by Platt, Sean
“Concerned?”
“You know, about Dad?”
Lila rolled her eyes. “Dad’s right there. Three cars up.”
Trevor apparently hadn’t seen him, but changed the subject to avoid his failing.
“Riots spread pretty quickly in a situation like this, you know.”
“Like what, Trevor?”
“Panic.”
“Uh-huh.” Lila looked toward the column of smoke they’d seen earlier, up ahead. It seemed to be in the road and was fairly wide. It was black, like a petroleum fire, but there didn’t seem to be any flames. “I’m not seeing any panic.”
“Give it time,” said Trevor. “It could happen. You don’t know what happened up there.”
“Broken down car,” said Lila.
Raj shook his head beside her. “Look how black that smoke is. Something’s burning.”
“Why would something be burning?” said Lila.
Trevor looked back derisively. He and Lila had always got along well. It was a shame that he’d become such a temperamental little shit. Just six months ago, she’d have told him all about her unexpected motherhood. But now, it felt like she could no longer trust him with her secrets.
“You’re right. Let’s look at ‘why would’ rather than what’s right there in front of us.”
Piper looked back. The van was long, and she seemed very far away.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said.
“See, Trevor?”
“She doesn’t know any more than you do!” Trevor spat.
“Settle down,” said Piper. “Just … it might be nothing.”
“Or it could be a riot,” said Trevor, shrugging. “Traffic jam, someone throws a Molotov cocktail, others pull guns, spreading back toward us until … ”
“Stop it, Trevor!” Piper spat. Duly chided, Trevor lowered his chin and looked out the side window, away from the windshield where Meyer was marching back toward the van.
He sat heavily in his seat and closed the door.
Piper looked over, waiting for him to speak.
“Something’s on fire up there,” he said.
“See,” said Trevor, his voice spiteful.
Meyer looked back curiously, but said nothing. He continued. “Talked to a guy just now who walked up and helped put it out. Nothing wrong; just a crappy car, too much idling, and a lot of leaking oil. Engine just caught fire. They threw dirt on it.”
Piper sighed, sitting back.
“Well, there’s more.”
“What?”
“The fire, no big deal. Ordinarily, they could just put it in neutral and push it off the road so we can get past. But it’s on the bridge.”
“Push it off the bridge, then,” said Lila.
“Yeah, just chuck it into the Ohio River,” said Trevor, rolling his eyes.
“I meant off one end, dumbass,” said Lila.
“Lila … ” Piper began.
“Ordinarily, that’d be no problem,” said Meyer. “But there’s construction, too. Bunch of orange cones up ahead. Someone must have wiped out the merge signs; I saw them lying down up there. But it’s three lanes going to one across the bridge, and that’s why we were so jammed up to begin with and what caused this guy’s engine to go, but now he’s smoking up there right in the middle of the single lane.”
“Push him forward,” said Lila. Trevor shot her a look but said nothing.
“Can’t, buttercup. He’s packed in, and the guy I talked to said his transmission is frozen. It’d take a tow truck. And even then it’d need to get in, and … ” He trailed off.
Lila’s stomach lurched. She caught the swell of illness without giving much sign, but she saw Piper eye her before looking away.
“So … ” said Piper.
“We’re going to have to go around.”
“How?”
“We’ll have to go north.” Meyer shook his head, eyebrows drawing together darkly. “That’s the thing about coming from Northeast Ohio. Just when you think you’ve gotten out, it pulls you back in. Like the mafia for Michael Corleone.”
“Who’s Michael Corleone?” said Trevor.
“You kids today,” he said. “Anyone wants to take over Fable in their adulthood, you’re going to have to get more steeped in cinema.”
Piper was looking to the left, where traffic in the other direction was still creeping past. Lila thought she might say something about making that line of cars stop and using the other half of the bridge. Instead she whined a single word. “Honey …”
Meyer looked at Piper, then at the eastbound cars.
