by Mike Chen
“Mm-hmm.” Sunny nodded when she said it because they didn’t look too sure at her answer.
Both maybe-Betty and Ivo did that heavy breathing thing that grown-ups did. Ms. Eswara did it sometimes after she talked to the students. Daddy usually did it after he put her to bed, right after he stepped out the door. Krista seemed to do it a lot when she looked at her phone. It seemed to mean that they were thinking hard.
“Well,” he said. His voice went quiet when he turned to maybe-Betty, but Sunny still heard what he said. “If she can’t get through, what do you say about taking her there?”
“Do you think it’s safe to be out?”
“She’s just a kid. Her mom’s sick.”
The woman looked out the window, lines forming around her face. “It’s really early. Maybe it’ll be quiet. The roads look clear.”
Ivo took his phone out. “Looks like we’re back in the signal zone.” He tapped on his screen. “I’ll text Gil and let them know we’re going to be another hour.” After his screen blinked, he looked back at Sunny. “Sunny, listen. We have to meet up with my brother, but we have some time. We’ll help you follow the map, okay? Get you safe to your mom and uncle.”
Ivo’s phone reminded her, she should check hers too. The signal bar was a big X for the longest time, but now it finally had a few bars. Seven more texts from Daddy. It looked like it sent hers earlier too.
Except the battery bar said it only had 1 percent left.
She skimmed Daddy’s messages, questions about how to get in touch and instructions on staying in one spot. This whole thing took longer than she thought it would and she didn’t want him to worry, even though she had a surprise in store for him. I am safe, she typed. Some nice people are helping me.
She couldn’t help the big grin on her face as she typed the next sentence.
I have a big surprise for you.
A notification appeared to confirm the sent message, then Sunny’s phone shut down.
Chapter Forty-Five
Krista
The checkpoint into the state of Washington wasn’t going to make it into any tourism brochures. Krista spied cones across lanes on both sides of the highway with police cars and barricades funneling traffic into a single lane each for north and south. In and out. At two in the morning on a typical day, there probably wouldn’t be enough traffic to fill it up. With nationwide travel restrictions happening, Moira’s Jeep was the only vehicle.
A uniformed police officer stood to the side of one barricade, his breath rolling out into the cold night air. Krista steadied herself in the back seat as Moira lowered her window and removed her mask. “Evening, officer.” Moira’s voice had reverted back to its American accent.
“Evening, folks. Heading home?”
“Yep. Back to Seattle.”
“All the way from California, huh?” The officer tugged on his thick jacket with gloved hands, and even from the back seat Krista saw a hint of tremble from the cold.
“My husband and I work there, but we want to be at our real home just in case.” For appearances’ sake—at least that’s what Krista figured—Rob grabbed Moira’s hand. “Be with our families.”
“I understand. And you, ma’am—” he looked over at Krista “—you’re their friend?”
“More like coworker,” she said, figuring the appropriate level of relationship would make it seem more natural. “But I think we’ve become friends during this. Long drive.”
The officer gave a tired nod in return. “I hear you. That’s my new best friend on the other side there,” he said, thumbing to the citizen patrol officer in the southbound lane. “Actually, he’s a dick. Takes his authority way too seriously. All the cit-pat volunteers do. I think most of them are in it for the power trip.” Their heads bobbed in unison, and Krista made sure to laugh too. “We’ll get you rolling quick. IDs, please. And please remove your breathing masks.”
Three hands handed three fake Washington IDs over, and Krista felt a little bump in her chest as she watched the officer study them. He took each one and held it up to a flashlight. “I’ll be right back,” he said, before disappearing into the squad car behind him.
“Goddamn it, Narc,” Moira said below her breath.
“Let’s not freak out.” Krista’s words came through gritted teeth. “Nothing’s happened yet.”
“Could everyone please step out of the vehicle?” he called out, half-inside the driver’s side of his squad car.
“There goes that thought,” Krista said.
