Distract him!
I shake my head, stuffing my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, but I do like she asks. Because there’s no chance that could go horribly wrong.
It’s already about thirty degrees warmer than it was in northern Arizona. I come down here so rarely that the hundred-degree heat always feels like opening an oven door and leaning in. The station attendant at least has the fans cranked up behind him, even if the owner is too cheap to shell out for real AC.
The bells above the door jangle. I glance back over my shoulder, surprised to see the formerly blank-screened pump suddenly light up with numbers. I don’t know what the attendant can tell from watching his register’s screen, and I don’t know what the hell the girl is doing, but a quick plan comes together in my head. It’s as dumb as it is simple.
I feign a big trip, crashing headlong into the shelves of candy. I thrash my arms out, knocking most of it to the ground in mess of epic proportions. The attendant must think I’m having some kind of a seizure, because all of a sudden, he’s at my side where I’m sprawled out on the floor, checking my pulse, shoving a thick candy bar between my teeth, like he’s afraid I’m going to bite my tongue off.
“Sir? Sir? Sir?” I don’t know that anyone has ever called me sir before, much less three times in fewer seconds. “Are you all right? Can you hear me? Sir?”
I make a big show of moaning, clutching my head as I turn onto my side. Just past the attendant’s hip, I can barely see the pump Zu is working, the way the numbers are spinning and ticking up, like she’s somehow pumping gas without paying for a cent of it.
“I’m going to call for an ambulance—”
The poor guy is so old and so genuine that I do feel a little sorry about all this, until he has the nerve to say, “It’ll be okay. You’re okay, kid.”
“I’m just… It must be the heat,” I say, grabbing his arm as he starts to pull away. “I’ll be okay. Do you have… Can I buy a bottle of water from you?”
Please say I have enough left to buy a water bottle.
“No, no, no,” the man says, rubbing what little white hair he has left off his sweaty forehead. “You wait here. I’ll get you a cup of water from the cooler in the back.”
I know it takes more than a few minutes to fill the truck’s tank, but whatever Zu’s managed to pump is going to have to be enough. I wait until the old man staggers onto his feet, straightens his ugly polyester blue uniform, and disappears into the back before I jump up and go running for the truck.
The timing is just right. She sees me coming around and jams the nozzle back onto its resting place. I give her a boost up into the cab, glancing at the pump’s screen. She’s somehow just stolen over three hundred dollars’ worth of gas.
The tires squeal as we go tearing out of there. I’m whipping around corners, looking for the on-ramp back to the I-17, laughing, laughing, laughing because I can’t seem to get rid of the adrenaline any other way. Zu reaches over and buckles me in, then does the same for herself. Her round face is flushed, but I think she looks pretty smug. I would be, too.
“Your brother teach you how to hijack a pump like that?” I ask when I can breathe normally again.
She shakes her head. No—it’s a new trick. I want to think about all the thousand ways that could have gone wrong, how there’s a good chance if the store has cameras, my face and the car is likely on them. I don’t know how this works, though—if that old man is going to shuffle back over to his register and see that someone’s been pumping gas without paying. And who’s going to smack the law down on me? Would the police really have time to follow up on this when they already have enough trouble to deal with in Phoenix?
Who cares? If they come after us, they come after us. They can try.
I’m not thinking straight—I know I’m not because the next words that come out of my mouth are so batshit crazy I almost don’t recognize my own voice. “If you help me find another kid, I won’t have to turn you in.”
But really, is it that crazy? She’s already proven herself to be a hell of a lot more resourceful than I am. She’s handy and basically means an unlimited supply of gasoline whenever and wherever I need it. And who knows? Maybe they have some kind of psychic link to one another. They can move cars and start fires and move a grown man across the length of a field. How is that any crazier? It doesn’t have to be her.
The smile slides down her cheeks bit by bit, and the disappointment I see in her eyes tells me the answer is no, long before the shake of her head.
It doesn’t make sense to me. I’m giving her a way out—I’m saving her life, and she doesn’t even pretend to act grateful? Maybe I was right before and she really does want to be taken in. She’s tired of running, tired of being hunted, and she just wants to walk back into the arms of the nearest black uniform and be done with it. That would at least explain why she didn’t run all of the times she could have. She wasn’t staying with me because she liked the company, obviously.
Look, I’m not a proud guy. I’m nobody’s favorite. I’m just getting by and have been for pretty much all my life. I’m not interested in college because I want to go on and be a doctor or a lawyer or one of those assholes who sit around with their heads in their hands on the stock market floor. On the scale of winners to losers, I know I fall somewhere in the middle.
I’m just trying to get myself to the point where I at least have options. I don’t understand why little Zu doesn’t feel that need, too, why she’d throw her freedom away like this. I don’t know anything about these camps, but I know if nobody is allowed to whisper a word about them, they can’t be good. If she can’t see that, she’s too trusting—she’s that man in the gas station offering to give me water while we’re robbing him blind. People like them, they can’t see the world for the wreck it is.
I mean, okay, I will admit it stings a little bit to know she’d rather be locked up than with me. Maybe—It could be she just doesn’t understand what she’s throwing away here. Maybe I need to explain it to her?
