Dead End

by Howard Odentz

  “We’re not stupid,” bristled Prianka. Calling my girlfriend stupid was about the worst move ever.

  “Okay,” said Dorcas. “Poor choice of words, but that and a nickel ain’t going to buy you a cup of coffee.”

  Sanjay held up one finger with Poopy Puppy still pressed to his ear. “The current average price for a cup of coffee in America, without milk, is $2.70.”

  In unison, we all said, “Poopy Puppy says so,” but Dorcas wasn’t amused. Not even a little.

  She unfolded her arms and took another long drag off of her cigarette.

  “You think all you need to do is tell her she’s found her super immunity fix and that’s it? What about all those other sites? What about the people who are probably still being experimented on? Hell, what if she gets her super-immunity thing-a-ma-jigger? So what?”

  I was tired.

  I didn’t want to think.

  I wanted to act.

  Her words were literally hitting a sixteen-year-old wall built between childhood and adulthood that I didn’t even know was there.

  “We have to,” I said to her as calmly as I could. “It’s the only way.” At that moment I truly believed what I saying. Then I took a deep breath, “But you’re not coming with us.”

  Dorcas seemed to physically stiffen.

  “Why not,” she snarled. “No one over sixty?”

  I looked nervously around, making sure not to make eye contact with her. I knew that Dorcas was absolutely capable. That wasn’t the issue. The truth was, I lost her once and I’d be damned if I was going to lose her again. She already almost took a bullet for the team. She didn’t need to try for another.

  I weighed out all the different ways I could respond to her, but the first response that made it to the surface to spill out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop it, was this:

  “You smell, Dorcas.”

  Bullseye’s mouth fell open again. It was becoming a habit with him. Meanwhile, Trina stepped forward and smacked me in the head just like Dorcas did when we were back on the bus.

  “Hey,” I cried.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she snapped, but what I had said was sort of the truth.

  “You really could use a shower,” offered Jimmy, being careful to rest his hands on the wheels of his chair in case he had to back away in a hurry.

  I looked up at Dorcas, and she caught my eyes. With one glance she plucked every thought out of my head. I saw the reaction on her face. She thankfully understood.

  She closed her eyes, took one more drag off her cigarette and uttered one single word. “Fine.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Go back to Walmart and bang on the doors. They’ll let you in. Take a shower and eat something. As for us, my guess is we won’t have to look too hard to find Diana and tell her what we need to tell her.”

  “And not get killed in the process,” she growled.

  “And not get killed,” I said.

  Dorcas dropped her cigarette to the pavement and ground her heel into it until there was nothing left but a dead piece of paper and some scattered tobacco.

  “This old broad is going to get me a nice shower and some food at a locked-up Walmart. You all go and save the world.”

  Save the world?

  That wasn’t what we were doing.

  We were saving our own skins so we could go find a place out in the middle of nowhere where there weren’t any poxers. Maybe there we could carve out a life for ourselves without having to look over our shoulders at every turn.

  Diana was trying to save the world, or her messed-up version of what she thought the world was supposed to be like.

  As for me and my friends, we just needed a rest.

  10

  DORCAS TOOK THE minivan and left us with the bus and all its contents, including the guns. I was sad to see her go, but I was relieved. She was one less person that I had to worry about.

  As the rain completely stopped and the morning began turning from black to gray, we watched her drive away. All of us, Sanjay included, stood in the middle of the road with our hands held high as we waved goodbye.

  After the rear lights of the van disappeared into the distance, Sanjay took a step forward and made a bunch of hand motions in the air. Then he said,

  “Go in peace and safety, too

  Nothing will bring harm to you

  Easy journeys on your way

  As you travel forth this day.”

  He made a couple more hand gestures and punctuated them with that weird phrase, “So mote it be.”

  What was even weirder was that we all repeated those four words after him. I didn’t care that we were acting a little bizarre. I didn’t care that Sanjay was going to get an owl from Hogwarts at any moment, then be whisked away to a magical castle someplace in England so he could learn how to be a proper wizard. All I cared about was that Dorcas was safe, and if her continued safety meant a little help from Aunt Ella’s witchy books, then I was cool with that.

  I think we all were.

  Once Dorcas was finally gone, I turned to everyone and said, “If you want anything from Swifty’s, now’s the time. We’re lucky the place didn’t burn to the ground after the fire.”

  Trina leaned in to Jimmy. “So would it be terrible if I already ate a candy bar today, but I want some more sugar?”

  “You can have whatever you want,” he said then grabbed her and deposited her on his lap as he wheeled away to the parking lot.

  “Loads of penny candy in there,” I said to Bullseye. “Have at it.”

  Prianka and Sanjay hung back for a moment. The three of us stood in awkward silence. Finally, she bent down and told Sanjay to take Andrew, Newfie and Poopy Puppy into the store and find some treats for them.

