by Lukens, Mark
“We’ll find Avalon,” Emma said.
Ray looked at Emma.
Josh watched the anger slowly fade out of Ray. Josh knew Ray was unquestionably their leader. They hadn’t voted on a leader or spoken it aloud, but it was like everyone just knew. And Ray seemed to assume the role automatically, also taking all of the responsibility onto his shoulders. They all had their own ideas about things, and all of them were able to express those opinions, but Ray seemed to be the one who spoke for all of them. And if Ray was their leader, then Emma was their spiritual guide, their hope, their beacon of light. And just her words, just her voice, her sense of unwavering assurance, had calmed Ray down a little.
“We’re meant to be there,” Emma said. “We’re meant to find it. I know it. Just like we were meant to find each other.”
Ray just nodded. He looked at Josh, then Luke, and then Mike. He nodded again. “Okay. We follow this route down to Georgia. We stay off the highways and main roads as much as possible. We avoid the cities and large towns as much as possible. The cities will have more rippers. The highway, especially the bridges or tunnels, could be bottlenecked with cars and trucks. Could've been roadwork being done in some places when the Collapse began, roads closed, abandoned cars waiting in lines, even blocking the shoulders. Massive wrecks.”
Josh felt like telling Ray that he didn’t need to explain all of that to them—they got it. But he let him go on; it seemed to be good for Ray, a therapeutic grounding for him, a nostalgic sense of his former self in the former world, a moment where he felt like himself again.
“We’ll keep using both vehicles,” Ray went on.
“In case one of them takes a crap,” Josh said.
Mike giggled and it made Josh feel good for a second. Mike needed to laugh.
“My money’s on the van taking a crap first,” Josh said.
“We’ll get as far as we can with both vehicles,” Ray said. “We’ve got a siphoning hose and a hand pump in the back with the two cans of gas. When we see a vehicle somewhere that looks safe enough, we’ll try to siphon some gas.”
“What about stopping to sleep?” Josh asked.
“I was thinking about driving straight through,” Ray said. “It’s roughly six hundred miles or so. If we can average forty to fifty miles an hour, with a few breaks here and there to stretch our legs and go to the bathroom, I figure we could get down there in twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
“You know it’s going to be a lot longer than that,” Josh said.
Ray glared at him.
“Like you said, we could run into a lot of obstacles,” Josh added. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“What about switching drivers?” Luke suggested. “There’s only three of us. We’ve got to sleep sometime.”
“We’ll just have to switch off,” Ray said. “Me and Josh first. You take over for one of us, and then one of us for the other one. We’ll keep switching like that.”
“We could teach Mike how to drive,” Josh said.
Ray’s eyes cut to Josh; he was already shaking his head no.
“Yeah, Dad,” Mike said. “I could learn to drive. I know I could.”
“No,” Ray said right away. “Later. There’ll be time for that later. But this . . . this is too dangerous right now.”
“He needs to learn at some point,” Luke said. “Right here on these dirt roads might be as good a place as any.”
“And what if he runs the Jeep or the van into a tree? Off the road into a ditch? What if he panics? Then we’ve lost a vehicle. Maybe Mike gets hurt in the crash. Or someone else gets hurt.”
“I just think he needs to learn, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Later,” Ray promised. He looked at Mike. “Okay? We’ll teach you later. Right now we need to get down to Georgia first. When we find Avalon . . .” He let his words trail off.
Josh didn’t think Ray was too sure they were going to find Avalon now that they didn’t have the map he’d drawn anymore.
“We still have two of the walkie-talkies,” Ray said, changing the subject. “We’ll keep in contact while we drive. We only use them if we absolutely have to. Who knows who might be monitoring those channels?”
Josh just nodded.
“Okay,” Ray said. “We should get going soon.”
CHAPTER 3
Emma
Emma stood next to Josh. The air was cold, but it also felt good to be outside the van. She knew she was going to be cramped in that van for a long time soon enough.
She didn’t doubt Ray’s strategy of trying to drive straight through, or at least drive as far as they could. It would be safer to stay on the move. Finding shelter from rippers and Dark Angels was going to be difficult. They’d been mostly in rural parts of West Virginia over the last few weeks, so avoiding rippers and Dark Angels had been a little easier, but both had still managed to find them. She remembered how it had been in Washington D.C. and the surrounding area. And that had been at the beginning of the plague—she could only imagine what those cities were like now. There would be so many more rippers. And as they made their way south in the van and Jeep, there would be more Dark Angels. The rippers were getting more and more desperate, growing bolder from their hunger. They’d probably eaten up most of the easily available food, and now they would have to hunt, maybe even eat their own: the young, the old, the sick, the weak. The cold weather might kill some of them. Maybe infections or diseases like the flu. Or malnutrition. But enough of them weren’t going to die. Even with deaths from disease, cold, hunger, and infections, there would still be a lot of them. So many of them.
“How’s your ankle?” she asked Ray.
“I wrapped it while I was getting the packs ready in the bunker.”
She heard him set his foot up on the ledge of the van’s doorway, the rustle of cloth as he pulled up his pants leg, inspecting the wraps around his ankle.
