Page 3 of Constantly Cotton

But the kids had been fed—twice, because he’d stopped for fast food while he’d been clawing his way through traffic to get to the hospital—and they had water, fuel, and AC. If he could tough it out over the mountains, he could find a place to park in Palmdale or Lancaster, before driving the relatively short six hours to Sacramento, where hopefully he could find the authorities to get the kids home.

It was a plan. He liked this plan. There was sleep in this plan; there was another chance to feed the kids. Hell, because it was a medical transport, there was even a bathroom in this plan. This plan was a go!

And it had been a go as he’d made his way through the mountains and found a small town before Palmdale with a gas station.

It wasn’t that he needed the fuel—as far as he could see, he had plenty to get him to Sacramento—but having the level place to park the bus was a plus. Once they’d descended from the mountains, and the temperature had leveled out a little from ice fucking cold to warm night breeze, the level place was pretty much his only requirement. There were thin polyester blankets in the compartments above the seats. He, Sophie, and Maxim broke those out and distributed them to the other young people, aged around ten to fourteen as far as he could see, and he had Sophie and Max tell the other kids they were stopping to sleep before he finished the drive. It should be easy, right?

A few hours, that’s all. Four hours of sleep, right? He was a soldier; he’d run on less, certainly. But he’d been running on two hours at a time for the last four nights, and it wasn’t like he wasn’t used to being perpetually tired, but this was stretching it.

He was trying to pilot a land yacht through a traffic tsunami, and the kids in the back were depending on him.

A few hours of sleep.

So he parked the bus and had the kids crack the windows to let in some of the night air, and then he wadded up one of the blankets under his head and leaned against the window and closed his eyes.

He dreamed about the desert.

Not this one here, the one at home, but the one far away, where his job had been to kill people in a war he didn’t understand. Half the reason he’d risen up the ranks, really, was so he could understand why he was ordering young soldiers to their death and making them kill people they didn’t know.

But back then he’d been barely out of OTS and trying to get the attention of his CO. He remembered all of them in the coms tent, the beginnings of an epic windstorm gathering around the barracks.

“But look,” he’d said, pointing to the blips on the screen. “General, these aren’t our guys. I know you think they’re our guys, but they’re not moving in our patterns. We need to get eyes on them because if they get any closer—”

About then the first missile was launched at their fortification, from what they later discovered was the back of a captured Humvee.

He’d seen the trouble, all right—but only when it was right on them.

He woke up in the front of the bus with a strained breath. Fighting his way to consciousness, he knew the one thing he had to do was listen.

He heard the grumble of a big vehicle—a badly tended SUV, he thought—as it exited Highway 14 and rode the hairpin offramp toward their current location.

Where the big medical bus was sitting like a fat bird.

Quietly, so as not to disturb the children, he hit the starter and watched as the warm-up light glowed on the dashboard. These things usually took about two minutes to warm up. Two minutes. That was enough time for the SUV to see them on the way by and to turn around and come back and check on them. Was it enough time to fire? Was it enough time for the men inside to see who was sleeping there and come back to kill them?

“Sophie,” he hissed.

The girl—wide gray eyes, a pink stripe in her hair, and a razor-quick mind—had apparently been sleeping as lightly as he had.

“Mr. Jason?”

“Tell everyone to get on the floor. We need to pull out as soon as the engine’s ready.”

“Yessir,” she said. No questions, no whining. God, it was too bad she was twelve years old; he’d like to recruit her.

The SUV passed them, and for a moment he wondered if he wasn’t getting on the road too soon. It was an SUV for God’s sake. Somebody lived out here, right?

But he got behind the wheel and started up the bus as soon as the light went out.

And as he was pulling away from the gas station, the first bullet zinged by, and the second too. The third didn’t zing. Fired from a silencer, he figured, the third bullet ripped through the side of the bus and then tore through the seat where Sophie and Maxim had been sleeping, before it lodged itself solidly in Jason’s shoulder.

“Mr. Jason,” Sophie said breathlessly from the floor. “What was that?”

And as pain tore through him, every synapse declaring a magnesium fire in his shoulder, and now in his side, all at the same moment, he realized they were fucked.

“Hang on, Sophie!” he called, stomping on the accelerator and going straight. Not toward the freeway, which would take him right by the people shooting at them, but straight, which would take him into some of the least populated places of California and possibly Nevada.

But hopefully, it would not take them to where there would be bullets.