by J. L. Esplin
Math, again. “I’m pretty sure it’s only a marathon if you run it, with one of those numbers pinned to your shirt.” I wave my hand over my chest.
“Is it even possible to walk that far in three days?” she asks, ignoring my logic.
“Oh, most definitely,” I say.
Stew leans around me again and says, “Probably not.”
What a punk! Leave it to Stew to remind everyone that we’re in the middle of a life-or-death situation.
“Wait,” Cleverly says. “Wait a minute.” She grabs the sleeve of my shirt, pulling me to a stop. “Is this our best option?”
I’m starting to think that our best option is leaving them behind. “Oh no, we have better options,” I tell her. “I just thought we’d go with Option B: scavenge drinking water from a toilet and walk for three days down this highway.”
She just kind of stares at me for a second while the wind does funny things with the loose pieces of hair around her face. Then she looks at Stew. “Is he always like this?”
“He’s gotten worse lately,” Stew says.
I roll my eyes at that. I’ve gotten worse?
“Listen,” I say, yanking my shirt out of her grip, “nobody is forcing you to come with us. If you have a better option, then great, go for it.”
I start walking again, Stew by my side, though he keeps looking over his shoulder. I don’t. I’m trying to set a three-mile-an-hour pace, which is kind of brisk. I’m not sure how long they plan to walk behind us, debating their options, but right now it feels like there is this invisible rope around my waist and that I’m pulling them with it. It’s already wearing me down mentally. That, and the fact that I’ve heard Will say at least twice that he’s thirsty.
I can’t help thinking about our water supply. Just before the end of today’s leg, about thirty-one miles from where we started, is the turnoff that leads to the reservoir. I don’t want to take it, no matter what Stew says about it.
It’s a waste of energy and time. We’ll just have to stick with the plan, ration what water we have, and walk straight past it. Which means, if we split our water evenly, we have enough for eight cups of water each. That has to last us three days. Eight cups, three days.
Okay, stop thinking about water.
Cleverly and Will catch back up with us, that invisible rope going slack, and I lengthen my stride, trying to keep our pace up in the wind. Will leans close to his sister and I hear him ask, “When can we get a drink?”
Cleverly shushes him.
“Stew,” I say, “you still have that ChapStick?” He digs it out of his pocket and I pass it on to Will. “Here, use that.”
“Thanks.” He takes it shyly, but then drops his sister’s hand and eagerly applies it to his lips and half his face.
“Just hold on to it,” I say when he tries to give it back to me.
“So, Jim Lockwood—I mean, your dad,” Cleverly says, her forehead creased in thought. “Where did you say he was?”
“Good question,” I say lightly, as if thinking about where my dad is doesn’t bother me at all.
“You mean, you don’t know where he is?” she says.
“My guess is somewhere between here and North Carolina,” I say.
“We haven’t heard from him since before he left town for a work trip,” Stew says.
“Oh.”
A mile marker is coming up on the side of the highway, a white reflective sign that indicates we’ve gone another mile, so I pull a black permanent marker from my shirt pocket and take the cap off with my teeth. I add a second line to the tally I started on the inside of my forearm.
“Where are you from?” I ask, tucking my pen back into my pocket, mostly to get off the subject of my dad.
Cleverly’s looking at the marks I’ve made on my arm and frowning because she has probably figured out that we’ve gone only two miles, and she has probably done the math and realized that we have thirty more to go before the end of the day.
It’s Will who answers. “Las Vegas. But Cleverly and I were staying with our grandparents when everything went dark.”
“We should call it the Great Power Outage,” Stew says. “Or the GPO!” He crosses his arms and makes some sort of unintelligible symbol with his fingers. Very rural Nevadan. Then he gets ahead of us, turns and throws his arms out, and yells, “Or simply, The End!”
I glare at him, but otherwise ignore him. “So, your parents are in Las Vegas right now?” I ask.
Will looks up at his sister, and she reaches down to squeeze his hand. “They were in Hawaii on vacation,” she says.
