“The girls are going to be all over Peter in Alaska,” Jamie says.
My stomach flops. I don’t want someone new who might disrupt our little family, who won’t love the kids the way we do, and I know it’s completely selfish of me to feel that way. I’m still searching for an appropriate reply when Jamie says, “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For being…I don’t know, a good friend.”
“I love you, dummy,” I say. “You can always talk to me.”
“I don’t want to pretend she didn’t exist anymore. I’ve wanted to ask you for a favor for a while. I only have one picture of her and it’s getting all crumpled…”
“Of course I’ll paint her. And when my phone is fixed we’ll take a picture of the picture.” My fingers itch to get started. I don’t want her to lose the only memento she has of Holly. I’ll look at it in the light tomorrow so I can try to commit it to memory in case it’s lost.
“Thanks.” Jamie takes a deep breath and holds it before exhaling.
It’s quiet until Zeke hoots in triumph. “All right, let’s give it a go.”
With the truck pulling and us pushing, the giant log rolls. The kids have slept through the entire experience and continue to sleep when we move on, although I’m wide awake. We’re almost at the Alaska Highway and what we find will determine our fate.
41
What we find is nothing but open road bathed in early morning light. It’s only when we’ve gone twenty miles north—another day’s walk for the Lexers—that we stop to switch places and eat, although I consume my wafflecake with much less enthusiasm than previously.
“I thought you’d never get tired of wafflecakes,” Peter says, and chases his last bite with water.
“I need savory. This has been too much syrup in too little time.”
“What do you want?”
“Spanakopita.”
“What’s that?” Bits asks.
“Like a spinach pie with cheese and onions,” Peter says. “It’s good, if sort of random.”
“In five seconds it’ll be something else,” I say. There’s a revolving carousel of food running through my mind every second of the day.
“How about now?” Peter asks.
“Everything bagel with cream cheese and tomato.”
Bits grins. “Now?”
“Salami on Italian bread with oil and vinegar and banana peppers.”
“Now?” Hank asks.
“Steak. I could do this all day, you know.”
Bits and Hank play the game while I help to put away sticky dishes. There’s only enough water to drink, not wash. I sit in the truck bed and hope that the coming sun means a warmer ride than last night.
It doesn’t. Maybe we’re at a higher altitude or winter is one day closer, but whatever it is, my jaw aches from chattering teeth. Peter pokes his head into my blanket burrow. “Come sit with me.”
My hair whips out of my buns when I climb between his knees. I put my blanket over my head and lean into his warmth. I’m in no danger of overheating, but it’s better. His stubble scratches my neck when he leans in to say, “How can you see the beautiful scenery with a blanket on your head?”
“You’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ‘em all.”
He must laugh because there are a few warm gusts of air on my ear. “I’ll tell you about it. The clouds are huge and the sky is the same color as Bits’s eyes. The trees are all evergreens, with the road the only thing to break them up. It looks like a painting. You’d be able to do it justice.”
It’s tempting, but I keep my head covered and say, “Pretty.”
I’ve been lulled into a place somewhere between waking and sleeping when he says, “You have to look now.”
I peek out. The mountains are close enough to see the variations in browns that make up their craggy peaks. I find Peter’s hand under the blanket and squeeze rather than ruin the moment by shouting something that won’t match my level of happiness at the sight of salvation.
“Okay, you can hide again,” he says, but I wait until trees have blocked the view.
Zeke coasts to the side of the road at a crystal blue lake. “Water fill up.”
I pick my way through sparse fir trees to the turquoise water. Bits dips her hands in the water and pulls back. “It’s freezing!”
“Want to go for a swim?” I ask. “I’ll toss you in.”
“No way!” she says and sneezes. She wipes her nose with her sleeve.
I hand her a handkerchief. “Yuck, booger arm. Hey, I just remembered another joke.” She and Hank look up expectantly. “How do you make a tissue dance? Put a little boogie in it.”
