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chapter twenty-seven

Tuck

Several hours later, the sound of a clattering engine met my ears and we all turned, the sight of a white pickup coming toward us. We stepped out of the road, and I waved, the older truck with an emblem that advertised Elrod Coltrane, General Contractor surprisingly slowing and then coming to a stop. I reached out, signaling to Emily to stay back until I’d determined the people inside were safe. A young man rolled down the window, another guy his age in the passenger seat leaning forward to see around him. “Professor Tecton! Holy shit!”

I could practically feel the glow of Charlie’s grin from next to me. He moved past and reached out to the driver for a handshake. “At your service.”

The guy laughed and as Emily and I approached the window, I saw that both men were wearing sweatshirts with the University of Tennessee logo. “Damn, this is crazy as hell,” the driver said. “Charlie freaking Cannon is just walking down the road all normal-like.” The young man laughed again, a sound of both amusement and disbelief. “I’m Emilio and this is Wells,” the driver said, hitching his thumb over to the guy next to him.

I introduced myself and Emily did too, and then Emilio leaned his arms on the window frame. “Wait, Nova, right? Charlie’s girlfriend?”

Emily nodded and mumbled something that sounded affirmative.

“You’re coming from Tennessee?” I asked, gesturing to Emilio’s sweatshirt. I glanced at the logo on the truck. I was going to assume that whoever Elrod Coltrane was, he hadn’t given these two young men permission to borrow his work truck.

“Yeah. We’re engineering students there. We all got evacuated because of the flood. A dam upstream of the Tennessee River broke and the entire campus was knee-deep in water. The wreckage from homes was floating past. We didn’t want to wait and see what else was gonna be in that water.”

“A dam broke?” Charlie asked, his voice incredulous.

“Yeah. The hardware and software systems that control everything from pipelines to chemical processing plants to dam operations had to have gone down with the power surge or whatever it was,” Emilio said. “There’s not much in modern society that those systems don’t control. We’re fucked.” He leaned back and gestured to his friend. “We mostly get how it works but have no idea how long it’ll take to get fixed over such a large area. All we know is we gotta get home where the lights are hopefully on. Our folks have gotta be freaking. What about y’all?”

We’re fucked. I swallowed, overcome again by yet another piece of information that sounded too big to truly grasp while we were standing in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road. “We’re trying to get home to California,” I said. “From what we’ve been told, the power is down from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to here.” And now we knew it extended down to Tennessee too.

“Pittsburgh? Damn,” Emilio muttered, looking down for a moment as he obviously digested that. He glanced over at his friend. “We were hoping it was more contained…maybe a couple states. We’re double fucked.” He gave himself a small shake, obviously choosing to think more about that later too. “We’re headed to Nebraska but we could drop you near Topeka before we continue north. Hop in,” he said, nodding toward the bed of the truck and then winking at Charlie. “Any friends of Professor Tecton are friends of ours.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said, his posture and radiant expression speaking of his new lease on life, despite the additional bad news we’d just received. He paused at the driver’s side door, perhaps measuring whether or not there was room for him up there or whether he’d have to ride in the back with the second-class citizens.

Regardless of having to endure Charlie’s self-important smile for hours, or whether this was a stolen truck or not, I wasn’t going to turn down a lift by a couple of college kids who appeared trustworthy enough and could cut several hundred miles from our trip. “That’d be great,” I added.

We climbed up to the bed of the truck and sat down, Emily and Charlie on one side, me on the other, before the truck jolted forward, bumping along the road.

After about half an hour, Charlie’s smug smile drooped and his head landed on Emily’s shoulder, and I heard him let out a rattly snore. The man was constantly tired and wound up. And that could very well have to do with the situation at hand, but I was pretty sure it also had to do with the fact that he wanted a hit or a pill and could no longer get one. Maybe he hadn’t been enough of a user that he was going through withdrawal, but he was probably pretty darn antsy with not being able to take the edge off with his regular coping mechanism.

I stretched my legs out to the right of Emily and crossed them at the ankles. I’d have liked to get some shut-eye too. I’d tossed and turned the night before, still keyed up from hearing Isaac’s account, my mind churning with thoughts and horrible visions of what downtown St. Louis had looked like in the aftermath of the event. And now I could add the picture of colossal dams overflowing as trillions of tons of water washed out entire towns in their wake.

