Barefoot, I launched myself after Lulu. She was about to step over the edge of a crevice. I yanked back on one of her shoulders.
Then I decked Lulu. She went down like a stack of logs. I would never ever admit how good it made me feel to do that to her, but I suspected everyone would know anyway. I put more of the padding into Lulu’s ears and tied her feet and wrists. Then I got her back into her sleeping bag and waited.
The haunting calls of the distant predators faded away toward the emergence of the morning sun. Like many animals, that one liked to hunt in the night when all the good ones were sleeping and not able to protect themselves effectively.
In the morning, I had to explain, but Lulu remembered enough that she wasn’t terribly upset. She packed some snow in a t-shirt and held it to her jaw, saying, “But you know, it isn’t like there are dentists around.”
“Better a sore jaw than an evening meal for whatever was luring you,” I murmured.
Lulu snorted. “Got me there.”
We made our way around the outskirts of what had been the greater Salt Lake City area. The line of mountains that ran generally from north to south was called the Wasatch Range on my map. There was a little note in the information section about it being considered the western edge of the greater Rocky Mountains.
I wasn’t looking forward to the Rockies. It had been a silly decision to set out in November to cross the continental United States without taking a southern route, but I wanted to get there as fast as I could so that I could get back just as fast. Somewhere along that long route I expected to find my maturity.
We climbed out of the valley that held the Great Salt Lake and only looked back once to see the sun sparkling on the lake as if it was pure and pristine. No one would suspect that something lurked in its depths that had a siren-like capacity to lure humans to whatever it had in mind for us.
But I did make a note on my map.
Soon the snow-covered peaks of the Wasatch Range became high plains desert again. Very high plains. Lots of hills and neat Western movie-looking peaks of rock but very little green. It didn’t seem like a place we would see anyone or anything. But we saw cattle, large herds of cattle. Then we saw large herds of something else that kind of resembled cattle. They had six legs, however. They watched us, but they didn’t come any closer or run away.
We stopped about every forty to fifty miles depending how uphill the route had been. I got a little skinnier and my legs more muscular. I think my butt was becoming one with the bicycle seat. Lulu found a bicycle shop and presented me with a wider seat. I almost took it as an insult as to the size of my tushie, but it really wasn’t meant that way.
Along the way there were lots of wind farms. The whoop-whoop-whoop of the blades still turning in the wind reminded me that I wasn’t going to be able to charge my iPod anytime soon. In fact, I wasn’t sure where my iPod had gone to, so it was a moot point.
One day we found a neat little cabin by the river we were near. I had lost track of the names of the rivers we rode beside, so I didn’t know the name. It twisted and turned much like the others and wound its way through canyons of stone and sagebrush misted with snow.
Before we knew it, we had reached Cheyenne and found human footprints on the side of the road in the snow. They couldn’t have been there long because it was a fresh fall, but we didn’t see anyone else.
We turned south after we reached Cheyenne and saw a small train of camels. They were the kind with one hump. I didn’t know the name, but they were headed off into the high desert, looking for something we didn’t know about. They weren’t in a hurry, and they didn’t seem to be bothered by us, so perhaps they had been at some exotic wildlife farm. But hey, I didn’t really know, did I? They could be mythical, talking, magical camels with extraordinary ability to bend time and space. They could be flying camels.
Honestly, the camels looked quite ordinary. As we watched them, I asked, “What do you expect to find, Lulu?” And she had the penultimate answer.
“I don’t know.”
Chapter 5
Furthermore and Also and So On…
Thankfully, Zach wasn’t wearing the prince charming crown again. The oversized headpiece had looked like it would tip him over and he wouldn’t be able to get up. But we were back in the formal dining room again with me sitting at the foot and him at my immediate left. Lit candles sat on every available area, even when it wasn’t clear what they were sitting upon. There was a veritable banquet of food, and oh my God, there were ten cups of steaming Starbucks caramel cappuccinos sitting next to my plate. All iniquitously venti, too. I couldn’t have drank them all, but it was the thought that counted.
