After the End ate-1

by Amy Plum

  “Is it essential that we waste time talking about my eye, or can we go now?” she says stiffly.

  I try to speak like she does. “Considering the fact that we’re being trailed by a dangerous hippie bird hypnotist and two thugs, I don’t mind continuing the eye conversation later.” Turning the key in the ignition, I head out of the parking lot and toward signs for Highway 47.

  As we leave town, I have an idea and pull over in front of a drugstore. “Stay here,” I order, and duck out so fast she doesn’t have a chance to stop me. Two minutes later I’m back in the car. Juneau’s sitting there staring quizzically at me as I pull onto the road and drive toward the edge of town. I let her stare, and we sit in silence until we’re way out in the country, driving past a sea of yellow flowers toward a horizon of low purple mountains.

  Juneau’s fidgeting like crazy, and the longer she tries to fight the urge to ask me what I bought the happier it makes me feel. She’s been freaking me out so much for the last eighteen hours or so, it’s kind of nice to finally be getting under her skin. I glance at the clock. Almost an hour passes in complete silence. I’m kicking myself for not thinking to ask to use the phone in the drugstore. But the thought of people chasing us has driven almost everything else from my mind, including the reason I’m driving her. Also, it’s so much fun watching Juneau squirm, I don’t mind putting off contacting my father a little longer.

  Finally I reach forward to turn on the radio. Before I can touch the button, she blurts out, “What’d you get?”

  “Well, Juneau, I’m glad you asked,” I say in my Dad voice. I hand her the small plastic bag from the floor in front of my seat. She opens it and pulls out a pair of black sunglasses. She stares at them, confused for a moment. And then a broad smile stretches across her face.

  “It’s to help you look like a normal person,” I say.

  “Thanks a lot,” she replies, but she cracks a little pleased smile.

  “No problem.” I grin. “You have to peel this label off before you put them on,” I say, and reach toward the glasses. My hand brushes hers, and something electric passes between us. Juneau looks at me, surprised. I return my hand to the steering wheel and focus on the road and try to ignore the tingling in my fingers.

  27

  JUNEAU

  WE’RE PASSING OVER THE LINE FROM WASHINGTON into Oregon when Poe starts shifting around in the backseat. He flaps his wings a couple of times, and then goes into full-fledged panic, banging against the window, shedding feathers, and squawking like someone’s squeezing him.

  Miles throws his arm up to shelter his face, and the car swerves wildly. The giant wheels of a truck we were passing come inches from my window and I yell, “Miles! Truck!”

  Cursing, he yanks the wheel and we veer away from the truck just as it lets out an earsplitting honk.

  “Is anyone behind us?” Miles shouts.

  “No,” I yell back, and he crouches down, ducking out of reach of the flailing wings to steer over to the side of the road. I crawl into the backseat with Poe and wrestle with him until I get ahold of him, folding his wings in and pulling him firmly against my chest. His heart flutters wildly against my fingertips. I try to still his panic by closing my eyes and slowing my own heartbeat, but it has no effect on him. No longer able to struggle, his eyes roll in panic.

  Something is trying to pull him out of the car. I concentrate and attempt to tap into the Yara, but I am getting absolutely nothing. Please, I think. I pull my opal out from under my shirt and press it tightly against the bird. Nothing. A minute passes, and Poe starts to struggle again and there… finally it comes, my lips and fingers tingling as I make the connection. “Thank you,” I whisper, as my mind is filled with Poe’s emotions. Fear. Possession. After a second, I recognize what he’s feeling from something we studied in our wildlife lessons with Kenai’s dad. Ravens have an ability to remember where they have hidden food. And Poe has the overwhelming feeling that another bird has found his cache. He is desperate to fly there and protect his food.

  I can just guess who is messing with his little bird mind, and try to picture where it is that Poe wants to go. I see the same clearing that I saw before—the place Whit released Poe with the note for me. He must have lost my trail and gone back to where he started to wait for the bird’s return and get a clear picture of where I am. A flare of anger ignites in my chest.

