by Emily Henry
“That you were a giant selfish idiot?” Sofía said.
Nick rubbed his scalp. “That I would’ve chosen y’all too. If I were an alien who wanted to save the planet Earth, and I could only have five people—and one dog—I would’ve picked you. Because no matter what we don’t say, I know you all. You’d walk away, in the middle of anything, if one of us needed you. I guess what I’m saying is, you’re my family too, and I’m sorry.”
Levi shifted between his knees and cleared his throat. “I meant literally, how did you end up here, in this cave, but I guess that’s all good to hear too.”
Nick and Arthur exchanged a look. “That question’s a little trickier,” Arthur said. “And a long story. What about you guys? How’d you find us?”
“Ditto to Arthur’s answer,” Levi said.
Overhead, the steady beat of helicopter blades was sweeping back this way.
“Let’s get into the cave,” Sofía said, “where they can’t see that light.”
We crawled inside then got to our feet and made our way to the waterfall in the back hollow, but as we were going, my ankle screamed and another blow of vertigo hit me hard, knocking the world off balance.
The shadowy cave slanted, the ground rising up beside me like a wall, and my cheek, my ribs and side slammed into it.
Sofía yelped my name and hurried to where I’d fallen, and even she was rocking like a pendulum in front of me. Her voice was warbling. The world was in flux in front of me.
Levi, Nick, Arthur, and even Droog crowded around me too.
“Stay with us, Franny,” Nick was saying. “We’re here, so just stay with us.”
Remy, I thought. What about Remy? We needed to get Remy.
I started to push myself up, but Sofía eased my shoulders back against the wall as she leveled her gaze on me. “It really is making you sick,” she said. “Whenever you use the power?”
Art looked at me hard and clicked on the flashlight in his hand to better appraise me.
“Maybe,” I said, then after another moment, let the truth out. “Yes.”
“Shit,” Nick said.
“What do we do?” Levi asked. “How do we fix it?”
“We don’t.” My heart palpitated. “At least not right now. We need to worry about Remy.”
Art jerked his chin over his shoulder. “Did you see that giant plastic bag over the substation? We think that’s where he is.”
Levi nodded. “That’s where Agent Rothstadt was taking us before we escaped.”
“Agent Rothstadt?” Nick said.
“Escaped?” Arthur said.
“We were rescued, actually,” Sofía said. “By your dog.”
I took a deep breath before launching into the whole story as quickly as I could.
“So we can use it up,” Arthur said when I’d finished. “That’s why your scars have been shrinking?”
“Oh,” Sofía said. “Okay, we’re not going to latch too tightly on to the part where we almost died?”
“According to Bill—Albert—every use of our abilities should let off some of the energy in us,” I answered Arthur. “If we can get rid of it, Agent Rothstadt and the others might not have any use for us. But the problem is Remy. We don’t know if he’s got any power left, if they’ve seen his scar or not.”
Arthur was studying the purple ridges on his arm as he clenched and unclenched his fist. “What about me? How am I supposed to get rid of my scars when Molly totally stiffed me?”
“Look, dude,” Sofía said. “If I could give you Ordinary-Vision in 3D, I would gladly trade you.”
“I’d give you mine too. You totally deserve it,” Levi said without a trace of irony.
“Thank you.” Arthur shot a resentful look at Droog, who wagged excitedly.
“Did Droog bring you here too?” I asked.
Arthur’s eyes flicked to Nick, and they held a silent counsel.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Seriously,” Levi said. “For all we know Remy’s strapped to a metal table right now, so please hurry and just say it.”
“We weren’t trying to come here,” Arthur said. “The stampede pushed us this way. We were trying to get to the quarantine tent.”
“We knew they had Remy,” Nick said. “And when the group text went silent after Levi sent those messages about that Black Mailbox guy, we thought either they’d gotten the rest of you or he had. And if that was the case, we didn’t have the resources to get you back, or to stop Wayne. Turning ourselves in seemed like the best option.”
Turning themselves in?
After everything that had happened last night? When Arthur and the others had stopped me from doing the same thing and ending this before Remy or anyone else got hurt?
“And then what?” I snapped, surprised by my own anger. The cord in me went taut, ready, eager. “Then all of this—everything we put ourselves through this week would’ve been for nothing!”
“You would’ve been safe,” Arthur growled.
“For how long? How long does a human dissection take, Arthur?”
“Longer than a bullet to the brain!” he said. “You heard what the sheriff said about your bud Black Mailbox Bill! He was planning to murder you. He had every nook and cranny of our lives mapped out—he knew exactly how to play you! You’re lucky it wasn’t over in seconds, Franny! At least if we’d turned ourselves over—found you—you would’ve had a little longer!”
“So what?” I screamed. “I would’ve been dead and you would’ve been dead.”
“You think I care?” Arthur screamed back. “You think I’d want to be here alone?”
His words hung in the air. My eyes stung, and my throat felt like a paper finger-trap pulling tight, shutting out all the air.
Arthur stared back at me. I imagined my expression must look just like his: crumpled, broken.
Nick cleared his throat. “Look, y’all, what matters is we’re all together, and we’re safe. Now we need to get back to the plan.”
