They left his father standing forlorn in the driveway, baffled by Wade’s unexpected rebellion. He half expected Cara to peel out in a shower of gravel, like something from a movie, but she handled the car with exaggerated care.
“How do you know how to drive?” he asked from the back seat. The front seat, where Cara’s mom had lay, was brown with dried blood, and he didn’t want to sit in it.
“My mom taught me. In case of emergency.”
“I wish my dad would teach me.”
“It’s easy. Gas pedal on the right, brake on the left.”
“I know that much,” he said. “I’ve seen TV. But I’ve never actually tried.” She shrugged, and smiled in the mirror. “I’ll give you a driving lesson later.”
“I don’t think my dad would like that.”
“He doesn’t seem to like you doing much of anything.”
They descended a series of sharp turns, overlooking the treetops on the slope below. They passed a driveway, and Wade glimpsed a wildly tilted house, its walls broken open.
“He’s trying,” he said. “He was supposed to be home schooling me. He said I was a challenge, before everything happened.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“She died in the quake,” he said. “She’d just started a new job in the city so my dad could stay home with me.”
Cara nodded. “My dad died, too. He texted me to say he was okay after the first earthquake. After the tsunami hit, we never heard from him again. When we tried to pull up his phone’s location, it just kept saying ‘not found.’”
Another house had fallen off its moorings and slid forty feet down the hillside. Its smashed picture windows glittered in the clear morning air.
“A lot of them are like that,” Cara said. “Not safe, really, but we scavenge food from them.”
“I think my dad is afraid to go in houses like that.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He never brings back much,” Wade said. “We’re almost out of food. It would have been better if my mom had lived. She was more interested in wilderness survival than my dad.”
“Of course.”
“I mean,” Wade clarified, “if one of them had to live, she was better equipped.”
Cara eyed him in the rear view mirror, long enough that he began to worry she wasn’t watching the road. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she said at last, “but you say some weird shit, Wade.”
“I’m not weird,” Wade said. “I just have interests.”
“Everyone has interests.”
“Most people have shows, not interests.”
She shrugged. “I suppose that’s true. At least it was. So you’re into survivalism?”
“Not exactly. Lost hikers,” he answered at once.
“Is that a band?” Cara asked. He couldn’t tell if she was joking.
“No, when people get lost in the woods. They behave in all kinds of interesting ways, and reconstructing what happened to them is a puzzle.”
“Hmm.”
“There are searchers who go out—as their hobby—to look for hikers who got lost in wilderness areas. They use all kinds of information—how experienced the people were, what equipment they carried, even personal details about them.”
“Like what?”
“Their state of mind, what they did for a living, and why they were in the woods in the first place. For example, hikers and hunters act differently when they get lost.” He was enjoying the chance to talk about it. Most people started off interested in the topic, then quickly grew distracted, their eyes wandering.
“What’s the difference?”
“Hikers tend to look for trails. They try to backtrack when they don’t know where they are, or they cut straight across terrain to reach a trail they think must be there. To find them you have to guess where they got lost and then predict which way they’ll head. Hunters usually get lost when following game. They tend to walk in circles, trying to re-orient themselves.”
She nodded, smiling in the mirror. “So all that info helps you guess where to look.”
“Exactly, you reconstruct the person’s mindset and use that to create a search plan. Sometimes the searchers find them years after the disappearance.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice diminishing. “You mean they find the bodies.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You sort of implied they were looking for the actual hikers, like they hoped to find them alive.”
“No, I didn’t. Not years later. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I meant… never mind. You must have some interest in living hikers, too. Otherwise, why would you study wilderness medicine?”
“Yeah,” Wade agreed. “Search and rescue is interesting, too. And wilderness survival. You can’t really avoid that—most of the literature is about finding people while they’re still alive.”
“Imagine that,” she remarked lightly.
They fell silent, passing the leaning husk of another shattered house. Wade had never imagined his home might be one of few still standing. Was this why his father hadn’t wanted him to come along on scavenging trips—to cover up the fact that they were among the few who had escaped the disaster unscathed?
Cara drove slowly, carefully. An SUV with flat tires was parked sideways across the road. He unbuckled his seat belt and hung over her right shoulder as she bumped over the grass at the road’s edge to pass the wreck. “I think your dad put that there,” she said. “He really didn’t do a very good job blocking things off.”
“He’s trying.” Wade realized that he was using that phrase a lot when describing his father.
“I’m sure your mom would have done better.”
Her eyes flashed in the mirror. When he saw her laughing, he let himself join in.
This was what it felt like to drive with other kids, he thought, with no adults around. It was probably the kind of thing that happened all the time, to other people, before the disaster. It was nice. For an instant, even the wrecked houses seemed like scenery from a movie, impressive but easy to forget.
He’d lied to Cara earlier; he knew he was weird. It hadn’t mattered as much when he was younger, but now it seemed that each passing year made it more painfully apparent. He’d never really imagined he would ride in a car and laugh with another person. It was something from television, a silly fiction.
