Chase rubbed his hands over his stubbled face. His eyes grew wide when they landed on me. I ran a hurried hand through my short, uneven hack-job, and covered my mouth.
“Toothpaste,” I demanded. I didn’t have a toothbrush; my finger would have to do. But when I reached for the bag, he snatched it away and retrieved the item himself. I didn’t know why; I’d already seen the gun.
A blast of freezing air shocked me when I opened the truck door. Shivering, I walked far enough from the truck to shake off the dream but not so far as to lose sight of it completely.
It would be warmer farther south at the safe house. Maybe my mother was already there, head on her forearms, grumbling that there wasn’t any caffeinated coffee like in the old days. Maybe there were other mothers there, too—people who could support her so she wouldn’t worry so much and calm her down when she inevitably tried to launch some knee-jerk rebellion. I could see her leading the charge, a contraband magazine rolled in one raised fist, a trash can of burning Statute circulars to her side. Thinking of this made me smile, a secret smile I would never let her see for fear she’d take it as a sign of encouragement.
“Nice coat,” Chase said, breaking me from the trance. I hadn’t thought twice about slipping on his enormous jacket when I’d gone outside, but now I was suddenly embarrassed, torn between throwing it at him and nestling deeper into the bulky canvas. I ended up shuffling my weight, as if trying to negotiate a balance beam, until he spoke again.
“We need to find some other clothes,” he said, watching my struggle with some interest. “You’ll stand out wearing a combination of your uniform and mine.”
I forced myself to be still. I didn’t know what he had in mind, but I figured it was in the same vein as his procurement of the vehicle. The prospect of stealing didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone or take too long.
I gathered the extra sleeve lengths in my fists and focused on the fact that by nightfall, my mother and I would be back together.
We were on the highway within a half hour.
* * *
JUST after seven, we passed a sign indicating that the Maryland border was nearing. I wanted to go straight to the checkpoint, but we couldn’t take the chance of backtracking into the highway patrol. Instead we were forced into a wide arc to go south. I checked a map every few minutes, tracing Chase’s proposed path. He’d shown me the exact coordinates where we would meet the carrier: 190 Rudy Lane in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
If we didn’t run into any more soldiers, we could still arrive in time.
Though there were no cars, our momentum was stunted. The road was pockmarked by missing chunks of asphalt and man-made debris: a bed comforter, the skeleton of an umbrella. We frightened a deer that had been eating the weathered remains of a Horizons cardboard box.
I took it all in with a mixture of awe and vanquished pride. I’d been nine when the War had taken Baltimore, and the remainder of the state had been evacuated before my tenth birthday. This was the only evidence of human life left.
Chase leaned forward slightly, steering around a rusted motorcycle laid out across the middle of the street. A strange, familiar feeling stirred in my belly.
* * *
“COME on. You’re not scared, are you?” His grin was fast and wicked, his challenging tone deliberate. He knew full well I hadn’t backed down from one of his dares since I’d been six years old, and I wasn’t about to now.
I threw a leg over the back of the bike, squeezing the frame with enough force to bend the metal. His dark eyes flickered with amusement as he grabbed the handlebars and released the kickstand. A tilt of his head told me to shove back, and when I did, his long leg slid between me and the front of the bike.
I fumbled with the back of his shirt, needing something to hold on to.
“Try this.” He grabbed my hands, sliding them around his waist until they were pressing against his chest. The warmth of his skin soaked through my thin mittens. Then he reached back to grip behind my knees, and pulled me forward until my body was flush against his.
I didn’t breathe. We were touching in so many places I couldn’t concentrate. His right foot slammed down and the bike roared to life. The seat vibrated beneath me. My heart was pounding. I could already feel the panic begin to trickle through.
“Wait!” I yelled through the helmet. “Don’t I need instructions, or directions, or a training course, or…”
For just a moment, his fingers interlaced with mine over his chest.
“Lean the way I lean. Don’t fight me.”
* * *
DON’T fight me, Ember.
Absently, I rubbed my right temple with my thumb. I had to stop thinking of the person Chase had been.
“How did Mom look when she was released?” I asked, shaking off the memory.
“What?” His shoulders hunched, and he glanced out the side window.
“How did she look? After the sentencing.”
“I never said she’d been sentenced.”
My back straightened. “You implied it. You said people either get sentenced or sequestered. And you said they let her go, right? So she fulfilled her sentence?”
“Right.”
I groaned. The vague commitment to an explanation was almost worse than the earlier vow of silence.
“How long did you hold her for?”
“Just a day,” he said.
“Don’t give me too many details, okay? I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it.” I crossed my arms over my chest.
He was quiet, brooding again. What did I do to you? I wanted to shout at him. Why won’t you just talk to me? It would be so much easier to accept this person if I didn’t know him before he was guarded and wary and cold. If I couldn’t remember that once he’d been an open book and that the days had been too short to hold all our words. It was infuriating, and worse, it made me question if I’d grossly misjudged everything there had been between us.
He stretched his stiff neck from side to side.
