“You know guys, with this much gas, it’ll only take us like, a little more than a day to make it home, if we keep on a straight path,” Chris pointed out. “We might actually almost be done.” Adam and the others marveled at the fact for a moment, and then Cody ruined it.
“Next time on: Cody & The Numbskulls! The boys make it home, perhaps just in time for a Sunday roast! Tune in!” He announced, the others all groaning, aside from Luke, which Adam never understood. Jeremy threw a shoe at the back of Cody’s head in protest. “Ow!” Cody shouted in pain.
“Yeah, next time it’ll be my whole foot, asshat!” Jeremy threatened.
“Yeah, I’d love to see your foot make it to my head!” Cody said. “You kinda need to be uh, what do you call it… athletic for that!”
“Or flexible,” Nolan added.
“And strong,” Derrick said.
“And shut the hell up? How about that?” Jeremy sarcastically asked, making the others laugh.
“So… not to be that guy…” Adam said, some of the others moaning. “Right… but, what if we run into a roadblock? Either literally or figuratively? Should we divert north or south?”
“Depends on the situation,” Luke determined. “Derry, what do you think? You’re the map-guy.”
“Right,” Derrick said, still proud at his title. “I’d say go north. It’s getting colder and colder. If we go north, that means there’s a better chance of snow. More snow makes it harder for… really anything to get around.”
“Yeah, including cars, dumbass,” Adam argued, chuckling at his own remark. “What do we do then?”
“Well, we used to plow for my dad’s company sometimes, remember?” Derrick replied, offering up some form of advice, at least that’s what Adam assumed it was meant to be.
“Der, that was like, two or three times a year,” Chris said. “And only when it got really bad.”
“And we don’t have any shovels!” Nolan said, countering Derrick’s point even further.
“Or plows,” Cody added.
“Well… god damn it I don’t know! We’ll find some shovels then!” Derrick shouted. Adam looked in the rear-view mirror, and couldn’t help but notice the others all smiling and laughing, despite the very real conversation they were having. He felt a grin slide across his face too, admittedly.
“Hey, remember that time we all went out on a Monday night to plow?” Luke said, reminiscing. “It was like, the December of 2016 I think.”
“2015. Junior year,” Jeremy corrected, reaching into his bag and pulling out one of his notebooks as proof.
“Oh yeah!” Cody recalled, laughing. “None of the regular employees could make it, right? That’s why we were all there!”
“Yeah!” Luke continued jubilantly. “And we were in one of the plows, and it was like, 4:00 in the morning, and Adam and Derrick kept arguing over who should drive?”
“Well because I was the better driver!” Adam pointed out. “I could keep the lines a lot straighter than him!”
“Oh bullshit!” Derrick rebutted.
“Here we go again…” Chris muttered.
“I’m the one who did it most often! It was my dad’s company! I should’ve been driving! That’s why I was!” Derrick yelled, diving right back into issues of the distant past.
“Wah, I’m Derrick and I should get to do everything because my dad said I could!” Nolan mocked, wiping away fake tears. The others laughed even harder.
“Shut up!” Derrick whined. “Wah, I’m Nolan and my sister is incredibly hot and I can’t take it!” The others all continued laughing, and simultaneously shot Derrick extremely confused looks.
“Right, because that’s relevant,” Luke said, shaking his head, though still with a smile.
“You know, it’s this kind of arguing that lead us to crash that plow in the first place.” Jeremy brought up.
“Right into the telephone pole, yeah!” Cody said, almost in a fit of laughter at this point.
“But, we missed the church,” Adam said in his own defense.
“By like a foot,” Nolan countered.
“Which would’ve been a whole lot smaller if I wasn’t driving!” Adam said.
“You weren’t driving! I was!” Derrick shouted. “You kept grabbing the wheel from the passenger seat!” The others were in tears, remembering that to be the ultimate cause of the crash.
“What was it your dad said again, Derry?” Cody asked, taking a breath. “‘If you weren’t a bunch of kids I’d kick all seven of your asses until it was one mashed up ass’ or something?”