“How about you?” Ray asked. “You hurt anywhere?”
“No,” she told him.
“You sure? We were in a hurry getting out of there. Adrenaline running high. Some of us could’ve gotten hurt without realizing it at the time. Now that the shock has worn off, we might notice some injuries.”
She knew Ray was looking around at the others for their answers.
“No,” Josh said. “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Ray said, exhaling a sigh with the word. “Everyone get enough to eat and drink? Anyone need a bathroom break? We’re going to be on the road for a while.”
Mike went over by the trees to relieve himself.
“I should go,” Emma said.
Josh helped her to the back of the van and stood watch while she went to the bathroom.
“This isn’t that embarrassing,” she said when she was done and pulled up her jeans. But she smiled at Josh to let him know she’d been joking.
“I made sure nobody was peeking,” Josh told her.
“Thanks,” she said.
Once everybody was done, they got back into the two vehicles. Mike and Luke rode with Ray, and Emma got back into the van with Josh.
Josh started the van and rolled his driver’s window up, the window motor whining just a bit like it was getting ready to break. The window clunked into place when it was all the way up.
“Ray drew me a map in case I get lost or we get split up,” Josh said.
Emma just nodded as she put her seatbelt on.
“Sorry you don’t have your books on tape to listen to.”
She’d left her tape player and earphones up in the bedroom at Doug’s cabin along with her clothes. Josh’s clothes had been up there too when the fire started. His photos of Marla and Kyle. The comic book he’d given to Mike.
“I finished the book,” she told him.
“Was it good? Did it have a happy ending?”
“Yeah. Happy enough. I was going to listen to The Tommyknockers next.”
“I never read any of those books. Any books, really. I never liked reading. I migh
t have listened to books, though. Never even knew that was a thing.”
“I . . . I just feel so bad,” Emma said. She turned away from Josh, toward the passenger window, fiddling with her glasses on her face.
“Bad about what?”
“About Rose. I should have known something was wrong. I should’ve felt something sooner.”
“Hey,” Josh said.
She felt his hand on her shoulder, then her thigh. Not sexual, but comforting. “You saved us,” he said.
They were driving now, bumping along the hard-packed frozen dirt trail.
“Like you said before,” Josh continued, “you’re not a machine. You can’t control what comes to you and what doesn’t.” Josh mimicked a robot’s voice: “I am Emma. Give me a quarter and I will tell you your future.”
Emma couldn’t help laughing, but then the brief joy was gone.
“We all trusted her,” Josh said. “Or we wouldn’t have let her in.”
“Ray didn’t want to let her in.”
“Okay. We’re human. Eventually Ray let her in. We all did. We all agreed. No one blames you for this any more than they blame Mike for his crush on her and blabbing his guts to her about the secret passageways.”
Emma nodded. She knew Josh was right, that the others weren’t blaming her in any way, but she couldn’t help feeling that maybe deep inside they did blame her, but they didn’t want to say it.
Josh rested his hand on her thigh again as he drove. His touch felt good, the slight heat of his flesh comforted her. And actually, even though it had happened under terrible circumstances, it felt good to be traveling south . . . it felt right. It felt like they were finally on the course that they were supposed to be on, heading for a destination that was unavoidable. Yes, maybe Ray had left his map of Avalon upstairs like they’d left so much other important stuff behind when the cabin caught fire, but she was sure that when the time came they would find Avalon. It was fate. Destiny. It was meant to be.
“It’s starting to snow a little,” Josh said.
She heard the van’s wiper blades thumping back and forth on the slowest speed.
A storm was coming—she could feel it. Something she remembered from one of her dreams, bits and pieces of it coming back. She tried so hard to block out her dreams, afraid the Dragon would latch on to them like he was picking up a ping from sonar. But dreams of a snowstorm, a blizzard, were coming back to her now.
Even if Avalon was their eventual destiny—for some of them, anyway—they were going to have to go through the storms first.
Bad storms.
They were going to have to go through hell.
CHAPTER 4
Luke
Luke stretched out as best he could in the back seat of the Jeep. He had lain the M-16 down in the back where he could grab it quickly if he needed to. The metal boxes with the two grenades and extra magazines of ammo were on the floorboard behind Mike’s seat, which was reclined back a bit. Mike was already dozing, and Luke felt it might be a good idea to try to get some sleep while he could, while they were still on these backwoods roads.
Ray had stopped once for a few minutes at a crossroads, studying the map that he had refolded neatly into a fat square he could hold in one hand. He jotted a few notes down in the small spiral notepad he’d found in the center console of the Jeep. Then he turned right and they were driving again.
Luke didn’t worry about Ray getting lost—he was like a human computer, able to visualize whatever he wanted in his mind. Luke imagined that visions of maps and coordinates and calculations popped up in Ray’s mind like one of those cyborgs in the movies, like The Terminator or Robocop seeing computer readouts in their fields of vision. Luke knew it wasn’t exactly like that for Ray, but he found the thought of it amusing.
He was comfortable enough with Ray’s driving and directions that he could lean back and close his eyes, his hoodie wadded up behind his head like a pillow. He didn’t really plan on sleeping, just resting his eyes for a bit, resting his body. Sometimes he was able to half sleep—not fully asleep but not fully awake, floating somewhere in between, letting his mind and body relax.
