The bed is still warm from our bodies and hard for me to abandon. I stripped off my socks while we were entangled, and now the metal floor stings my bare feet with cold as I sit up to get my bearings. I turn on the tap light and run a finger all around the button, trying to puzzle out how it might work, what it’s hearing or seeing. There’s no seam, no obvious way to open it. They want whatever happens inside it to be a secret, and it’s a secret that’s far beyond anything I could discover without a hammer. With a sly smile, I put the button under my pillow and make a mental note to get one of those flimsy travel sewing kits when we stop at a gas station tomorrow morning for biscuits.
Finally, I’m forced to face the fact that I’m about to pee myself. I grab a wad of toilet paper and hop down from the truck, looking around for a shadowy but safe place to squat. I hear a thump and almost pee myself for the second time in a day, but it’s just Wyatt dragging a big-ass log across the field.
“We’ve got a fire pit,” he says. “I thought we could start a bonfire.”
“Won’t we get in trouble?”
He drops the log and laughs. It’s a cross between bitter and crazy. “You shot, like, five people today. I don’t think anyone’s around to send you to jail for roasting some marshmallows in a field.”
“You brought marshmallows?” I ask tentatively.
He shrugs. “Imaginary ones.”
“I’ve never actually seen a bonfire before.”
He drags the log over to a circle of black ash surrounded by a ring of stones and concrete blocks. He’s already got some smaller branches set up in the middle of the ring, and I sneak off behind some trees to pee in skinny jeans, which is pretty much the most awkward and difficult thing ever. I don’t know what to do with the used toilet paper, so I stuff it under an old log covered in fallen leaves. I’ve never been camping, either.
When I return to the circle of stones, Wyatt is holding a metal lighter up to some twigs, trying to get them to catch fire.
“Where’d you get the lighter?” I ask.
“It was my friend Mikey’s.” He clicks the thing again and again, trying to get the flame to hold. He shakes it in frustration. “We left it out here in a Tupperware box, along with a couple of water bottles, a Swiss Army Knife, and some metal sporks. When we were younger, we were always afraid the apocalypse was going to come, zombies and everything. We figured we’d be safer alone, out in the woods. There’s a perfect climbing tree over there. If you sit still long enough, sometimes you see deer. Max and I used to come out here to watch them.”
“And the lighter still works?” I ask.
“It was in an airtight container. It’s not made out of solid silver or anything,” he says with a smirk. “They cost, like, nine dollars on eBay.” His smile turns down. “Or they did. I guess eBay is gone now, if Valor owns the mail trucks.”
The fire finally catches, and the twigs begin to burn. A thin column of smoke rises up against the deep purple sky, and a star winks into existence. Then another, then another. We’re less than five miles from my house, but it’s like we’re all alone on a frontier, far away from the city lights. Even the moon looks bigger and prettier, pristine and bluish white. But there’s a chill in the air. I rush to the back of the truck and slip on a sweater. While I’m there, I grab my quilt and the leftover food from Dr. Ken Belcher’s mansion. But I leave the sparkling water behind. We’re not that desperate yet.
“You still got that bottle of water out here?” I ask. “I think I saw a zombie.”
Wyatt grins. “I hope it’s one of the slow ones.” He jogs off into the woods, and I suddenly feel very alone. Two people in a wilderness is exciting. One person alone in the wilderness is a sitting duck.
I go back to the truck again, this time for my gun. If there’s anything I learned from Dave and from Sharon Mulvaney’s house, it’s that you never know when something badder than you is going to show up and give you a taste of your own medicine. As I settle down on my quilt by the fire, Wyatt appears with a single bottle of water. It looks a little beat-up, but I guess it’s not like water’s going to go bad. I open it and take a sip, then pass it to him. He sits down beside me on the blanket, and I lean my head against his shoulder. Being this close to him makes me forget all the other batshit crazy stuff. It just feels natural, even if there’s a Glock under my knee.
“It’s kind of weird,” he says, poking a stick into the growing fire to make sparks. “I feel like I know you, but I don’t, really. I mean, how old are you? What do you do for fun? What’s your middle name?”