“Oh,” Stew says. “Bad timing.”
The wind is really starting to pick up, even more than before. Microscopic bits of dust and dirt blast through the air, stinging our exposed skin. We move off the shoulder to walk down the middle of the highway, where the dust is less irritating. I roll down my sleeves to my wrist and turn up the collar on my shirt, then slide my hands into my pants pockets and tuck in my chin. Stew does the same. Will has this thin, oversized gray hoodie tied around his waist, and we slow down for a minute so he can put it on. Cleverly is wearing only a Tshirt and jeans.
“You got a jacket or something in there?” I lean close to ask her through the wind, motioning to her backpack.
“No,” she says, shaking her head.
On one hand, I can’t blame her. It’s summer; it’s the desert. The wind is too warm to give a chill. But long sleeves are actually ideal right now. Something lightweight and breathable, light in color so it won’t absorb the heat of the sun. And if it makes you sweat a little … well, that’s a good thing. That’s your body cooling you down.
The white noise grows so loud that we don’t talk at all after that, except every so often when Cleverly yells, “This is crazy!” I try to keep us moving at the same pace, but I feel the energy draining out of me. I can’t even tell how fast or slow we’re walking anymore, but we have to be slowing down. It’s hard to walk, hard to hear and see, hard to breathe. It seems like it’s been forever since we saw that last mile marker.
“This sucks!” Stew yells.
“Yep,” I say back. My ears are starting to ache.
“We gotta stop,” he calls over the wind.
“Why? The wind isn’t going away.”
“I have to pee.”
I turn my head to look at him, shielding my ear with my arm. “Didn’t you go before we left?”
“I have to go again.”
I stare at him for a while, trying to figure out if he’s messing with me, because it’s been less than an hour since we left.
“Are we stopping?” Cleverly says from my other side.
“Yes,” I finally say.
Stew takes that as his cue to run back the way we came, powered by airstream, and we all turn our backs to the wind and huddle into our shoulders while we wait in the middle of the highway for him.
I watch Stew veer left and pick his way through the knee-high sagebrush, which looks like a field of soft wheat bending and swaying in the breeze, except it takes more than a strong breeze to bend sagebrush.
I cup my hands around my mouth and yell, “Don’t pee into the wind!”
Stew yells something back but we can’t hear it.
It’s kind of a relief to have the wind beat against our backs instead of our faces. But my hair has grown out longer than I usually keep it, long enough to get in my eyes and annoy the heck out of me in a windstorm. I tuck in my chin and stare down at my feet. Cleverly moves to stand in front of me, her bare arms crossed protectively over her stomach, letting me block most of the wind with my body.
I hesitate, then let my pack drop off one shoulder. “I have a hoodie you can wear.”
“I’m fine,” she says, loose hair whipping violently around her face. Will moves to stand behind his sister, his hood pulled up, burying his face in her backpack.
“It’s really lightweight,” I say.
“I don’t need it.”
“I’m not offeri
ng it just to be nice,” I tell her bluntly, which is partly true. “It’s not just the wind. Long sleeves will help you stay cooler. You’re gonna get fried in this sun. You get sunburned, your temperature will go up, which will make you more dehydrated—”
Eight cups of water each. That’s it.
She twists her mouth to the side. “Okay, I’ll take it.”
I dig my arm deep into my pack, pushing stuff aside.
“It’s kind of weird that we’re standing in the middle of a highway,” she says.
I was thinking the same thing earlier. This may not have been the busiest highway in Nevada, but it’s not like you could have taken a walk down the middle of the 318. It’s actually a shortcut between Ely and Las Vegas. Anyone willing to take the route with no gas stations, no rest stops, and no cell service could shave forty-five minutes off their trip. There were plenty of takers.
“Warn me if you see a car coming from behind,” I say, spotting my light blue hoodie and pulling it out for her.
“I will. Then I guess we’ll run out there in the desert and hide behind some sagebrush.”
