Strike
Page 27
“Sorry I asked.” He shovels a bite of MRE brownie into his mouth and looks away.
Wyatt looks adorably horrified, which is how I realize that I’m totally thawed toward him.
“Milk shake?” he asks.
“God, yes, milk shake.”
My dad holds out a card with a teddy bear on the front. “This has five hundred bucks on it. I’ll give it to you if you promise to never say the word ‘condom’ in my presence again.”
“Now, Jack. If she’s going to do it, I’d rather she be safe—” my mom starts.
My dad and I both stick our fingers in our ears and say, “LA LA LA LA LA.”
Wyatt takes the card and stands up. When he holds out a hand, I let him pull me up too.
“Uh, did you say milk shakes?” Gabriela glances meaningfully at the MREs, and I hold out my hand to pull her up. Chance stands up too.
“Anybody else want something?” Wyatt asks.
“Ice cream!” Kevin shouts.
“Salad,” Bea mutters, not looking up.
“Coffee,” Rex says wistfully.
“Better painkillers?” my mom asks, only half joking, and Heather puts a concerned hand on her back.
“You sure this card’s going to work?” I take it from Wyatt and turn it over, inspecting every detail. It looks ratty and stained, like it’s been in the bottom of someone’s purse for a year. Any time I see the Valor logo now, it turns my stomach.
“It’ll work,” my dad says. “We haven’t had one turned down yet.”
“Just in case”—I look around at my friends—“everybody got your gun?”
Chance holds out his Glock, which matches mine. Wyatt’s got my dad’s gun, which I hope my dad doesn’t recognize or expect to see returned. I know mine is fine, considering I checked the clip in front of my dad just a short while ago to make a point. Gabriela doesn’t have a gun, but she still has her knife, and she wears it casually as a regular part of her wardrobe. In our matching black sweatshirts, we look like we’re about to go fight zombies and we know exactly how to do it.
“Team Milk Shake, away!” I say, and they follow me out the door.
As we’re getting into Wyatt’s car, my dad rushes out, waving a burner phone. “We all need each other’s numbers,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “God, Dad. Protective much?”
“It’s not safe out there.”
“I was being sarcastic. I know exactly how unsafe it is out there.”
The look he gives me is sobering. “If you can’t find this place, or if Valor shows up and we have to run, we might never find each other again. You’ve never lived in a world without the Internet.” I don’t make any more jokes as he puts his number in my phone. “And here’s a car charger. Stay charged.”
I hadn’t even noticed that my cheap little crap phone was almost out of juice.
“I would make fun of you,” Chance says quietly, “but he’s right. This is not a world I want to be alone in.”
I plug my phone into the car and watch the little green light glow. Wyatt, at least, has a good sense of direction, and we’re soon back on the highway. The mood is somber, but then again, no one got enough sleep and we’re on the run from two sets of high-powered enemies. Wyatt looks like determination alone is driving him, and Gabriela slumps back against her seat and starts snoring softly. Even Chance is pretty quiet, just staring out the window. It so happens that I’m watching him in the rearview mirror when he flinches and looks like he might start crying, and I glance back quick enough to notice that we passed a charred house, still smoking. I remember the night we met, how cocky he was. And here he is, on the verge of tears. As time passes, all of our walls are breaking.
Wyatt knows where my favorite milk shakes are, and he’s soon ordering half the damn menu. Number ones and number threes and salads and wraps and sundaes and brownies and, as he says, “The biggest coffee you can give me. Seriously. Just fill the bag with sugar and cream, thanks.”
I’ve never seen so much fast food at once, and my legs are soon buried in bags, my lap full of giant drinks. Wyatt hands the girl the card my dad gave us, and I dig my fingers into the seat. What if it doesn’t work? What if my dad’s wrong? I feel a panic attack creeping in, all the what-ifs.
And then I realize—the worst thing that could happen is that we drive away, tires squealing, and disappear into the night. If we can’t call 911 when we need help, they can’t call 911 when we break what used to be laws. But the card goes through, and she hands it back with plenty of cash left on it and a super-long receipt. The look she gives Wyatt tells me she’d shove me out of this car and take my place in a heartbeat. Not everything has changed—although the recently installed safety glass on the drive-through window suggests that regular businesses are catching on to new dangers.