“No,” he said.
“It’s like something is telling us to go back. We don’t have to go all the way to New York. But I know people in Pennsylvania.”
“Pittsburg is probably a secondary target. Same as Cleveland. I feel like we have a target on ourselves right now, just sitting here.”
“No, back east. Fifty, sixty miles. Nice and isolated.”
“Who?”
“Yoders.”
Meyer laughed. “The Amish?”
It took Lila a minute to make the connection. In the years she’d known (and been financially backed by) Lila’s father, Piper’s Quirky Q clothing line had made her into a minor celebrity in trendsetting and fashion circles. It was always funny to see where that fashion touched, but one of Piper’s favorite stories was about the Amish matron who ordered her dresses by mail, had them shipped to a P.O. box, and wore them secretly under her long black frock. Apparently, her husband never saw her change, and they had sex in the dark, so it was a perfect secret. Rebecca Yoder said the dresses made her feel “alive,” but not alive enough to risk a shunning.
“Why not?”
“How are you even going to explain that to her husband? And what are we going to do, Piper? Milk cows until the end of time?”
“They’re good people,” Piper said in a small voice.
“I’m sure they are. But we have a bunker, Piper. An honest-to-God bunker, which will shelter us completely — versus hiding out in a grain silo like Harrison Ford in Witness.”
This time Trevor said nothing, and Lila didn’t either, but Meyer still rolled his eyes. Hey, she’d tried. She’d watched all his favorites, both old and somewhat less old: The Matrix, Memento, Canvas, Bright Lies Big City, The Fountain of Truth, Inception, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dark City. She actively liked The Beam, which was still airing. But her father was an encyclopedia of entertainment, and his teenage children couldn’t be expected to keep up with it all.
“We’re not going to hang out with farmers. We need to get to Vail.”
“But … ”
“End of discussion, Piper.” He put his hand over hers — not a cheap gesture for Meyer Dempsey, who seldom showed affection in public. “I love you, and I respect your opinions. I’ll do anything for you. You know that. But you have to trust me.”
“I do trust you. But … ”
“Trust that I’m smarter than the idiots on the radio,” he clarified, then glanced at Lila, Raj, and Trevor in turn, and Lila felt some unknown context pass in that look. “And trust that whether or not you believe what I keep telling you — about the puzzle — I believe it. And I know it’s true.”
Quietly: “What’s true, Meyer? What do you think is going to happen?”
“Something,” he said. “Something that requires we make it to Colorado, no matter what.”
Lila watched the two adults, still feeling that churning in her gut, waiting to see how the power struggle would unfold. Finally Piper sighed and gave a small, press-lipped smile.
“I trust you,” she said.
Meyer gave her hand a final squeeze, then tapped the console to roll the car into manual-drive mode. He gripped the wheel, shifted into reverse, and expertly jockeyed the car around in the tiny traffic spot provided by the other cars.
Two minutes later, they’d crossed the median and were heading east — for just a little while, before heading north,
and into the unknown that made Lila want to scream.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Day Two, Afternoon
Rural Ohio
Trevor looked to the right-side front seat, where his father was finally sleeping. It was disarming. Trevor had to keep reminding himself that his dad would be of little use to anyone if he didn’t get some rest. He hadn’t slept the night before, fueled by nervous energy alone.
Up until running into trouble in Pittsburg, they’d been stopping at gas stations whenever they found one that wasn’t too busy, had its lights on, and didn’t seem likely to be harboring more teen hoodlums like they’d encountered back in Jersey. Most of those stations were automated, without so much as a clerk to wave a gun and tell them the provisions were his. But despite the fear of me-first roving gangs and shotgun-wielding clerks, they’d only found a single ransacked Circle K. People were behaving for the most part — something that, again, his father had seen when the bridge had become blocked. There, he’d spoken to others civilly without a single person getting knifed. And despite the way Trevor had been goading Lila, he was glad for it.