Usually Luke didn’t dream very much when he slept. He never remembered dreaming very much before the Collapse, but now it seemed like every time he fell asleep he dreamed. Now he dreaded sleep, knowing he would dream and those dreams would be as vivid as memories, as vivid as another life, like he’d been teleported to another reality.
And before he knew it, he was dreaming.
In the first part of the dream he was back in Cleveland, at the beginning of the Collapse, running down the street where he had rented his house. It was dark. Firelight flickered above the rooftops from front-yard bonfires on other blocks, the sounds of drunken revelry floating on the cold night air, the occasional shouts and clattering of gunfire. Those fools were celebrating the end of civilization with one last night of debauchery.
More gunshots in the distance. Screams of terror and pain. Police and ambulance sirens. Car alarms going off. Airplanes and helicopters roared past in the night air, lights flashing, cones of bright searchlights creeping along the rooftops and trees.
So much activity. So much noise. So many people. Luke was suddenly nostalgic for even this chaos—at least it was still recognizable as civilization; it wasn’t the wastelands the world had become only a few days later.
There was another noise in the background of his neighborhood streets. This noise was closer than the other noises. Footsteps. Someone was following him down the street in the darkness, hunting him, stalking him.
It was Jacob.
Jacob could be anywhere in the dark, his gun aimed at him, waiting for the right moment to squeeze the trigger. A panic rose inside of Luke, a feeling he was unaccustomed to. Jacob was like a bogeyman, a childhood monster lurking in the closet, an unbeatable force, an unwinnable battle.
And then Luke was in the Dragon’s town, in Hell Town, like he knew he would be. It was the same as the other dreams he’d had: his gun was gone, his knife was gone; he had nothing but his bare hands. And like the previous dreams, he heard the roar of the Dark Angels in the distance as they celebrated their new life, their new mission, their allegiance to the Dragon. Someone (not the Dragon—Luke was sure of that) yelled through a megaphone, the words inaudible to Luke, just more noise like the noise around his street moments ago.
It wasn’t dark here in the Dragon’s hell town like it had been in Luke’s neighborhood; it was daytime, late afternoon, with gray clouds hanging low over the earth, crushing down on him, the ceiling seeming to lower inch by inch.
Luke kept walking. He was afraid of something here in this town, yet he let his anger take over. He wanted to kill the Dragon. If he could kill the Dragon, cut off the head of the beast, then maybe all of this would be over.
He ventured deeper into the neighborhoods just off the main square of the town. He walked down the wide, tree-lined streets with older homes on each side, two and three-story homes with sagging front porches, cars and trucks abandoned on the sides of the streets and in the driveways, some with their doors wide open, metal left to rust.
Hell Town seemed empty, but Luke knew people lived here—the denizens of this town now congregated around their cheerleader behind the megaphone somewhere in the distance. Luke was getting farther and farther away from that crowd. But it didn’t matter because he knew, like in the previous dreams, the noise from that crowd would stop soon.
And there it was . . . the silence, nothing except the freezing wind blowing through the skeletal trees and whipping at loose metal and wood on the houses and roofs. And here Luke was again, at the corner where the house stood across the street, a dark tower of evil. And as with previous dreams, Luke was suddenly afraid of what waited in that house, yet at the same time he knew he had to go in there. Something important was inside that house, something the Dragon was hiding in there.
But getting to that thing the Dragon was hiding wasn’t going to be easy. J
acob had followed him from his previous dream, from Cleveland. Jacob was inside that house now.
“Luke . . .” Jacob whispered.
Luke was already across the street, up the steps of the front porch, almost to the open front door.
“Luke . . . come inside. We’re all waiting for you. She’s waiting for you.”
She? Who was he talking about?
Luke could feel the evil coming from the house as he stood on the front porch, his fingers twitching instinctively, ready to grab his gun from the shoulder holster under his hoodie that wasn’t there anymore.
Another noise sounded from deep inside the house, a scratching sound, then a cry for help. A woman’s voice.
Luke opened the front door and saw Jacob there, aiming his gun, smiling.
A blast of light from Jacob’s gun was the last thing Luke would ever see—he wasn’t going to save anyone. He wasn’t going to kill the Dragon. Jacob was going to be here at the house waiting for him, and all Luke was going to do was die.
Luke woke up with a start, a scream trapped in his dry throat. He sat up in the back seat, not sure for a second where he was.
I’m in the Jeep with Ray and Mike. Ray’s driving.
“Nice nap?” Ray asked, not turning around, keeping his eyes on the road.
Luke just grunted. He grabbed the bottle of water on the floorboard where he had wedged it against the metal ammo box.
“Bad dream?” Ray asked, still not turning around to look at him.
Luke didn’t answer.
“You were snoring,” Mike said with a smile.
Luke just nodded.
“And mumbling,” Mike added. “Saying things.”
“What was I saying?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t know. Like . . . uhh . . . and . . . err . . . nooo . . . stuff like that.”
“Leave him alone,” Ray told Mike.