“Yeah, but can you blame him?” Derrick asked.
“No, but I can blame him for not letting us get breakfast and coffee from the Donut Nook!” Chris said spitefully.
“Hey, we did get it!” Nolan clarified. “We just stole the car and drove there ourselves.”
“Yeah we did,” Jeremy said, laughing hard again.
“God, my dad hated you guys,” Derrick thought aloud, though he too was smiling wide. “‘Never again,’ he’d always tell me. ‘Never. Again.’”
“Well maybe if you didn’t move to Northern California, he wouldn’t have had this problem,” Adam playfully pointed out.
“He’d also be out of a job…” Jeremy countered.
“Meh… I’m a realist, not a miracle worker,” Adam said, the others all laughing again.
They continued to reminisce, and thus began a great journey into their past, sharing stories they had all already heard or been a part of, and yet none of them could get enough of rehearing. Adam couldn’t help but notice it; it was strange. Maybe it was after that talk with Chris, but he just couldn’t help but take notice to how happy they all were; how happy just being with them, just like this, made him. He had changed his mind, maybe they were his constant.
About 8 hours later, when they had made their way just a ways into Nebraska, and their conversations were only then starting to come to a lull, they had found their dreaded road block. Quite literally too, which, all things considered, was better than other outcomes.
There were massive boulders literally blocking the road. They cascaded across the entire strip of road, assumedly from the small cliff just to its right. Adam could not for the life of him believe it.
“Oh come on!” He whined, upset at the mere sight of it. “Where was the rockslide warning sign!?”
“Well, we just adjust our course, no big deal,” Luke told him.
“Yeah, except it’ll use a hell of a lot more of gas,” Adam said bitterly. “Der, there’s a map in the glove box, right?” Derrick opened it and checked, then pulling one out and showing it off to all the others.
“Yep, right here,” he said, inspecting it.
“Alright, well you’re gonna have to direct someone where to go,” Adam ordered, unbuckling, and putting the van into park. “I’m done driving for now, I wanna nap.”
“I’ll drive,” Cody and Nolan said at the same time. They glared at each other, and Chris, Jeremy, and Luke just sighed exhaustedly.
“Arm wrestle you for it?” Nolan suggested.
“Ugh… fine,” Cody reluctantly agreed.
“Alright well why don’t you guys head outside and HUHH–!” Luke tried to say. Unfortunately for him, they wasted no time, and slammed their elbows down right on top of him, and on quite the vulnerable area too. The others all winced in a shared ghost-pain, while Luke laid with tears welling up in his eyes, unable to speak and completely out of breath.
Suffice to say, Nolan won, and Luke earned the consolation prize of getting to ride shotgun so that didn’t happen again. They were on their way, now headed north, and would hopefully be back on track within an hour tops, if all went well.
All did not go well. They had to traverse side-road after dirt-road all the way up to North Dakota. It took them almost five hours. Chris wasn’t even sure how that was possible, but everywhere they went, every hint of a main road they tried to travel down, it just got blocked up, overgrown by forestation
to the point where it was unsuitable for the van; streets cracked and broken apart to high hell; old rusted cars walling off the path. It was infuriating.
Adam was fast asleep in the back, with Derrick sleeping next to him. Luke and Nolan were still up front, but they switched off who was driving. Cody, Jeremy, and Chris all now sat in the middle, and Cody and Jeremy were out cold as well. Nolan was fading out too, but to his credit, he was trying to fight it. Unfortunately for him however, within a few minutes, he knocked out completely, and fell asleep with the rest of the group.
The sun was still fairly high in the sky, but clouds had rolled in with a force, and it was constantly being hidden out of view. The area around them seemed grey to Chris. Decayed and empty. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
“So Luke,” Chris said at last, breaking the rather peaceful silence, “what do we do, once we find them? Or, you know… if…”
Chris saw Luke’s eyebrows furrow, and he stared off into the distance a little more keenly. The question made him anxious, if his blue, unnerved eyes were anything to go by. Luke was fairly expressive, but to all the guys– to Chris and Jeremy for sure, anyway– his eyes were always a dead giveaway to the truth.
