a strange, deep pop in mid air.
"Start the #*@!i...."
Stumbling once more, but catching her balance at the last second, Vera suddenly froze, even if only until another odd sound, this one much like a low-pitch version of a bypassing train, rang out from somewhere.
"Ida?!" she called out, face plastered with confusion and dirt. Then she got to running again, throwing a single glance back behind her before her feet got into full gear.
Elmer reached the van at that point, roughly pushing Mischa aside and jumping into the driver's seat. The vehicle made an awful sound, the machine equivalent of an asthmatic gasp, but on the second or third try, the engine kicked in.
"What are you doing here, Ida? I set you..."
"Now!" shouted Elmer, cutting Vera's attempt at a chat short. She did look down the road, at the other car, quickly figuring out what was going on, or figuring out enough, at least. Then she turned to get into the passenger seat of the van.
"Get away from here," she said in an intense, scared voice. Then Elmer hit the pedal and the van started off, everything in it sounding like metal scraping on metal.
"What the #*@! was... wait..."
Mischa stood for a second, pointing sluggishly at the van speeding away.
"Was that... were those the time travelers?!"
I nodded. "Some of them," I added, my brain starting to ask the logical questions tied to that remark. Those questions were answered almost immediately, as more shouting came across the field. Clutching her left arm in her right hand, Lisa was running in a bizarre zigzag pattern through the grain, and behind her, Karen suddenly appeared out of nothing, lines of blood across her face from cuts too many to distinctly make out at a distance. Lisa stopped and glared as the van sped off, clearly fearing that she was watching her chance to get away evaporate. Then, she looked at us. Then, she looked at the car.
We only just made it to the car before Lisa. Karen was falling behind quite a bit, but she was still putting up a good fight to get there, too. Shouting something completely incoherent, seemingly in another language entirely, Lisa flailed her damaged arm in an attempt to open the door to the driver's seat, but Patrick, eyes wider than I had ever seen, was clutching the handle from inside the car. Whatever had happened to her arm, she was clearly no match for him because of it.
"Back seat!" I shouted at her as I tore the door open to the shotgun seat. A look of rage briefly flew across her face, but she clumsily got the door open to the back seat, ducking in at the same moment Mischa got in in the back on my side of the car.
"Go!" she yelled, even before the door was closed.
"We need Kare..."
"GO!!" she repeated, trying in vain to kick the driver's seat from behind.
"No!" I answered back. Behind the messy dark blond hair, she sent me a look so furious it made me flinch, but only for a split second. At that moment, Karen arrived, fumbling at the door as if in a daze, but in the end opening it. Lisa barely even interrupted her angry gaze as she scuttled over, making just enough space for the luckily rather petite Karen.
"Now go," she grumbled, and I repeated the command to Patrick. Like the van, the jigsaw of components pretending to be a car made the sound of scraping metal, then kicked into gear, picking up speed much slower than the van.
"What the hell haappened out there?" I asked, looking back and forth between the two time travelers, Lisa sent me a glare, only a little softer than before, then silently looked out the rear window as best she could. Karen seemed a bit slow to notice that nobody was answering, but the look in her eyes finally came around. Most of her attention seemed on holding a plastic-looking strip against a gash in her cheek. She had already fixed another, similar strip over a bad cut on her forehead, and it seemed to be shrinking on its own accord, somehow.
"We went to the colony to..." She stopped, looking a bit uncertain of herself, giving Lisa a quick look before she continued. "We went to check up on them. But we were too late. The colony has been overrun. Most got out in time, so we wanted to set the time machines up to..."
"Woah woah, hold it," Patrick interrupted, distracted enough that the car began to swerve a bit before he got it under control again. "Did she just say time machine? Like, time machine as in time travel machine?"
"I'll explain later," I said in a quick, relatively calm remark. "Karen, what else?"
Tears came to her eyes. "They were everywhere. They just.... they just... everywhere. Everybody was gone."
"Karen, look at me!" I said in a stern voice, and her bloodied face turned, her eyes fixing directly on mine. "Focus, Karen. What happened?"
"They were too many and too fast," she sighed. "We only got out because I detonated one of the charges too early, giving us a head start."
"The flashes..." Mischa mumbled, actually startling Karen.
"No," Lisa cut in, "those were them firing at us. Not a lot gets out through a shield like that, but they were pretty pissed at us after that."
