A tiny meow comes from the VW’s interior. I scramble behind me for the box I stowed in the back and forgot, but Bits beats me to it with a cry of pure joy. She holds Sparky under her chin and looks at me with glowing eyes. “You really did get her! I didn’t think you would. It was three bursts.”
I nod noncommittally. I wouldn’t have done it had Bits been at the VW, not with what was coming. I can’t take any credit for Sparky’s survival.
Peter scratches a finger under Sparky’s chin. “Of course she did. We couldn’t leave Sparkle behind.” His raised eyebrows order me to agree. “Right?”
“Absolutely,” I lie.
“Anyone hungry?” Maureen asks. “I was planning to pack up—”
The rumble of a motorcycle drowns out her next words. Zeke pulls into the lot and stops, followed by a camper and a truck. There’s no way all of Whitefield is in those two vehicles, and my only prayer is Nelly.
Zeke takes off his helmet and hollers, “Y’all are a sight for sore eyes, let me tell you.”
He steps over his bike and moves to Penny and Peter. I hear him say Ana’s name and then turn to Maureen. Jamie and Shawn must have given them the news at the gate. Tony and Margaret leave the pickup, followed by Kyle, who swings Nicole to the ground. The camper door opens and a woman named Marissa emerges with her two children, along with five more adults I don’t know well. I take a steadying breath that escapes in a rush when Adam steps out, followed by a flash of blond hair and familiar broad shoulders. I’m through the assembled people before Nelly’s shoes hit the dirt. He picks me up in a bone-crushing embrace and sets me back down.
“Jamie told us. I don’t….” Nelly runs a hand through his hair. “Are you…”
“We’re okay.” My lips tremble, and I take a deep breath. “Better, now that you’re here. They’re okay, for now.”
“I didn’t think we were going to make it.” I start to ask why, but he squeezes my hand. “I’ll tell you later. I need to—” He points his chin in the direction of the others. I watch him walk away, and I turn to Adam.
“Hey, you,” I say. “Come here.”
“Hey, yourself.” Adam steps into my hug. “Nel was so worried.”
“What happened? Where’s everyone else?”
“We don’t know.” His voice cracks. Unlike Nelly, Adam wears his heart on his sleeve. “We had almost no warning. The fence went down before everyone could get to their spots. We got split up. No one answered the radio. We called the whole way here.”
I look around our group of twenty-odd people. It’s such a sorry number. It makes me despondent, until I see Nelly raise Bits in the air and draw a smile out of Hank. It may be a sorry number, I tell myself, but maybe quality, not quantity, is just as important.
CHAPTER 81
The sun is rising over the flat expanse of Who Knows Where, Canada. I’ve spent the night alternately staring at the road while driving or staring at where Penny and the kids sleep on the pullout bed. The outskirts of Montreal were nerve-wracking, but the last couple of hundred miles have been fairly easy since it was barely populated before. James spent the night driving or poring over our maps. He finally passed out with his face mashed against the sink.
We’ve managed to eke out some gas from cars. We’ll need a lot more of it to get to Alaska, though, even with the tank in the truck bed. Tony and Margaret began fumbling with rubber hoses in the dark, until we showed them John’s end-of-the-world siphoning method—a screwdriver into the gas tank with a container underneath. He would’ve been proud.
I rest my feet on the dashboard and watch the pickup and RV ahead. Besides Nelly and Adam, only Tony, Margaret, Zeke, Kyle and Nicole came west from the Whitefield group. It almost killed Zeke to leave his motorcycle in Quebec. He was afraid its roar would attract Lexers from miles away. I know it’s only a bike, but I understood. Another thing left behind.
Peter’s at the wheel. He glances behind us to make sure everyone’s asleep and then speaks. “I shouldn’t have done that to Oliver. I told him he was a murderer. I could see how sorry he was.”
His face is tight. I knew he’d feel guilty and don’t want him to, so I swing a fist in the air. “If you didn’t punch him, I would’ve.”
“I might have sent him to die up there.”
“He was going north with the others, anyway,” I say. “Maybe we should have gone, too.”
“To nothing? Not enough food, no fences? Lexers coming straight for us?”
