Flesh Eaters (47 page)

It was the heat and the humidity. It was getting to her, too.

“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Cypress is just up the road a ways. Maybe we can find a truck stop and get something to eat.”

He just shook his head.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t have my wallet with me. Everything was lost when I lost my backpack. Do you have yours in your backpack there?”

“No,” she said.

“Yeah, well, we’re pretty much screwed then.” He kicked at a pebble on the ground. “Do you at least have any water?”

“No.”

“Nothing? No juice boxes, nothing?”

“I dumped all that stuff,” she said.

“You dumped it?”

She nodded.

He looked at her then. “What is it? Why are you smiling? If you dumped our supplies, what’s in there?”

She took her backpack off and laid it at his feet.

“Open it,” she said.

A baffled grin was starting to appear at the corners of his mouth. “What are you up to?” he said as he unzipped the pack.

Then he looked inside, and the smile slid off his face. He reached in, and pulled out a cellophane-wrapped brick of hundred-dollar bills.

“What the . . . ?” he said. “There’s . . . there’s like forty of these things in here.”

“I know,” she said. She tried to hold in the giggles, but couldn’t quite manage it.

“That’s like . . . how much . . . how much is this?” he said, stammering.

She shrugged.

“I think it’s about seven million dollars.”

Eleanor glanced at Madison. The girl’s eyes were wide open and bright.

“Seven million dollars,” Jim said. His voice was hushed, reverent.

“About that,” Eleanor said. “What do you think? You’re the insurance man in this family. Is that enough for us to start our lives over?”

He threw the brick of money into the backpack, and as he sat there on the side of the road, he began to laugh. It was the deep, glorious sound of unfettered joy, the kind of laughter she hadn’t heard from him in years. The next instant Madison joined him, and to Eleanor, their laughter sounded like freedom.

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