“Shit. Okay, everyone just be cool.” Rob turned his head around as he got out, though if he saw a way out his reaction didn’t give it away.
“Good idea. Don’t freak out.” Krista pushed the lever to throw the seat forward. “I really mean it because he’s got a gun.”
“So do we,” Moira said as she undid her seat belt. “We can’t let him search the car.”
The officer’s deep voice came in a clear half yell. “Stand by the back, please.” They lined up, Krista in the middle, and she looked over at the other side to find the citizen patrol officer standing at attention, seemingly absorbed in monitoring his half of the path rather than what was happening there. The cop walked slowly over to them. “Mrs. Donelly, what’s your address in Seattle?”
“Six nine two Doolittle Road.” Moira spat the address out just as they’d practiced in the car. Krista loaded up her own fake address, ready to recite.
“Uh-huh. And what’s the cross street?”
Moira’s left side tensed up with her fingers curled into a fist, brushing Krista’s hand as she did it. “You know what, officer, I’m just blanking right now. It’s been a few years since we moved down to San Francisco.”
“If it’s been a few years, why are your licenses all valid? Shouldn’t your current ones be California IDs?”
“We come home a few times a year and renew when we need to. It’s easier legally to manage our rental property.” Moira spoke the words with real conviction; Krista didn’t know anything about managing rental property or if the location of a home address would affect that, but it sounded good.
“I see.” The officer looked at the IDs, holding them like a poker hand against the flashlight beam. “So, you have your rental property. Is that where you manufacture your fake IDs, or is that down in San Francisco?”
Krista repressed the urge to curse and kick the officer in the shins; Moira let out a sigh while a bead of sweat rolled down the side of Rob’s cheek despite the night chill. Various desperate scenarios played out in her head, but before she could judge which had the least potential for disaster, Rob stepped forward. “Look, officer, I’m going to level with you. You have to believe me when I say that my daughter is lost up in Seattle.” The officer held up his hand, and Rob took a much slower follow-up step. “We would love nothing more than to be back in San Francisco waiting for good news about a vaccine, but we have to make it to Seattle before the travel restrictions come down fully. Can I show you a picture of her?”
“Slowly,” the officer said as Rob reached into his pocket. He held his phone up, then began tapping on the screen after the officer nodded to him.
“See? That’s her.” He flashed the lit screen toward the officer. “And there and there. I guess pretty much all of my pictures are of her.”
The officer leaned in and squinted at the screen. “I remember her,” he said quietly. “Start of the shift. Five, six hours ago?”
“You saw her? Was she okay?” Rob’s eyes widened; if the officer doubted his sincerity before, he couldn’t now. “Who was she with? How did she even get here?”
“She said she was alone. But then the couple sitting by her, they said she was with them, that they were taking her to family in Seattle.” He shook his head. “She didn’t have ID. Said she was going to see her mom. I’d seen weirder stuff and they vouched for her so with this going on,” he gestu
red around, “I wasn’t going to deny her entry for lack of ID.” The officer heaved out a heavy sigh as he surveyed the three of them in the dim light. “You know, sir, I feel for you. I really do. Hopefully she’s probably already there with her mom now. But the law is the law. I can’t let you pass with a fake ID.”
They looked at each other, a mixture of desperation and fear in both Moira’s and Rob’s eyes. Krista thought and thought, her muscle for reading people going into overdrive as she stared at the officer, trying to find something they could use.
One idea came through. And much to her own surprise, she didn’t hesitate to do it.
“Officer, if I may.” Krista stood up straight, trying to project as much confidence as possible. “We’re being completely honest with you, but I think we all understand that you’ve got your duty. On the other hand, I’ve got eighteen hundred dollars in cash in my back pocket. Now, I’m sure the government isn’t paying you overtime in an emergency situation like this, so how about we cover your overtime expenses and you let us go find his daughter?” After the officer nodded, she reached into her left back pocket and grabbed the wad of neatly folded bills.
