Left in the Dust: The True Cost of Following a Fool novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Mile Marker 14

Drew names the culvert where Tegan hid, rescuers pull her out alive, and the walkers are barred from the makeup exam, until Brent tells a deputy that Keira said go.

The deputy keyed his radio and asked where the sign was.

Brent could not say. He pressed the tape on his forehead and shook his head.

"There was a green sign, and she went left. That's all I saw."

"Which sign?" the deputy said again.

"Dry Wash," Drew said.

He had come down the bus steps behind me without my hearing him.

The deputy looked him over. "Say again, son?"

"Dry Wash, mile marker fourteen. There's a drainage culvert under the road a hundred yards past the sign, on the west side."

"How do you know that?"

"My dad runs a grader for the county road crew. He took me out there twice to clear the sand."

The deputy was already talking into his radio.

I looked at Drew, and he looked at the road.

"She'll have gone for the culvert," he said. "It's the only place out there that gets her out of the wind."

"She'd have to be hurt to stay there," I said.

"Or scared."

I took out my phone and scrolled to Tegan, with her sunflower picture, and pressed call.

It rang four times and went to voicemail.

I called again.

The deputy held up a hand. "Miss Haverty, I need you to stop. The crew is moving. If she's in there, the sound will carry, and I want her quiet and still."

"Her phone's on," I said. "It rings."

"Then let it ring. They'll hear it."

I let it ring.

Nobody on that gravel said a word for twenty minutes.

The other walkers sat on the van's bumper in their blankets, and not one of them looked at me.

Keeley sat a little apart with her arms around her knees.

I had never seen her sit still.

The radio crackled at twelve forty.

"We have her," a voice said. "Culvert, mile marker fourteen. Conscious. Her ankle's bad and she's swallowed a lot of dust. We're bringing her out."

I sat down on the gravel because my legs stopped holding me.

Drew sat down beside me, a foot away.

He did not say anything, and I was grateful.

"She's alive," I said.

"Yeah."

"I called it in. I gave them everyone's name."

"I know. I was there."

Something in the way he said it made me turn my head, but his eyes were on the road, and his jaw was set.

The ambulance came in a long, slow line behind the county truck, and the medics lifted Tegan out on a board with a mask over her mouth.

Her eyes were open.

They found mine over the medic's shoulder, and her mouth moved behind the mask.

I'm sorry, it said.

I did not nod, and I did not shake my head.

A medic held up a hand to keep me back, and I stepped back.

The rest of us were loaded into the convoy a little after one o'clock.

The testing center sat in the middle of the university campus, with a vice principal at its doors holding a clipboard and a face that had spent six hours imagining the worst.

She counted heads as we climbed down.

"The exam board has agreed to a makeup session for every student who stayed with the bus," she said. "Tomorrow at nine, same hall, same rules."

A murmur of relief went through the thirty of us.

Then she looked past us at the van, where ten walkers in foil blankets were waiting.

"Students who left the bus against the driver's instruction are not covered," she said. "The board will decide what happens to them next week."

Keeley's head came up.

"That's not fair," she said, in a thin voice. "We were only trying to get to the exam."

"Miss Satterlee, you were trying to get to the exam without a mask, in a Category 5 dust storm, against a direct instruction."

"Keira said it was fine."

Everybody turned and looked at me again.

I was too tired to be angry.

"I have it on video," I said. "Please look at it."

"I'll look at all of it," the vice principal said.

She went back to her clipboard.

The medics were putting Brent into the second ambulance, and a young deputy stood next to the doors taking his statement.

I was walking past them toward the buses when I heard Brent's voice, loud enough to carry on purpose.

"Keira said go," he told the deputy. "She said it to all of us."

I stopped walking.

The deputy wrote it down.

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