“She looked…” he hesitated. “I don’t know, she looked like your mom. Short hair, big eyes. Little. What do you want me to say? I only saw her for a little while.”
I snorted at this summation. Leave it to a boy to be so literal.
“How did she seem? Was she scared?”
He considered this, and I could see a slight change in his face. A strain, pulling on the corners of his eyes. I was instantly worried.
“Yes. She was scared.” He cleared his throat, and I could tell her fear had pierced that callous shell. “But she was clearheaded, too. Not crazy, like some people get when they’re afraid. She was good under pressure, considering everything that had happened. She was absolutely determined we follow this plan.”
“Huh.” I slouched into the seat.
“What?” he asked earnestly. It crossed my mind that this was the first time he’d been interested in what I was thinking.
“I just never would have described her as clear-headed. I… I can’t believe I just said that. That’s terrible.” I cringed, feeling like I’d just betrayed her. “I don’t mean that she’s not capable of making decisions or anything. It’s just, under pressure, she’s usually… not.”
I saw a flash of our kitchen. Of her crying on the floor when I’d made Roy leave. Of all the times she’d brought home contraband, or gotten it in her head that she would tell off a soldier at the next compliance inspection. I was the safe and steady one. Not her. Now he was saying she didn’t need me, during the scariest time of our lives? That she could do this on her own? What had I been worrying about?
I pinched my eyes closed. They were burning, hot with tears I wouldn’t set loose.
“You’d have been proud of her,” he said quietly.
My heart cracked wide open. What was wrong with me? His words should have been a relief. But here I was, feeling inadequate because she could manage on her own. As if I were codependent or something.
Jus
t as the wave rose, it receded, and left in its place was clarity.
I didn’t need her to feel strong, because she had made me strong. And I had made her strong, too. She was a big girl, like she’d told me countless times when I’d gotten fed up with her rabble-rousing. She’d make it to South Carolina; I just needed to get myself there.
* * *
“SORT of makes you feel short, doesn’t it?” I said as the highway approached an enormous wedge cut into the mountainside. The mustard-colored walls stretched up over three hundred feet on either side, so that only a band of silver sky was visible overhead. Trees and vines, in various states of maturity, reached their crooked fingers toward us, having been long without the care of city maintenance workers. Chase was forced to reduce our speed as we jostled over a mudslide that had spewed out onto the road.
A large sign on my right that read SIDELING HILL VISITOR’S CENTER, NEXT EXIT, had been tampered with: Just below the words, a cross and a flag had been spray-painted with a big neon green X through it. I’d seen symbols like this on the news when we’d had a television, but never in my hometown. It made me feel like a domesticated housecat thrown out into the wild.
“You are short,” he commented, so late I’d forgotten I’d said anything. I tried to make myself taller in the seat, as if to say Five four isn’t that short, but the truck bounced so hard over the ground it was impossible to stay rigid.
We passed through the gap of Sideling Hill and continued on toward Hagerstown. Thirty-three more miles, the sign said. It was evacuated so quickly that most stores had been abandoned, full of merchandise. We’d see how intact that merchandise still was, eight years later, then catch the connecting highway south to Harrisonburg.
“Do you think it’s safe?” I’d heard about gangs in the empty cities. The original purpose of the MM had been to reduce crime in these places.
“Nowhere is,” he said. “It’s been cleared by the FBR though.”
“That makes me feel so much better,” I said.
He connected to Interstate 81, a vigilant eye on the road as we entered Hagerstown. The first houses we came upon were large, surrounded by rolling properties and stout trees. As we drew closer to the heart of town, little neighborhoods sprouted, then lines of track homes and condos. A supermarket. A restaurant. All covered by a gray film of ash, like dirty snow, that had grown impenetrable to weather.
No kids played in the street. No dogs barked in the yards. Not a single car on the road.
The town, preserved by time, was absolutely still.
I noticed a shopping center on the right and pointed to it. Chase took the nearest exit, turning onto a street called Garland Groh Boulevard. Within a minute, he had pulled into an alley beside an old sporting goods store. We’d had one of these at home, but it had closed during the War. The MM had turned it into a uniform distribution center.
I could see the empty highway just beyond the parking lot, a straight shot to the checkpoint. My heart pounded in my chest. It was a little more than five hours before the MM would report Chase AWOL. We’d have to get what we could and get out. Fast.
Chase unhooked the wires near his knees, silencing the engine. Before he opened the door he removed a slender black baton with a perpendicular handle from beneath the seat. His face grew dark when he caught me staring at it with wide eyes.
The other weapon was in the front pouch of the bag. In case we ran across people, he didn’t want anyone seeing we had a gun. It would have been like hanging a hundred-dollar bill out of your pocket and hoping someone didn’t steal it.
“Stay close, just in case,” he told me.
I nodded, and we stepped outside the safety of the truck. Our shoes left footprints in the thin layer of gray ash over the asphalt.
I stayed close beside Chase as we rounded the front of the building. The store’s tall windows had been shattered, the remaining glass forming icelike stalactites that hung from the green-painted frames. The columnar handles of two French doors were bound together by a thick metal chain and a padlock, but the glass on either side was missing.
