Craig suddenly lets out one of his croaking laughs. “That’s my shack!” he cries, slapping his knee like I’ve just said the punch line of a joke. “But you can all come along. Stay the night. Get some rest.” He eyes the collar round my neck. “Looks like you’ve been through the wars.”
I catch Ryan’s eye, silently asking him whether we ought to go or not. But really, we have no other choice. We’re too exposed here and we have nothing to eat. We can eat and sleep in the bunker. Plus, there’s more of us than him. He’s far too outnumbered to try anything.
“Okay,” I say finally. “Let’s go.”
*
Everyone takes it in turns to eat a pickle out of a jar. Then we use the medical supplies to patch ourselves up. I hadn’t realized how badly wounded I was by the whip. There’s a huge gash across my chest and another across my back. Molly cleans them both and sews them up, but I’m probably going to have scars. The adrenaline must have stopped me from feeling any pain. I’m also covered in bruises from the car crash. I look like a state.
“How did you guys all meet then?” Craig asks as he offers around some canned peaches for dessert.
“It’s a long story,” I say, scooping one up with my fingers and plopping it in my mouth. It’s sweet and sticky, and so delicious.
“It’s nice you’ve got each other,” Craig replies. “I’ve been alone for years.”
I feel sorry for him. At least on Catskills Mountain we had trees around, and animals. The desert is completely barren. It’s the sort of landscape that could drive you mad.
“Why did you settle here?” I ask.
Craig shrugs. “Good a place as any.” Then he laughs again, wheezing as he does. “I mean there’s nothing around for miles and miles.”
For someone who has been alone for so long, he seems strangely jovial. I can’t help but think of Emmanuel in the castle on the Thousand Islands. Being alone has driven him crazy, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe because being crazy has made it possible for him to survive.
There’s ample space in the bunker part for everyone to get a place to sleep, though we leave our stuff upstairs in order not to crowd the room. We all huddle up together, full after eating jar after jar of provisions. Knowing we’re so close to Houston—just an eight-hour drive—has made us throw caution to the wind. We all know that once we wake up tomorrow morning, we’ll head out on the open road and reach our destination. With the radio to help guide us, there’s no way we can fail. That doesn’t stop me whispering a prayer under my breath. This world is brutal and unpredictable and I know that between now and tomorrow evening, anything could happen.
For the first time in a long time, we feel like we can relax, let our guards down just a little bit. The bunker feels so secure, not to mention being in the middle of literally nowhere. But feeling secure gives our minds the chance to process what’s happened. One by one, our emotions creep up on us. Zeke and Stephan are dead. So are Rose, Flo, and Logan. We’ve all lost so much, seen so much, fought for so long.
“Hey, Molly,” I say when I realize sleep won’t come to me. “What did you mean when you said we all had pasts?”
I hear her sigh in the darkness. “I meant that I was a bit of trouble when I was a kid. The hotwiring cars kind. My parents were going crazy because of me. I was always in trouble. Then the war came and they died. There’s nothing like being orphaned to make you clean up your act.”
Her words hang in the air. Silence falls in the cabin as we all process what she said.
“I lost my parents too,” Ryan says. “During one of the first airstrikes.”
I roll onto my side and look over at where his disembodied voice is coming from. It’s so dark that I can’t even make out his silhouette. I wonder if that’s the reason for his sudden candidness. In all the six months we were together in Fort Noix, Ryan never spoke about anything personal like his family or life before the war. I never asked because I figured he had a reason not to.
“But it was when my sister died that it was the worst,” he finishes.
“What happened to her?” Bree asks softly.
“She had an asthma attack. Can you believe it? With the war and the slaverunners and nuclear destruction it was her own body that killed her. She’d run out of medication and that was that. She was six years old.”
Six years old. The same age as Trixie.
“My brother was killed by slaverunners,” Ben says.