Gabriela wakes up, sniffing the air. “Hey, can you park a minute? I bet they have toilet paper.”
“God, yes. I need to make a deposit,” Chance says, and Wyatt obliges them, although he’s careful to park in the darker edges of the lot instead of right under a light.
“You need to go?” he asks me.
I shake my head. “You?”
“I’m good. But there’s your milk shake. Uh, milk shakes.”
He’s got a four-pack of large shakes in his lap, and it’s got to be freezing. I take the chocolate one and sip, feeling some amount of tension unspool. The last thing I ate was that M&M, and it wasn’t even good. I dig in a bag for some fries and barely taste anything as I gulp them down. This feeling is eerily familiar. Food is just fuel to keep me running now.
“I worry about you getting dehydrated, but I worry more about you biting my head off,” he says. “You can’t drive on an empty gas tank.”
“The anger keeps me going.”
He pulls out a sandwich and swallows half of it. My belly feels comfortably sloshy. If I weren’t so nervous about waiting in the parking lot, I’d be getting sleepy. Through the brightly lit windows, I don’t see the usual families, Little League teams, or old people. The seating area inside is empty, although the drive-through has a hell of a line. All the cars are expensive, shiny, new. I’ve never even been in a car as fancy as the Infiniti SUV that’s pulling up to the speaker box and rolling down a black-tinted window.
The world’s falling apart? Don’t worry. Daddy will get you a deluxe Happy Meal.
“I hate this place,” I say.
“So leave your mark,” Wyatt says.
That makes me smile. It’s nighttime, after all, which means I’m harder to see. I dig my backpack out from beneath all the food bags and yank out my red and green paint cans. The air outside has gone full-on November, dry with a cold, crisp wind that lashes my bangs into my face. The parking lot behind us is empty, the strip mall mostly gone bankrupt in the last few years. And there’s no cover at all. I open Wyatt’s door and hunch behind it to scrawl VALOR $UCKS. I get spray paint on my shoes, but who cares? Everyone who parks here will have to see it.
I’m back in the car by the time Chance and Gabriela return to paw through bags. I get Wyatt to stop at a drugstore so I can buy some shampoo and conditioner, and Gabriela promises to help me wash my hair in the sink back at the empty house. I grab a few gallons of water, too, because I bet the cistern water is full of larvae or spores or something. The card goes through, and back outside, I sneak around to the side of the store and leave my mark on the unlit brick wall. With every spray of paint, I feel more powerful, take back some measure of control.
And as we drive, I see evidence that other people are getting in on the graffiti too. FREEDOM AIN’T FREE. GREED KILLS. FIGHT BACK. THANKS, OBAMA. SCREW VALOR, THE BANKS ARE THE ENEMY. They’re scrawled with varying levels of skill on the sides of buildings, in parking lots, and in the middle of the road. Someone made a stencil of the Valor Savings Bank logo and spray-painted it on every stop sign we pass so that they now read STOP VALOR. It’s beautiful. And it makes me feel giddy to see people waking up to what’s happening.
“Pull over at the boulder, okay?”
Wyatt grimaces. “Uh, are you sure? Just on the side of the road like that?”
“It’ll only take a second. Block me with the car.” I shake my paint can as he slows and the tires crunch gravel on the shoulder. “Besides, at least this time, it’s totally legal.”
I leap out before the car stops and start spraying.
“Hurry up,” Gabriela calls. “This is freaking me out.”
I’m done with VALOR $UCKS and the red anarchy symbol and into the green dollar sign when lights come around the corner.
“Come on!” Wyatt calls.
I add the last green slash and jump into the car, and Wyatt squeals back onto the road before the encroaching car sees me.
“At least we know it’s not a police car, right?” I’m breathless and high on adrenaline, and it feels good. I did this. I chose to do this. Suck it, Valor.
