The decision was less a choice and more a biological imperative. Staying meant waiting for the shuffling things to find them, or for the gnawing in their stomachs and the parched ache in their throats to hollow them out from the inside. They had to move.
Leo, despite the firestorm in his arm, took the lead. It wasn't a conscious power grab. Danny, the natural leader in gym class and playground politics, was shell-shocked, his eyes constantly darting to the shadows. Kayla was adrift in a sea of pain and terror. Someone had to pick a direction. Leo, his face pale and sheened with a cold sweat of constant agony, simply started walking upstream along the shallow creek at the bottom of the ravine. "Water flows to people," he mumbled, a half-remembered snippet from the very ecology trip that had brought them here. It was logic, thin and desperate, but it was something.
Kayla, in a gesture that surprised them all, reached out and took his good hand. Her fingers were ice-cold, trembling, but her grip was fierce. It wasn't romantic; it was primal. He was her tether to a world that wasn't falling apart, a point of navigation in the spinning chaos. She held on as if she were drowning. Danny followed a step behind, a silent rearguard, a baseball rock clutched in his hand.
The walk was a slow-motion nightmare. Every root, every uneven patch of ground was a fresh torture for Leo. He bit his lip until it bled to keep from crying out, but sharp, hitched breaths escaped him with every misstep. They stopped frequently, not to rest, but for Leo to bend double, cradling his arm, fighting waves of nausea until the world stopped tilting. Progress was measured in yards, not miles.
Hours bled together. The grey light through the canopy didn't change. They were in a green and brown purgatory, their world reduced to the sound of their own ragged breathing, the crunch of leaves, and the endless, whispering pain.
Then, the trees thinned. A slash of unnatural grey appeared ahead.
It was a road. A two-lane asphalt ribbon cutting through the wilderness.
They stopped at the tree line, staring. It was so mundane, so utterly ordinary, that its appearance felt like a cosmic joke. A choked, hysterical sound bubbled from Leo's throat. He took a few staggering steps forward, his boots hitting the gravel shoulder, and then his knees gave out. He didn't fall; he folded, hitting the ground with a soft thud.
The dam broke. The two days of cold, hunger, and terror, the shattering of his arm, the image of Miss Perkins's falling body, the brutal run—it all crashed over him at once. He didn't sob; he wept silently, his shoulders shaking, hot tears cutting tracks through the grime on his face. He cried for his mother, for his sister, for his own broken body, and for the sheer, stupid, infuriating simplicity of the road that had been here all along. They could have just walked. They could have been found.
His cry was the permission the others needed. Danny dropped his rock and clutched the sides of his head, a low, guttural moan escaping him as he sank down beside Leo. Kayla stood for a moment, then her own resolve crumbled, and she sank to her knees, her silent tears washing through the dried blood on her cheek. For a full minute, they were just three broken children at the edge of the woods, mourning everything they had lost.
But the road demanded more. It was not a sanctuary; it was a tableau.
"Look," Danny whispered, his voice hoarse.
The road was not empty. It was a serpent of stalled and abandoned metal. Cars, trucks, an SUV on its side, were scattered along the asphalt as if a giant child had grown bored and walked away. Doors hung open. Windows were smashed. Luggage and belongings were strewn across the pavement. It was silent, utterly silent, save for the rustle of a plastic bag caught on a bumper.
The sight sobered them, colder than any creek water. The crying stopped, replaced by a wary, hollow-eyed assessment. This wasn't rescue. This was another layer of the disaster.
"We need… we need to look," Leo said, using his good arm to push himself painfully upright. The tears were still wet on his face, but his voice had a new, grim flatness. "Water. Food."
The guilt hit them the moment they approached the first car, a blue sedan with a flat tire. It felt like stealing. They were good kids, taught to respect others' property. Peering into the empty interior felt like a violation. But the memory of their last drops of warm juice, the cramping in their bellies, was a sharper teacher.
They moved from vehicle to vehicle, a grim scavenger hunt. The loot was pathetic and surreal. They found a baby's blanket, a suitcase full of formal wear, a dozen CDs scattered on asphalt. In the backseat of a station wagon, Kayla let out a small, shocked cry and backed away from a dark, dried stain on the upholstery. They didn't go near that car again.
Then, triumph. In the way-back of an old hatchback, beneath a pile of road maps, they found two 2-liter bottles of Fanta Orange. The plastic was warm, the soda inside piss-warm and syrupy. It was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. They cracked one open with trembling hands and drank in greedy, desperate gulps. The sugar was an immediate, almost nauseating shock to their starved systems, but the liquid was life. It wasn't thirst-quenching; it was thick and cloying, but it was wet. They forced it down.
But there was no food. Not a granola bar, not a stale bag of chips. The glove compartments yielded only manuals and registration papers.
It was Danny who spotted the sign, a green highway marker a little ways down the road. "GAS / FOOD / LODGING - NEXT RIGHT - 2 MILES"
Hope, dangerous and acute, stabbed through them. Two miles. An impossible distance in Leo's current state, through woods that might hide anything. Their eyes drifted from the sign to the river of abandoned cars. One of them…
Leo's gaze landed on a boxy, older model Jeep Cherokee. The driver's door was wide open. The keys, glinting in the dull light, dangled from the ignition.
He looked at Danny. Danny's eyes went wide, and he shook his head vehemently. "No way. No. I've never—my dad was gonna teach me next year—"
"Danny," Leo's voice was tight with pain and a new, desperate authority. "You have to try. I can't walk two miles. Kayla can't. We'll die out here."
"I don't know how!"
"You've played GTA," Leo pressed, the absurdity of the argument not lost on him. "You know the… the pedals. The wheel. It can't be that different. Just… get it to move. Follow the road."
The logic was insane. It was also their only shot. The silence of the road felt oppressive, a held breath. Anything could emerge from the tree line at any moment.
Swallowing hard, Danny nodded. He approached the Jeep like it was a live animal. He slid into the driver's seat, the leather groaning under him. Leo and Kayla scrambled into the back, Kayla helping Leo navigate the step-up with his useless arm.
The interior smelled of old coffee and pine air freshener. Danny stared at the controls, his hands hovering over the wheel. He took a deep, shuddering breath.
"Okay. Seatbelt. Mirror." He mimicked his dad's pre-driving ritual. He put his foot on the brake, like in the game. He turned the key.
The engine cranked, sputtered, then roared to life. The sound was violently loud in the silence, making all three of them jump. The dashboard lit up.
"Okay, okay…" Danny muttered. He looked at the gear shift on the column. He tentatively pulled it down from 'P'. It clunked into 'D'.
The Jeep lurched forward a foot and stalled.
"Brake! You have to give it gas gently!" Leo urged from the back, his own knowledge purely theoretical, gleaned from watching his dad.
Danny's face was slick with sweat. He restarted the car. This time, he pressed the gas pedal with the very tip of his foot. The engine revved wildly, but his other foot was planted on the brake. He eased off the brake, and the Jeep began to creep forward, weaving slightly.
"Steer! Just follow the road!" Kayla whispered, as if speaking too loud would break the spell.
Danny gripped the wheel, over-correcting, sending the Jeep on a slow, drunken S-path down the center of the empty two-lane. He was going maybe ten miles an hour. But he was going. They were moving.
Tears of a different kind welled in Leo's eyes—tears of painful, disbelieving relief. They were in a stolen car, driven by an eleven-year-old, toward a hope that was almost certainly dead. But for the first time since the bus went over the edge, they were not just victims waiting. They were moving, however unsteadily, under their own power. The road stretched ahead, a grey river carrying them toward whatever came next.