But beyond all that, I didn’t feel safe not keeping guard. By necessity the truck was moving pretty slowly and at certain points, if someone had wanted, they could have chased us down and waged an attack.

As we drove, we saw more broken-down vehicles, and also a few groups of people who lifted their arms and attempted to wave down the truck. But Emilio and Wells didn’t stop for them like they’d stopped for us. Perhaps the information we’d given about the extent of the outage had heightened their rush to get home, or maybe they realized if they pulled over for everyone trying to hitch a ride, they’d be filled up and weighed down in short order.

I saw Emily turn her head as a couple who’d shouted a plea, disappeared behind us. “I guess we got lucky that we have the professor with us,” Emily said, tipping her head toward Charlie with a wry, if slightly shaky, smile. I nodded. I had to give credit where credit was due. We were also lucky that Emilio and Wells had slowed down when we’d waved, enough to notice Charlie at all. Isaac had mentioned that he’d gotten a ride too, which meant drivers had responded to his obvious need, but I had to imagine that certain kindnesses were going to end rather quickly.

“Yes, it was fortunate in this case that Charlie is recognizable and considered safe. They’re perfectly justified in driving right past anyone trying to get them to stop,” I told her. “Not everyone on the road is going to be well-meaning. We’ve only gotten a small taste of it.”

“More Leonards and fake Amish?”

“Yes. But mostly it’s wise to remember that the worst sides of people come out when they get scared and desperate. People who might not be predators under normal circumstances will do really fucked up things to survive.”

She seemed to deflate a little. My eyes lingered on her. If she’d been bothered that Charlie’s stardom outshined hers with the two men in the front of the truck, she hadn’t shown it. I allowed my gaze to run over her now as she focused on the road ahead. Since we’d left the Goodfellows’ home, she’d been wearing jeans and a thick, quilted jacket over a flannel shirt and a pair of boots. The whole ensemble was warm and practical and made her look vaguely ridiculous and kind of sexy too. A few days ago, I would have blamed that unwanted—and inconvenient—reaction on the fact that I hadn’t had sex in over six years. But now… I could admit that it wasn’t just that Emily was beautiful, it was that she was fiery and spirited too and that was the quality—above all else—that had always drawn me to her and still did.

Her hair was braided this morning, loose strands framing her face. She raised her hand to scratch her cheek and I saw that the talons she’d had at the start of the journey were now mostly gone. Then Charlie sighed in his sleep and moved his head more snugly into the crook of her neck and I felt an unwelcome zap of jealousy. Ever since Em and I had worked together getting the horses under control, I couldn’t help thinking of her as more of a partner than an old friend I was doing a favor for. But Charlie kept reminding me exactly why that was ridiculous and foolhardy.

I looked away, off in the direction we were heading. That feeling of partnership had been brought on by the high emotions of what we’d experienced together—and the thrill of vic tory. It would wear off sooner rather than later and I could go back to—happily—being annoyed by her.

Next to her, Charlie stirred, blinked, and sat up. He bent his neck one way and then the other. “Are we there yet?”

The truck pulled over to the side of the road several hours later and we climbed down from its bed. Emilio leaned out the window and said, “This is our turnoff. You’ll probably want to stick to this road.” He extended a piece of paper and a pen. “Do you mind autographing this?” he asked Charlie. “No one’s ever going to believe we gave a movie star a ride.”

Charlie seemed all too delighted, signing with a flourish and then handing the pen and paper back over. We thanked them again and Charlie waved as they drove away, standing there even after their car had disappeared from view.

“You’re welcome,” Charlie said to me and Emily when he turned our way.

I resisted an eye roll, deciding to give Charlie his moment instead.

“My feet thank you kindly,” Emily offered.

Charlie smiled. “So… Kansas,” he said, looking around. “It really does exist.”

Emily laughed. “Did you think it didn’t?”

“Have you ever heard of anything that came out of Kansas?”

Emily chewed at her lip for a moment. “The Wizard of Oz,” she finally said.

Charlie grinned and I turned up the road to get a visual of what was ahead.

I could see the distant skyline of Topeka, smoke rising in the air from various points. There’d been fires here too. And likely more death than I wanted to think about as large groups of people in a small area of land fought over limited resources. I also noticed several clusters of people walking on the edge of the highway, away from the city. I’d have preferred Emilio and Wells drop us off near more wilderness, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and I also didn’t want to end up lost somewhere.