“Are you trying to bribe me? That’s a federal offense.”
“It’s more than a bribe. It’s more than cash. It’s a chance. I have carried this with me ever since the quarantine. I’ve kept it safe, hid it away, but it was always there for me. I knew, I knew, that whatever happened, I always had it as a safety net. I could restart my life with it, keep my independence.” Krista stared at the cash in her hand. A stack of printed paper or a sum of currency. No, this was something different. “It was the parachute for my life.”
The officer nodded, and for the first time, she noticed the deep bags and weary lines etched across his face. “I’m facing eviction,” she continued. “My business is dying. I barely renewed my Residence License.” In her peripheral vision, she saw Moira and Rob look at each other. Guess they never put it together before. “I thought about taking this cash and just rebooting my life with it. But instead, I want you to have it.” Krista held it out, the weight of stacked money resting against her palm. “It’s a trade. You do whatever you need to do in your life. We do whatever we need to do for Sunny, because she’s not with her mom. You get a chance. We get a chance.” She looked back at Rob and Moira.
The officer looked each of them over, then checked out the cit-pat, who waved over at him. “Just one second.” He returned with some horizontal hand gestures, which hopefully meant “all clear” rather than “arrest these jerks,” and the cit-pat returned to his original position.
They stood in silence, neither of them moving a muscle until a tiny speck in the distance grew to approaching bright dots to actual headlights. “Sir, was that really your daughter?”
“Yes, officer. I’d... I don’t know how else to say it, but I’d give anything to prove that to you.”
“All right,” he said. His gloved hand wrapped over Krista’s as he took the cash. “Go before things get worse. I hope you find her.”
“Thank you.” Rob let out a full body sigh, one that deflated everything from his shoulders down as he spouted off four more thank-yous.
They gathered into the Jeep, and the engine roared to life. The officer stepped back, waving as they passed. They drove in tense silence. When they crossed the state line, Rob let out a sigh that filled the entire vehicle, hands on the dashboard. “I thought we were screwed for sure.”
“What a team, huh?” Moira’s native English accent returned with her short sentence. “Rob sets them up, then Krista bribes them.”
“See?” Krista adjusted to sit with her legs up across the back seat. “That’s why I use cash for everything. People love cash. Though—” she shook her head “—I should have kept some of it, huh? My big dramatic speech got ahead of itself.”
“We’re going to need one hell of a bake sale to get that back to you,” Rob said.
A tiny part of Krista panicked at the thought of losing her safety net, especially with such uncertainty in the upcoming days. But that part seemed smaller than even she expected, and the closer they got to Seattle, the more her anxiety shrunk. “Some things are more important than money,” she said. “But you’re right. All forms of payment accepted.”
They pushed forward for another mile, a sense of relief taking over the car the farther it got beyond the state border. Rob’s phone illuminated the car’s interior. “We must have hit a coverage pocket.” His voice had a shake in it. “More texts from Sunny. All timestamped a few hours ago. I’ve got one bar of signal.”
“What do they say?” Moira asked, but Rob had already put the phone up to his ear.
“Voice mail. Her phone might be dead now,” he said while the car navigated a wide curve around a hill. “Sunny, it’s Daddy. If you get this, find a spot and stay still. We’re coming to get you, okay? Just be safe.” He locked eyes with Krista in the back seat. “We’re coming.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Moira
The front door didn’t work.
Since crossing the Seattle city limits, they’d seen pockets of protesters and unrest appear, but nothing like the dense group that was standing outside of St. Vincent General Hospital. Signs touted things like Reclaim Our Country and the less-friendly The Cure for Tyranny, and while some of the people looked like the typical Reclaimed crowd, Moira noted the appearance of masked individuals the closer they got, and they’d donned masks to fit in with the crowd. “Hey!” Rob yelled to the closest security guard. He braced himself against the wood barricade and Moira jammed in behind him, with Krista’s shoulder leaning into her back. A bright light came out of nowhere, and after her eyes adjusted, she saw that it had nothing to do with guards but rather a TV news crew lurking by the hospital doors. “Security?”