We’ve been sitting in the parking lot in front of the PSF station for almost ten minutes now. Unlike the one in Prescott, there’s a steady flow of people milling in and out. This includes the clusters of PSFs and the National Guardsmen they brought in to help smother the food riots that started the last time they tried to pass out rations to the growing population of homeless. Because, hey, guess what? When your average summer temperatures are over 105 degrees, people are going to do whatever they possibly can to get bottles of water, including trying to knife one another.
The generic-looking building is in the shadow of a number of empty skyscrapers, including the silky blue glass column of Chase Bank’s former hub. The baseball field named after the company was closed even before all the professional sports drizzled from a few games a season to none. I’ve heard rumors that a number of homeless have overrun the field; it’s constantly being fought over by gangs looking to expand their territory. At least, those are the rumors. Heaven forbid any of these government clowns ever give us real information about what’s going on, outside instructions to “avoid central Phoenix whenever possible.”
Three beige stories of tiny windows—it looks so harmless. You’d never know it was a military base from a distance, and I know it probably wasn’t built to be, but it just adds to the feeling that I’m about to go in and make a business transaction.
“Ten thousand dollars,” I tell her. “That’s all these people think you’re worth.”
She doesn’t say anything. The afternoon sun is low and gives her ivory skin a warm glow. The bandages I applied yesterday are starting to peel. Every now and then she has to reach over and smooth the edges back down. I can tell that Zu is thinking hard about something. Her throat is bobbing, like she has to swallow the words one by one.
“You did this to yourself,” I say, my voice going hoarse. Jesus—I can feel my stomach turning as I look back out across the cracked asphalt. A car pulls into the space to the right of u
s, one of those white, windowless vans that serial killers seem always to use.
Out comes this woman with this head of bleach-blond hair that’s been so fried by chemicals there are these horrible kinks in it. She’s wearing acid-wash jeans and a leer as she catches sight of Zu in the passenger seat. When she spots me, her smile falters a little, but she recovers and bends down to Zu’s eye level. The little condescending wave she gives the kid makes my stomach twist and turn over.
And then Zu shoves the door open as hard as she can, right in the lady’s smug face.
“Holy shit!”
The skip tracer goes down in a limp, unmoving heap. Zu, meanwhile, is all action. She shoves the door open the rest of the way and steps over the woman to get to the van. By the time she wrenches the sliding door open, I have enough sense to start crawling after her.
The woman is out cold—you’d have to be to stay on the burning asphalt that long willingly. I glance around, horrified that someone’s witnessed this, but Zu only has eyes for the small figure that’s curled up in a little ball of leather straps and chains in the middle of the van. She waves me over impatiently, like, Can you catch up with the rest of the class, please, and I jump from our car to the other, only bending down to pluck the keys from the unconscious woman’s hands.
The kid—this boy who’s twelve, maybe thirteen at the most—stops struggling the minute Zu takes the blindfold off his eyes. I’m not really believing what I’m seeing. The van smells terrible, and it’s clear from the stain that the boy’s gone and wet himself like the baby he really is. He’s shaking, screaming something at her around his gag. I let Zu take the keys and undo the handcuffs around his wrists and ankles herself.
I see it out of the corner of my eye, resting on the front passenger seat next to a small handgun—a shiny black tablet, the kind they only give to registered skip tracers.
“Oh my God,” the boy cries when she’s able to untie the gag. His chest is heaving with every breath he takes, and he’s crying the way I used to when I was a kid and I came home with a bad grade or after a lost soccer match and my mom would tell me not to be so goddamn pathetic about such stupid things. He’s sobbing the way I did the night I found my dad’s body.
“Thank you, thankyouthankyou,” he sobs, clinging to me.
The boy’s legs don’t seem to be working, so I lift him into my arms and carry him to my truck. I already know it’s not going to be this one, either.
I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore.
I hit the I-10 and all of a sudden I’m just driving, going as fast as I can without catching any attention I don’t want. Every time I look up into the rearview mirror, I expect to see some kind of military SUV gaining on me, streaking down the freeway with guns blazing. Or at least a white van with a frizzy-haired woman sporting a new shiner leaning out her window to fire at me mid-chase.
I’ve seen too many action movies.
Zu calmly holds the boy’s hand, and he actually lets her. I guess that’s the difference between kids these days and the kinds of kids I grew up with. They don’t have much pride—at least not enough pride to act like a punk and be rude because he’s secretly humiliated about having pissed himself and cried in front of a girl. I guess they can overlook these things, given their circumstances. It’s kind of sweet, in a way…like normal puppy love, only with the addition of freak superpowers and hormones.
I have to hand it to him, too. Now that he’s calmed down, I think he might be trying to flirt with her. He keeps asking her questions, but she only nods or shakes her head.
“She doesn’t talk,” I explain finally. “But she understands what you’re saying.”
“Oh.”
I look at him out of the corner of my eye—ginger, an explosion of freckles across his face, dressed in nice enough clothes to tell me someone out there cares enough to know he’s missing. He fidgets and shrinks back against the torn leather seat.
