by Tracy Deebs
And then Eli’s laughing, too, earning more dirty looks. He grabs the atlas off the table, leads me through the maze of stacks until we’re almost at the back of the library. There’s no one around and we sink to the ground, lean against one of the bookshelves and spread the atlas out on our laps.
Now that I’ve remembered how to read an atlas—using the gazetteer at the back to point me in the right direction—it doesn’t take us long to figure out what city the coordinates are pointing us to: Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I turn to Eli, confused. “What’s in Albuquerque?”
“You mean besides desert?”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, besides that.”
“Resorts? Golf courses?”
“We’re supposed to save the world from a golf course?”
“Hey, stranger things have happened.”
“So, you’re a golfer, huh?”
“My dad is. He had me on his course almost before I could stand. By the time I was four, I had my own little set of clubs.” His voice is soft, his eyes a little dreamy and faraway. It’s an unexpected glimpse into this boy I’m traveling with but barely know. This boy I picked—or who picked me—to help save the world.
The softness doesn’t fit his smooth, popular image any more than it does the happy-go-lucky persona I’ve seen over and over again on this trip. But something, I don’t know what, tells me it’s more real than any other aspect of him that I’ve seen.
“You must be really good if you’ve been golfing all these years,” I say, working hard to bring my thoughts back to the subject we’d been discussing.
“I don’t do it anymore.”
“Why not?” It’s obvious from the way he talks about it that he loves it. I can’t imagine giving up something that I feel that strongly about.
“My dad and I stopped getting along about a year ago. Golfing’s not as much fun when you’re doing it with someone you can’t stand.” He blinks, and the softness is gone, replaced by the cocky grin and I-don’t-care attitude that I’ve grown accustomed to. I recognize it because, God knows, I’ve done it enough myself through the years. I’m an expert at pretending my relationship with my mom doesn’t bother me.
“Yeah, but is it worth giving up something you love just to hurt him?” I put my hand over his, squeeze.
“I’m not trying to hurt him. I just don’t want anything to do with him. I mean, he hasn’t unleashed a virus on the world or anything, but he’s still a bastard.”
I rear back at the reminder, feel shame swamp me as I know he wanted it to. Which sucks. I was just trying to help …
Eli must realize he’s gone too far, because he reaches for my hand and pulls me toward him. I try to yank away, but he holds me steady. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
“Yeah, it was.” I turn to look somewhere, anywhere, else. “I was just trying to …” What? What had I been hoping to do by talking about his father? It’s not like I wear my feelings for my parents on my sleeve for the whole world to see.
“I just—I don’t like talking about him. He cheated on my mom with Theo’s mother, treated her like crap for months. Then he left her and she couldn’t take it. Couldn’t be alone, couldn’t be without him. So she tried to kill herself a couple of months ago and has been in and out of psych hospitals ever since.”
My stomach clenches. No wonder he hates Theo so much. I mean, it’s not Theo’s fault, but I can see why Eli would have a hard time understanding that.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispers. “That’s why I don’t tell anyone. I can’t stand the pity.”
“I don’t feel sorry for you.” The words are automatic and untrue, but I do my best to sound sincere.
“Good. Because sympathy isn’t what I want from you.”
“Eli—”
His hand comes up to cup my cheek, and I start to freak out because I think he’s going to kiss me, and I’m not sure how I feel about that in the midst of all the rest of this.
I start to tell him so, but he’s leaning toward me and—
Someone clears his throat from the end of the stacks. “Good. You found the atlases.”
Theo’s voice is dry and distant and galvanizes me to action like nothing else could. I all but leap away from Eli, head ducked and fingers pressed against my mouth. My cheeks are burning, and I know I’m the same color as Theo’s polo shirt.
Eli pushes to his feet more slowly, and the look he gives his stepbrother would fell a lesser person. I steal a glance at Theo from under my lashes. His back is straight, his jaw tight, his eyes darker than I’ve ever seen them. And when he looks my way, they are completely shuttered. No life, no expression, no emotion in them at all. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad one, but I know I’m getting to hate how he can just lock everything inside. How I never know what he’s thinking or feeling.
“We need to get to Albuquerque,” Eli tells him. Am I imagining the slight challenge in his voice? The wispy edges of triumph?
“Do we?” Theo asks mockingly.
“That’s where the coordinates are for, at least according to the atlas.” I jump in, try to smooth things over.
“Then we’d better get started.” He starts to walk away, then glances back at the book near my feet. “You should bring that. I doubt Albuquerque’s going to be the end of this scavenger hunt.”
22
Eli and I end up stealing the Atlas. As I smuggle it out in my backpack—grateful that the alarms are off-line and can’t sound—I tell myself it’s okay. That saving the world trumps stealing a book any day, but it still makes my stomach hurt a little. Stupid, I know, but there it is.
The lines between black and white are blurring more with every second we’re on the road, on the run, until distinguishing the varying shades of gray has become next to impossible for me. Fleeing the authorities, breaking and entering, stealing. And even worse is the knowledge that there’s nowhere to go but down.