Bits groans and coughs into the handkerchief. I don’t like the deep, ragged sound and press my lips to her forehead even though she says she feels fine. Her cheeks are a deep pink, but she has no fever. I drop the water filter tube into the lake and pump to fill a container.
Bits looks to the clouds tinged gold with afternoon light. “I miss looking at the stars.”
“I do, too, but once we’re in Alaska we’ll watch all the time. And we’ll probably see the Northern Lights.”
“I really want to see them. They sound so cool.”
“I saw them once, when I was a little older than you.”
Peter crouches by the water’s edge and fills a container to be treated later. “You did?”
“One summer, way up at the top of New York State,” I say. “We were camping on a lake. They were kind of like yellow-green clouds made of light.” We’d stood on the shore, my father’s arm around my shoulders, until the magical colors had faded away.
“Dan told me all about them,” Bits says.
I concentrate on pumping the filter. “Yeah?”
“What’d he say?” Peter asks when I don’t ask any more.
“That you’d be granted any wish in the world the first time you saw them because they were made of fairy dust. Did you make a wish, Cassie?”
“No, I didn’t know I should.” I smile; Dan would’ve told Bits something silly like that while wearing an absolutely serious expression.
“I think you still can, even if it’s not the first time you’ve seen them. Since you didn’t make one before. I mean, it’s not like you knew.”
“Dan was kidding,” Hank says, and pushes his glasses up the way he does before a lecture. “They’re particles from the sun hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s the simple version, anyway. The Earth’s magnetic field—”
“He told me that, too,” Bits says. “But it’s fun to pretend.”
Hank thinks about it and then nods when he’s decided pretending is an acceptable activity. Sometimes he’s just too darn serious.
“You can see them all the time in the winter, apparently,” Peter says. “We’ll have our wishes soon enough.”
Hank looks down the road we have left to travel. “I wish we had them now.”
“Me, too,” I say.
42
It may be foolish to stop with less than a day of driving to reach Whitehorse, but Adam’s shoulder weeps blood and Kyle has puked four times from carsickness. We also don’t want to show up at Whitehorse in the dark with no idea of what will be there to greet us, or run into a pod on the road, although we haven’t seen a zombie for hours. We’ve seen animals, though—moose, elk and what looked like a bear before it lumbered off the road—and hitting one of them at night could destroy the truck and kill anyone not buckled in.
We pass on staying the night in a small cabin full of dried blood and body parts. Now that we’re in the mountains, I can’t stop staring at the golden grasses, low red bushes and white trunks of what look to be birch trees, their leaves as bright a yellow as I’ve ever seen. I thought I was surrounded by mountains at Kingdom Come, but these tall, rocky peaks are the real deal.
A sign advertises a hot springs ahead and another promises hotel rooms. I look longingly down the road that leads past a ranger station to the hot springs; to be warm and clean
would be indescribably wonderful. Just past the springs is a lodge-type hotel with a few cars in a gravel lot out front. My legs are creaky from sitting in a truck for twenty hours, and between that and my pants I walk like a malfunctioning robot.
“What is wrong with you?” Nelly asks.
I don’t want to bitch about Ana’s pants in front of Peter, so I shrug and then freeze at footsteps from the side of the building. It’s a lot of crunching, maybe a pod. We edge toward the pickup just as five large animals with shaggy brown beards, humped shoulders and thick fur covering their forelegs round the corner. They stop but don’t look half as shocked as we.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Zeke says. “Bison.”
They look us over briefly and head for the opposite corner of the lot to poke around in the grass. Usually animals fear Lexers, possibly because of the smell, and their calm is a good sign. Barnaby watches them with round eyes from the truck but doesn’t make so much as a whimper. He knows when something’s out of his league.
“Let’s go in,” Nelly says.
“You said you were shooting the next animal you saw,” I say. “And there they are, ripe for the taking.”
“We’ll be in Whitehorse tomorrow. What would we do with five hundred pounds of meat?”
“Eat it? Bring the rest as a present?”