Arthur’s eyes scrunched closed, and he massaged the bridge of his nose. “The plan was to lie low. In what world is that plan salvageable at this point?”
Seeing him like this—watching him give up—sent a searing pain through me.
The hyperventilating, blood-rushing, ears-ringing feeling of knowing you’ve just lost your grip on your life, that it’s drifted away from you.
I looked away from him to keep the emotion from exploding out of me in lightning streaks.
“Fine,” Nick said. “We need a new plan: We get Remy, go stop Wayne from blowing up Splendor with his Super Machine, burn through our energy to get rid of our scars, then turn Wayne over to the FBI and pin the whole thing on him.”
Levi’s eyebrows pitched up as he turned toward me. “You can get us into the compound, right?” His gaze dropped to the shrunken scars, just barely visible below my sleeve. “You’ve got enough of the power left to take out their electricity one more time?”
“Absolutely not,” Sofía said. “Look what that energy’s doing to her. She can barely sit up. It’s probably giving her some kind of radiation poisoning or something!”
“I’ve got enough,” I said.
Sofía pressed a palm to her forehead, rolling circles against it. “Franny . . .”
“I’ve got enough to cut their power,” I repeated. “I’ve got nothing to stop bullets.”
Levi gave a half-formed shrug. “They won’t fire on us. They need us.”
“There’s a lot of them,” Arthur said. “Even without electricity, we won’t be able to get through all of them.”
“So we need a distraction,” Nick said. “Get them busy before we make our move.”
“The only thing that’s going to get those soldiers out of that compound,” I said, “is me.”
“And if your e
lectrical blast is on the other side of town,” Sofía added, “then it’s not here, cutting the compound’s power.”
“So we’ve got to Ferris Bueller them,” Levi said.
“Say what now?” Nick said.
“Oh, come on. You guys have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. John Hughes at his best? Matthew Broderick has an epic day skipping school?”
“If you have a point, you should make it before Nick pulls your underwear over your head,” I warned.
“He sets up a fake Ferris to trick his parents. A complicated system of pulleys and recordings and a Ferris dummy, so that when his parents come in, they think he’s in bed sick, like he told them he would be.”
“Levi, I love your zeal,” I said. “Truly, it’s inspiring. But I suspect a Franny doll won’t fool Agent Rothstadt.”
Arthur snapped his fingers and pointed at Levi. “We need a fake light show. We need to make a blackout.”
“There’s no way,” Sofía said. “Unless someone in this cave has access to five hundred vacuum cleaners and the world’s longest power strip—”
“I do,” Nick said.
At first I thought he was joking, and Sofía’s and Arthur’s matching expressions of irritation suggested they did too.
But Nick wasn’t smiling. “My mom, you know. She keeps stuff.” He cleared his throat. “Like Arthur mentioned last night.”
“She’s a hoarder,” Levi volunteered.
“Thinks we need to be prepared for the apocalypse,” Nick said. “The point is, a few months back, you could barely move. It was disgusting. Cat hair all over everything. Cat turds you couldn’t get to because they were shoved so far back between towers of L.L.Bean catalogues and jumper cables and generators—mostly broken or expired junk she buys on eBay. So I started cleaning it out when she was sleeping. Only I couldn’t really get rid of anything in case she noticed it was gone. So Remy loaned me his car, and I put it all in storage.”
“He let you drive his car?” Levi said. “Am I the only one who hasn’t?”
“If you’ve got a storage unit, I guarantee the FBI already has someone sorting through it,” Sofía said.
“Then it’s a good thing I didn’t put it in a storage unit, Sherlock.”
THIRTY
WITH REMY’S CAR, IT would’ve taken seven minutes to get to the derelict-but-still-functioning movie theater across from Walmart. As it was, skirting through the shadows on bruised ankles and empty bellies, it took an hour and a half.
The CINEMA sign glowed an ugly orange, mismatched to the shade that ran in a thick stripe down the otherwise Barbie-skin-colored building, and the pockmarked asphalt was slick with oily puddles that rippled when the sticky wind blew over them.
“Back when Ma was an owner/operator, she worked out a deal with the guy who owns this theater to park her truck here when she was home. He made the mistake of telling her she could keep it here as long as she wanted, when he sent his condolences,” Nick explained as he led us to the semi parked in the back row of the lot.
“It was supposed to be a temporary break, a bereavement leave of absence.” Nick leapt onto the tailgate and fumbled with the padlock. “Only her bereavement wasn’t temporary, so the break wasn’t either.”
He tossed the lock onto the asphalt and slid the door up, ducking into the shadows. Arthur and Sofía followed, but even though my pain and nausea had let up enough that I could hide them, I was far from jumping into truck trailers and hauling equipment around.
I stayed with Droog and Levi to keep watch as the others sorted through the mess packed into the truck.
On the way over, Nick had explained the way his mom’s collecting had started as a sort of doomsday preparation. She filled their cellar with first aid kits and water jugs, soup cans and batteries. She didn’t want to go back to work until she could be sure Nick and his sister, Clarissa, would have everything they’d possibly need at home.