The fire’s glow warms my cheeks, and his arm snuggles over my shoulder, pulling me closer against him. I wonder if this is how it felt the first time a caveman stood up beside a fire and told a story. The words are unfamiliar in my mouth, almost holy.
“My name is Patricia Louise Klein,” I tell him, speaking to the flames. “My mom wanted to call me Patricia, but my dad called me Patsy, which my mom thought was stupid. Who names a kid Patsy Klein? He left us when I was four, and I refused to answer to anything but Patsy, so now I’m kind of stuck with it. I’m seventeen. I get good grades, work at a pizza restaurant, and take care of my mom. I guess the only things I really do for me are music and crafting. Yarn bombing and cross-stitching.”
“Sounds fun,” he says. “Tell me more.”
When I gaze into the fire, I can almost see through it and into the past, when things were easy. “I always liked yarn. Like, when I was little, I would do that finger-weaving thing and make these long, useless snakes. I would hang them around my room, put them on the Christmas tree, wrap presents with them. So when I got older, I taught myself how to knit from YouTube videos, and I made hundreds of scarves and gave them to everybody I knew and then donated the rest to the food bank for winter. And then I saw an article about yarn bombing and knew I had to do it.”
“Why?”
“Because we live in this crappy suburb, right? We have to drive everywhere, and nobody puts any thought into making things pretty. In New York or Paris, people put up beautiful statues, have outdoor festivals and markets, gather inspiring artwork in museums. Here it’s just ugly. Even the wild spaces are surrounded by treeless neighborhoods or rednecks. You’re never just driving or walking along and then think, ‘Oh, that’s such a pretty, random surprise.’”
“What about when a deer runs across the road?” he asks.
“Yeah, but that’s out of your control. And you might hit it and destroy your car.”
“But that’s free meat.”
I can’t tell if he’s serious or not until his mouth twitches.
I knock my shoulder back against his. “Ew. They have ticks, weirdo. But yarn bombing is thoughtful. Planned. You can almost guarantee that you’re going to make people think, maybe even feel something. At the very least, they’ll question it.”
He’s silent, but he puts his chin over my head and nuzzles back and forth. I watch the fire and enjoy the quiet. After a few moments, he says, all in a rush, “Do you think you would knit a scarf for me, one day?”
I laugh against him.
“Sure,” I say. “I can take time out of my busy assassination and yarn bombing schedule for that. But what about you? What do you do? What’s your middle name? And did you actually go to all the concerts, or did you just get the shirts online?”
He drags me onto his lap and wraps both arms around me, and for just a moment, I feel like a little kid. Cared for, hugged, wanted. In between Wyatt and the fire, I’ve never been so warm from head to toe.
“My name is Wyatt Dane Beard,” he says. “I like music, I play bass, I have a pet snake, and I used to skateboard a lot. Now I do lacrosse so I can take out my anger by beating on other guys with a stick. It was my therapist’s idea. My parents got divorced when I was eleven, and it royally screwed up my life. I wasn’t a decent person again until I turned sixteen and watched my friend Mi
key OD. I’m nineteen now but a year behind in school. I get good grades and hope they’ll balance out my old grades. I’ve never worked a day in my life, and I kind of hate myself for it.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“It’s just one more thing I’ve got to fix,” he says firmly, and I settle myself against his chest.
“I don’t know if I would work if we weren’t poor.” I sigh, thinking about how weird my hands feel when I get home every night, powdery and greasy at the same time, aching from making dozens of pizzas. “It’s not like I have a passion for crappy pizza or anything. And the customers are major jerks.”
“Are they paying you for this?” he says suddenly.
“Valor, you mean?” I shrug, my shoulders rubbing against his chest. “Kind of. They said there might be a bonus, but they didn’t say how much. I mean, it was basically a case of do this or we kill your mom and then you, so I didn’t ask about the pay scale. The guy who came to my house said her medical bills would be covered, so maybe they’re paying something. I guess I didn’t think that far ahead.” I swallow. “He had a gun. To her chest. I would have signed anything.”
