The Last Widow

She swerved onto Oakdale. Sara’s eyes followed the cruiser as long as she could. The brake lights glowed red as it turned left onto Lullwater.

Toward Will.

“I can feel the air seeping out!” Vale sounded terrified. He could help set off bombs inside of a hospital but he was whining about a hole in his side. “Help me! What do I do?”

Sara said nothing. She was thinking about Will. Bruised ribs. Broken sternum. If the spleen had ruptured, he could be bleeding into his belly. Had she sacrificed herself only to leave him dying in the street? And now this man, this whining child, wanted her to help him?

“You’re a doctor!” Vale whimpered. “Help me!”

Sara had never in her life felt so little empathy for another human being. She spoke through clenched teeth: “Seal the wound.”

Vale lifted up his shirt, hand shaking as he reached to cover the hole.

“Put your finger inside,” Sara told him, which was bullshit because his chest cavity was filling up with blood. Each time he breathed, he pushed more air into the pleural space, which pressed on the lung with the hole in it, causing the lung to collapse more quickly. Eventually, pressure would build up on the opposite lung and the heart and veins, causing them to collapse, too.

Her only concern was that it would take him too long to die.

“Jesus!” Vale screeched. The idiot had actually shoved his finger into the hole. The pain took away his breath. His eyes were so wide that the whites showed. Mercifully, he was in too much agony to complain.

Vale wasn’t the one she should be worried about, anyway. Carter was angry, focused and prepared to do whatever it took to get them out of here. Sara was aware that at any moment, he could reach around the seat and grab her neck.

She looked at the time.

2:04 p.m.

The golden hour was already ticking down on Will’s clock. Internal bleeding could be surgically repaired, but how quickly could they get him to a surgeon? He would need to be airlifted to a trauma center. Who would take him? Every cop in the vicinity would be responding to the explosion.

Two bombs detonated on campus. She couldn’t think about that. Wouldn’t think about that. All that mattered was Will.

“Pass them!” Carter yelled. “Get in the other lane!”

Sara hurtled into oncoming traffic. Tires screeched. Two cars smacked into each other. Vale screamed again. Sara pressed down on the gas. They were approaching Ponce de Leon.

“Blow the light!”

Sara put on her seat belt. She went through the light. Horns blared. The tires lifted off the ground as she struggled to keep the wheel straight.

Which—why?

Crash the car into a tree. Into a telephone pole. Into a house. Sara had the airbag in the steering wheel. Her seat belt. She didn’t have a hole in her lung or a knife sticking out of her leg or a gunshot wound in her shoulder.

Michelle.

The woman was sitting in the middle of the back seat. On impact, she would fly through the windshield. She could break her neck. Broken metal and glass could rip open an artery. The car could run over her before she had a chance to scramble away.

Do it, Michelle had dared Hank, staring into the black hole of a gun. Go ahead, you spineless piece of shit.

Up ahead, there was a dog-leg turn in the road.

Sara would go straight. She would ram the car into the brick house just beyond the red light.

Will was okay. He understood why Sara had told them to shoot her. He knew that none of this was his fault.

Her shoulders relaxed. Her mind felt clear. The calmness inside of her body told her this was the right thing to do.

The turn was coming. Thirty yards. Twenty. Sara punched the gas. She held tight to the steering wheel. She tried again to find Michelle in the mirror.

The woman’s eyes were wide. She was crying. Terrified.

At the last minute, Sara jerked the wheel right, then left, taking the dog-leg on two tires. The car bounced back to the ground. She went through two stop signs. She backed her foot off the gas. She tried to find Michelle again, but the woman had pulled up her legs and buried her head in her knees.

“F-fuck.” Vale’s nose whistled as he tried to draw air into his collapsing lungs. He had seen what Sara was going to do but been helpless to stop her.

“Slow down,” Carter muttered, oblivious. “Jesus fuck, my nuts are on fire.” He punched the back of Sara’s seat. “You’re the doctor. Tell me what to do.”

Sara couldn’t speak. Her throat was filled with cotton. Where was her earlier resolve? Why did she care what happened to Michelle? She had to start thinking about herself—how she was going to get out of this, whether it was by managing an escape or controlling her own death.

“Come on!” Carter jabbed the seat again. “Tell me what to do.”

Sara reached up to the rearview mirror. Her hands were shaking so hard that she could barely find the right angle. The reflection showed Carter’s injury. The knife handle was sticking out of his right inner thigh. Will had driven in the blade at an upward angle. The muscle was holding it in place.

Femoral artery. Femoral vein. Genitofemoral nerve.

Sara tried to clear her throat. Her tongue was thick in her mouth. She could taste bile. “The knife is pressing against a nerve. Pull it out.”

Carter knew better. The blade could also be damming a nick in the artery. “How about I use it to cut open your face? Turn right, then left at the light.”

Sara hooked a right at the stop sign. The light was green when she turned left onto Moreland Avenue. Little Five Points. There were only a few cars on the road. The parking lots in front of the shops and restaurants were sparsely packed. People had probably been directed to shelter in place. Or they were at home watching the news. Or the police had set up a tight perimeter around the hospital—so tight that the BMW had managed to get outside the boundary before they had time to implement the plan.

“Turn off that fucking noise,” Carter said.

The seat belt chime. Sara had not noticed the dinging sound from the passenger’s seat belt being left undone, but now it was all she could hear.

Vale didn’t try to stop the noise. He closed his eyes. His lips were tensed. His finger was still inside of the hole. Every bump, every shift, must have felt like torture.

Sara scanned the road for potholes.

“Shut it off!” Carter yelled. “Help him, God dammit!”

Michelle reached through the split in the seats. She was moving slowly, painfully. The blood on her hands had dried to a burgundy film. She started to draw the belt over Vale’s lap. Her hand hovered a few inches away from the buckle.

His gun was in the waist of his jeans.

Sara’s body went rigid. She prayed for Michelle to pull the weapon and start shooting.

The buckle clicked. The chime stopped. Michelle sat back.

Sara let her gaze slip down to Vale’s lap.