On the bright side, civilization did mean more chances to find food that didn’t have to be hunted and skinned and honestly, another cereal truck would be fucking fantastic.

“A highway,” Emily said as she joined me. “Is that bad?”

“It’s not ideal, but we might be able to score some snacks again from a broken-down car. And we can use one of them to sleep in again. It’s going to be dark soon enough and there’s nowhere around here I might hunt.”

Until I could find a map, being in a location with signs was important even if populated areas worried me and I’d have to be much more vigilant about being ambushed while we slept.

We traveled under the overpass, a few fires already lit beneath the massive structure with groups of people hunkered down around the flames. I moved behind Emily and Charlie, prepared to pull my weapon out should someone approach us, but no one did. I smelled the roasting scent of meat and saw a few of the people lift their heads and watch us as we moved past, likely ready to defend their food should they need to.

“What are they cooking?” Emily asked quietly, turning her head and barely moving her lips. “There are no woods around here.”

“Probably rats.” Maybe other more domesticated animals too, though I didn’t say that, and I refused to think too much about it. All I knew was that it’d been six days since the power went out in what I now knew was a multistate outage, if not the entirety of the United States, and desperation was setting in everywhere, some locations more than others. And for those who had been vagrant or homeless even before this started? Maybe they had a leg up, or maybe they had it worse than anyone.

Charlie made a gagging sound, and we stepped out from the dimness under the overpass out into the light of the setting sun.

We walked past a large warehouse, and then a few dark busi nesses, the roads that led into this city growing more congested with abandoned vehicles the farther we traveled. I saw a gas station several blocks up ahead and gestured to Charlie and Emily to follow me in that direction where I might find another map to replace the one Isaac had stolen.

The buildings were closer together here—we passed a printing company and a taco shop, an insurance agency, and a photography studio.

When we got to the gas station, we found it completely looted. We stepped among the wreckage of overturned shelves and broken glass, not so much as a pack of peanuts in sight. And if any maps had been here at some point, there weren’t any now.

“Great,” Charlie hissed. “Not a damn thing here. And I still have no fucking shoes!”

We stepped out of the store, the sky deep orange streaked with blue, and growing dimmer by the moment.

The sound of an engine caught me by surprise, and I looked up the street to see a vehicle just turning the corner and heading toward us. “Tuck!” Emily breathed. “A truck.”

“Come on,” I said, and ducked as I ran along the side of the gas station, going low along the fence and then stopping. I looked around the corner to see an old-fashioned truck that looked like it had once hauled produce or something trundling toward us, a fabric cover obscuring the bed and featuring an extra-wide back bumper. There were two broad-shouldered men in the front, staring ahead resolutely, and call it a gut instinct, but I didn’t think this truck would stop for a couple of hitchhikers. But it was heading in the direction we needed to go. I turned toward Emily and Charlie, who were behind me. “Follow me.”

The truck drove slowly past us and then I came from behind the fence, hunching low as I ran behind it. Reaching up, I easily grabbed onto a bar and pulled myself onto the bumper. I moved over as Emily and Charlie came up next to me and did the same thing I’d done. Thankfully the truck was heavy enough that our weight didn’t seem to rock it too much, and we simply hung on, squatted down as we watched the hollowed-out industrial section of town go by. Then we turned onto a long stretch of dark road, the truck avoiding stopped cars, its large tires easily carrying us through the weedy overgrowth on the side of the road.

What sounded like a window being cranked down met my ears, and then I smelled cigarette smoke. I thought I heard the crackly noise of static from the front as though the driver was changing the radio stations, perhaps searching for one that worked, but after a moment, the window was rolled up again and I could no longer hear the sound.

We traveled for about half an hour, moving between a squat and a kneel so as not to tire our legs, and I came to enjoy the lull of the engine, and the gentle rocking of the truck, taking the small break to try to remember the order of states we’d need to pass through to get home. We had the remainder of Kansas, and then we’d head to New Mexico, Arizona, and finally to California.

“Oh my God,” I heard Emily whisper and when I looked at her, I saw that she was peeking under the canvas flap. She turned toward me, eyes wide as she pulled the flap open so I could see inside.

I looked in, several pairs of sleepy eyes blinking back at me. “Kids,” I said, looking from one child to another. “It’s a truckload of kids.”