But then our car fills with headlights, too bright, too big, too fast. The car behind us honks. I look in the rearview mirror and see that it’s a shiny black SUV.
23.
“Jesus, girl. What have you done?” Gabriela moans.
I strap on my seat belt. “The rock is there for painting!” I shout. “People do it every day!”
“ ‘Class of 2016’ is not the same as ‘Valor Sucks,’ ” Chance says. “I mean, full points for brass balls, but let’s keep the antigovernment graffiti a little more quiet next time.” If I didn’t know him as well as I do now, I would think he was totally blasé, but he’s scared to death.
The SUV is so close now that I can’t even see its lights in the rearview mirror. Wyatt floors it, and the SUV speeds up and swerves to pace us in the other lane of the four-lane highway.
I pull my gun and aim as the SUV’s passenger-side window rolls down to reveal . . .
“Tuck?”
The big Crane goon points at the window with one hand while shoving his AR-15 out his window to suggest that if we don’t roll our window down, he’ll shoot it out.
“Goddammit.” Wyatt rolls down the window and leans his head back against the driver’s headrest as if he’s ready to avoid a gunfight. Or maybe he just doesn’t trust me not to start one.
“Slow down, dumbass!” Tuck yells.
“You’re the ones chasing us!” I shout back, waving my Glock.
Wyatt slows down to almost the speed limit, and the SUV keeps pace. I don’t put down my gun, and Tuck’s rifle barrel is staring at me like the little black hole to hell. My heart’s hammering, and Gabriela is on the floorboards, and the scent of grease and chicken and pickles in the air is making me want to barf.
“Y’all head over to Crane Hollow right now and nobody gets hurt,” Tuck hollers in his mean-guy voice. Then, in his regular jolly-guy voice, he adds, “Matty misses you.”
“We’re not going back,” I shout. “Leon’ll kill us.”
Tuck shakes his bald head. “Not true. You took out a lot of good folks. We need more bodies. You come back now, and you can have your trailer back. I promise.”
The cars race, neck and neck, toward a red light, and I look back at Gabriela and Chance. “Raise your hand if you’re pretty sure Leon’s going to execute us if he ever sees us again,” I whisper.
Everyone’s hand raises.
“Raise your hand if you think we need to get the hell away from that gun,” Wyatt says. Again, everyone’s hand goes up. “Okay. Here we go. Check your seat belts and hold on.”
“Let’s talk at the light?” Wyatt hollers, and Tuck smiles and waves like we’re all friends.
Both Wyatt and the SUV slow as we reach the stoplight. It’s a decently busy time of night, and even with the sweeping sense of caution Valor has inspired, cars are just doing their thing. I look ahead and do the math. And I realize what Wyatt’s going to do. I lean back against my seat, test my seat belt, and turn my face sideways. Like that would help.
“Patsy, I need you to . . .” Wyatt starts, but he can’t finish it. “I need you to do it. On three.”
“I’ll do it,” Chance says.
“It has to be her.” Wyatt pushes his seat back, just a little, as we coast to a stop. “If you roll down your window, they’ll know.”
“It’s okay. I got it,” I say.
And my hands are shaking and my stomach drops out and everything is cold and bloodless. Before the car comes to a complete stop, I bite my lip, sit forward, take a good look at the Crane goon in the driver’s seat, and wait for Wyatt’s word.
“One . . . two . . .”
Before he can say three, Chance knocks my gun down, half dives between the front seats, and pulls the trigger three times. I can’t see what’s happened, and Wyatt floors it, and the car squeals through the red light, fishtailing around a sedan. A spray of bullets pings off the car, and everyone but Wyatt ducks. Chance falls into the back, breathing hard. There’s a huge crunch and a ton of honking right where we were. We’re already through the light and doing ninety up the highway. I look in my side mirror and see the messy aftermath, the Crane-driven Valor SUV T-boned by a white van. I’m pretty sure Wyatt was just planning on taking out the driver, but a complete crash is even better. Tuck is standing in the street, shaking his gun at us.
“That was really effing close,” Gabriela says, breathless. “Jesus, bro.”