The officers stood in full riot gear from shields to helmets with no sign of certified citizen patrols around. Perhaps volunteers only got road duty while official law enforcement duties stayed with the big boys. Regardless, the officers either ignored Rob or didn’t hear him.
“It’s not gonna work,” Krista said, her voice muffled by her mask.
Moira gauged the chaos around her, from the unruly crowd on all sides to the armored guards ahead. Going through meant somehow getting past layer upon layer to get to the front door. Narc was usually right, but not this time.
Rob pulled his mask down; it hung by its rubber string from his neck, his full face exposed. “Security!” he yelled. “I need help!” That little touch of humanity must have worked, as the nearest officer broke his frozen stance and stepped their way. “We need to get inside,” Rob said to the security officer as he leaned in to hear over the chaos. “My daughter is somewhere in there.”
Moira barely heard the response over the growing furor. “Sir, this hospital is currently closed to public admittance. City orders. All medical emergencies are being redirected to County General in—” His sentence got cut off by the sound of breaking glass, first a few feet past the officer, then another directly in front of them as a bottle bounced off his helmet. The TV crew’s lights and camera swung in their direction, blinding her vision for a second; when it cleared up, it looked like the lone officer multiplied into a dozen, all with face shields down. More bottles and debris flew overhead.
They had to go. “Come on,” she yelled, grabbing Rob’s hand with one arm and pushing Krista back with another.
The farther they got to the back of the crowd, the louder the noise grew behind them, as if someone sprinkled pixie dust of aggression over the unruly hordes. By the time they broke free and began back to the car, the sound of police bullhorns demanding order battled the crowd’s yelling and screaming.
“These aren’t the Reclaimed people I knew.” Moira sighed when they returned to the Jeep. “Narc and Santiago would never do that. These are anarchists looking to blow stuff up.”
“Damn
it. He was right there.” Rob’s fingers balled into fists, eyes turned skyward. “Plan B?” Rob asked.
Krista punched the air in front of her. “Run over all those jerks and storm the door?”
Moira opened the trunk and rummaged through the things that Narc packed for them. “Maybe this will help,” she said, pulling out the police scanner. It squawked to life, spitting out static and random noise until she twiddled some knobs and hit some buttons. Voices passed through, pouring out sentence after sentence of technicalities.
“...and it’s just getting worse out front,” a male voice said out of the scanner. “If it keeps going, we may need the tear gas. I subdued one who tried to break into the entrance.”
“Copy that,” a female voice responded. “Suspect is in custody now?”
“That’s affirmative. He keeps shouting about how the government is refusing to help the Reclaimed community, so I may need earplugs.”
“Copy that. Did you ask if he paid taxes?”
“Negative, but I should. We have the side and back entrances sealed off, though we’re low on manpower right now. Sarge said protect the front entrance and the pharmacy wing. We’re always running low, even without any looter raids. Leave the loading dock alone for now, the barbed wire and gate will do.”
“Copy that. I’ll pass that along to the captain...”
Moira turned the volume down and closed her eyes, plan forming in her head. “Loading dock. That sounds like our way in.”
Krista marched over to the trunk and shortly after hospital scrubs flew out. Moira snatched hers out of the air, things moving in autopilot. They changed into their disguises quickly, right there by the Jeep. Krista’s serious expression seemed out of character for her. Rob carried an equally grim look, though his focus remained on the large hospital building, probably wondering where in the structure his daughter might be. Despite his maintaining a calm exterior for much of the journey, Moira knew him well enough by now to tell that his nerves were on fire this close to the finish line. He shifted, meeting her eyes. She smiled, the warmth coming so easily she wondered how MoJo’s plastic expressions had ever overtaken her natural instincts.