It had gone on for months: researching, visiting thrift shops and big-box stores for supplies. “The more she prepared, the less safe she felt,” Nick had said.
And then there was her husband’s stuff. All she had left of him: the receipts and styrofoam cups in his car, the torn work shirts he’d stuffed in a bag to patch or donate. His favorite old movies, the collectible bobbleheads he had believed would make them rich someday.
She’d asked Nick to handle selling the truck. Instead, he’d gotten a job and secretly kept paying the lease. He was planning to drive it someday. He’d keep taking care of her, bring her everything she needed, but he’d have a bed in a dark, empty truck cab to climb into at night. He’d have windows that weren’t blocked by stacks of coupon books and newspapers and postcards from local political candidates from the past five years.
He’d be able to leave Splendor without leaving her.
“Feel that?” Levi said, voice cracking anxiously.
I blinked clear of my daze. His eyes were on the sky. The twenty-four-hour glow emanating from the CINEMA sign mixed with the moonlight beyond the swirling black clouds to cast the night sky in an eerie gray-green.
A wave of warm wind hit me, wheezing and whistling, rattling the metal door of the trailer. The throaty rip-rip-rip of helicopter blades sliced through the quiet.
“They must be doing another sweep,” Levi said. He grabbed Droog, and we climbed into the claustrophobically packed trailer as quickly as we could. Arthur looked up from the tangle of Christmas lights he was wrapping around his arm.
“The helicopters are looking again,” I said. “They’re all the way out here.”
Arthur looped an extension cord around his neck like a scarf. “Then we’d better hurry and give them a show. Levi, grab what you can. As soon as the sound stops we’ve got to move.”
Levi and Sofía took a load of stuff across the street to Walmart, while Nick, Arthur, and I worked furiously in the movie theater parking lot, starting with the Christmas lights. Fifty-eight strands, plugged back to back, zigzagging through the lot with the final plug ending near an outlet we’d found behind the hedges on the side of the building. We’d hooked one power strip into it, and then plugged six more power strips into that and a few more into each of those. The plan was to plug the lights, and everything else we’d brought, into the power strips, then turn them on all at once.
We moved as fast as we could, working up a lather of sweat as we jogged between the trailer and the outlets, lining up vacuums and coffee makers and TVs in the mulch surrounding the hedges. Droog trotted back and forth, watching or herding or a little of both.
If I thought about our stupidly vague plan too long, I wouldn’t be able to ignore how stupid and vague it was. Instead, my mind would wander to Remy—where he was, what they might be doing to him—and then my chest would buzz and ache, and my anger would grow in me, and—
I hacked the thought off and jumped up onto the truck bed, feeling through the dark until I found an old metal fan with dust caught in its blades, alongside a radio. I grabbed both and hurried back to the hedges just as Nick and Arthur were setting down a microwave.
“Seriously?” Arthur said, wiping sweat from his top lip. “Your mom hasn’t missed her microwave?”
“Didn’t you know?” Nick hunched over his knees as he caught his breath. “Microwaves cause cancer, or syphilis or something. Plus she’s got four others. Think she plans to weaponize them if Earth’s last stand turns out to be zombies.”
Arthur straightened, dusting his hands off on his jeans, and coughed out a laugh. He shook his head and laughed again, louder this time. Nick started to laugh too, and for some reason, in my complete and utter exhaustion, my days’ worth of fear, the sound was contagious. I started to laugh too, tears squeezing out of my eyes.
“Zombies,” Arthur barely got out. “If only it had been fucking zombies, we’d be ready.”
Nick giggled and scratched at his jaw. “Ma
didn’t think of aliens.”
A guffaw burst from Arthur, and he leaned against the side of the building, chin bobbing at his clavicle as he cackled.
It was the fatigue, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t have made it stop if I wanted to. The laughter bubbled through me, breaking any last vestige of control I had over myself. My legs felt like jelly. My hands felt like jelly.
I slumped against the wall beside Arthur, who reached down and gripped the top of my head like it was an armrest as a giddy shriek rose out of him.
Nick squatted, one tattooed hand palm-down on the asphalt to keep his balance, as he laughed.
Gradually, the mania settled. The three of us fell silent, staring at one another.
“I love you guys,” Nick said after a minute.
It caught me off guard. He had never said it.
My throat felt tight as I opened my mouth a couple of times. Finally I got it out. “I love you too.”
Arthur put his palm over his eyes, and his shoulders hitched. I thought maybe he’d started laughing again, but he wasn’t making any sound, and soon, I realized he was crying. For once, I didn’t pretend not to notice.
Nick and I stood and circled up around him, wrapped our arms around each other, around him. We were all afraid, and there was nothing any of us could say to change that.
Overhead, the clouds had thickened, black, writhing masses that billowed in the wind, diffusing the moonlight into a soft, slippery thing.
Across the road, Levi waved his arms, signaling he and Sofía were ready.
It was time.
We pulled apart. Nick climbed into the truck and started it up, then patted the seat to call Droog up. She perched on his lap, front paws propped on the open window, and Arthur and I got into position at the hedges while Sofía and Levi did the same on the far side of the street, all four of us waiting for Nick’s signal.