“I think that was the SUV we stole,” Wyatt adds.
“Lesson to self: Do not give Leon Crane new playthings.” I pick up my milk shake and suck in enough to give me a brain freeze.
“Did you get him?” Wyatt asks.
“I got the driver,” Chance says quietly. “Right in the temple.”
“I didn’t need to know that,” Gabriela mutters.
I look in the mirror and see him put a hand on her shoulder. “You always need to know that. Otherwise, it stops mattering. We can’t let it stop mattering. Then we become like them.”
I turn to look Chance in the eyes. “Thank you,” I whisper. “It still matters.”
Wyatt exhales, long and slow, and turns down a side street. The air in the car relaxes once we’re off the highway and away from the SUV. I don’t want Chance to be right, but I think he might be. It’s so much easier to forget. But the more I let myself forget, the easier it becomes to kill people. I don’t know why he knocked down my gun and did it himself. I don’t know how to pay him back. “Thanks” does not feel like enough.
“You want a milk shake?” I ask. “It helps.”
He chooses strawberry.
We’re silent for the rest of the drive home.
Back in the house, we drop all the food bags like we’re returning from an expedition with unexpected and welcome treasure. The general mood is jovial and light, but I can’t get there. I didn’t see the driver’s head, didn’t see the bullet, didn’t see its aftermath. I didn’t even recognize him. But he’s dead because I just had to stop and play rebel. And what about the people in the van that T-boned them? For all I know, it was an innocent family on their way to church to adopt a puppy. It looked like a work van, though, but why should a bunch of painters be worth any more or less than a busload of children?
No matter what I do, people die. Whether I see it happen or not, they die.
“Honey, are you okay?” my dad asks.
It throws me, at first, because how should he know I’m upset? My mom’s the one who lives with me, who understands my moods, but she’s just laughing with Heather and eating a sandwich. She knew the old Patsy, but my dad’s the one who recognizes the new one.
“We, um . . .” Suddenly, the fries are stuck in my throat, and I have to find a soda to wash them back down. “We ran into some Crane goons. Tuck and some other guy. In the SUV we stole from Valor. They wanted to take us back t
o Leon. So we ran.”
My dad puts down his sandwich and leans forward. “Did they follow you here?”
Wyatt shakes his head. “We shot the driver. They crashed about two miles away. Tuck lived, but he couldn’t follow us on foot.”
I smile at him. He always knows when to use “we” to make me feel more human.
“So they’re looking for us,” my dad says, and his fingers twitch like he wants nothing more than to start typing on his dumbass laptop.
“Or they were driving around and recognized a familiar car full of familiar kids,” I counter.
“Were you guys doing anything suspicious?”
A blush creeps up, and I dig through the bags for napkins. I say nothing.
“You were, weren’t you?”
That accusing tone—like he’s going to slap my wrist.
“I was spray-painting the Haven High School boulder, and they just drove around the corner and saw us,” I say into the bag.
“Patsy, come on. That’s incredibly risky and stupid. You can’t do things like that.”
My head snaps up, and I’m surprised that he’s not shaking a finger at me. “If you’d like to talk about doing things that are incredibly risky and stupid, what about having a daughter you can’t take care of with a woman you can’t marry? What about leaving me? And my mom? What about giving bombs to a psychopath like Leon Crane? What about playing around with your bullshit anarchy on the Internet? Oh, excuse me, the ‘darknet.’ You don’t get to show up after thirteen years and start telling me what to do. You’re just a suburban hacker trying to get back at his daddy.”
I stand up and rub the fry salt off my hands.
“Patsy, stop. The most important thing right now is keeping you safe.”
“All I ever wanted was to find you. And I was so worried you’d be disappointed in me. But you know what, Dad? I’m disappointed in you. And I’ll spray-paint whatever the hell I want.”
I stand, grab a lantern, a random food bag, and the drugstore bag. “Gabriela?”
She stands, too, following me to the grand, echoing marble stairs. My dad watches us, and I would say he lets us go, but nobody “lets” me do anything anymore.