Whenever they stopped for gas (keeping topped off for the seemingly inevitable moment when the power grid failed and the pumps stopped working, or gangs took the land), Meyer had been grabbing coffee. It was all brewed fresh, payable with a swipe as if nothing strange was happening in the world. Caffeine had pushed him through the night and well into the second day. But despite appearances and what Trevor felt about his old man, Meyer Dempsey was not an unstoppable machine. He was his son’s hero, as cliché as that was, but just another man in the end. Seeing the anchor in their storm unconscious — even necessarily so — made Trevor uneasy. And judging by the others in the car, he wasn’t alone.
Lila and Raj were talking secretly, keeping to a two-person huddle. Watching them, Trevor suppressed a bubble of jealousy. He and Lila had always been close, and seeing the way she’d shut him out in favor of Raj hurt more than he wanted to admit. They seemed to be working on something, and twice Raj (not Lila) had asked Trevor if his phone had data coverage. It hadn’t either time, but the question piqued Trevor’s interest. He’d assumed they kept checking phones to try and call Raj’s family, but what was the data for? The van had all the entertainment and connectivity they’d need, thanks to the Mercedes satellite.
Despite the jealousy he’d never admit to — and the loneliness that came with being shut out — Trevor found himself adjusting to the idea that Lila’s boyfriend might be with them to stay. Everyone had tried to call his parents — and Mom, for that matter — but no calls were going through. They had data in the van and had tried to send messages that way, via messaging and mail, but there was no sign that Raj’s parents were receiving. As usual, Trevor assumed his father had been right. According to the news, the major cities were sparking with chaos: looting, riots, crime. Apparently, there was a big fire somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. So who knew what New York would be like now — in terms of survival, not just Internet service. Thank God they’d fled when they had. Thank Dad for all his plans and decisive actions, whether Trevor bought any of his more new-age fears about culmination and consciousness or not.
The sticky question of Raj Gupta seemed to have ended in permanent stalemate. It was a mistake to take him from home, but they wouldn’t leave him alone on the delusion that it was somehow better than simply keeping him with them. Every mile they put between New York and themselves, the more firmly they drove Raj into their family, for better or for worse.
If they made it to Colorado (when they made it, he amended; Trevor trusted his father more completely than he’d ever tell Lila), Raj would be moving in with them. They’d stay in Dad’s Bunker of Fear, probably eating beans and stale crackers while the world went to shit, with nothing to do but sit in front of Piper’s dumb old TV shows and watch Lila and Raj make out.
He looked forward, his attention waning. The road ahead, now that it had grown dark again, offered little of interest. Traffic had thinned, and they’d mapped out a path that skirted Cleveland and the outlying suburbs while still keeping them high enough to get around the problems in Pittsburg and the halo of disorder that seemed to have sprouted around it. Maybe traffic would pick up again. Trevor almost wished it would. Right now, this just seemed like any car trip, with the autodrive tooling along at a conservative sixty-five despite Meyer’s insistence that they haul ass while he was asleep. It was easy to believe none of the past day and a half had happened.
Piper had mostly turned around so she could cross her legs. He’d successfully ignored her while watching his sleeping father in his almost fully reclined seat, but now she saw him facing forward and looked up.
“Hey.” She smiled.
Trevor forced himself to meet her eyes, then detour his focus to somewhere near her left shoulder. His crush had always been inappropriate, but the past thirty-six hours had made it clear just how unseemly continuing that infatuation would be. Piper was twice his age; she was married to his father; she was, for shit’s sake, his stepmother. But that didn’t stop her from being the most beautiful woman Trevor had ever known in person, and it didn’t help that she doted on him, paid him all the attention he’d ever want.
