I wished I had a good answer, but I couldn’t come up with one. So I told the truth.
“It wouldn’t have.”
“I told you how much I needed you,” she said. “Didn’t that count for anything?”
“Of course it did. I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to get hurt, Tori—”
“Bull!” she snapped angrily. “You wanted to wage your own little war. It’s been like that from the beginning. Everything you’ve done, every decision you’ve made, everywhere you’ve led us was about you feeling sorry for yourself and the life you lost. You may have been traveling with us, but you were always on your own journey.”
“You’re getting what you want,” I argued. “I’m going to Nevada.”
“You expected to die tonight,” she cried. “You left us. You left me. The only reason you’re here now is because you chickened out when it counted. I don’t care what you do anymore, Tucker. I’m tired of following you around.”
She turned to leave.
“So what are you going to do?” I called. “Are you coming with me?”
She stopped but didn’t turn back to me as she said, “I’ll be in the car, but from now on we’re on our own.”
She left the room and I was alone.
Everything she said was true. I had to hear the words to realize it. Anger and loss had driven me to take revenge. It felt like the only way to make the pain go away. Every move I had made, every decision, reflected that.
The others were just along for the ride.
I had convinced myself that I was helping to keep everyone together, but the truth was I was using them to support my own quest. I had been quick to criticize everyone else for not doing what was best for the group, while I was being the most selfish of all.
I wanted to run to Tori and apologize. I wanted to tell her that I got it. That I was wrong. That I wanted to try again. I wanted to tell them all . . . but I couldn’t.
They could be Retros.
Early the next day, I woke before sunrise after not sleeping much. I packed up my gear and brought it outside to the curb. First order of business was to find a new car. I got into the Fiat and only had to drive a few minutes before I found our next vehicle: a Volvo XC90. It had three rows of seats and still enough room for our gear.
I tried not to think about how all of these cars belonged to people who died inside of them.
When I drove it back to the library, Kent was waiting on the steps.
“I was afraid you took off without us again,” he said.
He never would have said that before my adventure the night before. Now everything I did was going to be scrutinized and questioned.
“Why would I take off without my gear?” I said, pointing to my bag on the curb.
“Oh. Didn’t see that.”
“Load up,” I ordered. “I want to get going.”
As Kent threw his bag in the back, Tori came out of the library.
“Did you have to get such a gas-guzzler?” she asked.
“We can always trade it in,” I said. “There are plenty of cars out there to choose from. Is anybody else coming?”
As if in answer, Olivia came out of the library with her bag hanging from her shoulder and her sunglasses on, even though the sun was barely up. She looked as though she was ready for a day at the beach.
“You sure you want to come?” I asked.
She walked right up to me, went up on her tiptoes, and kissed me square on the lips.
“Somebody’s got to make sure you eat your greens,” she said. She walked to Kent and tossed her bag to him.
“I’m riding up front,” she said. “I’m tired of being carsick.”
She went right for the passenger door and got in.
Kent shrugged and put her bag in back.
I looked to the library, expecting to see Jon come out. He didn’t.
“Do we say goodbye?” Tori asked.
“Goodbye,” I said so low that Tori could barely hear it, let alone Jon.
“I’ll drive the first leg,” I said and headed for the driver’s door.
“Wait!” Jon called as he ran from the building with his bag banging around his shoulder. “I was afraid you’d leave without me!”
He loaded up and was given the way backseat. Again.
That was that. We were all going. Even those who didn’t really want to. Was that a sign that we had truly become dependent on each other? Or did one—or some—of us go along in order to monitor our movements for the Retros?
With that in mind, I put the car in gear, and we began our journey.
Next stop: the gates of hell.
TWENTY-TWO
It was a tense, quiet, and very long journey.
Jon estimated the trip would cover roughly two thousand miles, which is a very long time to be stuck in the same car with people who were all on edge. We mapped out a route that was the most direct, while carefully skirting major cities. Fortunately most interstates didn’t swing too close to downtown areas, and the only time we had to stop was when we needed gas or to pillage a grocery store. Our route took us from Louisville to the southernmost tip of Indiana and on to Illinois. We swung way south of St. Louis, hit Missouri, and headed for Kansas City.
We passed through places I’d always heard of but never expected to visit. I wished I could have appreciated it more. Or even a little. Here we were, traveling across America, but rather than getting a glimpse of all the different cities and places of interest, we saw nothing but abandoned cars, empty skies, and weeds growing up through the roadbed.
Nature was already hard at work, trying to take back control. It would have to get in line behind the Retros, SYLO, and anybody else who wanted to stake a claim on the planet.
We guesstimated that it would take us three days of driving. We could have made it in less, but we didn’t dare drive at night. The first night we stayed in a hospital east of Kansas City in a town called Independence. There were plenty of signs all over the empty town that boasted of its being the birthplace of Harry S. Truman. It made me wonder what a former president of the United States would think of the mess his country had become.
We planned to spend the second night near Denver, then push on to Nevada the following day.