As if to emphasize her words, the sound of a dozen iron bees cutting through the air seemed to pass us by, leaving thin streaks of silver smoke in the now early twilight. Small tinish pops rang out as pale blue flames erupted up ahead, but whatever they were, they seemed to miss their mark.
"Shit," Lisa burst, "they brought biwheels."
"Bi what?" exclaimed Mischa in a softly confused voice.
"Biwheeels. Two-wheeled drones. And they're clearly armed."
"Clearly," grumbled Patrick, sounding terrified, with good reason.
Mischa, meanwhile, squirmed in his seat, trying to look out the back.
"Motorcycle robots? Like in Terminator?"
"Oh, I like that one. Bale ish aim hom..."
Karen's words were so slurred they almost slid perfectly into her sudden burst of gasping for air, before she seemed to come to her senses. A single look at her eyes was enough to know that she wasn't doing well.
"Yeah, head injuries makes you say some #*@!ed up things like that," Patrick chuckled. I was about to scold him, but a look at him, and I saw utter terror across his very pale face. Just the remarks of a scared boy.
Twisting to look out the back, I could see the biwheels behind usx. They looked more than the Batbike without a driver, though, wheels so large they looked silly. They were catching up quickly.
"What the hell do we do?"
Lisa sat back in her seat, her movements slow and heavy, almost as if she had accepted her fate.
"We give the others time. I was trained to expect this, at some po..."
"Well, I #*@!ing wasn't!" Patrick suddenly snarled, swerving and kicking the brake. The car went into the middle of the road and cut speed to half, forcing the biwheels to make breakneck maneuvers to avoid colliding with the old car. One of them went straight into the ditch by the road, flipping violently into the air as it spun, firing its tiny rockets into the dirt in a hail of grassy clumps. The other made an S-turn and swept straight by, quickly disappearing out into the slowly growing darkness.
"What the #*@! was that?!" Lisa raged, almost immediately.
"My dad had me learning cars all my life, I got a few..."
"I mean why the hell did you do that, you idiot?!"
As the car got up to its previous speed little by little, the three of us looked at each other quite confused. Karen, too, seemed confused, but it appeared to be more a medical issue.
"I just got our asses out of the fire, you... crazy... lady," Patrick said, stumbling badly at most of the words.
"Yeah, and now that thing is going for the stockpile in the van!"
Patrick, having no idea what she meant, put his eyes back to the road. Mischa and I, however, stared at each other for a second.
"Stockpile`" I finally asked. "Those things in the back of your van were..."
"Electromagnetically suspended binary metals," Karen interjected, sounding perfectly lucid but staring so blankly out into space that it had to be some weird kind of reflex. "Basically homemade thermite, but with instant burn." In perhaps the scariest event of the entire ordeal, she stared directly into my eyes, not blinking once. "Big boom."
"You're lugging around explosives and you didn't feel like telling us?!" I erupted, now the angry one, which clearly caught Lisa off guard.
"Why... the #*@!... would we?" she hissed. "You're not a part of this. You were supposed to be... wait, why aren't you out fixing the time machine?"
"There's that word again!" Patrick chimed in.
"I don't like doing things just because someone tells me to," I answered, keeping my voice calm but firm. Lisa glared at me.
"It's called orders for a reason," she all but hissed.
"And it's called soldiers because not all of us are," I growled back.
We both looked out the front windshield when the car suddenly slowed down. We had nearly reached the edge of town, Patrick now turning the loudly complaining car down the road that would go straight into town. We were barely through the turn when a loud pop shook the air, a second after a brief flash of blue cutting through the dark grey landscape. Another two pops rang out, but only one flash of blue. The other was swallowed up by a strange glistening in the distance. One which quickly turned into a blindingly white cloud, followed by a boom the likes of twenty thunderclaps!
"#*@!..." said Lisa, the word only escaping her lips slowly.
The white light glowed in the sky like a fading echo for a few seconds, getting ever nearer as the car drove down the road. Houses were appearing alongside the road, slowly increasing in density as the town grew closer. I looked at Patrick a few times, trying to see if he was still holding it together. He was, but the look in his eyes and the drop of his jaw told quite clearly that he was struggling to do so.
"Go faster." Lisa said, breaking the tense hush in the car. "Go faster," she repeated when Patrick didn't respond.
"No," he finally said, his voice disturbingly soft, so calm he might have been on the verge of sleep and sound no different. There was a strange silence as Lisa seemed to deal with some confusion about his answer.