He shakes his head as we step into a lobby that smells of mildew and decay, but it’s an old decay that’s barely there. The place looks like it could have used a major renovation before zombies, with the battered tables in the restaurant and fuzz-covered upholstery on the lobby furniture. Pots are scattered willy-nilly in the kitchen, some with dried food crusted to their sides. The upstairs guest rooms are empty as well.
Zeke pats the woodstove in the lobby and says, “We’ll sleep down here. Let’s get everyone inside and bring down mattresses.”
I help bring in wood from the pile outside for Peter to start a fire. Nelly sits in a chair with a brochure about the hot springs, driving me bonkers with talk of deliciously hot water and boreal forests. Once the fire’s roaring, Nelly asks, “How about we take a dip?”
“We probably shouldn’t,” I say. We’ve spent the past year trying not to do anything too dumb, and I don’t want to start now.
“We could drive over,” Peter says. I look at the floor to keep from laughing when his hand goes to his hair.
“It should be safe enough,” Mark says.
“I’ve never been,” Margaret says, eyes aglow. “I say we go.” Heads nod all around.
“Please, please, please,” Bits says. She folds her hands under her chin. “Please? We never get to swim. I’ll do anything you want forever.”
I tickle her side. “Stop with the drama already. Everyone’s agreed to go.”
Hank is excited enough to jump up and down with Bits, which makes me glad we’ve said yes. Who knows when they’ll go swimming next? Definitely not during an Alaskan winter.
We drive past the ranger cabin to a boardwalk that passes through a warm water swamp. Even walking softly, fifteen pairs of feet are loud on the wooden planks that wind through the autumn woods, but I don’t let myself get crazy about it. I’m not going to pass up this chance and hope we get back one day. Besides, we’ve grown pretty good at feeling out an area, and with the way the birds call and little rodents scamper in the underbrush, it seems we’re the only living or undead humans here.
The boardwalk becomes a bridge where we get our first glimpse of a long pool surrounded by a riot of red and orange bushes. Tendrils of steam rise into the cool air and yellow leaves float on the surface. Several staircases lead into the water from a roofed wooden deck that houses changing rooms and cubbies for clothes.
“Ladies first,” Zeke says. “We’ll get in once y’all are in the water.”
We strip down, me to nothing and the others to their spare underwear. I’ve brought my zombie-water clothes in order to wash them, but I don’t want to wear them until they’re disinfected. I take the soap, shampoo and conditioner and shiver my way to the steps.
“Oh. My. God,” Jamie says when she hits the water. “This is amazing.”
I sink into the hot water, every muscle crying in joy, then sit on the wooden benches built at the sides of the pool to scrub Ana’s clothes with a bar of soap. I slip on the bra and underwear once they’re rinsed.
“Get over here with that rat’s nest,” I say to Bits. She swims over, spitting out water, and I drag the brush through her snarls while she acts as if I’m murdering her. Now I wish I had taken Ana’s conditioner instead of a small bottle of cheap stuff.
Bits hangs on Peter’s back like a monkey when he comes up from dunking himself, hair freshly shampooed. “All aboard,” he says, and brings her to the opposite end and back again.
“You’re nice and clean,” I say. “Sorry about the mouthwash debacle.”
“You were trying to keep me alive. How mouthwash was going to do that, I don’t know, but it’s the thought that counts.” I splash him and stand to cool down.
“Your cup runneth over,” Nelly says, eyes on my chest.
I look down. Ana’s bra is a bit too small, hardly inappropriate, but I turn a few degrees hotter than the water anyway. Peter glances down and away just as quickly. It’s a basic black bra, but he might recognize it as hers. I sink into the water and glare at Nelly.
“Let’s live here forever,” I say because we need an immediate subject change. “We’ll eat moose and bison and drink pine needle tea so we don’t get scurvy.”
“Pine needles have vitamin C?” Peter asks.
“Doesn’t everyone know that?”
“I didn’t,” Adam says.