  Sanjay nodded and slowly walked away toward Swifty’s with Andrew on his shoulder and Poopy Puppy dangling at his side. Newfie lumbered along beside him. She watched them go until they were across the parking lot and up the stairs to the store. Then she turned to me.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I think I’m just numb,” I told her, which was the honest truth. Frankly, I think I was a little punch drunk from finding Dorcas alive. That was one hell of a shock to the system. But more than that, Dorcas’s words kept looping in my head.

  ‘You’re nuts. You’re nuts. You’re nuts.’

  Was she right?

  I leaned back against the bus and stared at the pavement. Maybe if I looked hard enough, the answer to my question would be there, but I doubted it. Prianka came up and stood beside me then leaned back against the bus, too.

  “We’re doing the right thing,” she told me. Sometimes I forgot that she knew me almost as well as I knew myself. Through all the drama and snide banter that we had endured through the years, she couldn’t help but understand me. After all, we’d known each other since kindergarten. To top it all off, the past few weeks had been a crash course of non-stop togetherness.

  “I hope so,” I told her. “But who knows if Diana will listen to us.”

  “We can only try,” said Prianka.

  “But . . .” I began before she cut me off.

  “This isn’t just your fight anymore,” she said. “It’s not Trina’s, either. It’s all of ours.” I kept staring at the ground. She didn’t understand.

  “Are you really sure about that?” I said. “You’re not the one with the special blood.”

  “I know,” she sighed. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. It’s not just about who’s immune and who isn’t immune,” she said. “Diana and her people are working on a whole new world order. I don’t think Jimmy’s part of that world order, or Sanjay, for that matter.”

  She wasn’t wrong. I had already figured that part out. No matter how ‘vital’ they w
ere, Diana wouldn’t think so. She would only see their disabilities, nothing more.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t have anything else I could say.

  “And what about me?” Prianka whispered. “I’m brown. Do you think there’s room for brown people in her new world order, too?”

  I felt sick to my stomach. For the first time, something really ugly crawled inside my head and lodged itself right in the center of my cerebellum. Of all the people that I had seen at Site 37, or coming out of helicopters, they all looked like me. All of them were white like me. All of them were the same. When Diana said that she wanted to reserve the world for those worthy enough to be a part of it, what exactly was she really talking about?

  Where was the line that couldn’t be crossed?

  Who drew it?

  I looked into Prianka’s beautiful face, so pretty and perfect and intelligent in all the right ways, and I didn’t have an answer for her. All I knew was that we were going to find Diana, and tell her she already figured out her little science project on her own.

  I wasn’t thinking about consequences. I wasn’t thinking about other people who were being experimented on. I was really only thinking about surviving.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered as I kissed Prianka gently then put my arms around her. We stayed like that for a while.

  It was the truth.

  I didn’t know anything.

  11

  I ONLY HIT A few trees trying to turn the bus around and pointing away from Walmart.

  “Oooh,” said Trina after the second oak smooshed against the back bumper. “You’re so lucky you don’t really have a license.” After the third tree cracked, along with a rear headlight, Trina announced to everyone that I engineered the entire poxer epidemic myself to get out of Driver’s Ed because I would never have passed.

  “Fine,” I growled. “You try driving this boat.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “Stop the bus and get out from behind the wheel.”

  “I’m stopping the bus and getting out from behind the wheel,” I huffed as I spun the huge wheel over to the side of the road and came to a halt. “All yours, Dorcas junior.”

  I pushed by Trina and went to sit next to Prianka three or four rows back. She smiled and draped her arm over my shoulder. Meanwhile Jimmy hauled himself up a couple of seats until he was positioned right behind my sister. He leaned forward and said something uber-macho about how to handle the bus.

  Oh, dude. Bad, bad move.

  I heard Trina snarl.

  If his legs had been working, I’m sure she would have broken them.

  In any event, after a few lurches and a well-deserved cry from Bullseye as he fell on his butt in the aisle, we were on our way, with smoky, damp air and Swifty’s little fishing bear at our backs.

  A few miles later the air began to clear. By the time we hit the intersection where turning left went back the way Aunt Ella had originally brought us, and right headed off to Guilford and crazy, knife-wielding Roger Ludlow, the skies were a little less gray.

  They were still filled with clouds, which looked like they had plans to dump more water our way, but it wasn’t raining anymore.

  “Well, there’s one good thing,” I said to Prianka as I leaned across her and looked out the window and up into the sky.

  “What’s that?”

  “Too many clouds. I don’t think we have to worry about helicopter people today. That ought to buy us a little bit of time to figure out what we’re going to do next.”

  She chewed on her lip and stared out the window with me. After a moment she said, “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  Meanwhile, Trina yelled back to us from up front. “Which way?” she called out.

  Jimmy turned around and looked at me and Prianka and shrugged.