  I still don’t understand what Whit is doing, but I am the last of my clan running free, and he wants to help the bad guys capture me too. Over my dead body, I think, and wonder if it will actually get to that point if I resist. I don’t plan on letting him find me to test that question.

  Poe feels my anger, and our fragile connection is broken. He flaps to break free from my grasp, so I pick up the T-shirt he was sitting on and wrap it around him, like I’ve seen the clan mothers do with their flailing babies. Once he is swaddled and can’t move an inch, he gives up. He shudders once, and then his wild eyes close and he seems to sleep. I place him on the floor, tucking Miles’s other dirty clothes around him like a nest.

  The car has stopped and Miles is staring at me, eyes wide, lips pressed tightly together. I crawl out of the back and into the front, strapping myself in. “He’s okay now,” I say, but instead of putting the car in gear, Miles turns it off.

  “Why was the bird having a panic attack?” he asks, his voice a note higher than normal.

  “Whit was trying to get him to come back and tell him where we are,” I say, and then, seeing a twitch in Miles’s right eyebrow, correct myself. “I mean, Whit was going to read his memory to see where we had gone.”

  Miles nods, his eyebrow still twitching. “So you used my shirt as a straitjacket.”

  “It’s called swaddling,” I said. “It’s to calm him.”

  “Because that’s what you do when you’re ‘close to the Yara,’” Miles says, ending in a spooky voice; then his lips form that sarcastic smile that makes me want to punch him.

  “No, that’s what you do when your baby’s freaking out. So, Poe’s a raven—I inter-species extrapolated. And it worked. What would you have done?”

  “Rolled down the window,” Miles says. “Let the bird go before it shits all over my backseat.” He gestures to two white splats on the upholstery and looks mildly upset.

  I roll my eyes and pull out the atlas. “We need to get off this main road. When Whit realizes that Poe’s not coming back, he will come after us. And if we were headed in the right direction—toward my clan—this would be one of the obvious routes we would take.” I trace our path on the map and find a junction where two small roads veer off and away from the highway, one meandering past a lake before it joins back up with the larger road near Idaho.

  There’s a road sign within view, and I compare it to the map and calculate how far we are from the turnoff. “We’ll keep driving another sixty miles and then exit,” I say, and then wait.

  Miles sighs and turns the key in the ignition. I’m going to have to tell him more. I need him to understand what’s happening or else… Or else what? a voice says in my mind. Or else he might leave me. And I still need him, I think, cursing the fact that, for some reason, I need this boy to help rescue my clan.

  28

  MILES

  “GIVE ME BACK MY WATCH, YOU FLEA-RIDDEN winged rodent!” I am chasing a raven around a clearing in the woods in the middle of nowhere Oregon as a brainwashed teenage ex–cult member meditates by the campfire. It seems that crazy spreads, because I have finally lost it. I’m at the end of my rope.

  “It’s shiny,” Juneau calls, shaking herself out of her trance. “Ravens like shiny things.”

  “Why did you even let him out of the car if there’s a chance of him flying back to Whit?”

  “He’s not acting paranoid anymore. Whit stopped trying to get him, so he’s safe now.”

  I stop chasing the bird and walk over to stand in front of Juneau. “Where. Are. We. Going,” I say, my teeth clenched so tightly I have to bite the wo
rds out.

  “Like I said, I’m trying to figure that out,” she says calmly.

  I stare at her, my eyes wide. “Three days, Juneau. We’re on day three of our demented road trip now. If you don’t tell me right now where we’re going, then I am out of here. Gone. And I will leave you and the bird here and go back to California and you’ll have to find someone else to drive you. Someone who doesn’t mind sleeping on the ground and being forced to eat innocent wildlife on a daily basis by an insane hippie.”

  “Innocent wildlife?” Juneau says, confused.