“What’s your name?”
“Are you like the woman?” he asks instead of answering. “A skip tracer?”
At this point, I am the exact opposite of whatever a skip tracer is supposed to be. Zu points at me and gives a big thumbs-up, and I feel like she’s just singlehandedly elected me the next president of the United States.
“Oh,” he says again. “Okay. My name’s Bryson.”
“Nice,” I say. “I’m Gabe. This is Dorothy.”
She reaches around Bryson and punches me in the arm again. “Ow. Fine. Zu.”
“Zu?” Bryson grins. “That’s cool.”
Okay. It is a little cool. Better than, like, Pauline, I guess.
“How’d you get picked up?” I ask. After two days of talking to myself, it feels weird to be having a conversation.
He sighs, banging his head back against the seat again. “It was really stupid. Della’s gonna kill me.”
“Della being your mom?” I didn’t start calling my mother by her first name until I turned twenty and was embarrassed to have the word associated with her.
“No, she’s…she’s watching me and my brother and a couple other kids. She and her husband are really nice and they’re taking care of us until things get better.”
“She’s hiding you?” I ask. Wow. The lady must have balls of steel. I should know. Terror’s got mine in a viselike grip. “Then yeah, I’d say Della is probably going to kill you.”
The whole setup is really fascinating. This woman, Della, and her husband, Jim, had recently moved to a quiet neighborhood in Glendale—one that was still hanging in there while the streets and cities around it started vacating with foreclosures. They didn’t have children of their own but were the friendly kind and, more importantly, were open enough with their views on Gray to be immediately trusted by the others. It started with one kid in Bryson’s neighborhood disappearing the night of his tenth birthday. Then, a few months later, another kid vanished. Finally, when it was Bryson’s birthday, his mother woke both him and his brother up in the middle of the night and brought them over to Jim and Della’s house, telling them only that they needed to be good and stay hidden until she came back for them.
“You didn’t like it there?” I ask.
“No—no, Jim and Della are the best. She’s a really good cook and Jim’s been teaching us how to fix cars in the garage. It just sucks to have to stay in the attic a lot of the time. We don’t really get to go outside, either.”
“And you got caught because you got sick of it?”
Another sigh. “Because they said they were going to take us to California, to a place there that was safe, and my brother, he’s such a baby—he didn’t want to go without this stuffed bear he used to sleep with. I just thought…it’s not so far between our houses, and if I snuck out during the night I could be real quick, you know?”
Zu nods, all sympathy, but there’s something about her expression that makes me think she wants to ask him a question.
“I’m guessing the skip tracer was lurking around the neighborhood, waiting for one of you missing kids to turn back up?”
“I guess.”
This is the part where I’m supposed to say something to make him feel better. I know it is, because Zu is giving me this look like That’s your cue, buddy.
“Well…it was nice of you to try. I’m sure, um, your brother appreciated it.”
“If I were smart, I would have taken Marty with me. He’s a Blue—he could have, like, thrown her down the street to help us get away, or something.”
“What are you?” Do not say Red, please, God, do not say Red….The Yellow was scary enough at first. I’m not really sure I could handle that.
“Green.”
“Which means what?” I press. Jesus, where am I even going? I need to pull off eventually, but I just want to get as far away from Phoenix as possible. “You have a good memory?”
He shakes his head. “I’m just good at math—puzzles. Sooo dangerous. Too bad you can’t throw puzzles at a gun.”
I let out a
low whistle, more at the bitterness in his tone than the mental image.
“I’m really…I’m really scared I messed it up for everybody. That somehow the skip tracer figured out where I was hiding and got Della and Jim in trouble and the others—”
“Nah, man, I doubt it, not unless you said something,” I say, cutting him off. If I’m not allowed to panic and freak out about this situation, no one else can. “Do you have a way to contact them?”
He has a phone number I can call; it’s just a matter of finding a working, unoccupied pay phone. They basically went extinct once cell phones came around, and then, when no one could afford cell phones or their service, suddenly there were lines around the block to use the precious few pay phones remained.
I find one, finally, at one of those outdoor strip malls that have one nail salon and one Chinese food restaurant still open. I have no idea what they’re doing that the rest of us aren’t, but whatever. Good for them.
Just to make sure no one’s going to stumble across us, I decide to wait it out a few minutes. Make sure it’s safe to leave them here alone. When I’m convinced it’s safe, I turn to interrupt their conversation.
“But I’m sure Della would let you stay, if you wanted to,” Bryson is saying from where he and Zu are huddled in that little bit of space between the dash and the seat. “The attic is big and we have video games!”
I snort, but a second later, a sharp pang cuts through me. I look down at Zu for her reaction as she scribbles out her response on the back of the same worn scrap of notebook paper I saw her looking at earlier.
I lean over his shoulder to see her response. It’s weird, because her handwriting looks the way I’d expect her voice to sound—big, girly, light. I’m going to my uncle’s ranch in San Bernardino.
Which is…where, exactly? California, I think. If she expects me to drive her all the way out to Southern California, she has another think coming.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell them. “Lock the doors, okay? And stay down.”