Very few words were spoken the entire trip. At least, very few between me and anybody else. I think they were all pissed at me for abandoning them and then acting as if I didn’t care. Kent and Olivia cozied up in the third row whenever they got the chance. I heard them whispering and giggling but could never make out what they were saying, not that I wanted to know. A couple of times Jon turned around to look at them, and Kent immediately smacked him and told him to mind his own business.
Tori barely acknowledged my existence and kept her baseball cap down low over her eyes. She had once again become the sullen girl from school who rarely spoke to anyone. I knew by now that it was her way of protecting herself.
I may have been traveling with four other people, but I was alone.
A few times along the way we passed the wrecks of some Retro jets, as well as destroyed Navy fighters and bomb craters. Each time it meant that a battle had taken place nearby, but there was no way to know whether it was a SYLO base or another construction site where the Retros were erecting a gate to hell.
A gate to hell.
What did that mean? I didn’t believe for a second that it was literally a gate into the afterlife. That made even less sense than Kent’s alien-invasion theory. But if Granger was telling the truth, SYLO would do anything to stop them from building another one. Based on what had happened at Fenway Park, I believed him. That left some questions: What were they? What was their purpose? What power did they give the Retros?
Was the “gate to hell” another monstrous killing machine?
Weighing it all kept my head spinning.
The morning of the second day we got up early, well before dawn, and started on our way to Denver. It was over eight hundred miles away, and we wanted to get there
in time to find a place to spend the night. One great thing about driving in an abandoned world was that there were no speed limits. A few times when I was behind the wheel I hit a hundred miles an hour. We all did at one time or another. I don’t know if we were in a hurry to get there or to end the torture of being in the car together.
Of course, we had to stop several times to gas up. I usually siphoned the gas while Tori and Kent hit stores for food. Kent loaded up on jerky, which was basically dried meat sealed in plastic that would probably last a hundred years. It was salty and a little too chewy for my taste, but it provided protein. I think.
We had gotten our stops down to a science. Between gassing up, grabbing food, and going to the bathroom, we were never stationary for more than fifteen minutes.
The silence was making me crazy, but I didn’t want to make conversation with people I didn’t trust. I couldn’t discuss plans or strategy for fear that the information would go right to the Retros. For all I knew somebody was using our walkie-talkies to contact them. I decided to hold anything I had to say until we hit the Valley of Fire.
We made incredible time into Colorado and were closing in on Denver before three o’clock in the afternoon—plenty of time to find a place to stay. Kent was behind the wheel, and without any explanation, he took an exit off of the interstate.
“What are you doing?” Tori asked. “We’ve got plenty of gas.”
“Side trip,” he said.
That got everybody’s attention.
“What are you doing, Kent?” I asked sternly.
“Relax,” he replied calmly. “I want to check something out.”
“You can’t make that call,” Jon said nervously. “Tell him, Tucker. That’s not how it works!”
“Either tell us what you’re doing or get back on the interstate,” I said adamantly.
“Look,” Kent said. “We’ve been on the road for hours. My butt is killing me. I just saw a sign back there, and I want to check it out, that’s all. No big deal.”
“Sign for what?” Olivia asked.
Kent turned around to us and smiled. “It’s a surprise.”
The rest of us exchanged worried glances that all said the same thing: We’d already had far too many surprises for one lifetime.
I had an added worry: Was Kent leading us into a trap?
“You’ll like this,” he added. “Trust me.”
Unfortunately, trusting him was the one thing I couldn’t do. But while we were arguing, Kent was driving us closer to whatever it was he wanted to see.
“Do you have your gun, Tori?” I asked.
“Whoa! Easy there, Rook!” Kent exclaimed. “Don’t get all paranoid.”
“Then tell us what you’re doing,” I demanded.
Kent huffed and said, “Fine. This trip has been torture. We all know that. Rook, you’re always saying how we have to be careful not to lose our sense of civilization, or something like that. It’s not normal to be stealing cars and eating out of cans and living on floors and peeing in pits. I get it, but there’s more to it than that. You know: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Remember that? I don’t know about you guys, but I haven’t been happy in a long time, and that’s about as important to me as anything. So if you’d all just relax, I say we stop worrying about SYLO and Retros and survivors and Armageddon for a couple of minutes and have a little fun.”
“What kind of fun?” Tori asked suspiciously.
“This kind,” he said and turned the car into a huge, empty parking lot.
There wasn’t much to see other than wide-open spaces and a few one-story buildings. As Kent drove us toward the structures, I spotted a sign that actually made me smile.
“The Track at Centennial,” I read aloud.
“The what?” Tori asked, confused.
“Go-karts!” Kent exclaimed.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Olivia said sourly. Apparently racing go-karts wasn’t on her list of fun things to do.
Tori didn’t seem too thrilled either.
But I kind of liked the idea.
“What do you think, Rook?” Kent asked hopefully.
I hadn’t seen him this enthusiastic about anything in a very long time.
“I think . . . we ride.”