His voice is as clear as a bell. It’s the first time I’ve heard him truly admit his brother is dead. For a long time, he was clinging onto the hope that he was alive, but it seems that he’s finally accepted reality.
“You had a brother?” Ryan asked.
I think it’s the first time I’ve heard Ryan and Ben behave cordially to one another since they first met back at Fort Noix. Finally, they have something in common, something that can make them realize they’re not so different from one another, that they’re both on the same team.
“I did,” Ben says. “It’s how Brooke and I met. We were chasing the car that had Bree and my brother in it.”
“He was brave,” Bree said. “Right up to the end. He didn’t let the slaverunners hurt me. And he loved you. He said you would come for him.”
There’s a long silence.
“Thank you,” Ben finally says. I can hear the emotion thick in his voice.
“Flo wasn’t my only sister,” Charlie says suddenly. “I had two other ones, Daisy and Rebecca. Flo was the oldest. I was the youngest.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say into the darkness.
I can hardly believe we’ve all been beside each other so long without getting to know the fundamentals. It’s just another thing the war stole from us: socialization, communication, friendship. When your life is reduced to fighting and surviving, there’s never really a good time for a chat.
“That’s why Flo wanted me to be stronger,” Charlie adds. “She didn’t want me to get taken like they were.”
“Was it slaverunners?” Molly asks.
“Yes,” Charlie says. “Slaverunners.”
No one asks anymore. The very fact that we’ve even spoken feels like the beginning of a healing process has begun. It’s like we’ve stepped over some invisible line, broken down one of our guarded barriers. In this awful, terrifying world, opening up to each other about our pasts has been one of the scariest things we’ve done.
Despite our exhaustion, no one sleeps well that night. Bree wakes several times, sweating and screaming. She used to have night terrors all the time when we lived alone on the mountains but they stopped when we were at Fort Noix. I feel terrible for putting her in a position where she is so scared again. The only difference now is she has Charlie to comfort her. I can’t help but feel a little pang of jealousy as I realize she leans on him more readily now than she does on me. It’s partly her growing up and becoming independent—she’s starting to realize she can’t rely on me forever—but it’s also partly because of me, because of how I’ve had to shut down my emotions to get through it all. I’ve been through so much, I don’t have anything left in me to give.
As I lie there in the darkness, my mind mulling over everything we’ve been through, it dawns on me that I’ve become the soldier my dad always wanted me to be, the practical, tough, emotionless son he never had. But I also know that my emotionless exterior will only last so long. I won’t be able to keep it up forever. One day, all the heartache will hit me at once, and when it does, I’ll cry enough tears to refill the Mississippi.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I’m almost surprised when I wake the next morning, still alive and in one piece. No disaster befell us during the night like I’ve come to expect. I even slept at some point.
I still have the heavy metal neck brace on that the slavers put on me and have no idea how I’m going to get it off; I can’t exactly get Molly to take her axe to it. It’s irritating and cumbersome, but it’s just another niggling pain I’m going to have to endure.
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My wounds are sore as I start to climb the ladder. When I reach the trap door, I push up with my hands and discover that it’s stuck. I push again, putting more strength into it. But it doesn’t budge.
I start to panic. The darkness down in the bunker seems to suddenly envelop me, and the stagnant air seems to grow even hotter. I can’t help but think of the prison cell Ben and I were locked in back in Arena 1 in all those months ago.
Finally, I jam my shoulder in the trapdoor hard enough for it to give. The hinges ping off as I slam my palms into it.
Quickly, I ascend the ladder, and the sight that meets me makes me cry out in despair.
Everything is gone.
From the floorboards beneath me, I can hear people jerking awake, scrabbling to get to the ladder and find out what’s making me wail. Ryan’s the first to emerge out of the hole. He looks at where I sit crumpled on the floor with an alarmed expression on his face.
“He took everything!” I cry. “Craig. He stole everything.”
The others begin filing out of the underground bunker, and look around at the empty room with dismay. The food, the weapons, our backpacks, everything has gone. Then I realize, with an even greater despair, that our map has been taken as well.