“Well,” Luke said slowly, taking his time to think each word through, and lifting his fingers lightly off the steering wheel, “there’s the laboratory toward the center of town; maybe after we hit our houses, we go there; see if people set up shop there, and what they have to offer. You know: food, beds, knowledge.”
“Okay,” Chris said. “Well– and I’m not saying this will be the case, but– if we don’t find anyone, what then? Are we really going to go back to Cyrus’s? I mean don’t get me wrong, he seems great, and that place is on the borderline of too good to be true, but… I don’t know if we belong there, you know?” Luke paused, and just for a moment, his eyes glanced down at the dashboard, then back out to the road.
“I don’t know, Chris,” he answered at last. “I don’t even know that we’ll have to go, but I mean… Maybe we don’t belong there, and maybe we do. We were only there for like a day, you know? Maybe we go back, give it a chance– a real chance– and leave again if it’s not for us. I’m sure Cyrus would understand.” Chris sat quietly, trying himself to understand the reasoning behind that. He did, but all the same he just couldn’t shake that there was something off about the decision.
“I just… I don’t know if I want to just meet new people, you know what I mean? I know it sounds ridiculous, but if we go home and…and nobody’s there… I just want it to be us, and to just move on together. Not with all these other people, no matter how nice they may be,” Chris confessed, looking directly at Luke. Luke turned to him briefly, slowing the car up a bit, though still moving.
“I get it C, really, but you gotta give life a chance sometimes, you know?” Luke said, now looking back and forth into the rear-view mirror at Chris. “It’s just like back at school; you know some people, but then you get to middle school and you meet more people. Then it’s high school, and I’m sure college was the same thing. You don’t necessarily lose the people you already know, if anything you just become closer to them. You just also make new friends, sometimes great ones. We didn’t know Jeremy and Cody until middle school, and look at what happened! I love those guys, and so do you; Jeremy’s your best friend for Christ’s sake. You see what I mean?”
“I guess so, but it’s all so different now, you know?” Chris said. Luke tilted his head slightly, and gazed at Chris through the rear-view mirror again.
“Not really,” he countered.
“Not really? How not?” Chris asked, baffled and confused.
“Well, this is, I imagine, what it would be like outside of school altogether; it’s all the same,” Luke said.
“Not when everything’s like this!” Chris said. “Not when it’s all gone.”
“It isn’t,” Luke replied, confused at Chris’s statement. “Man, nothing’s gone.”
“What!? Of course it is! You know that better than most!” Chris insisted.
“Chris, it isn’t,” Luke said. “So in some places the ground is ripped, some of the buildings are broken, there are different… things walking around. Earth changes all the time; it has for years, and it will keep changing. That’s life. It sort of sucks, but life’s a bitch, you know?”
“Well…Well what about all the people? What about all the people we lost? That we still might lose?” Chris asked, half playing devil’s advocate, half genuinely wanting an answer from Luke. He was quiet again for a moment, and gripped the wheel a bit tighter.
“I don’t know if you know this– maybe you’ve heard me sometimes– but every night, before I go to sleep, I do this little… ritual, I guess. I say goodnight to everyone I love: my family, you guys… Emily… I ask God to keep you guys safe, and I talk to Emily about what we’ve done, what we’re doing, all that. I used to do it with her when uh… when she was still here…”
Luke stopped for a moment, and turned his head to look out the window. He glanced up at the sky, still littered in clouds, and then turned his back to face the road ahead.
“So I do it now, and I ask her what I should do. And I ask her to give me the strength to see us through it, you know?” He continued. “She was always my rock; she kept me grounded, kept me happy, and always let me know that things were going to be alright. And, I don’t know… because of that, I could let you guys know it too.” He paused again, and gestured up to the clouds with his hand. “When I look up sometimes at the stars, when they’re out at night, I find the brightest one, and I just… I know that it’s her. And all the stars around her are all the other people we either have, or might have lost. They’re still around; we don’t lose them. Not if we don’t choose to. And if they’re not gone, then things aren’t really that different, are they?”