Zach didn’t have food in front of him. Instead, there was a map of the continental United States spread out before him, and he was tracing a route with his finger.
I took a moment to let him sink in. I wanted to absorb the entire picture since I didn’t get to look at him any other time. Still pretty. Nice cheekbones. That dark hair still had the golden highlights even in the candlelight. Great lips. Kissable lips.
His lips made that funny little smile as if he could read my mind. It was a dream after all, maybe the dream Zach could read my mind.
“I was wondering when I would dream about you,” I said, fingering one of the Starbucks cups. Even a caramel cappuccino couldn’t compare to Zach.
“It’s always up to you,” he said. And to be sure, he had the bedroom voice, too. At least, that was what I called it. He had a voice that was meant to be used on a telephone, regardless of the fact that there apparently wouldn’t be any more telephones available in the foreseeable future. (Oh, what was I complaining about? I had the real thing, at least for the extent of my dream.)
“Then why don’t I dream about you every night?”
Zach’s finger stopped. “You’re in Colorado now. That’s what Gideon says.”
“Yes, we crossed yesterday, or was that today? We saw camels.”
“Camels,” he said as if I had remarked that I had seen a pink elephant.
“There was this thing in a tunnel that had two very large red eyes, too. Utah? Nevada, maybe. I didn’t get a good look at it. I didn’t really want to.”
“Red eyes,” he repeated. A frown marred his perfect face. I didn’t like that. Frowny face Zach = unhappiness. Smiley face Zach = quivering loins, mine.
“The girls warned me off,” I said so that he would stop frowning. Then I shook my head. “Spring has taken to stabbing me with a sterling silver toothpick when I don’t listen. It does tend to get my attention.”
Zach took that in and that little hint of sad tinted with amusement came back.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I miss you, too,” I said and smiled as best as I could in the dream. I even realized that it was probably a very sad smile. I had wanted the great journey. Maybe I was just running away from everything I cared about, but I was committed now.
His hand enveloped mine. Warmth spread through me at the contact. “Gideon says you need to take U.S. Highway 34. There’s a town called Sunshine along that way.”
“U.S. Highway 34,” I said cheerfully. “Sure. Why not? I’ll need to look at the map.”
Zach turned the map so that I could see it. He pointed to Cheyenne and traced Interstate 25 as it travelled south to Denver. A tad more than halfway to the Mile High City, there was a little red road that intersected it, and look at that, there was a little town called Sunshine on the map. It was a really little town. It had the lightest of all the lettering, and the black dot was the smallest of all of the cities and towns.
Before we had gone to sleep along the side of a road, Lulu, Spring, and I had discussed our route. The straightest route to D.C. was along Interstate 70 across Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois. At Illinois, we could go northeast on Interstate 70 or we could go do a little dip on Interstate 64. The mileage was about the same, but once we hit Interstate 64, we would be following some of Hanley’s directions and there were a
few groups of people along that corridor that he had indicated were friendly.
Spring was ambivalent. Lulu was all for meeting new people. I guess she didn’t like my deodorant, or maybe she was tired of my snoring. (I swear I don’t snore. I don’t remember snoring, anyway.)
“Gideon says,” I said. Gideon had moments of precognition, too. It worked like mine, except I tended to see only horrible outcomes. So it was only kind of like mine. Like mine, it wasn’t predictable, and it wasn’t always available voluntarily. It couldn’t be called on request, and sometimes its manifestation made me want to spit nails at the nearest convenient wooden wall. But when it came…it was wise to pay attention.
“What does Gideon say?”
“There’s something important along that route that you need to see,” Zach said. “Go through Sunshine. Go on U.S. Highway 34. Make sure you remember.”
“U.S. Highway 34,” I said obediently. Abruptly, I was bored with manifest destiny in how it related to my great journey. “How’s your carpel studying going?”