“What about the truck? Do you get to keep it?”
I look past the fire to the hulking shadow of the mail truck. So normal and trustworthy and boringly governmental. Such a brilliant way to sneak up on people. Everyone’s excited to get a package. The fruit basket was pretty clever, too, and I consider that I might want to find a fake box or something, to make it look less like “It could be a check or a subpoena” and more like “Happy birthday!” At least one person on my list is going to need major incentive to open the door for me.
And what would I even do with a mail truck after this? Sell it? Park it in my driveway and take it to school every morning? And will there even be a Postal Service anymore, now that Valor Savings owns the government? Will there even be school? I snort to myself, considering that my life now brings new meaning to the term “going postal.”
“I don’t know,” I finally say. “They seriously went out of their way to keep me in the dark. I couldn’t see past the first five days and keeping that gun off my mom.”
“She’s lucky to have you as a daughter,” he whispers.
His voice sounds so sad and far away that I twist in his lap and kiss him gently on the lips.
“You do what you have to do to survive,” I say.
“But what about what you do before survival is even a problem? What if you make the wrong choices when there are dozens of choices? What if you can’t fix it?”
“There’s always another choice,” I say. “And you’re a good person.”
“I’m . . . glad you think so.”
He kisses me again, deeper this time, and I cup his face. There are tears caught in his eyelashes, and they tickle my fingertips as his arms wrap around me, hotter than the fire. He smells like smoke and detergent and boy, and I can’t get close enough.
Later, after we’ve kissed each other until our lips are nearly numb, Wyatt makes sandwiches with the food from the fridge and slices an apple with the Swiss Army Knife from his secret tree-house hidey-hole. The fire slowly dies as we sit there, talking and holding hands. He feeds me huge grapes too fast, stuffing them in my mouth until I nearly choke with laughter. I trace his broken tattoo by the firelight, and he lets me this time.
“You should get a new one,” I say. “Something beautiful.”
He chuckles softly. “How do you cover up something that screwy?”
“With something bigger.”
He stands and kicks dirt over the embers of the fire, helps me up and follows me to the mail truck. The quilt is wrapped around me, dragging on the ground, and he takes it from me and shakes it clean.
We fall asleep curled together on the narrow cot under my quilt. I wonder for just a second if our tender whispers will carry to the camera under the pillow, but before I can move it, I’m asleep, held snugly in his arms.
Sometime in the night, he sleepily, slurringly says, “I’m so sorry.”
But he doesn’t say about what.
I’m about to ask when the first bullet rips through the wall.
8.
Alistair Meade
Wyatt rolls on top of me like some kind of idiot hero.
“Tell me that was your gun,” he grunts. “Tell me that was an accidental discharge.”
My hand slips under the pillow and past the button, and I’ve never felt so good about wrapping my fingers around the Glock’s grip.
“Not mine. Someone’s outside.”
Three more shots go off, punching random holes in the truck. Wyatt rolls us both onto the floor, as if that’s going to help. He lands on top of me like a sack of dumb rocks and tries to shove me under the cot.
“Come out, or we’re coming in!” someone yells from outside, kinda like they’re unsure. Another shot backs up the demand. The voice is familiar, and I go cold all over and slam my other fist into the floor. Goddammit.
“What the hell, Jeremy?” I scream with what little air I can find. “Stop shooting, you moron!”
The shots stop, and I hear whispering. Of course Roy’s with him. Of course. But why are my redneck buddies here at all? And why are they shooting? And are they going to start again? My relief at the pause in gunfire spills uneasily over into doubt that I hear echoed in Jeremy’s voice.
“Patsy?”
“Yeah?”
“Is that really you?”
I shove Wyatt off me and crawl to the front of the truck, pausing between the seats, just in case Roy’s holding a gun too. His eyesight’s notoriously bad, and his trigger finger is shaky. Sure enough, there they are, standing out in the middle of the field like dorks. They’re both wearing camo and have their faces painted, badly, in streaks. It would be hilarious if they didn’t have guns pointed right at me. What kind of game are they playing?