I scanned the parking lot behind us as Chase stepped through the doorframe. Apart from a scorched Honda that someone had set fire to years ago, it was deserted.
I breathed in sharply as I followed him inside.
A cash register was dumped on its side directly in my path. Metal racks and tables had been overturned or tossed into the aisles. Much of the clothing was missing, probably stolen, and what was left was strewn about as though a tornado had taken the interior of the building. As I made my way farther inside I spotted exercise machines and weight sets, all tagged by neon spray paint with the same symbol: the MM’s insignia X’d out. A rack of sporting equipment spilled onto the weather-stained, laminated floor. Baseballs, footballs, and flat basketballs were peppered all the way to the far wall.
“Try to find some clothes. I’m going to see what else I can pull together.”
I nodded. Even though I knew it was ludicrous based on the condition of the place, I checked for security cameras.
“You won’t get caught,” Chase said, reading my mind. “Anyway, look around; it’s not like you’re going to do this place any more damage.”
He had a point, but the last weeks had made me paranoid, and this place was scary. I worried that somehow the MM might be spying on us. That this was a trap.
I was glad that Chase wanted to go upstairs, because that’s where the arrow and sign for WOMEN’S CLOTHING pointed as well. The frozen escalator groaned beneath our weight as we climbed toward the camping section. It seemed surreal that people used to camp recreationally, but I knew Chase and his family had done that a lot when he was little. As he departed toward the steel racks, I felt a twinge of panic.
“You’ll just be over there?” I pointed to a mangled tent across the floor.
Something changed in his face when he registered my concern.
“I won’t be far,” he said quietly.
A central skylight gave the top floor a faint glow. The closer I got to the far wall, the more shadowed the area became, until I had to squint to see the floor. I stepped gingerly over the rubble crowding the aisles and found several racks of clothing in the back that looked relatively untouched. The tops were all fitted, and the pants were bootleg—that had been the style back then—but old as they were, they were new to me. Though the fabric was dusty, these clothes still held the crisp, folded lines and size stickers. I hadn’t owned clothing that didn’t come from a donation center since my mother had lost her job. Despite the circumstances, the thought had me giggling.
There was a special on women’s hiking boots: $59.99. Free for me! I thought guiltily, and searched through the shoe boxes strewn across the floor for my size. We never would have been able to afford these, even eight years ago. With inflation, these shoes would be well over $100 now. I was getting $100 shoes! I couldn’t wait to tell Beth.
If I ever talked to her again.
I forced the thought from my mind. Behind me was a display of jeans, and I quickly grabbed a pair in my size. A winter coat off the floor had minimal dust covering it, so I took that too. Then a tank top, a fitted tee, a thermal shirt, and a sweatshirt. I grabbed some extra socks, just to be safe, and an unopened package of underwear. It hit me that my mother might not have a change of clothes, either, so I grabbed one of everything for her also.
But as I made my way into the changing area, the laughter died in my throat. The dressing room was the size of a closet, and without the bright overhead lights, it looked like the containment cell I had seen in the shack.
I wasn’t about to shut myself inside.
I scanned for Chase but couldn’t find him. I was glad he hadn’t seen me falter; the last thing I needed was him thinking I was afraid of guns and the dark. With a deep breath, I dropped the items right where I was and hurried to change before he came looking for me.
The jeans fit pretty well, though they were loose around the waist from the weight I�
�d dropped at the reform school. I was midway through pulling down the tank top when I heard rustling behind me.
I spun toward the sound and saw Chase, ten feet away, wearing jeans and a new sweatshirt and carrying a pack over one shoulder. I twisted back away from him, the tank still hiked above my bra.
“Give me a second!” My voice hitched. “Turn around or something!”
He didn’t listen. He closed the space between us. I heard him breathing, felt the closeness of his body. I was frozen in place, but inside, every inch of me was taut and live with electricity. How long had he been standing there, watching me?
“What happened to you at the reformatory?” His voice was just above a whisper, hedged with a barely restrained violence.
“What?” As if submerged in a pool of ice water, my fingers finally thawed enough to pull down my shirt. I threw the other pieces over top.
“When I got there, they brought me down to that room, and I heard you. I can’t get it out of my head.”
The shack. He’d interrupted Brock and the soldiers just before my punishment. I’d screamed. The memory of it was enough to make me ill.
“You want to talk about this now?” I asked, incredulous.
He didn’t wait for me to turn back around. Suddenly he was in front of me. He leaned down, a breath away, and stared into my face. Both of his hands gripped my shoulders. I bit back a wince at the pressure.
“What did they do to you?”
“What did they do to me?” I shook out of his hold. “You’re the one who sent me there! Now it matters what happens to someone else when you disappear?”
The betrayal, the resentment, stormed through me. After he’d been drafted, he hadn’t called or returned my letters. He’d sent no word that he was alive, that he was okay. He hadn’t checked in on my mother and me. His promise that he would come back was a lie. Because a soldier had come back, not him. And that soldier had ruined everything.
He faltered back as though I’d shoved him. His hands went to his short hair.
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