She’d said it jokingly, but neither of us laughs.
We don’t talk about the reasons why, but I guess we’re both aware of the fact that seeing a car could be more cause for concern than for celebration. The last time I saw a running vehicle … well, let’s just say it didn’t end well.
Anyway, the chance of us seeing anyone come down this highway is pretty much zero.
Cleverly takes off her backpack and gives it to Will to hold, takes the hoodie from me and pulls it over her head. She tries to put the hood up, keeping her hair tucked back, but it keeps blowing down, her hands fumbling with the drawstrings. I finally grab the drawstrings and tie it for her.
“Thanks,” she says.
“You’re welcome,” I mumble, shoving my hands in my pockets. I squint off to the side at nothing, because it’s weird seeing her wearing my favorite hoodie.
“So,” she says in a long, drawn-out way, like she’s trying to fill an awkward silence. “I’m craving a cheeseburger like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I believe you,” I say.
“That’s because you don’t know how much I hate cheeseburgers. But right now, I could literally skin and eat a cow.”
“You could literally skin a cow? That’s pretty disgusting, actually.”
“Is it more or less disgusting than drinking toilet water?”
I pretend to think about it. “More,” I say. “In fact, I think I just lost my appetite. I’ve been trying to get rid of it for days now, so I guess I owe you one.”
She presses her lips together, like she’s trying to hold in a smile, and I realize I’m doing the same thing. I look down at my feet and sort of kick at the asphalt.
Then she says, “I assume Brighton Ranch has cows that we can skin and eat?”
A small laugh escapes from my chest, but not for the reason she thinks. “Mr. Brighton doesn’t have any cows.”
“What kind of ranch doesn’t have cows?”
“Don’t worry, other than live cows, they have plenty of food. He’s a self-reliance freak, like my dad. Probably even more so. He’s built up this mind-blowing food storage—”
“This sounds familiar,” she says, looking at me with a thoughtful frown, and I realize she was already promised the same thing once before. Her grandparents probably described Jim Lockwood’s place in much the same way, a place stocked with food and water, yet here she is, standing in the middle of a deserted highway, not eating a freshly butchered cheeseburger.
Then Will starts laughing. I glance up to see Stew about ten yards away, with his back to us, and I start laughing, too, because a stream of urine is sailing straight out in front of him, like a fluid yellow ribbon caught in the wind.
“Unbelievable,” I say.
“That is sick,” Cleverly says, but Will keeps laughing.
Stew finally comes loping back through the brush, his tan button-up shirt plastered to his chest, pumping his fists in the air. “Did you see that?” he calls.
“Unfortunately,” Cleverly says.
“That was pretty awesome!” Will says.
“Okay, we gotta get going.” I’m feeling antsy, like we’re wasting time. But before Stew gets to us, he reaches to his side and unhooks one of his canteens from his pack.
“What are you doing?” I call.
He starts walking backwards away from us, and unscrews the cap. “Signing the Declaration of Independence,” he says, putting two fingers to his forehead in salute.
I drop my pack and move quickly past Cleverly and Will, but before I can stop him, Stew brings the canteen to his mouth and tips it back, recklessly chugging water, his throat working to keep up with how fast he’s guzzling. I watch—almost stunned—as lifesaving water streams along the sides of his cheeks and down his neck.
“Stewart, wait!” I yell. I stop walking and hold up my hands to him in surrender, because that’s all I can do. He’s about ten feet away from me. I would rather chase him down, grab him by the throat, and punch him in the face, but I’m worried he’ll do something even stupider, like dump the whole canteen.
Finally, he comes up for air with a gasp and swipes the back of his hand across his mouth. I don’t know how much water he drank, or how much is left in his canteen, but I’m sure he’s used up the day’s water ration, and then some.
I’m kind of shocked. Stew can be a stubborn jerk when he wants to be, but he’s not an idiot. He’s annoyingly brilliant for an eleven-year-old, in fact. He wanted my attention, and now he’s got it.