Trevor was with her for the duration. He was with his father, with Lila, with Raj. Assuming Mom wasn’t waylaid, she’d be halfway to the ranch, and blessedly, Trevor was with her for the duration, too. They were all in this together. Their own little ecosystem. He had to make peace with the idea that he’d be locked in with Piper (or as good as locked in) and that his chances to find another girl and forget her were practically nil. Hopefully, the ranch had porn on the juke. He could form an unhealthy attachment to some slutty actress who took it in all holes. Wouldn’t that be a pleasant change?
“Hey,” he replied.
“How are you holding up?”
Trevor looked back. The van’s relative quiet made it feel like they were alone together, but they weren’t. Lila and Raj were up. In their own world, but awake.
“Okay, I guess.”
“We’ll make it, you know.”
“You mean, like, stay alive?”
She laughed — a delightful sound that was as much throat as it was air.
“I meant we’ll make it to the ranch.”
He glanced at Lila. Then, not wanting to speak but wanting to move things forward and needing to talk to someone, Trevor said, “Do you believe him?”
“Your dad?”
“Yeah.”
“About the ranch?”
“Yeah. That we have to get there and stuff.”
Piper shrugged. Her answer was only half serious. The other half was the pacifying answer you give a kid who won’t know a brush-off for what it was. “Where else are we going to go?”
“Somewhere that’s not days away.” They’d all heard the update on the news. The original estimates held. NASA and the Astral people were in agreement. They had four days before first contact, and that left little wiggle room. It had taken them almost thirty-six hours so far, and they’d only reached Ohio. They were supposed to have taken a plane. They were supposed to be there already. When that was the plan, this made sense to Trevor. The idea of driving changed his opinion in the extreme, trust in his father notwithstanding.
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Get a hotel.”
“Your dad doesn’t want to get a hotel room.”
“Well, maybe we could talk him into it. Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. Or Canada. Aliens never go to Canada.”
“You have a lot of experience with aliens?”
“In movies, I mean.”
“Maybe in Canadian movies they go there. Are you sure? Do you want to check?”
She was humoring him. He was slowly moving from infatuated to infuriated.
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are, kiddo. But he’s doing the best he can. He’s a smart guy, and I trust him. Do you trust him?”
Trevor l
ooked back. Now Lila and Raj were listening. Lila nodded first, probably without even realizing it.
“Yeah.”
“Then we have to go with that. None of us knows what’s going to happen. Your dad was prepared so far, and he’d tell you that in some way, he did know what was going to happen — at least enough to start building a bunker, buy and stock this van, and all that. We owe him a lot right now, whether we understand it or think he got lucky or not. And yeah, we can’t know for sure, but it’s better than what I knew — or what I’d know to do now on my own.”
Trevor nodded.
“We’ve said what we think,” Piper continued. “And we should continue to. We will continue to. Of course. He’ll want us to. But in the end, he’s driven to take us to Colorado come hell or high water, and, well … ” She trailed off.
Trevor sighed, then nodded again.
The van was quiet for a long few seconds, save the hypnotic hum of their wheels on the road.
Then Meyer’s phone, silent since Jersey, started to ring.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Day Two, Late Afternoon
Rural Ohio
Meyer blinked awake to the sound of his ringing phone. For the first moment, he didn’t answer. He just stared at his family and Raj. They were all looking his way, vaguely guilty, as if they’d been doing something they didn’t want him to know about.
The spell broke, and he snatched his phone, registering that it was Heather when he saw the screen, though his mind didn’t really make the connection until her voice was in his ear: decidedly higher-pitched than Piper’s sexy rumble, a bit squeaky, rushed with adrenaline as if she were high.
“Heather?”
“Meyer? Thank God. Where are you? Are the kids okay? Hell, is fucking Piper okay?” She didn’t stop to let Meyer answer. “I’ve got a little bit of a problem here. Actually, I’ve got a lot of problems. I forgot to bring my Vellum, for one. When I get to Colorado, will Piper share hers? I mean, if she doesn’t mind me seeing her porn or whatever other embarrassing books she has on it. She wouldn’t mind, right? Better than sharing her husband.” A small, uneasy laugh.