“What if we can’t find more gas? Or the roads are blocked? Or—”
“Or we run into a pod,” Peter says. “Or crazy people. Or there’s a tornado. Or a flash flood. Or the bus breaks down. There—now we’ve named everything that could happen.”
“Nope,” I say, and caress the VW’s dash, “Miss Vera won’t break down. Will you, Miss Vera? You know how much I love you, don’t you?”
“Miss Vera? You named the bus Miss Vera?”
“Vera the VW. Miss Vera Winifred Bus, get it?”
“You are a very weird person,” Peter says. But he laughs his first laugh since yesterday, which is what I was going for. “We know where we’re going and that they’ll take us in.”
“We know where we’re going, but we might not get there.”
The orange of the sun makes even this lonely stretch of highway look like something special, so I reach into my jacket and pull out the phone. I take a picture of the road stretched out before us and then snap a picture of Peter’s hands glowing orange on the wheel, the knuckles on his right slightly swollen and scabbed.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“A pictorial essay of our trip. That way they’ll know our story when they find the bodies.” I lean over and take a picture of myself with Peter.
Peter shifts the gears with more force than necessary. “Cassandra, stop being so pessimistic.”
If the past day has shown us anything, it’s that the worst is always a possibility. A probability, actually. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but you won’t get hurt as badly if you expect and prepare for the worst. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.
“I think the word you want is realistic,” I say.
Peter sighs. I know I’m being argumentative, but if we’re going to get to Alaska we need to be practical. We don’t have room for fairy tales and blind faith. I can’t believe this will end well, not when all the signs point to the truth that it won’t.
The truck’s blinker flashes and we slow to the side of the road. Nelly stretches his arms above his head before strolling to our window. Barnaby follows, but not before eating something disgusting off the road and then coughing it back up.
“Pit stop?” Nelly asks.
“I have those terrible coffee packets,” I say. “Want me to make some?”
“Oh, God, yes.”
The others wake at the sound of Nelly’s voice. Sparky roams around the bus with plaintive meows. “Sparky needs to pee,” Bits calls. “And maybe poop.”
“How are we going to do that?” Peter asks me. There are no fences here, and we can’t waste time searching for a scared cat if she runs off.
I sigh. “We’ve got to deal with a half-grown cat and the world’s dumbest dog, and you’re telling me to be optimistic?”
“Pete, don’t bother,” Nelly says with a chuckle. “She’s too stubborn.”
I make a face at him and tell Bits to find the twine in my bag. Bits hands it to me and asks, “Are we making a leash?”
“No way. Have you ever tried to walk a cat? If I can give you one solid piece of advice in your life, it’s this: Never tie something around a cat’s neck and try to take it for a walk. I speak from experience.”
I kiss her cheek when she giggles. Sparky attacks the string as I try to fasten it around her, but in the end I fashion a rudimentary harness. “I’m sure she still won’t like it, but at least she won’t strangle herself.”
“I love you,” Bits says, and throws her arms around me. It’s so unexpected and ge
nuine that my eyes fill. I’ll get her to Alaska, to safety, if it’s the very last thing I ever do in this miserable world.
“I love you,” I say, and try not to choke on the words. “More than all the stars in the sky.”
Bits takes Sparky from my lap and smiles at Peter. “That’s infinity, you know.”
She and Hank set the cat down in the grass and stand guard. Sparky makes a run for it, only to be yanked back by the harness. I can’t help but laugh; I knew it would happen.
“I like that,” Peter says. “More than all the stars in the sky.”
“Me, too.”
I think it’s time to retire Until the end of the world and after. The world has been over for a while, and we live in the after. It’s become completely attainable.
Peter gazes out the windshield at the orange-streaked sky. “Are they really infinite?”
I picture Dan on the ambulance roof. Maybe he was telling me to keep watching, or that he’d be up there, or maybe even that he loved me. I wish I knew because they were his last words, and somebody should have heard them. I ignore the rock in my stomach and say, “No one knows for sure, but we’ve decided they are.”
Peter nods and continues his watch of the clouds. I imagine he’s thinking about Ana, and I touch his shoulder before I leave to set up the stove.
“Coffee?” I ask Penny.
