by J. L. Esplin
Stew’s muffled voice replies, “I’m not rubbing anyone’s feet. Go to sleep.”
I try not to think about how long it’s taking them to drift off, try not to count the seconds. But it isn’t easy to rest my body while at the same time make myself stay awake. I make a mental list of the things I’ll need to gather together before I leave, decide to move everything into Cleverly’s backpack. It’s less bulky, easier to carry. I don’t think she’ll mind.
Then I think about time. I’ve got one mile to go before I reach the turnoff, then another eight miles before I reach the reservoir. I’m giving myself three hours to get there. If I spend a couple of hours there boiling water, then take three hours to get back, I’d arrive back here just before sunrise. I could sleep for maybe an hour or so.
Finally, Stew’s familiar snore starts up, and even though I’m dreading it, I know it’s time to go.
I pull my knees up carefully, propping myself into a sitting position while keeping my sights on Stew’s sleeping form. He’s on his side, his back toward me. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Cleverly move and sit up.
I tilt my head and give her a look that says, What are you doing?
She bends close to me and whispers, “I’m going with you.”
I pull back, mouth the words “No, you’re not” to her. But she ignores me, reaches for her shoes.
I look over at Stew, his snore soft and even. Will looks totally out too. But I don’t want to risk waking them. I grab my shoes, give them a few taps on the ground to scare out anything that might have crawled inside there, then pull them onto my aching feet. I grab the flashlight, tug on Cleverly’s arm, and though she’s only had a chance to slip her feet halfway into her shoes, she follows me off the tarp and into the brush.
“I thought about it,” she whispers, using my shoulder for balance as she pulls on the heel of each shoe, “and there are a couple of points I’d like to make.
“First,” she says, releasing a deeply held breath and standing up straight, “I don’t think it’s smart for you to go alone. I think it’s a stupid idea, John. Not to mention reckless.”
My eyes narrow at her, but she continues, “And second, if I go with you tonight, I can drink my fill at the reservoir. Then when we get back, only two of us would need water in the morning. That’s more water for Stew and Will, more water for the next two days. It’ll even make up for the lost canteen. You know I’m right, John.”
Of course I know she’s right. I knew she was right the moment she sat up and said she was coming with me. But I still have to ask her. “Are you sure you can do it?”
Her chin goes up. “I don’t know. Like you said. I’m trying not to think about it too much.”
I give her a long look, like I’m considering her answer. Then say, “Can’t really argue with that. Ready to go?”
11
WE STAY QUIET until we’re a good ways from camp. Me, carrying the backpack with the canteens, water bottle, pot, fire-making supplies, and our knives—just in case. Cleverly with the flashlight.
“I have a question for you, Jonathon,” Cleverly says, breaking the silence.
“Okay,” I say, snorting out a short laugh, “but call me John.”
“Oh. You don’t like three-syllable names?”
“My name is just John.”
“Oh. Just John.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“No, I like just John,” she insists, even though I definitely remember her saying John is a boring name.
“What’s your question?” I say.
“What was so funny about us riding horses to Las Vegas?”
I grin a little, remembering Will’s idea. “Well, first, there are no horses at Brighton Ranch. It’s not that kind of ranch.”
“Ah,” she says, but she sounds confused. “What kind of ranch is it?”
I hesitate, because I know the Brighton Ranch she is imagining is about to change. Horses on big green pastures, rolling hills, shade trees, a babbling brook. Well, the babbling brook is actually there, and some shade trees—it’s all just surrounded by a lot of dirt. “It’s a tortoise ranch.”
“A what?”
“A ranch for desert tortoises.”
“You’re kidding.”
“What, you don’t have tortoise ranches in Las Vegas?”
“Pretty sure we don’t.”
My grin widens. “When Will was talking about horses, I kept picturing us straddling a couple of Mr. Brighton’s giant sulcata rescue tortoises and slowly riding them to Las Vegas. You know how long that would take?” A laugh escapes me now, just thinking about it.
“What is the purpose of a turtle ranch?” she asks.
“Tortoise. It’s part wildlife preserve, part business. Mr. Brighton ships them all over the world. Mostly to locations with desert climates.”
“A mail-order turtle?”
“Tortoise.”
“Are you trying to tell me that turtles and tortoises aren’t basically the same thing?”
“As nicely as possible,” I say. I grab the straps of the backpack, just to give my hands something to do.
“You know an awful lot about animals,” she says. “Ducks, and tortoises, and rats, and cows…”
I look at her with a raised eyebrow. “You brought up cows. I think it’s my turn to ask a question.”
She clamps her mouth shut and faces forward.
“What’s your last name?”
“Iverson,” she says.
Cleverly Iverson, I repeat in my mind.
“What’s your favorite color?” I ask.
“Green. What’s yours?”
“Cobalt blue.”
“That’s oddly specific, John. Any other deep questions?”
She’s been doing this side-to-side, back-and-forth motion with the flashlight since we left, scanning the ground while we walk. It’s sort of dizzying. I don’t think she even realizes she’s doing it. Every once in a while, her light will fall on a big beetle or the tail end of a lizard scrambling away, and she’ll make this little squeaking sound, like she can’t help it.