  “The roasted lizard we ate last night. Which, along with the bunny we ate on the mountain, makes two innocent wild animals that I consumed within twenty-four hours. What next? Bambi? Why don’t we eat something non-innocent and annoying? In which case, I vote for the bird.”

  “If you don’t want Poe to pick up your things, you shouldn’t leave them sitting out,” she rebuts.

  “I didn’t! It was in my bag!” I growl, and spin to see my bag sitting on the ground beside the tent, its contents strewn all over the ground. “I’m going to kill you!” I yell, and make a lunge for the bird, who flaps away and alights on a branch too high for me to reach.

  “Go ahead. Leave us, then,” Juneau calls. She turns and walks away from our campsite, out of the clearing onto the pebble beach lining the lakefront. Sitting down on a flat boulder, she pulls her knees to her chin and looks out across the water. I sigh, and my anger fizzles out when I remember what she looked like last night in the tent.

  She looked her age—a rare occurrence. She looked defenseless, even though her hand stayed inches away from her loaded crossbow all night. She looked sad.

  She spoke in her sleep again, but this time I think she was talking about me. “I know. I can’t trust him,” she said a couple of times. And then she whispered, “Who else have I got?”

  Right then, for the first time, I felt bad about what I’m doing. I mean, now that it’s clear I can’t talk her into going to California with me, all I’m trying to do is stay with her long enough to get a phone call through to Dad. There’s no way I’m driving her on her crazy mission. I’ve decided that as soon as we get to a town, I’m making the call.

  But she believes I’m going to help her. She believes her family has been kidnapped and that we’re on a quest to save them. She believes she has some kind of superpowers.

  Okay, she’s not all there, but that doesn’t mean I have the right to trick her and pretend that I’m her friend when I’m just going to hand her over to Dad. Not that I have in any way pretended to be her friend, I think. To stay on the moral high ground of this situation, I just have to be careful not to befriend her. She knows I’m helping her for a reason—she said it herself. So there’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing unless I lie. Or trick her in any way. So far, so good.

  But as for the imaginary superpowers: All day today, she’s been trying to do things. Talk to the bird. Press her necklace against the ground and talk to it. Skip rocks and watch the ripples on the surface of the water, lips moving as she does. Each experiment ends with her giving this frustrated, teeth-clenched growl before she goes off to try something else.

  She didn’t even offer to make lunch today, so I heated up some pork and beans, which wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it would be. I left her a bowl of it, but she fed it to the bird. And now it’s almost night, and it doesn’t look like dinner’s going to happen unless I do something about it.

  I hesitate for a moment, hoping she’ll spontaneously remember mealtime and fix us something from the supplies she bought. I concentrate really hard. Dinner, Juneau. Remember dinner. Hell, if she can read the raven’s brain, maybe she can read mine too.

  Of course it doesn’t work. I settle for the direct approach and walk down to the waterfront and sit next to her on the rock. She doesn’t move, just stays still with her head resting on her knees, looking out over the water.

  “You okay?” I ask after a minute.

  “No,” she replies.

  “Is it because I called you insane?”

  She balances her chin on her knees and pivots her head back and forth to say no. “That’s nothing new. We had already established the fact that you think I’m unbalanced. Which, coming from you, I consider as a compliment.” Her mouth turns up slightly on one side.

  Something about her expression makes my heart do a little surge of happiness. What’s wrong with me? I’m definitely catching her crazy.

  She sighs and looks serious again. “I’m staying here until I get a sign telling me where to go next. But I’m not keeping you captive, you know. You can leave at any time.”

  “Despite my threats, I wouldn’t leave you in the middle of the wilderness alone,” I protest.

  “Because I wouldn’t make it out alive without your advanced survival skills,” she says, trying not to laugh. “Okay. Thanks for saying you won’t leave me stranded. But you could drop me off in the next town,” she continues.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Frankie was right. You need me, don’t you?” she asks. I feel cornered and shrug. She doesn’t press me on it and looks back at the water.