“I did,” James says, and we high five.
Margaret is on a bench, eyes closed, looking younger and more relaxed than I’ve ever seen. “I knew.”
“See?” I say. “So we’ll be set.”
Kyle sits on the steps, dipping Nicki in the water by her armpits so her cast stays dry. He looks less ashen now that we’ve stopped for over ten minutes. “I’m down. I’m tired of puking in the truck.”
The peacefulness of the water soaks into me along with the minerals the brochure raved about. I float on my back and listen to the sounds of merriment, then swim to where Peter sits staring into the forest. “Hey. We’re almost there.”
“We are.”
He doesn’t look happy to be almost there. I sit beside him, run my hands through the water and blurt out, “I’m sorry I have to wear Ana’s clothes.”
“They’re just clothes.”
“I don’t want it to upset you.” This is probably where I should stop, but my mouth keeps going. “I wouldn’t, except I didn’t have underwear or a bra. I didn’t think I’d be wearing it in front of people or I would’ve washed my old one. It doesn’t fit that well, but running without a bra is, you know…Well, I guess you don’t know, but—” I finally get my mouth to shut and watch a leaf float by.
“I didn’t know it wasn’t yours,” he says.
“Great. So I’ve made it worse.”
“You haven’t made it anything. I told you, it’s fine.” There’s a long silence in which I decide that drowning myself will be the best way to never have to look at Peter again.
“How’s your side?” he asks. “Those bruises look like they hurt.”
I don’t want to think about the bruises, have barely looked at them. “Only to touch. How’s your cheek?”
“Better than yours.” His has faded to a pink mark, while mine is a lovely purple-black.
“I’ll have to practice my punching, then. I guess it’s almost time to get out.”
I rise off the bench. I haven’t looked at him since schooling him in the hazards of running without a bra, and he takes my arm. “I’m fine. I was just thinking.”
“Sorry I interrupted with the insanity of how my underclothes don’t fit properly.”
I’m relieved that he wears his half-amused by my antics expression. “I’m used to your insanity
. And you look nice—” He stops with his lips pressed together.
I’m not sure how to respond to being told I look nice in a bra by someone who isn’t unfastening it or selling it to me, and I stare at him for a few seconds before a giant laugh escapes. I think his ears might be pinker.
“I have no idea why I said that. I didn’t mean—”
“It was the automatic you-look-nice reflex,” I say, and pat his shoulder. “You look nice in your underwear, too. There, now we’re even.”
Bits swims between us and comes up with a splash. “Cassie, quick, what do you want to eat?”
“Vanilla milkshake with French fries for dipping.”
“Really?” Bits asks. “That’s gross.”
I widen my eyes at Peter. “Oh, no, she’s never dipped fries in ice cream. This is not okay.”
“It’s delicious,” Peter says. “I thought it was gross until Cassie made me try it.”
“Then I want to try it,” Bits says. “Maybe we can in Alaska?”
“I’ll do my best,” Peter says. “All we need are potatoes and cows. They’re a dime a dozen.”
Peter winks, but I know he’ll move Heaven and Earth to get that cow and potatoes. The little things that make life sweet, like milkshakes, are rare these days. The big things, like people who’ll do their damnedest to get those milkshakes, are even harder to find. But I’m surrounded by them.
43
The warmth of the woodstove dries my hair to its soft brown self and my jeans will be dry by morning. I feel almost normal. We’ve brought mattresses down to the lobby and enjoyed our famous wafflecakes in celebration of our last night of traveling. None of us says it’s our last night because no one wants to jinx it, but everyone settles on their mattresses in better spirits than since we started this journey.
I toss and turn all night with worries about Whitehorse and nightmares about Whit, who wins our battle in sleep if not in real life, and wake up feeling as tired as I did before bed. They’ve managed to get a rusty VW in the lot working, thanks to Miss Vera’s battery, and Peter’s at the wheel when the sun pokes up its head.
Until the End of the World Box Set Page 98
