A bearded man in light-blue coveralls stepped out from behind a green Pathfinder and made his way over to her door. Taking a deep breath, she lowered her window and turned off the car. As he got closer, he also got bigger. His hair was brown and pulled back into a low ponytail, and his beard matched his hair except for a stripe of gray that ran through the middle.
“Julie Jackson?” he asked in a raspy drawl.
She almost didn’t recognize her new alias, but she caught herself in time and nodded. Her siblings sat as still and quiet as statues.
“I’m Billy.” Sticking out a grease-lined hand for her to shake, he grinned. It was wide, friendly, and made Jules’s held breath leave her in a relieved rush. She accepted his hand and shook it.
“Nice to meet you.” Once he’d withdrawn his hand, she opened the door a crack. Taking the hint, he stepped back so she could get out of the car. “Is there a bathroom here?”
“Everyone always asks for that first.” Chuckling, Billy pointed to a pair of doors next to the clothing racks. “There’re two. Have at ’em.”
The three in the backseat scrambled out and rushed for the bathrooms. Ty made it there first, and Tio hung back so Dez had first crack at the other one. Although Sam climbed out of the car, he circled around the front to stand next to Jules instead of joining the stampede to the bathrooms.
“Man of the house, huh?” Billy slapped him on the upper arm. Jules eyed her brother with concern, but he didn’t react to the contact except for tensing slightly. “Good for you, watching out for your sister. While you’re waiting, you can pick out your new look.” Looking comically like a game-show hostess, he gestured toward the wall of clothes.
“New look?” Jules headed toward the clothes and saw that the boxes covering the large table were filled with hair dye, cosmetics, wigs, glasses, and even fake facial hair, which made her laugh. “This is perfect for you.” She held up a blond mustache for Sam to see.
He snorted. “Right.”
“The guys will probably do fine going boot-camp style,” Billy said, having followed them. “You and the little lady should probably change colors, as well as chop off some of that.” He eyed Jules’s light-brown hair, which fell to her lower back. “It’s pretty distinctive.”
“Sure,” Jules said, even as she felt a slight pang at the thought. She hadn’t had short hair since she was a chubby seventh grader. In eighth grade, she’d lost weight and grown out her hair, and she still associated cropped hair with the pudgy little girl she’d been.
“Great!” Billy clapped his hands together, connecting with a sharp sound that made Jules jump. “Let’s get cracking.”
EXCERPT #4
SUMMARY: Not daring to stop or rest until reaching their safe house in Colorado, Jules drives her carful of sleeping siblings through the night.
Four Days Earlier
Jules had never been so tired. It made it worse that she was trying to minimize bathroom stops, so she couldn’t suck down excessive amounts of coffee or Diet Coke to keep herself caffeinated. Her eyes kept moving to the dashboard clock, which only made time go more slowly. It was a few minutes before four a.m. central time, and she’d been driving for almost twenty hours.
The rest of the Pathfinder’s occupants were sleeping, which filled Jules with an odd mixture of proud satisfaction and boredom. She was tempted to poke Sam, just so he’d wake up and she’d have someone to talk to.
“Bad sister,” she muttered under her breath. “Let sleeping siblings lie.”
It didn’t help that Kansas was freaking dull. The other states hadn’t been much better, but at least she’d had adrenaline and sunshine to help her through. Now that she was exhausted, having only the tunnel her headlights created on the mostly empty interstate made staying awake a form of torture.
“Eight more hours.” She glanced at the clock again. “Less than eight hours. Seven hours and some minutes.” “Some” sounded better than “fifty-eight.” It probably wouldn’t be exactly eleven a.m. when they arrived, but it helped to have a countdown.
“You ok-kay?”
Sam’s voice was low, but it still made her jump. After the initial shock, she welcomed the buzz of adrenaline. It might give her an extra ten minutes of being fully awake. “Hey, Sam. Did my muttering wake you?”
She saw his shrug in her peripheral vision. “Not r-r-really sleeping, juh-ust in and out.”
“Do you mind staying up and talking to me, then?” She sent him a grin. “I’m fading a little here. It’d really suck if I fell asleep and killed us all in the last hours of the drive.”