"We need to get there, go faster," she added, her voice now sounding tense and frustrated.
"No," Patrick repeated, keeping the car at the same steady pace. With an angry grunt, Lisa pushed herself between the driver and passenger seat, trying to get through to him, but in a move that took everyone in the car aback, his elbow hit her squarely in the face with astounding force for the guy's size, sending her back into her seat, growling angry words in that same strange language they had used before.
"This is a public road," Patrick said, the moment she went back. "People live here, people cross here, it's dark, and whatever the #*@! you're doing to set of shit like that no doubt has everyone panicked and not looking out for themselves. I am not racing through a populated area and risking people's lives just to cut twenty second off of your #*@!ing response time, is that #*@!ing clear?!"
His voice rose as he spoke, ending in what would have been shouting if his teeth had not been gritted so hard I feared they would shatter in his mouth. I sent Mischa a surprised look, finding him sitting in the back, jaw slack and eyes wide. I wasn't the only one to not expect that kind of outburst from quiet little Patrick.
We did get there, of course. Lisa remained remarkably quiet the half minute or so it took to get close enough to see the van, but it took only a peek in the rearview mirror to tell from her face that it was not from respect. She was seething, and she was thinking. The two were a combination I felt none too comfortable about.
The white glow had already faded from the sky, but several pieces of twisted metal still glowed a dull red or brighter. Whatever had happened, it had ripped the entire back part of the van open, like a cardboard box by a cat wanting food inside. Shards of metal and chunks of more or less melted plastic were strewn around like litter along the motorway. The major chunks seemed to be what was left of the strange boxes Mischa and I had seen in the back of the van, back when it was actually still a van.
"The biwheels may still be around," I mumbled out loud, my brain more preoccupied with spotting survivors.
"No," came the slurred response from Karen, who was awkwardly leaning against the hood of the car. "They're rapid attack drones, they don't do mop-up."
"She's right," Lisa chimed in, sounding extremely bitter, "there's gonna be a team here to clean up in minutes. So shut the hell up and salvage what we can."
Mischa and I looked at each other, and then at Patrick, who still wore an angry frown as he stepped out of the car, but nonetheless came to help. He did stop to say something to Karen, but she politely waved for him to go help us with the van.
It was a mess. Getting even remotely close meant we felt the heat of the warm wreck, like standing around a large bonfire. Lisa barely even seemed to care, walking up to the back of the van and looking inside, kicking it with an angry roar before she brushed away the embers that were trying to set her dangling red coat on fire. She flinched when a figure stumbled out from behind the vehicle. The rest of us never even noticed before he stood there.
"Status?" he said, or asked. It took a moment for me to recognize Elmer, his clothes charred and in shambles, a good part of his already short hair sinshed right off. His face showed signs of having had blood wiped off it, too, but he wasn't bleeding in any serious way, not from what could be seen.
"Nthing," Lisa said, "there's nothing left."
I wondered for a moment why they were suddenly not talking their strange language, but that thought soon evaporated as another formed.
"Anyone seen Vera?" I asked, causing only a few odd glances from the two time travelers talking by the van. A glance at Karen didn't help. She was still supporting herself heavily against the car, looking as if she was giving herself some sort of peptalk.
The grass was tall. Although there were plenty of houses nearby, it was still farmland, fields of grain waving in the breeze around the site. This grass got cut maybe twoce during a summer, and it grew back fast. Finding her by sight alone, especially in the near dark, seemed like a lost cause. I flinched when a cone of light suddenly appeared, looking behind me to find Mischa holding a small flashlight.
"What?" he asked, his usual look of casual pretend ignorance all over his face. "It's a keyring. I come prepared."
The cone ran over the grass quickly, spotting a growing circle of smoldering stubs around the wreck that made me worry if the grass was dry enough to catch fire. For the moment, it didn't, but the thought stayed in my head as I tried to pierce the dusk with my eyes.
"What the hell are you doing?" came the angry hiss as Lisa walked over and grabbed the flashlight right out of Mischa's hand, fumbling for a second before she managed to turn it off. "There are teams out looking for us. You just gave our position away to anyone with eyes."
I chose to say nothing. Mischa complained but it never went beyond a few grunts, mainly because I grabbed his arm and told him with a stare to not push our luck.