  I shouted back. “If you’re looking for the ass-end of Massachusetts, Guilford is to your right. Just so you know, that means squeezing this boat through a covered bridge. We’ll have to find a huge tub of Vaseline. I vote for left.”

  Neither Bullseye nor Sanjay commented. As I turned around and looked at them I realized that they were both sound asleep. Come to think of it, I was really tired, too.

  Between a sleepless night followed by leading a bunch of poxers out from behind Walmart, and then finding Dorcas, I was a little pooped myself. I wish I had the luxury of closing my eyes, but I didn’t. I had way too many thoughts propping my lids open.

  “Left it is,” yelled Trina, and threw her weight into the steering wheel of the bus. Dorcas would have been proud. Trina was handling the yellow submarine way better than I ever could. She was naturally talented with things like that. Me? Not so much. Besides, I was glad that my sister was driving.

  I needed the break.

  A couple miles down the road, Trina slowed the bus and we all looked out the left hand side windows. We’d been here before, not that it looked that much different from any other stretch of road in this part of the world. A big swath of foliage was gone where a bunch of Japanese tourists and their tour bus had dived down an embankment.

  It was also where Tattoo Guy died. No one needed a reminder of that.

  Trina stepped on the gas and we sped up, leaving the stranded tour bus behind.

  After a painful moment of silence, Prianka turned to me and said, “We have to go someplace high.”

  “What?”

  “We have to go someplace high,” she said again. She turned slightly so she was facing me. “Diana’s been searching for us with helicopters, right? So we have to find a place where she can find us, like the top of a building or on top of that mountain where we climbed the observation tower, remember?”

  Climbing up the tower on top of Sugarloaf Mountain seemed like eons ago. Trina had a meltdown and Jimmy calmed her down when we were up there. I also saw a toad leap to its death from halfway up the spiral staircase in the center of the tower. I had no idea how the thing got there in the first place. It had probably been contemplating a poxer-filled world and what a toad could do about it when it decided to jump.

  One second there, the next gone.

  “I remember,” I said to Prianka, but I didn’t tell her about the toad or how it died.

  What was the point?

  Prianka stood up and made her way to the back of the bus where all the guns were, along with the bags of supplies we had brought with us.

  She rummaged around for a minute then came back and stood next to me. I slid over to the window seat and she sat down.

  “Warm,” she said.

  “What? The seat?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You keep a warm seat.”

  If she was trying to trick me into saying something sort of crude about my ass being hot, I wasn’t taking the bait. Letting my mouth run off like that didn’t quite seem right anymore. I didn’t know why. Instead, I said something totally lame. “Just keeping it warm for you.”

  Prianka did a quick sideways glance at me. I half expected her to reach over and put her palm on my forehead to see if I had a fever, but I wasn’t sick. Instead, I think I was starting to get a bad case of ‘The Realities.’ Whatever I had was slowly removing my snarky comebacks and replacing them with maturity.

  Yuck.

  “Look,” Prianka said and fanned out a bunch of brochures that she had taken off of the tourist racks at Swifty’s. She handed me a dozen or more and kept a pile for herself. “Search for someplace high.”

  I took the pile from her. The very first brochure, right on the top, was for The Basketball Hall of Fame over in Springfield.

  Springfield was about the biggest city we had around here. I could only imagine how many poxers would be roaming the streets there, especially since the onset of Necropoxy happened on a Friday ni
ght. The few areas in downtown that housed all the restaurants and clubs would have been teeming with girls dressed for dancing and guys, covered in tattoos, who were all so much bigger than Jimmy that they looked like they could eat Jimmy.

  Since people were poxers now, Springfield was definitely out of the question.

  The next brochure was for fishing boat charters at a marina on the Connecticut River. I had to smile. Whoever named the Connecticut River didn’t really think it out too clearly. The Connecticut River started some place way up in Vermont, went straight through Massachusetts and all the way down to the Atlantic at the Connecticut Shore.

  It probably should have been called ‘The New England River’ or something else that said what it really was.

  Either way, a marina was about the lowest place around, not the tallest. I suppose it was good to know that when we needed to find food, we could probably go fishing and the marina would have plenty of rods and tackle. Trust me, fish wasn’t high on my list of things I wanted to eat, but at some point, just like with baking bread, I was going to have to learn how to fish and stomach whatever I caught.

  There weren’t infinite bags of potato chips left.

  For a moment, I thought about Stella Rathbone’s cozy hideaway. Her roof was high—not super high, but high. Right away, I erased any notion of going anywhere near The Wordsmith Used Book Emporium in Greenfield. Stella’s place was our safe house. We didn’t need to go and advertise that she was there or how she was living.

  Okay, so scratch Springfield and Greenfield. I flipped the marina brochure out of my hand and let it fall to the floor with the other one.

  “That’s two down,” I said as the brochure settled at my feet.

  “Me, too,” said Prianka. “I’ve got a place up north billed as the the Grand Canyon of the east coast.”