“One guy broke his wrist yesterday, and it came in handy. Sinclair did a little surgery, although it was hard to keep the guy from feeling the pain.” Zach looked pleased with himself. He had been a pre-med student before the change. He would be something else when Dr. Sinclair was done with him. Maybe he wouldn’t be an official doctor, but he would be the next best thing. Kara was also studying under Sinclair. If there was anything the world needed, it was going to be doctors. (At the very least to take care of all the things that seemed to happen inevitably to me.)
His fingers stroked mine and I sighed. I wished he would kiss me again, but it was only a fleeting thought that disrupted the innate pleasure of his touch.
Just for a moment in time, in the midst of a dream, I could relax and be the human being I was supposed to be. I didn’t have to worry about losing Zach or anyone else to whom I’d grown close. I didn’t have to think about what fresh new horrors the Burned Man was conjuring up. I had a little more self-confidence and I was ready for what was to come.
* * *
We made the highway by the time the sun was making the mountains cast long shadows. If I had to guess I suppose it was about three or four p.m., but really it didn’t matter about time anymore either. I didn’t have an appointment, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men weren’t going to put watches back together again. (Unless the king, his horses, and his men possessed some kind of mojo that I never heard about.)
We stopped to scrounge for canned food and bottled water. So far, everything was still available.
Lulu hadn’t asked why I wanted to go down this specific highway. Since she knew about my precognition, I figured she wasn’t really concerned. I didn’t know what Lulu possessed in the form of ESP because hers wasn’t manifested, or she didn’t want to talk about it. Sometimes people wholeheartedly refuted the whole “survivors are psychics” theorem. She had witnessed mine a few times. She probably heard the stories about the Big Mamas, too. Instead of arguing, she just followed me off the ramp.
We slept that night in a house in Garden City. There were five bedrooms in the house, and three of them hadn’t been slept in for years. There was also a fireplace in the master bedroom, and it kept us very warm through the evening and the rest of the night.
I waited for something to happen but it didn’t. I wanted to have a dream about Zach and say, “See? Here I am. What’s the deal?” But if I dreamed that night, I didn’t remember the dream. More’s the pity.
Lulu was cooking eggs again when I woke up. She was good at finding eggs. (An egg-finding savant, sure.) She had stopped at a farm in between the freeway and Garden City and come up with a half-dozen. Also she hadn’t gotten pecked once.
“I think I can do over easy or over medium today,” she said, without looking in my direction. “Hot and runny yolk or hard runny?”
“Is that your gift? The ability to tell when someone wakes up?” I asked sleepily.
“You snorted suddenly and then sighed,” she said. “It was a clue. Like it was serendipity, you know. Eggs are almost ready, and voila, you wake up.”
“Did you make that word up?” I asked suspiciously.
“No. I read it in a magazine.” She pointed to the nightstand. There was an O magazine on top. I reached over with one hand and thumbed the cover open. Sure enough, that was one of the words used in a subtitle. All it made me wonder was whether Oprah had been psychic or not.
“Don’t you want to know why we’re going the way we’re going?”
Lulu shook her lovely head. Jeez, a girl could get jealous over those short curly blonde locks. She didn’t dye it. It was a series of natural blonde streaks. She could have been on Oprah’s second page modeling a sleeveless, red velvet sheath and showing off a brilliant white smile. She even had the bee-stung lips to go with it.
“I wish I had toast,” she said. “Fresh bread. Gibby makes some damn fine bread. Especially that sourdough kind.” Gibby was a Redwoods Group member, a survivor who also happened to be a chef. She was also the kind of chef who could make something sinfully good out of roadkill, if she were so inclined.
“We have Ritz crackers,” I said.
“Eggs over easy on Ritz crackers,” she said slowly as if thinking about it.
“With spray cheese.”
“Well, okay then.”
The rest of the day went like that. Lulu didn’t seem to care where we were going or what we were doing. She went through the motions, and it reminded me of myself. Is that the way the others in the Redwoods Group saw me? Until something kicked me out of the median? Someone, or should I say, several someones.