“Do you regret coming along?” I ask a little hesitantly, because we haven’t gone that far. There is still time for her to change her mind.
“No,” she says. “I would have been awake most of the night worrying anyway.”
“Worrying about me?” I ask, surprised.
She gives me a look. “You are the last thing I’m worried about, John.”
“What are you worried about?” I ask.
“Ha ha,” she says, as if that were a bad joke.
But I didn’t mean it like that. Of course she’s got things to worry about. We’re less than halfway to Brighton Ranch, and as bad as today was, it’s only going to get worse. We’ll have less food, less water, less energy for walking.
But even beyond this walk to Brighton Ranch, there’s so much more to worry about. I wonder if she worries as much as I do about the things she can’t control. If she thinks about being on her own, without her parents, as much as I think about being without my dad.
“Why did you come out here?” I ask.
“I told you. So I can drink at the reservoir—”
“No. I mean, why did your grandparents send you and Will to our place?”
Her forehead creases, like she’s trying to remember something. “Did I say that?” she asks.
My eyes widen a little. “I don’t remember your words perfectly, but you said something like that. You said your grandparents know my dad, and that he would take you in,” I say, suddenly remembering the words.
“Oh yeah,” she says. “You’re right. I’m sorry, John. I just made that up.”
“You made it up?”
“I didn’t know who you were. Just some boy filling up his canteen with toilet water. Was I supposed to tell you everything?”
I don’t bother reminding her that she drank some of that toilet water. “So, your grandparents didn’t send you to Jim Lockwood’s place?”
&n
bsp; She shakes her head. “We left on our own, without them knowing.”
She doesn’t elaborate, so I ask, “Why?”
“My grandpa had started skipping meals,” she says, making a figure eight pattern on the ground with the light. “Insisting he wasn’t hungry. But we knew it wasn’t true. We could see the tremors in his hands.”
“There wasn’t enough food?”
“There wasn’t enough anything,” she says quietly. Then she quickly adds, as if she’s worried how that might sound to me, “They kept a food and water storage. My grandma had chickens, a vegetable garden. But it’s just the two of them, John.”
I get what she means. Her grandparents hadn’t planned on Cleverly and Will. Four people using the food and water storage meant for two.
“If my grandparents would have had any idea how long this would last, I think they would have done things differently in the beginning, made different choices. Rationed food and water sooner, or driven us down to Las Vegas before the gas ran out. Not that I blame them,” she insists. “I would have done a lot of things differently too.”
“What happened exactly?” I ask.
“I told you. My grandpa started skipping meals. He had talked about your dad, said he wished he’d had a setup like Jim Lockwood—big tanks of water, racks of food in your garage. So I filled up a bottle of water for Will and me to share. Then I wrote a note, and I left it on the fridge. My grandpa won’t have to skip meals anymore.”
Something about the way she says it reminds me of Stewart. A stubborn determination to do things on her own, not rely on someone to the point of breaking them. Still, I can’t help but admire her and Will for deciding to leave.
Then I think back to when we first ran into them in the abandoned home. “How did you know how to get to our place?”
“Mile marker 98,” she says. “I found it in my grandma’s address book.”
I nod in understanding. When you live off a highway in the middle of nowhere, you don’t bother with street names. Going sixty-five or seventy-five down the highway, you could blink and you’d blow right past the crooked green sign on the unpaved road leading to our house. But mile markers on a highway count down the miles—or up, depending what direction you’re traveling. People just know what mile marker to look for to get to our place. Mile marker 98.
“Obviously we didn’t know your dad was gone,” she says. “Or that everything else was gone.” She pauses, then says, “Stew told me, you know.”
A heat blooms in my chest before I’m even sure what she’s talking about. “Told you what?”
“He didn’t say much about it, but he told me what happened to your dad’s food and water storage. That some men broke into your house in the night and took everything.”
It doesn’t bother me so much that Stew told her, just that she’s brought it up. I’m not sure why—I mean, she just told me all that stuff about her grandparents, how she ended up out here. But I am bothered that she’s brought up the robbery. Does she expect me to talk about it? Tell her what it felt like to wake up with my dad’s gun pressed to my head?
I drop my hold on the backpack straps, stuff my hands into my pockets. “What did you think happened to it? That the two of us ate a six-month supply of food in three weeks?”
“Well, no—”
“That we somehow misplaced six fifty-five-gallon water tanks? You know how much water that is, Cleverly?”
“Three hundred thirty gallons,” she says without missing a beat.
I roll my eyes. “That’s right. I forgot you’re a math genius.”
“Genius? That’s really simple math, John.”
“Look, can we just not talk about it?”
She glances up at me, then back at the road. “Sorry,” she says quietly, like she’s confused or hurt.
I can’t explain it to her. It doesn’t even make sense to me. The way a thought can enter my head and suddenly my entire chest goes tight, my throat closing up, impossible to breathe …
Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it.
“It’s fine. I’d just rather talk about something else, all right?” I say.
She nods, but neither of us comes up with anything.
