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get off this road,” Leo suggested. “It’d be the first place they’d search.”
    “Right,” I said.
    Justin jerked open the atlas. “There are lots of little roads all over the place around here,” he said. “We just have to watch out for dead ends. And if we go much farther west we’ll hit a big freeway.”
    “So we go east, then,” I said. “And let’s turn every chance we get. I don’t want to give them an easy path to follow.” Until it snowed again, our tire tracks would reveal our route, but at least a winding path would make it harder for anyone to set up an ambush. “You tell me when the intersections are coming, and which way to go to keep us east and south. Okay?”
    “Got it,” Justin said. “About a mile from here, you can take a left.”
    I pressed my foot against the gas pedal, pushing the car faster than we’d risked before. Twenty miles an hour…twenty-five miles an hour. I eased off only when I felt the tires start to skid on the snow. It was even and fairly shallow here, but it still offered much less traction than the plowed roads I used to take for granted.
    We reached the turn and turned again fifteen minutes later. And then the good luck we’d had so far started to run out. The farmland gave way to forest, and the wind sweeping over the trees had left the snow sloped across the road. It was still shallow enough for us to drive through, but the slant threw off the tires. I had to creep along, hugging the ditch, braced against the slightest drift to the side. The dark tree trunks slipped past the faint glow of the headlights like looming phantoms. A bead of sweat trickled down my back, but I didn’t dare stop to unzip my heavy coat.
    It was almost an hour before we came to another viable turnoff. A sprinkling of snowflakes fluttered down—not enough to cover our tracks, just speckling my view through the windshield. My ankle was starting to ache from holding my foot steady on the pedals. But we’d hardly covered any distance at all.
    Unfortunately, the SUV couldn’t run on determination alone. The fuel indicator had dipped below the ¼ mark.
    “We’re going to need more gas soon,” I said. “Is there any extra in the trunk?”
    Leo shook his head. “I poured everything we had in before we left the cabins.”
    The road ahead of us looked particularly lonely, but so far we’d been more successful siphoning from vehicles left at isolated houses than in towns, maybe because other scavengers had already made the rounds in more populated areas.
    “Shout if you see a mailbox,” I told the others.
    The first two houses we came across, down lanes between the trees, were car-free. Then the forest receded by a row of country houses only about an acre apart. I eased up and down the driveways, munching on potato chips from the bag Justin had opened as a hurried lunch.
    We peered at each house before getting out of the car, but all of them looked abandoned. The weather hadn’t been kind. A huge crack bisected a living room window. The roof over one of the porches had collapsed. We found a little gas: an old truck gave us a couple gallons, which we sucked down our length of plastic tubing into the jugs we carried. Then, after a few empty garages, a van offered a few more gallons. But it wasn’t enough.
    As we edged onward, Tobias snuffled and shifted in the back, his most recent batch of sedatives wearing off.
    “What’s going on?” he asked.
    “Looking for gas,” I said.
    Through the rearview mirror, I watched him fumble with the pill bottle. His face was even pastier than usual. If the pills were upsetting his stomach like they had Gav’s, he wasn’t complaining, but it couldn’t be enjoyable staying constantly knocked out in that artificial sleep.
    “Hold on,” I said. “Why don’t you help search these places? It’ll go faster with more people.”
    So at the next property, Tobias got out, quickly veering away from us as he coughed into his scarves. Leo and I checked