Race to Refuge

Chapter Nineteen: Mallory

Ginny looked terrified, but I must have seemed safe enough for her to hazard getting in the car with me. I unlocked the doors and she climbed in. She was wearing denim shorts and a pink tee shirt and for the life of me I couldn't tell how old she was.

"You're safe now," I told her, sounding confident although the truth was that I wasn't sure. "You're welcome to stay with me as long as you want. I'm on my way to a safe place—a house near the North Carolina/Virginia border."

Her eyebrows drew together as she tried absorbing this.

I continued. "I have friends there and we can join them. They grow their own food and they're in a very, very quiet area so there shouldn't be too many people there. Or no people there." I was starting to drive away again.

Her expression was alarmed. "But I can't leave here. Not for good. I've lost my brother and I've got to find him."

I'd been wondering what a small girl like Ginny had been doing out on her own. It sounded like she hadn't really been on her own at all. "Your brother? Is he in the area?" I parked the car in a hurry on the side of the road because it looked like Ginny was going to jump out of the car if I didn't stop moving.

"He's Ty. He's fifteen. He rescued me from my middle school and had loaded a van full of our stuff." Her voice started getting choked up, so I gave her a minute.

"What kinds of things did he have in the van?" I asked, trying to let her regain her composure on the easy questions.

"Stuff to make water safe. Food. Weapons. We were in good shape. But he had to go use the restroom, so he went into the woods and told me to just stay put. Then these zombies came up and they were chasing Ty farther into the woods. He was yelling back at me to stay put."

I nodded, looking down at my hands, which were folded in my lap. I didn't want her to see the truth in my eyes. The truth that her brother probably hadn't made it. That we really, really needed to get out of this area, especially if there were zombies close by. But I was going to let her tell her story first, before I started persuading her to leave with me.

"So you were alone in the van?" I asked. "Stuck, right? Did you ... did you leave the van to run away? Is it around here somewhere?"

Ginny shook her head. "I wasn't really stuck because Ty showed me how to drive. Not great driving, but enough to be able to get away if I needed to." She stared out the car window at the woods as if Ty were going to show up at any second.

I said gently, "He sounds like an awesome big brother. What happened to the van, then? Did you drive off with it? Did it maybe ... well, did it get wrecked?" Because if I'd been trying to drive a car at her age, I'd have wrecked, for sure.

"No. I waited, instead. The zombies were after Ty, they weren't after me. So I was sitting in the passenger seat with the doors locked and staring at the woods. Really scared. Then on the other side of the car, there was a knock on the window. Men were standing there and they had guns." She swallowed hard.

Now I wasn't really sure if I wanted to hear the rest of this story. This little girl was precious. I fervently hoped no harm had come to her. "Did they see you?"

"They did." She took a deep breath. "They told me to unlock the doors and open them and I did. Then they argued over me. One of the men kept grinning at me and he wanted to bring me with them." She shivered.

"But the others didn't?"

"The one who did want me was the man who got behind the wheel and started driving off down the road. So I'm not real close to where Ty and I were. One of the men didn't really care either way whether I was with them, but the third man was like the leader of the group or something. He didn't want me to come along because it was going to make more work or trouble for them. I was so glad when they just told me to get out of the van. Then they left. With all our stuff. The van, the food, the water, everything." A lone tear trickled down Ginny's face and she didn't bother to brush it away.