“Yeah!” Kent exclaimed.
“You’re both crazy,” Olivia exclaimed.
Kent parked in front of the low buildings, where there was a snack shop, an arcade, and the track office.
“I’ll go find the karts,” he said and hurried off.
The rest of us were left in the car.
“What exactly are go-karts?” Olivia asked, perplexed.
“Little cars that you drive around a racecourse,” I replied.
“Oh. Like we haven’t been driving enough?” she shot back.
“Let’s give it a try,” I said. “We haven’t had fun in a long time.”
“Yeah,” Tori said sarcastically. “That darn genocide thing really got in the way of my playtime.”
“Kent’s right,” I argued. “We’ve been going nonstop, so why not take a little break? It won’t change anything, except maybe help blow off some steam.”
I didn’t add that if anybody needed to blow off steam, it was me.
“I’d like to give it a try,” Jon said. “We still have a few hours of daylight left.”
“All right, let’s do it!” I said and got out of the car, headed after Kent.
I was nearly at the building when I heard the sound of a gas-powered engine firing up. I circled the building to see a row of colorful, miniature race cars ready to be taken for a spin. Kent had started the first one and had moved on to another.
“They’re easy to start,” Kent called over the sound of the engine. “Flip on the red ignition, open the choke, and pull on the handle. Easy peasy.”
I chose one of the carts, and after a quick once-over, I saw that it was more or less like starting my father’s riding lawn mowers. I powered it on, pulled the cord, and was rewarded by the deep, loud rattle of the gas-burning engine. It was a powerful go-kart. I was looking forward to taking it on the track.
“Everybody take one!” Olivia shouted.
She was holding an armload of helmets that she must have gotten from the office. Olivia was up for fun, but she didn’t like taking chances. At least not where there was the potential for injury. Jon followed behind her with several more helmets. We all tried them on until we found one that fit. All but Tori.
She sat alone in the shade of the buildings.
“I’ll get her,” I said.
I jogged to her and held out a helmet.
“C’mon,” I cajoled. “It’ll be fun.”
“I don’t need to have fun,” she said flatly.
“I hear you,” I said. “It does feel a little . . . disrespectful.”
“You could say that.”
“Look, this is it. After tomorrow, things are going to change. I don’t know what we’ll find in Nevada, but I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, we won’t be together much longer.”
“We’re not together now,” she corrected.
I held out the helmet and said, “So then why not have a last hurrah?”
Tori looked at it, then stood up and grabbed it. Did I detect a small smile?
“Stay out of my way,” she said and strode for the track.
Five karts were powered up and purring. They were so loud that we had to shout to be heard.
Olivia and Jon were already strapped in, ready to go.
“It looks like a Grand Prix–type course,” Kent yelled. “Go around clockwise.”
I gave him a thumbs-up and put on my helmet.
Tori snapped on her helmet and buckled into a kart, as did Kent.
The first to take off was Olivia. I could hear her screaming with excitement from behind her helmet and over the roar of the engines. She drove out of the pit area, turned left onto the track, and was gone. Jon sped out right behind her. I was next. I settled into the pa
dded seat, secured the safety straps across my chest, buckled up my helmet, and jammed on the gas. The little go-kart lurched forward, and with a roar of the engine, I was off.
I sped out of the pit area and in seconds I was on the wide track. I’d driven go-karts before, but never on a track this big. In a word, it was awesome. After I figured out the nuances of handling the powerful little car, I jammed my foot to the floor and never picked it up. There were long straightaways and sharp turns on the snaking track. The trick was to cut the angles and avoid swinging wide, which would kill your speed.
I easily passed Jon and then Olivia. Both were driving conservatively, slowing down on the curves and not jamming it on the straights. I flew by each with a loud “Wooo!”
“Come back here!” Olivia called playfully. “I’m gonna get you!”
I figured I was the class of the track—until Tori cut me off on the inside in a tight turn and sped past. She even had the presence of mind to throw me a wave as she flew by. I was so busy watching her that I didn’t notice Kent coming up on my other side. He blew by almost as fast as Tori, and I got a taste of my own “Wooo!” as he shot past.
I didn’t care. I was having too much fun. For those few minutes I felt like a little kid again, because I was. There was nothing to worry about but the next turn, nobody to fear, for they were only trying to pass me, and no mystery about how it all worked. There was no death. No betrayal. No murky future.
It was perfect.
I lost sight of the others and ended up driving on my own for a good long time. That was okay. I was having a blast pushing that little go-kart to its limit, drifting into turns and speeding on the straights. For those few minutes all the dark thoughts and memories were washed away, or at least pushed so far back that I didn’t think about them. It was all about the pure joy of a mindless yet thrilling activity.
After four or five laps I realized that I had to pee, so I pulled the car into the pit and killed the engine. No sense in wasting gas. I popped off my helmet and jogged for the building to see if there was a working bathroom.
When I rounded the corner to the far side of the building, I saw something that rocked me and forced me to skid to a stop.