so much as a Secret Lab Solution. Red scrambled away from the corpse and bumped into Sam.
“You killed it,” Sam said.
Red eyed the whirring teeth. “I don’t know about that.”
“Well, it can’t chase us,” Sam said, and she sounded cheerful for the first time since Red had killed the men who’d kidnapped her.
“Yeah, but when are its batteries going to run down?” Red asked.
She stood up, very slowly, and felt her hands shaking. Adrenaline had gotten her this far and now she was crashing. Pretty soon she would feel an overwhelming desire to sleep. They couldn’t sleep out here, though—not even in the brick house with its terrible orange color scheme. There were three bodies in the road and Red didn’t have the time or the energy to move them very far.
“Here’s the thing,” Red said. “These guys were on patrol. That means if they don’t return within a certain time frame, then someone from their group will come looking for them. Chances are they won’t bother walking, either—they’ll come out in a truck.”
“So we can’t be anywhere near these guys when they do that,” Sam said, catching on quickly.
“Exactly,” Red said. “Not to mention the fact that Riley and D.J. are waiting for us. I think the best thing to do is to roll their bodies into the ditch so they aren’t easy to find, and then we should try going across country diagonally to get back to D.J.’s. There’s no need for us to follow the road exactly, right?”
“You were only doing that so you could find out where their patrol was going,” Sam said. “And I screwed that up.”
“Action now, self-recrimination later,” Red said. “I’ll roll the bodies into the ditch. You go back and shut that front door. Make sure the house looks like it’s sealed up tight, but first double-check that I didn’t leave anything in the living room.”
“You’re sending me away because you think I’m too little for this,” Sam said.
“Sam,” Red said. “This is disgusting work, and I’m already covered with blood. There’s really no need for you to be involved. Besides, the first thing anyone will do when they find the bodies is check nearby houses. Let’s not leave any clues for them, right?”
“That guy—the one who had the monster come out of him?” Sam said, pointing at Toothpick. “He said he knew I was around because he’d found my unicorn on D.J.’s lawn.”
“Your unicorn?”
“Yeah, I had this dumb plastic unicorn that I carried in my pocket. I’ve had it since me and Riley left the house. It fell out of my pocket, but I couldn’t remember the last time I saw it.”
That was what Red had seen Toothpick picking up. It was satisfying to have at least one mystery solved.
Sure, even if you don’t know where the monsters came from or why or what caused the Crisis and the Cough, then at least you know why Toothpick was so interested in D.J.’s house.
Red didn’t have any idea how long it would take for an alarm to be raised, but she had to assume that Pretty Quickly was the answer.
The men were all stupidly heavy to move—even Toothpick, and he’d had most of his insides blasted out of him by the Thing That Should Not Be.
Despite the chill in the air Red was sweating and out of breath by the time she’d pushed all the men into the ditch. She’d mostly kicked the last one, because it was exhausting to hunch over and try to roll the bodies.
Sam sat on the lawn of the brick house, her arms wrapped around her knees. Red fell to the ground next to her, legs splayed out. She knew they should move, but she was tired down in her soul. The adrenaline surge and all the physical activity left her head nodding.
“What about the monster?” Sam asked
The thing’s head had finally stopped whirring, but Red didn’t feel confident that it was no longer a threat just because it seemed to be dead.
“Maybe I better just leave it where it is,” Red said. “What if