"Wonderful friends you've been making," he muttered with a frown as he squinted and looked at the grass again. Before I could comment on that, he pointed at something in the dark and began walking quickly.
The smell was horrible, like stale vomit and badly burned steaks. There was even a faint sound of something simmering, but it was impossible to know if it was just the grass. Holding my sleeve over my nose and squinting my eyes almost shut, I started to make out the shape of someone writhing slowly as I got close.
"Vera?"
There was a gargle, followed by a brief whimper.
"Vera, are you o..."
She wasn't. Finally standing right beside her, I could make out enough in the dim light of the Moon and the streetlights by the road which had finally come on. It looked bad, real bad. Half the coat was just gone, threads hanging like long, shaggy hairs along the burnt off edges. Her clothes beneath weren't much better. Large patches of skin were exposed, and much of that was so badly charred that it barely even counted as skin anymore. Her left hand seemed to be trying to touch some of the patches on her stomach, but it was in a bad shape itself, skin blackened and at least two fingers looking like they had been badly broken. Her kitchy orange glasses were nowhere to be seen, and what I could see clearly of her eyes were intensely bloodshot. Part of her lower lip was so badly burned that her teeth behind it were starting to show.
"Ida," she whispered, shaking in what looked like pain.
"Don't talk," I answered quickly, kneeling down beside her and trying not to throw up from the smell.
"Sorry," she replied, and I failed to hold back a weird chuckle.
"We gotta... We need to get you help. I know somewhere."
"Sorry," she repeated, her eyes finally focusing enough for her to look right at me. I felt a weird pain run down my spine as I forced myself to return the look.
"It's okay, it's not your fault. We didn't stop the biwheels when..."
"Sorry," she repeated, briefly shaking so badly it looked like final cramps.
"What? No, stop that, I'm gonna call..."
My heart froze and my stomach cramped up when she reache dout and caught the flap of my sleeve.
"S... sorry, Ida," she repeated, but this time with more than a whisper, her voice sounding strained and on the verge of crying. "Sorry for everything."
Her eyes filled with tears, and it quickly became apparent that those tears hurt her, physically, as they made their way out of her damaged eyes. She let go of me again, but the hand began pointing at her body, waving around as she tried to hold it still. I tried to follow it with my eyes, but it moved so randomly I couldn't make out what it was trying to do.
"Take it," she stuttered quickly, probably to reduce the pain from talking.
"Take what?"
She more frantically pointed at something, at what looked like a small chest pocket. Without thinking, I grabbed her jacket and stuck my hand in there. I never got far. The moment she screamed in pain, I pulled back, terrified of what I might have done. I flinched when Mischa knelt down, gently lifting the remnants of her once blue jacket, exposing the pocket, along with more burns inside. I finally, carefully, pulled out what she had in the pocket. It looked like half a cigarette, except made of some form of metal that managed to remain cool despite the circumstances. She made a twisty motion, and I unscrewed it. There was nothing but another cylinder inside, made from some redish metal.
"Go," she half whispered as she reached out a hand for the small cylinder. Then she looked me in the eyes again. "Go."
I slowly stood up, looking half at her, ahlf at the small cylinder. Mischa stood up, too.
"We're going to go get you help, just... just stay, okay?"
I felt like an idiot for that line, thinking where I had imagined she would run off to.
"Is she gonna, you know, make it?" asked Mischa, his voice nervous although he tried not to be. I didn't really have an answer, and therefore said nothing.
"We found Vera, she's over..."
I stopped in my tracks, looking at the sight of Lisa and Elmer packing a few surviving boxes into the back of the car. Patrick was standing a few paces from them, closer now to Mischa and myself, his arms crossed across his chest, eyes sternly on the two.
"They've been dragging those things out since right after you went looking through the grass," he said in a low, tense voice. "I tried talking to them, but they basically just pushed me out of the way."
A few of the boxes, maybe five, were still on the side of the road, Elmer moving them one by one to Lisa, who put them in the car. Karen still stood against the hood, although she looked more lucid now.
"Vera is over there, in the grass. She's badly hurt," I said, a bit louder. Lisa gave me a quick glance, but never broke her stride with the boxes. As the pile by the road shrank, Karen began stumbling towards the car.
"She needs help," I continued, but there was no reaction.
"How are we all going to fit in that car?" I added, getting a strange feeling that I already knew the answer. My thoughts were cut short when there was a painful scream from within the tall grass and the air filled with a burst of colored dots.