A/N I reckon that Fang's gang doesn't really get enough face-time, so here's a chapter focussing on them. Yay!
The van complained loudly as Kate shifted gears. She stamped down on the clutch pedal and felt some resistance on the stick before it slid into place and the grinding sound stopped.
'Hey, Katie, take it easy!' Ratchet grumbled from the back of the van.
'For the hundredth time, Ratchet, my name is Kate, not Katie,' she replied, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. 'And why on earth did we have to steal a stick shift? I've only ever tried driving one a couple of times before.'
'Well, you know how they say that guys like a girl who can drive a good stick shift.' It was said with a snigger, and Kate looked up sharply into the rear-view mirror just in time to see an empty soda can hitting Ratchet in the side of the head.
'Keep your disgusting thoughts to yourself, ingrate,' Star sneered. She had spent most of the journey so far sprawled across the three seats in the middle section of the van, seemingly unworried about seatbelts and the like. Around her were steadily-growing piles of empty food wrappers and drink cans, which she was clearly finding a good use for as she continued to chuck trash at Ratchet over the backs of the seats.
'Hey, hey, hey, it was a joke!' he protested, his hands held up in front of his face in an attempt to protect himself from the lightning-fast volleys of garbage. 'Didn't mean to offend your sensitive Catholic school ears!'
After a minute or two Star appeared to get bored of her latest game, retreating back to lounging across the car seats, and it wasn't too long before she started snoring. Ratchet groaned under his breath.
'Snores like a freakin' machine gun,' he muttered, clamping down on his headphones with both hands and twisting himself around to face the loading doors at the back of the van, and in the momentary near-silence that followed, Kate was able to turn her full attention back on the road again.
'Quality entertainment,' Holden remarked from the seat next to her, his voice quietly amused. She shot him a quick glance and laughed a little at the expression on his face.
'Yeah, it's like a mobile comedy show following us around. Wish they'd give it a rest sometimes, though.'
'Not my fault,' interjected Ratchet from behind them.
Kate shook her head, rolling her eyes in teasing exasperation.
'If you don't mind me asking, how exactly did you and Star ever become friends?' Holden said mildly. 'It doesn't seem as though it should work. It's never looked as though you've got a lot in common.'
Kate sighed.
'We don't really. And before we were taken I don't think we'd ever spoken more than a few words to each other. But she helped me a lot while we were in that lab, getting tested on and altered and stuff; I wasn't exactly born with that fighting edge, so before I learned to harden up I was pretty vulnerable in there. She was there for me. She spoke to me from her cage when I was having panic attacks, and she was the one who told me to get a grip whenever she thought I was giving up. There was this one time when some scientists came to take each of us for testing. They got us out of our cages and walked us down the hall together, then when they tried to take us down different corridors Star went crazy. She fought them so hard that they had to sedate her in the end – kept saying that she wasn't going to let them take me out of her sight. We've been through a lot together, and I can pretty much guarantee that if she hadn't been there with me I would never have survived. I know she puts up this front of being kinda cold and stuff, but she's a good person.'
Holden nodded.
'I get that.' He paused for a second, then spoke again, his voice more tentative this time. 'Did it change the way you think? I mean, you were at Catholic school, right? Did it change the things you believed in?'
'I was never particularly religious or anything, actually. My parents sent me there because it scored well on rankings and stuff, not because it was Catholic. I mean…' She searched for the right way to word what she was feeling. 'I guess I believe in something, like something that's bigger than just us and the world and all, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. I get what you mean, though; going through the sort of stuff that we've experienced changes the way you look at things.' She glanced at Holden again, watching for a moment as he mulled over her words.
'I think that anything I might have thought before about higher powers or whatever was smashed when I was taken,' he said suddenly. He stared at the glove compartment, his eyes distant, and rubbed absently at the meshwork of scars that made his arms look like they were covered in thick, pink webs. 'I guess I thought that anyone who was evil enough to let that happen couldn't be in charge of everything. I think that if I'd let myself believe that they could then I would've just given up; it wouldn't have seemed worth fighting.'
He fell silent, and Kate felt a pang as she took in what he'd said. In a lot of ways, he reminded her of her older brother. They looked completely different, of course, but the way Holden spoke, so steadily and unashamedly, was very similar to the way Jamie used to speak.
Her grip on the steering wheel tightened as she thought about her brother, and before she realised what she was doing the top third of the wheel had buckled, leaving a very crooked circle of metal in her hands.
'Great,' she muttered, giving the wheel a slight turn to check that the steering was still working properly.
'You okay?' Holden asked, eyeing the bent metal beneath Kate's fingers.
'Yeah, I'm alright,' she replied with an airy laugh, her voice sounding much calmer than she felt. 'I was just thinking too hard.'
