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The road stretches out ahead, twisting and turning like a snake in between grassless hills. Phil sits clutching a backpack to his chest as if it were a pillow, and stares out the window to a fuzzy grey horizon. Dan’s leg pushes against his every few seconds, a gentle pulsing that does little to calm the way Phil’s hands quiver against the canvas straps.
This is life now, grey and fragile and trembling.
The woman driving the van is tall, with dark hair wrapped up into a knot on the top of her head and a blue scarf over her nose and mouth. Phil sees her hands on the wheel, white-knuckled and smudged with what looks like dirt and motor oil. The man in the passenger seat is short and ginger, and keeps glancing back at Dan every minute or so as if he was about to spring up and attack. He’s got cloth wrapped over his mouth as well, white with small blue dots, as if it had been cut from a bed sheet.
The man sitting on the other side of Dan is thin and feverish, leaning with his head against the window, eyes half closed. Dan is as far away from the man as he can get, and Phil tries to take shallow breaths behind his own cloth covering, but this is worth it, even with the threat of sickness sitting so close.
Everything has a price. Their price for this ride is now clutched in the ginger man’s fist in the form of a small, orange bottle. It was Dan who did it, Dan who had helped them jump-start the engine and handed over the pills while Phil stood off to the side, holding their things and staring out of the corner of his eye at the sick man. Both of them were shivering.
Phil’s glasses are tucked into the breast pocket of his jacket. The right lens still has the spider web crack running through the glass, and the hinges on the back are getting stiffer. He slides them over his face and the left side of the world slides into focus. There is a trail of people along the side of the road, walking. They go by too quickly for Phil to make out any faces, but he knows that their eyes will be hungrily eyeing the back of the van as they pass, the noisiest thing they have probably heard in weeks.
When they finally got the engine to work, Dan and the dark-haired woman bent over the open hood, Phil had to resist every urge in his body telling him to grab Dan and flee, to disappear down some dark alleyway or up into the rafters of a building before they were swarmed. But instead he had stayed, clutching the backpack, trusting in Dan and trusting that this was the right thing to do.
Phil tears his eyes away from the window and looks back toward the front seat. None of them had said their names. None of them had spoken since they’d got in the van. Phil looks to the woman, sees the sweat beading on the side of her temple and the silver ring on her left hand and decides to call her Caroline. The red-haired man is Eric and the sick man is maybe called Jared. He wonders how they all met, if maybe they were a family, with Jared as the son and –– well, he looks too old. Maybe Jared as the brother and Eric as Caroline’s husband but there’s no matching ring on Eric’s hand so maybe they are friends or co-workers or just strangers that found each other.
Phil wants desperately to sleep, but there’s no way he’s closing his eyes with this many people around. He feels something touch his hand and he jumps slightly but it’s just Dan’s finger, snaking underneath the backpack. Phil shifts the pack to sit between them and Dan’s fingers slide between his own. This feeling – a backpack (or pillow, or blanket) over their clasped hands, the gentle swaying of the van, the eyes of strangers surely locked onto them – he nearly feels at home.
There’s something almost funny about this. He wonders, fleetingly if Dan senses it too, but there’s no need to guess. The way that Dan bumps his arm against Phil’s, the slight pressure in his fingertips – he is also thinking of back then.
When the van breaks down it is with a great sputtering gasp, and Phil thinks vaguely of the radiator that haunted the corner of his uni dorm. Caroline leans back in the seat, hands over her eyes.
“S’alright,” Eric says softly, leaning towards her. “We knew it wouldn’t last that long.”
“I need to get back,” she says. Her accent sounds northern. Phil’s stomach begins to hurt.
“Look – Jo, it’s alright,” Eric says, and Phil wonders who he’s talking to for a moment before realizing that he was the one who made up their names in the first place. Jo nods, wiping her eyes and glancing back at Dan and Phil. Phil quickly averts his gaze.
“This is it, then,” she tells them, and Dan nods. Phil blinks, stuffing his glasses back in the pocket of his jacket before yanking on the handle to the door. The wind nips at his cheeks and for the first time in several weeks he can actually smell the smoke. He stretches out his legs and swings the backpack over his shoulder. Eric gets out of the car ahead of them, still nervously glancing. Phil doesn’t blame him, as he and Dan’s height and newfound quietness are probably why they’ve been mostly left alone. But it still unnerves him, slightly, to be looked at with such trepidation.
“Thank you,” he says. His voice is slightly hoarse. Eric’s eyebrows raise slightly.
“Yeah,” he says after a moment, “yeah, you too.” He pats his pocket.
Phil feels Dan standing just behind him, to the right. Through the van windows he can see Jo coaxing the sick man out of his seat.
Eric steps toward them, and Phil hears Dan’s sharp inhale behind him, feels him push against his shoulder. But Eric just holds out his hand. Phil swallows, trying to force his heart back down into his chest where it belongs, and extends his arm.
They clasp hands, and Eric gives Phil a sort of half-nod. Phil tries a smile and the corner of his mouth twitches up slightly behind his handkerchief. Then it’s Dan’s hand lightly pulling his shoulder, and they turn away.
As soon as they crest the next hill Phil reaches out his hand to interlink it with Dan’s. He turns his head, their eyes meet and the corners of Dan’s eyes start to crinkle.
“What,” Phil asks in a low voice.
“Always the flirt,” Dan says.
It takes Phil a moment to even register that Dan has made a joke. Then his eyes widen as he breaks into a smile, a real, full smile and his lips brush up against the worn fabric.
“I was being nice,” he says, and pulls Dan closer to him. The earth is dusty under their feet, and they plod onward. “Clearly you’ve forgotten what that is as you nearly jumped him.”
Dan exhales, and comes to a stop, pulling Phil’s hand so that they’re face to face.
He reaches his other hand up and pulls down the cloth around his mouth, then moves it to the back of Phil’s neck, pressing his lips against his forehead. They feel cold and chapped. Phil closes his eyes and leans forward, burying his face in Dan’s shoulder. He feels Dan’s arms snaking around his back, under the backpack, pulling him closer and closer.
It used to be that they could stay like this for as long as they wanted, minutes or hours or long, lazy days. But those times are long gone, so Phil breaks the embrace and pulls Dan’s cloth softly back up over his nose. Dan looks over his head, eyes scanning the landscape for anything out of the ordinary, becoming once again the ragged and weary traveller on the lookout for any sign of danger.
Phil takes comfort as it comes, in small reminders that the Dan hidden beneath the layers of cloth and dirt and age is still there, sometimes.
They twine their hands together once more and press onwards, past dirt and grass, shrubs and tree stumps, their steps in matched rhythm and eyes fixed forward.
They don’t talk much these days. There’s not much to be said, and hardly the energy to say it. But they communicate all the same, and Phil knows that with every brush, every squeeze, every pulse there comes a small message.
I am here. You are here. We are safe.