Page 30 of Five Survive

Maddy didn’t say anything.

“I don’t have anything useful,” Red said, zipping the suitcase shut and kicking it away.

“Let me see,” Maddy murmured, turning back to her own bag. She picked up one of the wash bags, shiny plastic zebra print, and opened it. “Yes, I thought so,” she said, dipping her hand inside and coming back with a pair of hair scissors.

“You never cut your own hair—?” Red said.

“No, but I always take these when I go away. Never know when you might need a pair of scissors. I had to turn leggings into shorts once when I misjudged the weather.”

“Are those for first aid or a weapon?” Red eyed the scissors.

“Both, I guess,” Maddy said, pulling out a small roll of Scotch tape from the same wash bag. She placed both items beside her, giving them a quick pat. “Oh yeah.” She reached out for the front of the suitcase and the zippered compartment there. “I brought a real flashlight, just in case we were out late on the beach and our phones ran out of battery or something.” She pulled out a flashlight about the size of her hand, black with a fluorescent yellow stripe. “I put a beach ball in there too. Guess that was pointless. What the hell is going on,Red?”

“I know!” Arthur said suddenly, loud enough for the others to hear. “We can use the mattress from my bunk to block up the big window behind the sofa.”

“That’s a good idea,” Red said, at the exact same time that Oliver said it, as he reemerged from the bedroom with Reyna on his heels. He had something in both hands, cradling the items as he struggled past Simon in the narrow corridor. He arrived beside the table and stopped to look around at them all, eyes alive and searching.

“Okay, time’s up,” he said. “What did everybody find to help us survive the night?”

Oliver went first, of course, placing down a small first aid kit—Red guessed Reyna had packed that—and a headlamp, with a couple of spare batteries. Maddy stepped up and added her scissors and Scotch tape to the collection.

Simon returned to the kitchen empty-handed, like Red. But he stopped there, pulling open one of the drawers.

“I knew there’d be one here somewhere,” he said, cutlery rattling and a scraping sound of metal on metal as he pulled his hand out, clutched around the black handle of a kitchen knife. It was sharp, with a serrated edge that caught the dim overhead lights.

“Chekhov’s knife,” Simon said with a dark smile as he added it to the items on the dining table.

“Huh?” said Oliver.

“Never mind, it’s a theater thing.”

A clatter and a grunt behind, as Arthur wrestled with the mattress from his bunk, pulling it down and tucking it under one arm, his glasses knocked askew on his face.

Red gave him a thumbs-up, and he returned it with his spare hand.

“Did someone open my tequila?” Oliver said, digging through his backpack on the counter.

“Another mystery to solve,” Simon said, by the refrigerator. “Right after we work out why there’s a sniper out there shooting at us. That reminds me.” He opened the fridge and pulled out a glass bottle of vodka, unopened, adding it to the pile on the dining table. Red questioned him with her eyes. “For disinfecting wounds,” he explained. “Or liquid courage.”

“Aha,” Oliver said, his hand reemerging from the bottom of his backpack clutched around a shiny silver Zippo lighter. Engraved too, bet that was expensive. Onto the pile it went.

“There’s a small toolbox in here,” Reyna said, voice muffled, her head buried in the closet right by the front door. “I guess we don’t need a tape measure, though.”

“Not unless we want to measure the length of the RV for fun while we’re trapped in here,” Simon said.

“It’s thirty-one feet,” said Red, “not just thirty.” Simon should know, he was the one who told her that, and now she couldn’t get the damn number out of her head.

Reyna backed up out of the closet, and in her hands were a small hammer, a screwdriver, and a roll of gray duct tape. “There’s a mop and a dustpan and brush in there too,” she said, adding those new items to the collection.

“Great.” Oliver’s eyes spooled around, skipping over Arthur, whose hands were full, and flicking between Simon and Red. “Simon,” he said. Unlucky. Probably because he was closest. And because everybody knew he drank the tequila. “Can you grab the dustpan and brush and sweep up the glass?”

“Really?” Simon hardened his gaze.

“We don’t want anyone cutting themselves,” Oliver said, leading him in the direction of the open closet, the movement disguised as a pat on the back. “It will take you two minutes, go on.”

Simon muttered something under his breath, but Red only caught the hardest of syllables. She didn’t imagine it was anything worth repeating. He picked up the dustpan and brush, struggling for a moment to separate the two, then bent low, sweeping piles of window glass into the pan, glittering as it moved.

“Excuse your feet,” he said, maneuvering around Maddy’s shoes and her still-open suitcase.

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