4

Chapter 4

Milo

I didn't say a word to Owen. I picked up my backpack, walked out of my room, and drove away from Larkin Street without looking back at the house.

I went over it again and again on the highway. I had called Professor Kim from inside a locked car with the windows up. Nobody was near me. Nobody could have heard. And Owen had sat on my bed in my sweater and smiled and named the exact place, the way someone names a town they've already been to.

I didn't know what that meant yet. But I knew it meant I had less time than I thought.

Mayfield Wholesale was a giant warehouse store out by the interstate. I pushed two flatbed carts up and down the aisles for three hours. Rice in fifty-pound bags. Dried beans. Oats. Canned chicken, canned tuna, canned vegetables, peanut butter, powdered milk, salt, sugar, cooking oil. Forty bags of charcoal. Twelve boxes of matches. Every pack of batteries they had on the shelf.

By the second trip to the register, people were staring.

"You opening a restaurant, honey?" the cashier asked. She was an older woman with reading glasses on a chain and a name tag that said Darlene.

"Something like that."

A guy in a Patriots hat behind me in line laughed. "Or he's one of those end-of-the-world guys. You got a bunker too, buddy?"

His girlfriend smacked his arm, but she was laughing too.

I looked at the three things in his cart. A case of beer, a frozen pizza, and paper towels.

"You should buy more food," I said. "And a heater if you don't have one. Something bad is coming in the next couple of weeks. A real cold. Worse than anything you've seen."

He laughed even harder. "Okay, Noah. Want me to build an ark?"

Darlene didn't laugh. She looked at the forty bags of charcoal and then at me, and I saw her think about it for a second. Then the line moved, and she went back to scanning.

I paid with my new card. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars. My hands didn't shake once.

It took me four trips to load everything. I drove to the far end of the lot, behind an empty Sears building, where there were no cameras and no people, and I touched my grandmother's ring. One by one, the bags and boxes disappeared from my back seat into that gray room with no walls. When I closed my eyes, I could see them sitting there in neat stacks, exactly where I put them.

The room didn't get any smaller. It didn't even look fuller.

My next stop was Pell's Pharmacy on Grant Avenue. I'd worked the counter there for two years in high school. The owner, Mrs. Ruiz, was a short, gray-haired woman who used to slip me leftover pastries from the break room because she said I looked like I needed them.

"Milo Bennett!" She came around the counter and hugged me. "Look at you. College boy."

I bought every bottle of fever reducer, cough medicine, antiseptic, gauze, and electrolyte powder on her shelves. She didn't ask questions until the total came up.

"Milo," she said quietly. "Are you sick?"

"No. I'm just getting ready." I leaned across the counter. "Mrs. Ruiz, please stock up for yourself. Food, medicine, a good heater. Do it this week. Don't wait."

She looked at me for a long time. She was the only person all day who didn't laugh.

"Okay," she said. "I will."

By the time I left, the sky had gone dark gray, and it was barely four o'clock. The rain had stopped. The air felt strange, dry and sharp in my nose.

My phone buzzed in the cup holder. A local number I'd saved that morning.

"It's Rhett," he said when I answered. "From the warehouse. Where are you?"

"Grant Avenue. Why?"

"The three sleeping bags I had in stock. I want to bring them to you tonight."

"I can pick them up tomorrow."

"Check the temperature on your dash."

I looked. When I left Mayfield Wholesale, it was fifty-one degrees. Now it said thirty-four.

"That's not normal," Rhett said. "Not for October. My dad's notes said the first sign would be the temperature falling fast, then the wind. I'm coming to you. Where are you staying?"

"The Starlight Motel on Route 9. Room twelve."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes."

I pulled into the motel lot ten minutes later. The second I opened my car door, the wind hit me.

It came from nowhere, straight down the road, so strong it slammed my door back against the hinges. A metal trash can rolled across the lot and smashed into the ice machine. The motel sign was swinging on its pole, the bolts screaming. I grabbed the roof of my car to stay standing, and the wind tore the breath right out of my mouth.

I knew this wind.

In my last life, it came on November ninth. One night of it. The next morning, the freeze started.

It was October thirty-first.

I tried to make it to my door. I got four steps. The wind picked up again, harder, and my feet came off the ground. I went down on the asphalt and slid sideways across the lot toward the open road, where a semi truck was coming fast with its lights on.

I grabbed for anything. A parking block. A drain cover. My fingers slipped off everything.

Then a hand closed around the back of my jacket and yanked me backward so hard I hit someone's chest.

"I've got you." Rhett's arm went around my waist and held on. He was braced against the side of a red pickup truck, his boots planted, his whole body between me and the wind. "I've got you. Don't let go."

I didn't. I held onto his jacket with both hands while the semi roared past three feet from where I'd been.

He dragged me around to the passenger side of his truck, pushed me in, and climbed in after me. He slammed the door, and suddenly it was quiet except for the wind beating the windows and both of us breathing hard.

His hand was still fisted in my jacket. He didn't seem to notice.

"You okay?" he asked. "Milo. Look at me. Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine."

"You're bleeding." He touched my chin with his thumb, where I'd hit the asphalt. Then he pulled his hand back, fast, and reached for the radio on his dashboard.

The weather station was playing a warning on a loop. Temperature in the county down twenty-two degrees in two hours. Wind gusts over seventy miles an hour. Residents advised to stay indoors.

Rhett turned it off and sat there staring at the windshield.

"Dad's notes said the wind comes the night before," he said quietly. "The night before the freeze."

He turned and looked at me.

"Milo, whoever told you the tenth was wrong. It's not coming in ten days. It might be coming tomorrow."