“Yeah, it’s me.” I wave the gun. “Are you done with trying to kill me now? Cuz my aim’s better and you know it. What the hell are y’all doing?”
They whisper together again. “Wanna parley?” Jeremy yells.
I snort. “Your obsession with Pirates of the Caribbean needs to stop now. But yes. Please. If you promise not to shoot.”
They whisper again, and Wyatt’s hand lands on my leg. He shows me his gun and raises his eyebrows. “They’re idiots, but they’re my idiots,” I whisper.
“I don’t trust them.”
“I do. But stay hidden and keep them in your sights. There’s something weird going on. Valor said there would be nobody around to stop me.”
Wyatt nods, and his eyes shift sideways. “Is one of them your boyfriend?”
I eject the magazine and shove it back home to make my point. “Don’t insult me like that when I’m holding a gun.” Then, loud enough for the guys outside to hear, “I’m coming out now. I’m armed. Put your guns on the ground.”
Roy tosses his without a second thought, but Jeremy stares at his for a second and yells, “Ain’t gonna happen, Cowpatty. This shit’s for real.”
I take a deep breath and stare at them. My two lovable, moronic, geeky redneck friends. Whatever’s going on, I’m betting they wouldn’t be here if they had a choice. And I don’t want to hurt them. And even if Jeremy’s still holding his gun and glaring at me through his badly done face paint, I know that underneath the bravado, he doesn’t want to hurt me, either. My first thought is that maybe they work for Valor, that I’m finally in trouble for everything I’ve done wrong. But I don’t see a mail truck or mail shirts. And nobody’s offering me a fruit basket and a signature machine. And there are still three names on my list.
It can’t be Valor. Can it? And if not them, who?
Shit.
Jeremy’s staring at me like he’s running restaurant close-out numbers that insult him by not adding up. But the Patsy I am now
is not the same Patsy I was last Friday night, playing Six Degrees of Separation as we mopped the kitchen floor and threw chunks of old pizza dough at one another. I’m not going to shoot them in cold blood. And I’m not going to let them shoot me, although I know that would be a surefire way to keep my mom safe. I’m not ready to give up. Not yet.
I’m not going to let them stop me. My heart hardens, goes cold and dark, and falls to some wet place in my stomach.
“Have it your way,” I holler. “But remember who’s a faster draw.”
Wearing only my thin tank top and skinny jeans, I point my gun at Jeremy’s heart and squeeze between the seats and into firing range. When I hop down from the mail truck, Roy takes a step back, and Jeremy’s gun wavers.
I wish I had a pistol to cock, to let them know I mean business. Considering how quiet the night got after the shots stopped echoing, that click would be awfully satisfying. Still, my matte black Glock looks sharp and evil in the moonlight, and I hope that’s good enough. “Now, why are you guys shooting at me in the middle of nowhere?”
I can hear Jeremy swallow from twenty feet away, and I force myself to walk forward, my bare feet numb in the frosty grass. Goose bumps slam up my arms, and every hair on my body is at attention, and for just a second, my vision goes double, like there are four guys here instead of just two. My gun and Jeremy’s gun are identical, pointed right at each other, blue light glinting off stamped gold letters.
Goddammit, Valor.
“We didn’t know it was you,” Roy says, soft and lost.
“Oh, so you just thought, Hey, let’s go randomly shoot up a mail truck in the middle of a field. That would be fun. Because I don’t think so.”
“They never said who.” Jeremy’s voice is stronger than Roy’s. It always is. Up close now, but not close enough to touch, his bright blue eyes glare at me from their jacket of camo, resentful and sullen and sorry. I’ve never seen him like this before, hard and desperate. He’s usually just a good-natured clown. But he’s never tried to shoot me before either. I glance back at the mail truck, but I can’t see a hint of Wyatt. Still, I know he’s there, watching, finger on the trigger of my dad’s old gun, the one I used when Jeremy taught me to shoot.
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