Ryan comes over and drags me back up to my feet.
“We can’t stay here, Brooke. We don’t know who he will have alerted to our presence. We have to leave.”
I know he’s right but I can hardly stand. The shock of losing our possessions is too great for me to bear. All that food, gone, and the means with which to hunt stolen from us too. What are we going to do?
Finally, I manage to stand and stagger out of the shack and into the bright daylight. At the very least, our bikes remain. Craig must have left them knowing the engine noise would wake us up.
Without the map to guide us to Houston, we have no choice but to follow the Mississippi south. The roads are so destroyed here that there aren’t even any signs we can follow, and the bombs have flattened everything, meaning there aren’t even any distinguishable landmarks. It may add some more hours onto our journey but at least we’ll end up in Louisiana eventually, and then it’s just a case of heading west until we hit Houston.
We mount the bikes and go, my heart falling as I lose a bit more faith in the kindness of mankind.
*
After several hours driving, our gas gauges start to get low. It worries me to think we might have to make the last leg of the journey on foot.
We’re in a town built on the banks of the river that hasn’t been completely flattened. It’s called Baton Rouge and the road here is still intact. There’s a road sign informing us that Route 10 heads all the way west right to Houston. I can hardly believe our luck. The road sign tells us it’s 271 miles, which will take about six hours if the road holds out the whole way. As long as we don’t have to detour or run out of gas we should be there by nightfall.
It seems like everything is finally looking up. But a feeling inside of me says it won’t last for long.
We’ve been riding for another four hours when something up ahead gets my attention. I can’t quite tell what it is I’m looking at yet, but something about the view ahead of me isn’t quite right.
The closer we get, the better my view becomes, and it dawns on me that we’re approaching a series of massive craters that have completely obliterated the road.
We drive up to the precipice and stop. One by one, we dismount from our bikes and stand side by side in a row staring at the chasm before us, the latest hurdle blocking our way.
“It looks like the Grand Canyon,” Bree says.
I don’t know how she can find beauty in it at all. To me, it looks like a scar in the earth. A war-inflicted wound. A gash that will never heal, violently blighting the world.
I can’t help the disappointment that bites at me. We’re less than two hours from Houston and now we’re facing another massive detour that might add who knows how many hours onto our journey. We’re so low on gas, I don’t even know if our bikes can handle going off course again. The last thing we need is to be stranded and have to proceed on foot. It would be a cruel trick for fate to play on us when we’re so close to the Texas border.
“What are we going to do?” Molly says. “We can’t go around it. It looks like it stretches on for miles.”
She’s right. The crater goes on and on, as far as the eye can see.
“We’ll have to find a way down,” I say.
“You want to drive through it?” Ryan questions me, an eyebrow raised.
“What about the radiation?” Ben adds. “It will be worse down there. We can’t risk exposure.”
As much as it frustrated me when the two were arguing, having them team up against me is even more annoying.
“Do either of you have a better plan? You know how to make a bridge?” I say sarcastically in response. When I’m met by a wall of silence, I add, “Didn’t think so.”
And with that, we get back on the bikes and begin driving slowly along the edge, looking for a place we might be able to drive down. But this crater isn’t home to a slaver community. No one’s chiseled a path for bikes into the crater’s edge. It’s just a sharp, jagged hole, blasted into the earth by a nuclear bomb.
“If we had some rope, we could try shooting it across with an arrow,” Molly says.
“I’m pretty sure that only works in cartoons,” I say. “Plus, there’s the whole not having any rope situation.”
“What if we abandon the bikes?” Bree says from behind me. “Maybe we’d be able to scramble down?”
It’s one of the more sensible suggestions, but it’s still too risky. Not having the bikes could mean the difference between life and death. We need to keep hold of them as long as we possibly can.
“Hey, look!” Charlie suddenly cries, pointing ahead.