Now, just being alive was weird. They had that in common.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a while. “That was probably inappropriate.”
He shrugged. “I say lots of inappropriate things,” he admitted. “I usually don’t mean to.”
“It feels strange to laugh,” Cara said.
He nodded, still hanging over her shoulder as she carefully navigated the tight turns. “What’s it like out there?” he asked.
She paused a moment before replying. “It’s really bad.”
A cold worm of fear uncoiled in Wade’s stomach, muscular and blind. He noticed a faint sheen on the air, a blurring of the leaves. The smoke was returning.
“Like what?” he asked.
She shook her head, waving one hand as if shooing away hovering insects. “Most of the houses are wrecked from the quake, and the fire is mostly in the debris from the tsunami. We were on high ground. We hid out for the first few weeks. When the army arrived and set up a camp, we were out of food and fresh water. We thought they were going to fly us out, take us someplace safe. Then they started stringing up barbed wire.”
“Why?” Wade asked.
“They said it was to protect us. But we realized they weren’t going to let us leave. No one knows what to do with us. There were rumors of things happening in other camps. Mom and I got away. It’s been getting worse ever since.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Cara shook her head. “People are… it’s like something about them is gone. Like they aren’t even people any more, not the way you think about them. They just do whateve
r they want. I used to think people were basically good, you know? That they cared about other people. But it turns out all that was wrong. Once the laws were gone, it was like the good part of people went with them.”
The view through the forest dimmed, and the road ahead cradled a thickening veil of smoke. The air had a foul smell, like rotten, charred hay.
“My mom cries,” she said, “when she thinks I’m asleep. And I want to tell her everything’s okay, but I can’t.”
“Everything will be okay,” Wade said.
Cara’s eyes in the mirror were tight, angry. “You don’t know that.”
He couldn’t explain. He’d only wanted to reassure her, but his words had come out hollow, like nonsense syllables uttered by extras on a film set. “It just has to be,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t,” she replied. “That’s what they used to tell us, but they were wrong.” She turned off the road at a faded metal mailbox. “We’re here.”
The tires crunched on the gravel driveway toward a low-slung wooden house with a red metal roof. The windows were intact, the floor level. A low deck was attached to the front door.
They stepped over a spattered brown trail that led across the wooden slats, as if someone had run from the house with a dripping paintbrush. His father’s bike slumped against the wall beside the entrance.
As they neared the open door, the odor of smoke yielded to a powerful smell of dry rot and feces.
“Did you..?” Wade trailed off.
“It’s the toilets. That’s what happens when they dry out. I’ve smelled it in a bunch of houses.”
“Right.” He and his father had been discarding waste water into the toilet bowls. He’d known it was important to keep water in the lines; now he knew why.
The dotted line of dried blood led into the gloom. He stopped, unwilling to retrace it.
“Come on, it’s not that bad,” Cara said. “You’ll get used to it.”
They halted a moment to allow their eyes to adjust to the dim light. A short hallway led to a living room, with featureless, smoke-obscured rectangles for windows. He wished Cara had reminded him to bring the flashlight. She vanished inside, and he heard her rummaging around. He felt his way toward the kitchen, banging his shins on an overturned dining table. The chairs lay strewn like mines.
A single small window over the sink illuminated the kitchen in aquarium light. Wade searched the cabinets methodically, yielding sixteen cans of food and a few packets of instant noodles. His stomach clenched. He opened the refrigerator and immediately regretted it. The rank smell overwhelmed the room and nearly forced him out. When he recovered, he organized the usable food on the countertop.
Then he heard men laughing.
Months ago, it would have been an unremarkable sound. But all at once, the seething static he’d first heard in the driveway was in his ears again, the whisper of a thousand lost voices. Transmissions from a distant planet, electronic ghosts of the long dead.
He peered through the dirty glass. Two men were walking down the driveway.
Both were bearded and wore small backpacks. One had a short pole strapped to his pack, a rifle. As they passed the car, the first man ran a hand over the hood, then snatched it back as if burned. He held up a palm to signal the other. They crouched, silent, like animals that had caught the scent of prey. Wade instinctively dropped down until he could barely see over the window frame.
They probably don’t want any trouble, he told himself. The two men held a whispered exchange, their eyes never leaving the house.
They looked hungry.
One man drew a gun from a leather holster. The other slunk back behind the car, and emerged with the rifle in his hands.
“I’ve got everything,” Cara called. “Where are you?”
The men’s heads snapped to the front door.
“Get in here,” he whispered.
The man with the rifle sidestepped around the front of the house, circling directly under the kitchen window, headed to the rear.
“What’s going on?” Cara asked from the kitchen door. She wore a backpack, with another strapped to her chest.
“The gun,” Wade hissed. “Where’s the gun?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice dropping. “In the living room somewhere.” Wade gestured at the window and held up two fingers. She shook her head, not understanding.
“There’s someone outside!” he whispered. “We have to get out of here!”