  “If you didn’t like the lizards, why did you eat three of them?” she mumbles, and I can’t help but laugh. This wins me a small smile from her, and she rocks back and forth for a second before sighing and looking tired.

  “You haven’t eaten,” I say. “And though you’ve hardly said a word to me all day, I can’t help but notice you’ve been carrying on full-fledged conversations with all sorts of inanimate objects. And when they don’t talk back, you look like you want to kick the shit out of them.”

  “Sounds crazy, right?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “Sounds crazy… looks crazy. Why don’t you just settle for your insanity diagnosis and let me be?”

  “Because you look like you’re having a meltdown. And friends don’t let friends do meltdowns.” I say it even though I know she won’t get the reference. She never does.

  “So you’re my friend?” she says skeptically.

  Oh, crap. What have I done? I shrug and look out at the water. “Well, I wouldn’t say best buds, exactly, but I don’t hate your guts. At least not at this precise moment.”

  She almost cracks a smile, and there my heart goes again, turning a flip in my chest. No, Miles. Do not go there, I urge myself.

  She’s talking. “Tell me something about you. It doesn’t have to be important.”

  I lean over and pick up a stone from the ground beside the boulder. I roll it around in my fingers, feeling its smoothness, watching the colors change in its quartz-like interior as I turn it back and forth in the blue air of twilight. And then I throw it as far as I can into the water and wait for the plop before turning to her and saying, “I got kicked out of high school with just a couple months left until graduation.”

  “For what?” she asks.

  “Cheating on a test,” I say, “among other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “Bringing alcohol and pot to school.”

  “Pot?”

  “Drugs.”

  “Oh.” She hesitates and then asks, “So why’d you cheat? Didn’t you study?”

  “That’s the thing. I didn’t need to cheat. I had studied—I knew all the answers. I don’t know why I did it.” I try to remember and can’t. It was unimportant. Trivial. I’d done it a million times. “Probably just to see if I could get away with it. For the thrill.”

  “And you think I’m weird?” she says. I shrug and pick up another stone.

  Juneau rubs her hand over her spiky hair again. Then she exhales deeply, and her body looks like a balloon deflating. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I say, because you’re not going to believe it anyway.” She shuffles her body around so that she’s facing me. “In 1984, at the outset of World War III, my parents and some friends of theirs escaped from America to settle in the Alaskan wilderness.”

  “There was
no World War III,” I interject.

  She gives me a frustrated look. “Are you going to listen or what?”

  I lean back on my elbows and listen.

  29

  JUNEAU

  WHEN I FINISH, MILES SITS THERE STUNNED, HIS mouth hanging half-open and his eyebrows frozen in the up position. Finally he remembers how to talk. “And now?” he asks.

  “And now something’s happening to my skills. Since yesterday, I can barely Read. I certainly can’t Conjure. I can’t even get anything from Poe, and we’ve already had a connection.”

  “Can I see some of this stuff you use?” he asks, and it strikes me that while I was speaking he dropped his sarcastic, incredulous manner and is actually being sincere. He might not believe what I say is true, but he believes I’m telling him what I think is true. I don’t have to Read him to know that.

  Whit taught me to read body language—to be perceptive about the way people unconsciously show their feelings and thoughts through gestures and facial expressions. For the first time, Miles has let down his guard. He’s taken the first step to trusting me.

  So I reciprocate. I show him my pack. He watches as I pull out the firepowder, the stones, the herbs and animal furs and bones, and asks me what each one is used for. It’s strange—I have the feeling that in showing him, I’m betraying my people… disclosing their secrets. Just in case, I keep my explanations intentionally vague.

  And I don’t pull out the precious stones and gold nuggets. Whit specifically ordered that those always be hidden from outsiders. Though Whit is a traitor, his advice is sound. Frankie warned me not to trust Miles. All I need is City Boy to take off with the car, my money, and my gold, and I am well and truly stranded. I watch as he inspects a pouch of pounded hawthorn root, smelling it and wrinkling his nose.