Luke finished his speech, and Chris stayed silent, actually quite blown away by what he had just said. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but it just really struck him hard. Maybe it was because he was so open, for the first time in a long time, about Emily. Chris couldn’t even begin to remember the last time he had heard that much about her, especially out of Luke. And just… that unwavering optimism.
Granted, it seemed like he couldn’t really accept that people were in fact dead, who he’d either seen with his own eyes, or just based on probability, but still, all in all it wasn’t a bad though process to have. Not to Chris, anyway.
“I mean, with you guys too– before any of this happened, before that massive storm– you guys are what made me feel like I had purpose; like I belonged. Like I was someone I wanted to be, someone I liked; before– hell even during our whole split up. Getting that back, it’s… that’s the way back, our way back,” Luke added, still gazing out at the first clear and seemingly endless road they’d been on in a while now. “I think we're getting there, and when we finally do, then really, we haven't lost anything.”
It was kind of annoying, was what it was. Chris envied it, his ability to remain to hopeful all the time, so vigilant. Very rarely did Luke just break down in front of any of them. He knew that he and Cody used to talk sometimes, and he and Nolan were about as close as Chris was to Jeremy, but almost never in front of the others would Luke show how scared he ever really was; apart from his eyes, anyway. Hell, the last time that happened was when they got split up, and even then he turned it off in a matter of minutes; it was unbelievable.
Chris supposed that mentality did sort of fit into his own whole “stars are constants” thing though, if only a little. So maybe he did have something of it in himself, even if it was just a bit.
They didn’t say much else for a while, and Chris just gazed out the window at all the vast scenery passing by them. The clouds were starting to part, and the sun was peeking out in waves and splashes onto the earth. The ground beyond the road was almost entirely brown, some of it laced with snow, and almost all of it dying. But every now and again there were spots– just a few here and there– wher
e the grass was still green. There were hardly any really, but still, those there were made Chris think; they gave him hope. He didn’t know if they were the remains of a sick and dying landscape, or the start of new growth, but either way, it was a pretty sight to see.
He supposed Luke had a point. When he thought about it, nothing really was that different. It was still as beautiful as he remembered it to be, every now and again.
Maybe things weren’t going to be the same back home… Maybe Luke was right… Maybe there wouldn’t be a home there at all… but maybe there would. Either way, so long as they were together, maybe they could make it a home again. Maybe things didn’t have to be so different after all.
Derrick, Cody, and Nolan sat awake, patiently watching as the easter Montana landscape passed them by. Derrick drove, while Cody and Nolan sat in the middle seats. Cody specifically in the middle, and a passed out Jeremy to his left. Luke was in the passenger seat, but he too was totally unconscious.
Cody and Nolan were playing another card game. War, it looked like, from what Derrick could see from the rear-view.
None of them, as far as Derrick knew, had ever been to Montana before, but he had to admit, it was pretty. Sure, things were more or less broken up where there used to be life, but still, it could have been worse. They knew that firsthand.
“Damn it! You always had pretty nice hair; stylish, I mean,” Nolan said softly. Cody just chuckled, and grabbed the two cards they’d just played.
Derrick glanced back at them, confused. They played another hand, and Cody sighed, Nolan smirking and grabbing the two cards himself.
“Uh, let me think…” Cody muttered. “You uh, you used to be pretty funny, back in the day. Made me laugh, anyway.”
“What are you guys doing?” Derrick asked, grinning a little himself at the strange nature of their out of nowhere compliments.
“Whoever loses the hand has to give the other a compliment,” Nolan explained.
“Something I thought of, just to uh… spice it up a little,” Cody said, then clicking his tongue disappointedly. “What the hell… You have a nice… smile”
The Way Back (Book 1): The Way Back Page 22