Penny looks longingly at the coffee packets. She slept last night but doesn’t look as if she has. “I’m not supp—”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Penny offers to finish the coffee in her enthusiasm for a cup. I brush my teeth, visit the Ladies’ Bush, and then stretch out in the grass. Everything aches. I’m exhausted and weighted down. I look around at the faces we have with us, but all I see are the ones who aren’t here. The holes they’ve left. The emptiness.
I know we all won’t make it to Alaska. Some of us will, maybe, but not all of us. Not by a long shot. There will be more holes, more empty spaces. The thought is so disheartening that I want to stay in this spot and let the grass grow over me. My forced determination evaporates, leaving only the belief that we’re going to die, one by one. I wish Ana were here—she’d screech at me to buck up and then make me run a mile, for fun. And John might have been able to get us all to Alaska or at least give me faith that it was possible.
Peter walks over and nudges me with a foot. “Coffee’s done. Ready to go?”
He follows my line of vision, and I can tell by the way he slumps that he also sees those empty spaces. But then he straightens his shoulders and extends a hand. I don’t know how he manages to conjure up a smile. Years of living with ghosts, perhaps.
“Everything’ll be all right,” Peter says.
I can see that he believes it, as crazy as that may be. And that he needs me to believe. Maybe it’s something you can choose to believe. You make it all right, no matter what gets thrown at you. Maybe happiness is something you can decide on. It has to be better than the alternative. I don’t think pessimism suits me. He pulls me to my feet, and I hold tight on our way to the bus.
Bits laughs at something Hank whispers in her ear, maybe one of his jokes. He blinks like an owl, and I feel my fierce protectiveness for Bits expand to include this smart, funny little boy. He may act older than his ten years, but he still needs a mother.
I look down the westward road. It’s so barren, so lonely-looking, so filled with the unknown. It looks like it stretches on forever. It certainly feels like it does. I don’t see how it can possibly be all right.
But then I see Nelly and Adam share a kiss before they climb into the pickup. I watch Jamie put her arm around Ashley’s shoulders and guide her to the camper. Kyle flashes me one of his rare grins when I smile at Nicole, who plays the drums on her father’s head from her seat on his shoulders.
There’s still so much love in the world. So much to hope for. And so much to lose. But if I concentrate on the former hard enough, I can almost believe it, too. I’ve had my chance to break down, to fall apart, to be overcome by helplessness and hopelessness. But not anymore—I’m never going to let this world get the best of me again.
“Yeah,” I say, and squeeze Peter’s hand before I let go. “It’ll be all right.”
About the Author
Want to read more? Visit http://www.SarahLyonsFleming.com
All the Stars in the Sky (Book 3) Coming winter 2014
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Sarah Lyons Fleming is a Laura Ingalls devotee, wannabe prepper and lover of anything pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic—or anything in between. Besides an unhealthy obsession with home-canned food and Bug Out Bag equipment, she loves books, making artsy stuff and laughing her arse off.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, she now lives in Oregon with her family and, in her opinion, not nearly enough supplies for the zombie apocalypse. But she’s working on it.
Thanks to the usual suspects, and some new ones:
My many parents, who read, reread and love my work. For my mom and dad, who read it so many times they must have it memorized. And Mama P, who caught many of those last sneaky typos. I’m so grateful for all of your love and encouragement.
Jamie, whose enthusiasm rivals my own, and who hasn’t yet stopped answering the phone when I call for moral support. Seriously, you’re the best. And Jamie’s friend, Tracy, who also treats my drafts with a ton of excitement. You ladies are my first fangirls!
Rachel Greer, who gave me some great advice to stop smiling all. the. damn. time. She knows what I mean.
Danielle, for reading and proofing. Not only is she excited for the story, but she tells it like it is.
Rachel Aukes, for her helpful comments and for happily (I hope!) answering a few pesky emails.
Linda Tooch, for proofing and giving her honest opinion.
Will Fleming, husband and editor, both jobs at which he excels. Once again, he kept me on the straight and narrow in terms of grammar and clarity. When it comes to writing, he doesn’t let me get away with anything. But he lets me get away with plenty in real life, and that’s just the way I like it.
Until the End of the World (Book 2): And After Page 32