“Crabby-Guts-Man-Thief-Girl brought us breakfast, too,” Spring sang into my ear. She flew around to show me an earthworm that was almost as big as she was. She carried one end while one of the other firefly pixies carried the other end. The others converged for a quick session of who-can-get-the-largest-section.
“Oh, gross,” I said. “You brought the firefly pixies earthworms?”
“I dug under the snow for them. Thought they might like them,” Lulu said reasonably. “They like butterflies on the hoof, and the other day they pretty much ate some kind of garter snake while it was still alive.” Her pretty face convulsed for a moment. I guess live snake was not on her menu anytime soon.
The firefly pixies really liked the earthworms. They said it tasted like chicken. (Not really, but I had to say it.)
Consequently, Lulu made it clear that she didn’t care why we were going the way we were going, and she didn’t care to ask questions. In some ways, Lulu was now like me. I would have never made the comparison before I had seen her making eggs on a skillet over an open fire near Elko, Nevada. She had been as different from me as wind was from water.
But we were both…broken?
It was up to us to fix the problem.
“I had a dream about Zach,” I said.
Lulu flinched.
“He said Gideon said we needed to go this way.”
She pulled the skillet back from the fire and expertly put the eggs on two plates that had been appropriated from the house we were in. She added a silver-plated fork to each plate. “I don’t have Ritz crackers,” she said blandly.
“I do,” I said and crawled out of the sleeping bag. Pretty soon we had eggs over crushed Ritz crackers, topped with a curlicue hill made of spray cheese.
After that, the conversation was minimal. Lulu wasn’t uncomfortable to be around. In fact, she tried to anticipate my needs and even the needs of the firefly pixies. She got them a better cage while we were “shopping” in a Walmart somewhere on the eastern side of Colorado. She even lined it herself. The girls thought it was whiz-bang.
“What is the large metal wheel inside for?” Spring sang in my ear.
“Uh, it’s an exercise wheel,” I sang back.
Lulu looked at me expectantly. I said in English, “They don’t know what the cage was used for…before. They seem to think
we had really great things for our little furry friends.”
One of the firefly pixies got on the wheel and shook it with her little clubbed hands.
I sighed. “You walk on it, so that you stay in one place and the wheel moves,” I sang.
The firefly pixies nodded. The one on the wheel tried walking and immediately fell over front ways. The other pixies all tried to get on at the same time. It was like watching Charlie Chaplin do pratfalls except in miniature green.
“A marvelous evil invention of the humans! Conquer it!” Spring shrieked with good humor and flew down to join them. Mastering the wheel took them about an hour, and I prayed that no one would tell them what its original purpose had been for.
For the next full day, I would hear them periodically trying out the exercise wheel and tiny little firefly pixie giggles of joy.
As we got closer to the Colorado border, we stopped for a little chow. I checked the map for a town called Sunshine. Even as closely as I studied the map, I couldn’t find the town. There was a Sunshine, Colorado specified in the map’s index with a population of 344 indicated, but I couldn’t find it. If it was listed, then it had to be there, but all it recorded was the cross-reference to find it. Section D-22 on the map. Finally I thrust the Rand McNally at Lulu and asked, “Can you find a town called Sunshine in section D-22? I can’t see it.”
The snack break was a blanket on top of a Ford Mustang which had stopped on the side of the road as if it had coasted to a halt without ado. There were water bottles and two plates of earthworms for the firefly pixies. We had Ding Dongs and Spam on crackers. Saltines this time. Lulu was intently looking at the can of Spam and asked, “How long do you think canned food is really good for?”
“Sinclair said as long as there weren’t any bulges in the can or it didn’t look opened in any way, they would be good for years. After about five years we’ll have to have our own food growing or we’ll starve.” Survival After Apocalyptical Occurrences 101. Sinclair gave the same lecture to all the people in the redwoods camp. Lulu hadn’t been listening at the time for reasons that I didn’t want to beat myself over the head with.
Mountains of Dreams Page 5
