by Holly Hook
The tiny bathroom felt too big all of a sudden, like it was trying to expose us. Alana breathed on my neck and Jerome's heart raced. My back was against his chest. I couldn't tell where Gina was.
"We can't stay in here," she whispered.
"We wait until they leave," I said. "If we leave now they'll kill us." The noise continued outside the door as something dragged. What were they taking? It must be something the Cat would fit in its huge scoop. I imagined them rolling down the road with a cooler of beer. David would want that. Probably all for himself. He could be his real self now that his dad was gone.
"Okay," David shouted at last. "I think we're pretty good to head to town. Everyone back in the van. Great job. We're all set for a while."
And then footsteps faded.
But not before someone crinkled some paper and flicked what sounded like a lighter.
Feet pounded out of the building and the swinging door creaked.
"Out," I said.
Gina opened the door and the smell of smoke hit my nostrils. I dropped the radiation suit again--Dr. Shetlin's suit--and bolted out into the gas station. At first I couldn't tell where the fire was coming from but the swinging doors were shut, blocking us from view. I could see through the bottom. The Cat was moving and its engine was back on. David was getting himself away from the coming firestorm.
"Everyone out," I said. "Split up." Smoke rose from two aisles over, spreading its tendrils through the air and reaching for us. It stank. I leaned to see inside the aisle. Light flickered on a row of motor oil quarts. "NOW!"
Alana seized my hand. "There has to be a back door."
"We can't go out the front," Jerome said.
The bottom of the van rolled past, leaving us here. It was going too slow. The firelight got stronger over the other aisle, turning the smoke a light gray and making the whole gas station flicker on the inside.
And then there was a pop and flames rose in a whooshing wall of death. Heat blasted against my face as the wall spread through the entire aisle. Something popped.
“This way!” Gina yelled, grabbing my arm.
I wrenched out of it. Someone was going to die. Panic seized me and I lost all rational thought.
I ran for the front door and didn’t look back. The heat grew unbearable and I gagged on the smoke. It was the worst smoke I had ever smelled. A wave of dizziness washed over me as it invaded my lungs. My head exploded in a new pain and I felt like I was going to throw up. The room spun and the floor rose. I made contact. The air was cooler here, much cooler, and easier to breathe.
Someone screamed my name.
Hands grabbed at me. I turned my gaze to the ceiling. It was black. Full of rolling smoke. The end of the world spun above my head, waiting to come down and eat.
The hands yanked me up. I staggered. “Leave me alone!”
“She’s losing it,” Alana said. She had her shirt pulled over her face.
Losing it. Losing what?
I moved my feet. It sounded like a good idea. We burst through the swinging doors and out onto the wooden deck. It was dark out here. Very, very dark. Smoke followed us out and rose, spreading out along the overhang of the gas station and the pumps. It fled into the sky, blending into the void above.
I breathed fresh air. It was the freshest air I had ever tasted.
We all kept together, moving out through the parking lot, until Alana and Jerome let go of me and I went down to my knees, coughing the poison out of my lungs. My head cleared a bit and my heart calmed some. Then I dry heaved and got on all fours, coughing and gagging, but nothing came up. That was good, since I needed all the hydration I could get.
“Laney,” Alana said. “What did you do that for?”
“Do what for?” I managed, coughing again. It was getting better. I had only breathed in one lungful of smoke. That probably wasn’t enough to kill me. Was it? People went to hospitals for this.
I almost died.
“I panicked,” I said. “Sorry.”
“The back door was right there,” Gina told me, leaning down. “I wasn’t trying to kill you.”
“I know you weren’t,” I said. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had run without me. We’d be even, at least. “I…I don’t know. I freaked.”
“It’s all right,” Alana said. “Next time someone grabs your arm, follow them.”
“Unless it’s David,” said Jerome. “Never follow him.”
“I agree.” I held back another tickle in my throat. I looked up to see the Cat way up the road, rolling away with the van in tow, which was dark. We all sat in an ocean of shadows. Behind Jerome, Happy’s Gas continued to burn. Flames licked the top of the doorway. The place had erupted into an inferno. Fire rolled where I'd fallen.
I had almost died and I didn't even feel anything.
"We can't stay here," Alana said.
I watched the Cat and the van get farther and farther away. Everyone was rolling away with supplies in tow, leaving us nothing. No one was looking back. If they were, the fire would blind them to us. We stood in the dark, in a shadow cast by the overhang and the pumps. Flames lashed out of the door now, trying to reach for the pumps, and sheer instinct finally returned and I backed away onto the road itself.
"We don't know if this is all going to blow," I said.
"We need to leave," Gina said. "Our suits are in there."
I faced her, not that I could see her. We were all voices in the dark. Jerome was a shadow against fire.
"David left us in the open," Alana said.
"What did you expect?" Jerome asked. "People suck. They're going to suck even more now that civilization has ended."
The sky spread far and wide overhead. A cold wind blew against me. It whistled, empty of everything. "We've got to find another building."
"We can go back to the Visitor Center," Alana said. "We have a roof there."
