Left in the Dust: The True Cost of Following a Fool novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Ten Came Back

The stayers turn on Keeley's lie when Keira plays her video, and when the rescued walkers arrive Keira plays it for the deputy, who credits her 911 call, until Tegan is found missing.

Nobody on the bus said anything for a full minute.

Then a girl two rows ahead of me, who had stayed, turned around with her phone held out.

"Did you tell them it was fine to go, Keira?"

"No."

"Then why does Keeley say you did?"

"Because she wrote it before she left the bus."

I unlocked my phone and played the video with the volume turned all the way up.

My own voice filled the aisle. It's seven forty-one. Our driver has told every student to stay on the bus and wait for rescue.

Then I said all eleven names, one after another.

When it ended, the girl lowered her phone and looked at the floor.

A boy near the front muttered, "She never said go. I was right here."

"I heard her say no too," Drew said.

He said it quietly, from across the aisle, and he did not look around to see who was listening.

The driver lifted her head from the wheel.

"I'll say the same to anyone who asks," she said. "That one told her to stay. Plain as day."

The chat kept lighting up with Keeley's message, and under it, the replies began to turn.

Somebody wrote: nell never said that.

Somebody else wrote: wait is that true? it's on video.

I turned my phone face down on my knee.

My hand had stopped shaking, but Drew's water bottle was still in my other hand.

I held it out to him.

"Keep it," he said. "You'll want it."

His fingers brushed mine when I tried anyway, and he took it back and put it in his bag.

I noticed how warm his hand was, and then I noticed that I had noticed.

We waited.

The dust did not lift. It thickened against the glass until the windows went dark brown, and the bus rocked with each gust.

At eleven fifty, a pair of headlights crawled up behind us, and then a county truck with a light bar, and then a white passenger van.

A deputy in a dust mask climbed aboard, checked every seat with a flashlight, and told the driver the walkers had been found.

I stood up.

"Are they alive?"

"All the ones we've found," the deputy said.

He took me outside with him because I asked.

The wind had dropped enough to see twenty feet.

The van's side door rolled open, and the walkers came down one at a time in foil blankets, coughing, with dust caked in their eyebrows.

Brent had a cut across his forehead that someone had taped shut.

Keeley came out last, and the first thing she did was look for me.

She walked straight across the gravel, wrapped in silver, with her hair full of grit.

"Deputy," she said, in a voice that carried. "I need to tell you something. We only left because Keira said it was safe."

The deputy turned to me.

I did not argue with her.

I handed him my phone and pressed play.

He listened with his head tilted, and in the middle of it he took off his mask to hear better.

My voice said it again. Eleven students are leaving anyway.

The deputy handed the phone back.

"You were recording before they left," he said.

"I was recording the driver's order. It's the first thing I did."

Keeley's face did something I had seen once before, under a streetlight, a few inches from mine.

"You filmed us," she said. "You set us up."

"I filmed the driver."

"You planned this."

"I stayed on the bus, Keeley. That's all I planned."

The deputy cleared his throat.

"Miss Satterlee, your classmate called in all eleven of your names with a mile marker before you were two hundred yards out. Every unit on this road had your names. That call is the reason we found you."

Keeley opened her mouth.

Nothing came out of it.

Behind her, the other walkers had stopped coughing to listen.

Tegan was not among them.

I scanned the foil blankets twice.

There were only ten.

"Where is Tegan Clayson?" I said.

The deputy looked at his clipboard, then at the brown wall of air behind the van.

Brent's voice came from the back, small and cracked.

"She turned west at the sign," he said. "We kept going."

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