When Eli and I get back to the car, Theo’s already there. He’s sitting in the backseat, legs up, computer in his lap.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He doesn’t even bother to look at me. “Searching for the AR gate in level two, so once we get to Albuquerque we can plug in the password, solve the task, and move on.”
“Have you found it?” Eli swings up next to him, grabs a few granola bars from the stash in the back, and tosses one to me. He tries to hand one to Theo, but Theo ignores him.
“I haven’t found shit.”
I pull out my laptop from where I stashed it under the seat, then climb into the front. We sit there in awkward silence for over an hour, each of us exploring a different section of the level, looking for the AR gate. As we do, I try to figure out what the task is. I know it has something to do with healing the cracks in the earth, but I’m not sure how we’re supposed to do that.
I remember talking to my history teacher a couple of years ago about some guy who had purposefully set a huge wildfire in West Texas. It burned half the state, including his ranch, before they got it under control, and in the end he was left with nothing.
I had been struggling with why anyone would do something so deliberately hurtful—especially if they ended up getting hurt themselves—and she’d told me that some people can’t see past their obsessions. They set fires just to watch them burn, cause mayhem just because they can. And if they get caught in the cross fire, then they very often consider it an acceptable price to pay.
I’m afraid my father is like that man, only he’s set fire to the world. Is he sitting back somewhere, enjoying the show? Watching everything burn, even knowing that he’ll end up torched with the rest of us? I think he is, and that frightens me more than anything, because how can anyone reason with a zealot? Or out-think one?
Another fifteen minutes pass with us going nowhere before Theo slams his laptop shut. “This isn’t going to work.”
I had just been thinking the same thing, but hearing it from Theo—who has b
een so unflappable through this whole disaster—alarms me in a way I haven’t let myself be scared since I thought I was facing Homeland Security and the FBI on my own.
“Sure it is.” Eli doesn’t look up from the game. “We just need to find the right spot—”
“There are too many damn variables in this game.” Theo climbs into the driver’s seat, turns on the ignition. “Shut the door, Pandora. We need to get going.”
I do as he asks, then keep playing the game as he drives.
A few minutes later, he turns into a nearly empty gas station. But as we pull up to the pumps, I realize that only two are working—OUT OF ORDER signs decorate the rest. Plus, gas here is almost twice as expensive as what we bought the last time I looked.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “Why the huge jump in price again?”
“The control systems for the pumps are failing,” Theo says.
I run his words over in my head, but they don’t make much more sense the second time than they did the first. “I don’t get what that means.”
He sighs and I want to punch him. It’s the first time he’s treated me like I’m a pest since this thing began. “Each pump has a separate controller that regulates it,” he tells me. “It has a battery and that battery is somewhere in the pump. But it doesn’t run forever—it needs to be charged. No electricity—”
“No charge,” I finish for him.
“Exactly. More and more gas stations are going to start failing in the next couple of days, if they haven’t already.”
“Which accounts for the price hike,” I say.
“That and the general hysteria that’s beginning to crop up.” He nods toward the small store behind the pumps. Even from here I can see that the shelves are half-empty and that this owner, too, is guarding what’s left with a shotgun.
“If he’s so scared, why does he even bother coming to work at all?” I ask.
“Probably because this is his business, his livelihood,” Eli says. “If he wasn’t here, people would just break in and take whatever they want. Better to be here, afraid, and benefit somehow than lose everything and have no way of taking care of your own family.”
He’s right, but the image he paints is so disturbing that it makes me miss the library, where everything was so civilized, at least on the surface. But then I remember the atlas tucked in my backpack and wonder how many others stole books today when no one was looking.
“You knew this was coming,” I tell Theo. “That’s why you stocked up on gas.”
He shrugs. “What we have in the back isn’t enough to do much good, anyway—fill up one tank, maybe, and ensure that we aren’t stranded in the middle of the desert. But after that, we’re out of luck.”
“Do you always have to be such a downer?” Eli demands. “Can’t you just sit back and take things as they come for a little while?”
“If I did that, Pandora would be in jail and you’d be sitting at home sucking your thumb.”
“Screw you and your fucking savior complex. There are other people in the world who are just as capable as you are, you know. You’re not always right. You almost killed her in that car crash, remember?”
Theo’s jaw is so tight that I’m afraid he’ll crack a tooth. I don’t blame him. Eli’s being a jerk, and even knowing the cause doesn’t make it easier to swallow.
Besides, I’m grateful for Theo’s savior complex, or whatever it is. It’s the reason I’m standing here, and I think it sucks for Eli to throw it in his face in such a crappy way.
I start to tell him so, but something holds me back at the last second. I don’t like this feeling of being in the middle of two powerful but opposing forces. Especially when I owe them both.
Not knowing what else to do, I jump out of the van and start heading toward the front door of the shop. I don’t say a word to either of them, but since they both seem to feel like they have to play the rescuer to the role of damsel in distress that they’ve cast me in, I figure my disappearance should put a crimp in their fight. Sure enough, it takes only a few seconds before Theo comes jogging over to me.