I thought about how hungry we would get. How desperate. Those bodies were still lying there and if there was any food left, it was very, very little. "There's no way to go but forward," I said. "If we die, we die." I wanted to move. I didn't want anyone to ask why I had split from everyone in Happy's Gas. I didn't want to tell them that I was scared. Not so much of my own death, but of watching someone else I cared about die. It was better if those things stayed out of sight.
"But you want to get to your dad," Alana said. "Now you don't care if you die?"
"I do care," I said. I wanted to live. "I just freaked out and ran in there, okay? I wasn't trying to kill myself. People who do that don't realize what they're going to be missing."
"Look," Jerome said. "We're all upset. I have good news. We have a little more food and water. Thank the huge pockets. They worked wonders sneaking things into Rad Cinema. I was the go to guy." Jerome patted his pockets, which still bulged with their contents. "I grabbed more in the station, so we're good for another day or so. Gina, you have the radio, right?"
Chapter Twelve
Walking sucked.
I was so sick of it. I got bored counting my steps as Gina struggled to get the radio back on the doomsday station. The signal was weaker out here. I focused instead on how the pavement felt under my feet. It was a sign that we were still on the road. Alana's flashlight was giving off less and less and our bubble of brightness was vanishing. The void was closing in.
No coyotes made noise tonight.
No crickets chirped.
It was all silence and the wind and I had no idea where the next structure would be. I struggled to remember any landmarks, any overhanging rocks we could shelter under for the day like vampires. My mind had gone blank. That was another world.
The Cat's light vanished over the horizon. We were now officially the only people out here, struggling to catch up.
"I think I heard someone speaking," Gina said, turning the dial to the radio. "There."
The same man spoke on the radio tonight. He sounded a lot more tired and his voice was slurred like he hadn't slept at all in the
past week. I couldn't blame him. What day was this? Day two going into day three. I thought.
"Oklahoma City. Helicopter transports and buses are waiting if you can get there." Static. "Reports indicate..." Fuzz. "Very few survivors west of the city. Estimates run from one hundredth of a percent to one tenth of a percent."
I about choked.
Numbers were what I understood best and I cranked that out in my head.
"That's one out of every thousand people who survived on this side of the country," I said. "At the most. It might be one out of every ten thousand." It was true. No one on the surface had made it.
"If you can hear me from the western side of the country," the man continued, speaking carefully like he knew he was fading in and out, "Try to reach Oklahoma City. The Army has set up a checkpoint. If you can find a working vehicle that will help you get there faster." He was coming in clearer now. We were walking into better reception. Did that mean a tower was out here?
"A checkpoint," Alana said. "That's good. As soon as we find a car we go."
"Well, what's the Army planning?" Jerome asked.
"Do not get caught outside during the day," the man cautioned. "Stay out of all sun until further notice. Sunscreen will not be sufficient to protect you from the ultraviolet radiation. Avoid moving through forested areas if possible. Intense storms are forming in the Midwest, Northwest and other areas of the country and lightning strikes are starting many large and violent wildfires. I repeat, do not..."
"That's awesome news," Gina said, moving the radio so it was under her other arm. The man's voice was muffled for a bit. It was like Gina didn't want to hear any more. "Where are we supposed to go?"
"He told us," Alana said. "Oklahoma City."
"They never get bad storms there," Gina said, dripping with sarcasm.
"We don't know what the weather's really doing now," I said. "Everything's changed. The atmosphere is all screwed up. Anything could be happening. We don't even know what season it is now." Or if there were seasons.
"It's sure not summer," Jerome said, wrapping his arms around himself.
The cold wrapped around me like a vice carried by the wind. The desert got cool at night, but not like this. I shivered. I had never felt cold like this before, except for when I opened the freezer. I breathed out. I couldn't see my breath so it must not be that cold. I wasn't used to this.
"We need shelter before daybreak," Gina said.
"The thing is, we can't see where any shelter is until the sun starts coming up," I said. Icy panic raced through me and Dr. Shetlin's blisters exploded behind my eyelids when I blinked. The image would always be there, waiting to pounce when I was the most vulnerable. "That flashlight's dying. Maybe if we turn it off for a while, we can see what's around us a bit better. You know, let our eyes adjust."
Alana clicked it off and pure darkness fell. "What about coyotes?" Alana asked.
"They're dead," I reminded her. It was common to hear them yipping in the distance, making those eerie sounds. But now there was nothing. I wondered if anything but the cacti and the cockroaches had made it through the second pulse. At least something would survive.
We walked in the dark, using the feel of the road as our guide. My eyes adjusted a little, but not much, allowing me to see the faint outline of the horizon. I squinted. It almost looked like there was a very faint orange glow to the north. I had to be my imagination. No lights could still be working out here. The radio guy said that they weren't even working on the eastern side of the country. Maybe they weren't shining anywhere but deep underground.
But the glow got brighter and brighter as we walked. My feet ached but we pushed on. Gina had turned the radio off and I hadn't even noticed. I almost asked her to turn it back on. I wanted a voice to break up this heavy silence, any voice, and I wanted it to tell us that there was still a world out there and people in it that weren't looking to kill us.
"What was the name of that little town?" Alana asked. "The one before Colton?"