Cara dropped to a knee. “We’ll climb out the window,” she said. “When that guy goes in the front door, he won’t be able to see for a minute.”
“You’ll never squeeze through with those bags,” he hissed.
A board on the front deck creaked.
Wade peered outside. The man was no longer visible. He eased the window up, expecting at any moment to hear the pane squeal in its track.
He was overcome by the need to flee. It flooded his arms and legs, as if his fear was itself a kind of life that animated him more powerfully than anything had before. He thought he heard Cara shedding the backpacks. Not waiting for her, he clambered on to the countertop and squeezed through the narrow opening.
He miscalculated the height, and hit the ground harder than he had expected. His knee struck the bottom of his chin. The world swam, but fear kept his legs moving.
He ran across the yard to the forest’s edge, not looking back. The folding knife in his pants pocket banged against his thigh, and his ears seethed with thrumming voices. The whispering in his ears pulsed into a soft roar, many voices chanting.
He was almost safe within the trees when he thought he heard his name.
Stop, he told himself. Stop running. Stop running before you get lost.
Turning to face the house was physically painful, like looking into the sun. Cara wasn’t behind him.
What can I do? He asked himself. They were armed. They were predators. Anything that might draw them out of the house would end with him getting shot.
He retraced his steps toward the house, running in a crouch, anticipating at any moment to feel the stings of gunfire. He practically dove behind the car, his sweaty hand slipping off the handle before he managed to tear open the door and clamber inside.
A shout came from inside the house. Wade twisted the key and stomped on the gas in one movement. The car roared, but went nowhere. A man appeared in the front door, brandishing the handgun wildly. Wade grabbed the gear shift. There was a sickening metal clunk and the car leapt forward.
Wade’s head snapped as the wheels bumped over the edge of the front deck. He caught a glimpse of the man holding up his hands before the body bounced up on the hood, splintering the windshield. The car hit the front of the house, beams fracturing like bones, and Wade smacked into an airbag.
He coughed white dust. Through the jagged white lines of the windshield, Wade saw the hood was lodged where the doorway had been. Someone was wrenching open the car door, making the hinges scream. He lay across the front seats, and as the driver’s door opened he began kicking furiously at the intruder.
“Wade! Stop it!” Cara yelled, shoving his legs aside. “Get out of the way!” She slid into the seat, pushing him over onto the stained passenger side.
She threw the car into reverse. The engine revved but they went nowhere. Wade heard shouting, and the second man rounded the corner of the house, waving his rifle.
“Shoot him!” Cara screamed, shoving a cold metal L into Wade’s hands. He brought the weapon up before his face, uncomprehending. “Shoot him!” Cara yelled again, jamming the shift lever back and forth. There was a sharp sound, and the window beside Wade’s head clinked like ice cubes rattling together.
A neat hole had appeared in the glass. He wondered for an instant if he’d already been shot, if he was dying and didn’t even know it yet.
Voices sang in his ears, beckoning, calling out to him alone across the desolation, a radio signal from the depths of his own heart, the rush of blood in his ears,
the sirens of his fear.
He pointed the gun out and squeezed the trigger, blowing a larger hole through the window and sending the world into terrifying silence. He fired again and again, not even trying to hit the remaining man, until the gun clicked in his hand.
With a splintering crash, the car dislodged from the house and skidded backwards across the yard. Cara’s mouth was moving violently, and he felt certain she was cursing. She wrenched the car back into forward gear, and they slithered across the gravel driveway, blind, the shadows of trees like barricade walls around them.
There was a violent lurch, and they were back on pavement. Cara scarcely slowed down on the first few hairpin turns, hanging her head out the window as they rounded the uphill curves. She didn’t slow until they were at least a mile from the house.
The voices in Wade’s ears were gone, replaced by a loud ringing. He’d read that lost hikers reported hearing people calling out their names, even long before search parties reached them. Their minds perceived patterns in the sound of a flowing stream, wind in leaves, the pulse of blood in their own inner ear. They ran to the voices, ran wildly until exhausted and more hopelessly lost. The lost needed patterns, a map, something to tell them where they were. In its absence, they supplied one, right or wrong.
Cara was jostling him with her free hand. She mouthed something he couldn’t make out.
“Can’t hear you!” he shouted. His voice came from a far off place, muffled as if under heavy blankets, but already the ringing seemed to be subsiding. Wade laughed suddenly, surprising himself, filled with a jubilance that roared like floodwaters into a place within him that minutes before had been scourged clean.
Cara yelled, “That concludes our first driving lesson!”
They drove home in thrumming, elated silence.
*
His father stood on the porch, and in his face Wade saw the smoke gathering between the trees, smelled again the stink of the burning earth. “I’m so sorry,” he said to Cara as she stepped out of the car. She gave a short, wounded cry and ran for the house.
Wade’s dad hovered, his hands shoved in his pockets. “She died about fifteen minutes after you left,” he said. It sounded like an apology, but Wade supposed that was just how people talked at times like this.
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