“Where are you going?” he demands, catching my elbow with his huge hand.
“Away from the two of you, before you make my brain explode,” I say as I shrug him off. “And don’t grab me like that.”
“Sorry.” He puts his hands up in mock surrender, backs away a couple of steps, and just looks at me. I fight the urge to squirm. I’m sure I look awful—I haven’t done anything with my hair since I dyed it yesterday. And despite the rainstorm two nights ago, and the accident, and everything else, I realize I haven’t had a shower since before this whole thing began.
Though I’m studying the beads on my flip-flops, I know we’re both conscious of Eli standing by the car, watching us. I can feel his need to come over, to bust up whatever he thinks is going on over here. But the service station is getting busier, and after what happened last time, I know he won’t risk leaving the van unprotected.
“You know I appreciate what you and Eli have done for me, right?” I tell Theo. “I never could have gotten away if you hadn’t helped me. But that doesn’t mean you need to keep protecting me, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean you need to fight with Eli over the best way to keep me safe. I know you two think you’re total bad asses, but I can hold my own. I need to know that you respect that about me.”
“Bad asses?” he asks, an eyebrow raised in disbelief. “Seriously?”
“Would you rather I say you have a superhero complex?”
“Jesus, what is with you people today? Savior, superhero, bad ass. I’m just me.”
“And I’m just me. Not a damsel in distress, not a princess waiting for you to slay my dragons. I messed up, big-time. I’m the first to admit that. And you saved me. But you don’t need to keep doing that. I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.”
“Come on, Pandora. Don’t be stupid. We know that.”
“Then why all this arguing about what’s best for poor little Pandora? Neither of you even thought to ask me what I think.”
He looks like he wants to argue, but he doesn’t. Instead, he swallows whatever objection he has and says, “Fine. I’m asking now.”
“Why do you look like it hurts you to say that?”
“Because it does.” He’s exasperated and it shows in his voice and the huge hand he runs roughly through his hair. “I don’t want you to go along with Eli just because …”
His voice trails off, and I know I could torture him by making him say what’s on his mind. But the fact is, we both know what he’s worried about, and I don’t have it in me to string this whole conversation out.
“I don’t make decisions based on anything but what I think is right. If we stand a chance of winning this game, we have to agree that we’re all equal. And that we all have the responsibility to speak up when we think something’s going wrong. I won’t throw my lot in with Eli, but I’m not throwing it in with you, either. Not blindly.”
He closes his eyes in obvious relief. “Thank you, Pandora.”
“I think you have that backward.” I reach for his hand, squeeze it. And there’s that strange feeling, that odd little spark again.
The shutters come back down over Theo’s eyes, and I know he feels it, too. I start walking toward the store again. “Hey, where are you going?” he asks.
“To pee. Is that okay with you?”
“It’s fine.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out some money, presses it into my hand. “Have him put this on pump number six, okay? And if you’re not back out here in five minutes, I’m coming in after you.”
It’s a big concession, but I’m not stupid enough to think Theo would let me walk into danger alone. Nor would I want to. In this case, he’s just assessed the danger and decided things aren’t going to get out of hand at this small, out-of-the-way gas station.
Still, I’ll take my victories where I can get them, and as I head inside I feel lighter than I have since I saw my f
ather’s e-mail in my in-box. It’s hard for me to believe that was only a couple of days ago. It seems like a year has passed, at least.
Part of me still wants to go back, to rewind the clock. But it’s too late for that, too late to do anything but follow the course set out for us. It looks like it’s Albuquerque or bust.
23
It’s my turn to drive and I do, all three hundred miles to Albuquerque while Eli dozes next to me and Theo wedges himself between the seats in the back. It doesn’t look comfortable to me, especially the way he has to twist his body to make all eighty inches of it fit, but I guess it’s better than being stuck in the seat.
Thank God for the atlas, as the highway is backed up with people attempting to go I don’t know where, so I end up taking the side roads most of the way. The last thing I want to do is waste our gas idling on a road to nowhere. At one point I flip on the radio, try to figure out where they’re all going, but only a couple of stations are broadcasting, and it’s just more end-of-the-world stuff, so I turn it off. Maybe it’s stupid, but I can’t take preachers screaming at me to repent right now. Later, when the guys are awake, will be soon enough to face reality again.
For now I just want to drive.
We’re about forty-five minutes out of Albuquerque when I spot a produce stand by the side of the road. Though it’s getting late, it’s still open, a man and woman sitting behind the rows of fruit and vegetables, a few LED camping lanterns illuminating their goods.
I pull over as soon as I realize what they’re selling and back up the van the two hundred or so feet I went past them. Eli wakes up just as I turn the engine off, and he gets out with me, stretches his legs.
I’m starving, and my mouth waters at the sight of all this non-junk food. Every restaurant we’ve run across today has been closed, and we’ve been living on granola bars and bags of chips. It’s no more than what I deserve for letting two teenage guys pack the supplies, but since I now have a chance to remedy the situation, I’m totally going to do it.