"Margrove or something," I said. I searched my memory. I should know. I'd lived in Colton all my life, but the other town was so far away that it wasn't worth going to. It didn't even have a high school so there was no team to play against. The kids there--or at least the kids who used to live there--had to be bused to a different school every day. The teachers reminded us that in Colton, that we were lucky.
Or had been.
"Well, I think it's burning," Alana said. "This is bad."
I picked up my pace. The glow was orange. Fiery.
"David was there," I said. "He's torching all our supplies. Why can't he just leave us and forget about it?"
Jerome sighed. "People like him want to hurt. I'd tell you stories about things my dad tried to do to my mom when she left him, but it's not worth it right now. We've got to get there and see if anything's still standing."
"Something else could have caught it on fire," Gina said. "Someone might have been cooking when they died. With gas."
I hadn't thought of that. "We'll probably never solve the mystery," I said. A part of me was glad that there probably weren't any people or animals left in the town - Marlon was its name--to suffer from that fire. Another part was glad that the place wouldn't stink too bad with decay once we got there.
But a bigger part, one that wanted Dad, needed to know what if anything was left. The sun had to be only a few hours from rising. The town was miles away and the open desert would leave us just as vulnerable as David had.
So we saved our breath and walked. My eyelids wanted to droop from the lack of sleep. How many hours had it been? I hadn't slept in the Visitor Center. Or the gas station, that was for sure. I looked behind me to see if I could still make out the glow from that. Nothing. It might have stopped burning, or caught the pumps on fire and used up all its fuel.
Marlon was definitely on fire. We climbed a low, long hill and stood over the town, which was a collection of embers, jagged edges and lonely towers. Flames snapped in and out of low houses, trailers and squat buildings that might have once been stores. A hellish glow surrounded everything. I squinted. The town might be a mile or two away. It was close enough to get to if we hurried.
The sky was just a little gray now. A tiny bit visible.
Jerome faced the sky. I could make out his form now. "Run."
The four of us bolted down the hill. All the drowsiness vanished from my limbs as sheer adrenaline raced through my veins. We'd been walking all night. The sun was rising. We had only minutes before the danger level rose.
"I have to stop," Alana panted halfway down the hill.
Now it was my turn to grab her arm. "You can't," I said. My throat was hoarse and my stomach threatened to heave out the water Jerome had let me drink earlier. I wondered how long it took to die in the sun. Even if it didn't kill us right away, it could later...much later. The danger would hide like it did with Mom and then it would announce itself with a new mole...or a new cluster or strange, alien moles...
The sky brightened. Dark gray. Then medium gray. The town got closer and more visible. The fire wasn't as bright in the semi-dark. The close side of the town was darker. The wind had blown the fire in one direction, sparing it. A couple of trailers and a low building stood separate from the rest of Marlon as if they had backed away from the flames. A dusty road with pickup trucks connected them to the inferno.
No one needed to speak. I ran, ignoring the horrible burning in my sides, the cramps in my legs, the spasm in my foot. The trailers were both dark. One had the door flung open. A dark form lay in the doorway. It had small windows. The other building had barred windows. A police car out front that looked broken-down, with its hood raised. The town jail.
We were like a flock of birds, turning and running towards it.
The sky had gone pinkish on the horizon. The deadly sun was just rising. I could make out the thick, smoggy clouds above. They pulled against each other, clearing in little places and offering holes for death to come through.
I ignored the horrible smell as I entered. The reception desk was empty but a door down the hall was open. We all stopped in the lobby as the door swung shut behind us. It was mostly dark in here. A leg stuck out from the bathroom, clothed in a black shoe and a brown police pant leg.
"Not another bathroom," Alana managed, leaning over to catch her breath.
I rubbed my hands across my arms. They felt okay. When Mom was sick, I had read somewhere that the sunlight in the early morning and at sunset wasn't nearly as dangerous as the sun in the middle of the day. I stepped away from the glass door just in case and out of a pink rectangle of light that hit the reception desk. Parts of the station were dark. Safe.
I fell to my knees as Jerome said something about another vending machine. I gulped down breath after breath.
I crawled across the floor and towards a long couch that was free of bodies, dead or alive. The room spun around me and I climbed onto the couch, getting on my back. Nausea washed through me and I didn't care if I died right now. I thought about Dad and what New York might be like right now. He probably assumed I was dead. Like me, he didn't realize the Collider would be underground.
Alana said something to me, but I didn't respond. I wanted to be alone for a while. She said something about me needing sleep as someone made thumping noises and more glass shattered. The vending machine. It played in my mind as an image of Mom, made of glass and shattering in the living room of our house. Her pieces landed on the carpet and I swept them up into a dustpan along with bits of dust, drops of blood and crinkled, used water bottles. Meanwhile, David laughed and held up a match, touching it to the couch...
I turned over.
The sun came out and he melted away, turning into an acrid puddle on the carpet. I turned to Alana, not realizing she'd come into the house. But then the beam of sun reached her and she screamed, writhing in agony as dark little moles appeared across her body. I shouted for Dad, for anyone, but her breathing got farther and farther apart. Ten seconds. Then seventeen. Then thirty-two.