We ride over to where he was pointing and see animal tracks leading down into crater. If we follow in their footsteps, we’re bound to find a safe way down. It looks like a pack of them walk this route regularly, at least enough to have worn a wide groove into the mountainside. But I look at the others, unsure.
“They might be predators,” I say.
Molly raises a cocksure eyebrow. “Last time I checked, we were the predators,” she says.
I can’t help but smile at her fighting spirit. She’s right. Whatever animals made those tracks, we’re stronger, better, and fiercer than them.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s do this.”
I lead the way down the perilous path. We don’t use the motors, instead letting gravity do the work. Any way we can save gas now we’ll have to take. Plus, if we’re quiet enough, we won’t draw attention to ourselves to whatever predators are lurking in the bottom of the crater.
Bree holds onto me tightly, tense as I maneuver down the steep incline. Bits of rock tumble from beneath my tires, making my heart fly into my mouth. She’s gripping so hard it’s starting to irritate the wounds on my chest and back.
After a tense ten minutes, we finally make it into the crater. As soon as I get on level land, an eerie feeling comes over me. My spine tingles as I get that undeniable sensation that we’re being watched.
We race across the trough of the crater then reach the steep wall at the other side. There’s no sign of a path back up. I curse under my breath.
“We need to search on foot,” I say. “There’s not enough gas to keep riding back and forth.”
As I start scanning the crater’s edge, it occurs to me that the only way we’re getting the bikes back up is by pushing. Even if we do find a path we can follow, it’s going to be back-breaking work getting back out of here.
“I think I’ve found something!” Molly calls.
We all go over and see her peering into a hole, five feet in diameter, dug into the side of the crater. It’s clearly been made by an animal of some sort.
“Do you think it’s a burrow?” I ask.
“I guess so,” Molly says. “Pretty big
burrow.”
I don’t want to even imagine the type of creature that’s living inside. At the basin of the crater, the radiation will be high, meaning whatever lives down here will have taken a huge dose over the years. Just like the crazies in the lakes in the north, the creatures living down here will have evolved into something unrecognizable and formidable.
We all agree it’s too risky to venture into the burrow, even if it does eventually lead out of the crater. If there is something sleeping inside, it’s probably best to let it rest.
“I think I see something,” Ben says, peering into the distance.
Sure enough, there’s another path leading up the crater, made by the same prints as the one we took down. The animals that made these tracks have shown us down into the crater and are now offering us a way back out. They’re like guardian angels.
We go back to get the bikes and head toward the path. But as we go, a new noise joins the thrumming of our engines.
Jack and Penelope are suddenly alert, their ears pricking up, their teeth bared.
“What’s that noise?” I call out to the others.
We draw to a halt and cut off the engines. As soon as we do, the noise becomes perceptible. There’s no mistaking it. It’s the howling of wolves. And it’s close. Too close for comfort.
Penelope and Jack immediately join in with the howling. Bree tries to quiet Penelope down but it’s no use. The tiny Chihuahua is trying to make herself look fierce.
“Quick,” I say. “We have to go.”
But it’s too late. All at once, we’re surrounded by the most disgusting creatures I’ve ever seen. They look like wild dogs, but the radiation they’ve absorbed from having lived in the crater has made their bodies mangled. Their spines are curved upward, making them look more like hyenas than dogs. Their fur is balding in places, sticking up coarsely in others. Tumors grow out of their skin. Saliva drips from their jaws in thick strings, and their teeth, like their claws, are enormous.
I gun the engine of my bike, hoping that the noise will scare them off, and start whizzing around and around in circles, trying to tire the creatures out so that they’re slow enough to take a hit. The others do the same. The wolves chase our bikes, their eager jaws snapping, treating it like a game, as though they’re nothing but puppies. It reminds me of Sasha, our old pet dog, and the way she would lumber around play fighting with me. I’m almost relieved that she was killed by slaverunners; they saved her from this fate, of being turned into a grotesque, cancerous, murderous creature.