“I guess it’s time for a water break,” I call to Stew as calmly as I can.
He shades his eyes from the sun and wind. “Yep. Might as well eat too.”
I bite down on my back teeth, and then agree with a nod.
Cupping my hands around my mouth, I turn and call out to Cleverly and Will, who are still standing where I left them. “We’re gonna stop for a minute!”
They look relieved. I don’t think they realize that Stew has just staged a mini water rebellion, and won.
5
THE CAP IS off Stew’s canteen and it’s making me nervous.
“Stew,” I call to him evenly, as if I’m not still really angry about the water, “you wanna see if we can make some sort of shelter from this wind?”
He hesitates, like he’s trying to decide if I mean to trick him. Finally, he shrugs one shoulder and replaces the cap.
I’m still nervous about him holding the canteen, but I look away from him—as if I trust him, as if he doesn’t need me to keep an eye on him with that water—and I go back to my pack and get to one knee on the warm asphalt to find our shelter supplies inside.
My dad made these disaster packs for each of us years ago—originally with about three or four days’ worth of food, water, and emergency supplies inside—and stored them in the cool crawl space beneath our hall closet.
If he hadn’t, our chances of making it out of here would be zero percent.
After moving some stuff aside in my pack, I find the blue tarp I’m looking for folded at the bottom. I also take out four metal stakes and my hatchet.
“Over here!” Stew yells, and I see he’s found a somewhat clear area of dirt within the sagebrush, which will also help block some of this wind. Cleverly and Will are already with Stew, huddled together and waiting for me.
I grab my pack and run down there, dropping it next to Stew’s pack in the swirling dust. Then Stew and I get to work setting up a tarp shelter, which would normally take us about two minutes, if we weren’t working in a freaking tornado. We nearly lose the tarp twice before we finally get a handle on it. With it folded in half the long way, we lay it out on the dirt, and Cleverly and Will stand on it to keep it down. Stew holds a stake in place through the first grommet on one corner while I use the hammer side of my hatchet to pound it in. But the ground is too hard, and I’m not exactly full of energy these days—I’m operating
on the handful of granola that I had before the sun came up. The stake barely makes a dent in the packed dirt before it slips to the side.
“Hold it really tight,” I tell Stew impatiently, but after a few more hits and slips, he gives up. He drops the stake and sits back on the tarp like he’s exhausted or something.
I’m beyond frustrated with him. Really, he had the easy job. I grab the stake and hold it in place myself. I get in a couple of decent hits, but it’s not going in, and I realize that I can’t gather enough force behind my swing if I have to worry about holding the stake too.
Then Cleverly is in front of me, kneeling down and taking the stake from my hand. She holds it in place with both her hands and looks me in the eyes. “Don’t break my fingers, John,” she says with deadly seriousness.
This causes me to smile nervously, so I quickly assure her, “I won’t. Okay, you ready?”
She looks like she has a firm grip on it, firmer than Stew was holding it. She nods. With my focus on the stake, I pull my shoulder back and swing the hammer down hard, using any upper body strength I can muster. She flinches a little, but then adjusts her grip and nods for me to go again. I pound the stake, again and again, until it finally, finally, starts to go in. Cleverly lets go and moves back while I finish it off.
I’m sweating by the time I’m done, out of breath, and feel a couple of blisters forming on my hand, but I don’t really care. I’m just glad it went in. I take a second to roll up my sleeves, and then we move on to the next one.
Will squats down to watch us, holding the extra stakes. Stew just sits on the tarp with his head buried in his knees. But once we get all four stakes in place, pinning down the bottom layer of the tarp, he has the decency to get off without waiting for me to ask.
Lifting up the top layer from two corners, Cleverly and I make a sort of V-shaped cave, with a floor, and a roof that the wind will hopefully glide right over—yeah, right. Normally, I’d prop it open at the corners with a couple of telescoping tent poles, but they wouldn’t hold up in this wind. Even with us holding it up, the tarp is flapping violently.