He nodded and went back to watching the trees flying past the window.
Kate remembered the day that Jamie had left all too clearly, saying goodbye at the train station three years ago. His military uniform smelled like the same detergent that their mum had used since forever, and she couldn't stop the tears from welling up and spilling onto it as he hugged her.
'Hey, don't be crying now,' he'd said. 'We'll send letters and talk on the phone when we can and everything. It'll be just like I've gone away to college.'
She couldn't bring herself to say what she knew everyone was thinking: but what if you don't come back? Instead, she gripped him tighter and said,
'I'll miss you.'
He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, having to bend down low to reach; at 6'1'', a full-grown man of eighteen, he'd towered over Kate's twelve-year-old self.
'I'll miss you too, Katie.'
He always called her Katie.
He hadn't left her mind since she'd watched him walk away through the doors to the platform. Not really. It had gotten easier to deal with him not being at home as time went on, and he'd come back for a couple of weeks last year, but the fear that his last letter really would be his last was something she'd never gotten used to. And now that she wasn't at home anymore things were even worse – had he heard when she'd been kidnapped? Did he know about what had been done to her? Had he died since she'd run away to join the gang?
She breathed in deeply, trying to calm herself down and keep the fear from taking her over. We've all got our causes, she told herself. His is the military. This is mine. We're both fighting for something important.
A sign appeared on the road ahead, letting Kate know that a place called Lakeview was coming up in five miles. They were now only about a half hour away from the Californian border; she'd been driving through the night for nearly five and a half hours now, not counting the time they'd spent getting over that rock pile, and she was exhausted from the all concentration that it was taking to make sure they didn't swerve off the road.
'Maybe we'll be able stop for a bit at this next town coming up,' she said, glancing at the clock on the dashboard. 'It's twenty past six now. If we stop and rest for a few hours then by the time that we're ready to go again there'll be some shops open and we can restock.'
'Sounds like a plan, Katie,' Ratchet mumbled sleepily.
Her mouth tightened at the corners.
'Don't call me Katie,' she said quietly.
They drove on, and when another sign came up showing that they were only a couple of miles outside of Lakeview, Kate started to think about how they could let the others above them know about the plan to stop. Maybe if she just parked the van then they'd get the message?
But in the end she didn't need to worry about that, because suddenly she was thrown against the window as something rammed into the side of the van.
They were pushed off the road, the vehicle rolling right over with the force of the hit. Kate could hear shouts from all directions, could feel her head spinning as the world rotated around her, could feel her seatbelt cutting into her neck and across her stomach as it held her upside down in her seat as they turned; a large shape flew over her head, falling on top of her as the van lurched, and she realised it was Star. Reaching out, Kate pinned her friend to the dash, holding her in place and for a fraction of a moment feeling grateful towards the scientists who had decided they were going to give her superhuman strength. Then the van came to a stop with a jolt that sent her head whipping sideways into the window.
There was a creaking sound as the body of the vehicle settled around them, the dents in the metal groaning and shards of glass making tinkling sounds as they fell from broken window frames. Looking to her left, all Kate could see was dirt; the van had ended up on its side.
'Everyone alive?' Holden called out, suspended sideways in his seat by his own belt.
'Yeah,' replied Kate. 'Few cuts from the glass and managed to crack my head against the window, but I'm alright.
'I'm cool.' Ratchet's voice was slightly muffled; his hearing had given him a split-second's notice about what was going to happen, not long enough to get out a sound of warning, but enough time throw himself down onto the floor of the van. When they'd started rolling, he'd braced himself between the bases of the seats and held on with everything he had. Star, who had been asleep and slumped across three seats, had not had such a lucky time of it; she'd been flung forwards on impact. Her almost instant reactions had allowed her to grab hold of the back of Kate's seat with one hand as she passed, preventing her from flying through the front windshield, but the momentum had sent enough force through her arm to twist it out of its socket.
'Shoulder's hurt,' she said, the blood from her nose bright red against her white face and her voice thick and strained. 'Elbow got pulled and bashed my nose pretty hard. But mostly the shoulder.'
'What was that?' Kate asked.
Ratchet opened his mouth to answer her, but before he could a huge, fanged face appeared in the windshield. The Eraser tilted its head to look at them, a brutal relish in its yellow eyes.
'Well, well, well, children,' he growled. 'This is why you always wear a seatbelt.'
A/N Writing this is helping me learn geography - I like to know where characters are going, and if I'm ever writing a journey then travel times and locations and stuff need to be realistic or it annoys me. Seriously, you have no idea how long I spent hovering over Oregon and California on Google maps trying to work out what route the group was gonna take. And jeez, you Americans have bloody big spaces where there is NOTHING going on. Seriously, roads should not be that long and empty. :P Review!