Cleverly has to wind up the flashlight again, but we don’t stop walking through the darkness, the shoulder of the highway flat and gravelly here. I listen to the sound of gravel crunching beneath our feet. My stride is different from hers, a bit longer, but every once in a while, our steps fall into perfect sync, an even crunch, crunch, crunch, before falling out again.
We’re close to the turnoff, and I’m surprised at how fast the mile went by. Years back, some creeks used to extend out here, closer to the highway. There’s a small ghost town near where they used to be, mostly crumbling walls and a few gravestones, but also a row of trees. I see their dark outlines getting bigger against the starlit sky.
Cleverly’s done charging the flashlight, and the beam hits the ground, swinging forward and back with the movement of her arm. We approach the trees. On one of her upswings, the light flashes ahead on the road and I catch a glimpse of something on the ground. On the next swing, I see it again.
I slow and come to a stop. “Can I have the flashlight for a minute?”
“What is it?” she asks. But she hands it to me.
I wind up the light really fast to brighten it, and then walk forward about ten more steps, past the gravel, shining it directly at the soft dirt. Where the side of the highway meets the turnoff to the reservoir.
Tire tracks. Standing out in the dirt like a 3-D stamp. Wide, like they came from a truck.
12
I GRIP THE flashlight tighter, crouch down on my heels, and stare at the wide trail of dirt like I’m inspecting it.
I don’t need to. It’s obvious that the tracks are recent, the impression of tire tread crisp and clear. This morning’s windstorm would have erased any tracks that were already there, would have blown the dirt road smooth.
“I guess this means there are people already at the reservoir,” Cleverly says behind me. “Think it could be Spike and his pregnant wife, Killer?”
You better hope I don’t see you again.
My pulse kicks up a beat, though I hate that I’m letting that stupid threat get to me.
“That would be my guess,” I say, as if it’s not a big deal. I push to my feet, wincing as my arches stretch, pulling at that sore spot on my right foot.
“Oh, good. We can get Stew’s canteen back,” she says, but I hear a nervous tremble when she speaks.
“It’s a big enough reservoir,” I tell her. “I think we can avoid running into anyone who’s camped out there. You ready?”
We start down the road, heading west toward the far-off mountains. I hand her back the flashlight so she can continue her scanning, our path flat and dusty now.
“What do you miss most?” I ask, just to get my mind off threats from tattooed bodybuilders twice my size. “Can’t be a person,” I clarify. “Something that uses power.”
“Listening to music,” she answers after thinking about it. “With my headphones in, full blast, walking through my neighborhood—”
“You miss walking?” I say, bumping her with my shoulder.
“No,” she says, bumping me back much harder, causing me to stumble a little. “I don’t know how those words even came out of my mouth. What do you miss most, John? And don’t say something stupid, like your Xbox.”
“But that’s what I miss most,” I say, throwing my hands up. Then, “Fine. My cell phone.”
She gives me a look. “That’s cheating.”
“How is that cheating?” I ask, even though I already know.
“The only reason you miss your cell phone is because you want to use it to talk to someone,” she says. “Missing a cell phone is basically missing a person.”
“You can do a whole lot more with cell phones than just call people, you know,” I argue. “Maybe I miss taking selfies—”
Cleverly gra
bs my arm to stop me. “Hang on, I’m getting kind of cold.” She gives me the flashlight to hold and unties my hoodie from around her waist.
The temperature has dropped more since we left. I wonder if Stew has felt the chill and woken up to pull the sleeping bag over himself. If he’s realized we’re gone.
“Do you think we should have left a note for Stewart and Will?” I ask. “Just in case they wake up?”
“Will won’t wake up,” Cleverly says like she’s sure. “He sleeps like the dead, even when he hasn’t spent an entire day walking.” She pushes her arms through the sleeves, pulls the hoodie over her head. “You would know more about how Stew sleeps, but he seemed completely exhausted to me.”
“Yeah,” I say, frowning. “You’re probably right.”
“Let me take a turn with the backpack,” she insists, and I shrug and peel it off my back. She takes back the flashlight and we start walking again. I stuff my hand into my pants pocket and find that box of matches, turning it end over end.
“There’s a campsite,” I tell her.
“A campsite?”
“On the west side of the reservoir. It’s pretty flat and rugged. Not much different from what you’ve seen out here. But all along the banks of the lake, there’s tall grass, up to your waist in some places, and some cottonwood trees. There are twenty sites, and maybe half of those have decent fire pits and picnic tables. And then five of those also have shade enclosures. Those five sites with shade, all in a row, are really the only ones that ever get used.”
“Any bathrooms?” she asks.
“No, just pit toilets. The campsite has no plumbing, no potable water.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘potable,’” she admits.
“No drinkable water. You have to bring your own.”
“Oh, great. We didn’t bring any.”
I hold back a grin. “Anyway. We can assume that whoever got there before us has set up camp at one of those five sites.”
“All right. So we know what area of the reservoir to avoid.”
“Actually,” I say, releasing a breath, “maybe we should check out those five sites.”
She gives me a quick look. “Why would we do that?”
