by R. T. Martin
Kayla smiled. “I think that’s the best idea you’ve had yet.”
They made their way back to Orlando and placed the can next to him. “Perfect!” He slid back under the engine. “Can someone hand me the flathead screwdriver?”
“Get some sleep,” Kayla told Steph, heading over to where the toolkit was laid out. “You’ve earned it, probably more than any of us.” Steph gave her a little nod and walked away.
Kayla helped Orlando for the rest of the day, handing him one tool after another. He even taught her how to change the oil of the truck.
It was late afternoon before he slid out from under the truck and said, “Okay, let’s see if that does it.”
Everyone gathered around the truck. Orlando stood over the engine, propping one foot against the top of a wheel well and the other right up against the windshield. He took off his belt and tied it around something in the engine that Kayla couldn’t see, then spotted everyone watching him.
He paused. “This may not work. I just want to put that out there. I don’t want everyone getting their hopes up.”
No one said anything. Kayla knew their hopes were already up.
Orlando gripped the belt and pulled as hard as he could. The engine sounded like a big lawn mower, sputtering for a second then going dead. Orlando adjusted, gripped the belt again, and pulled. It sputtered a little longer this time, but it went quiet again. Orlando took a deep breath and muttered to himself. She could see the frustration in his face. He quickly adjusted something in the engine. Once more, he pulled on the belt. This time, he pulled so hard he fell off the truck.
The engine roared to life.
Chapter 12
“It’s a temporary fix,” Orlando said to the group. “If it runs out of gas or turns off for some reason, it might not start again. You all saw how hard it was the first time. I don’t trust it to restart if it stops.”
“That means we should go now,” Ms. Pollack said. “How far will it get us?”
Orlando shrugged. “I filled the tank, but I couldn’t tell you what kind of mileage it’ll get, especially after the changes I made. No electricity means it’s eating more gas than it would normally. Also, headlights and turn signals don’t work. I doubt even the speedometer will function, but it’ll move, and that’s all we need right now.”
“Then let’s go!” the teacher said excitedly. “Everyone in the back.”
The choir quickly gathered their belongings and rushed to jump into the truck. There weren’t really seats, just two long benches, but there was enough space for everyone and their bags. Ms. Pollack said she’d drive first since Orlando had been up all night. Within a few minutes, they were on their way home.
They drove down county roads, guided by the map Orlando had grabbed from the store. Even out here in the middle of nowhere, they had to slow down occasionally to avoid abandoned vehicles
Kayla watched scenery go by: mostly cornfields and soy fields. Every now and then, they passed a cluster of trees.
More than an hour passed before they reached any sign of civilization—a small town, smaller even than McKenzie. As they drove into it, Kayla saw Orlando breathe a sigh of relief.
“This is my stop,” he said to her. Orlando gave Ms. Pollack directions, shouting from the back of the truck into the cab. He led them into a residential neighborhood where they stopped in front of a house. Orlando hopped over the side of the truck but made a point of telling Ms. Pollack to “keep it running.”
He was only about halfway up the sidewalk when the door popped open, and a man who looked remarkably like Orlando rushed out and hugged him. Orlando exchanged a few words with his brother before returning to the edge of the truck.
“Time for you all to head on without me.”
There was a chorus of “thank you” from the students.
Orlando looked over to Kayla, Steph, Luke, and Maddie. “It was great to meet you,” he said. “If you ever find yourselves in McKenzie again, let me know.”
“Thank you, Orlando!” Ms. Pollack shouted out the window.
Orlando gave one last wave. The truck started moving again. Kayla and the others waved to him until they rounded the corner and he was out of sight.
From there, they made their way back to the country roads toward home. Every hour, it felt like they were covering the same ground over and over again—the same fields, the same little packs of trees, the same hills.
Kayla poked her head out the side of the truck near the driver’s window. “How’s it going, Ms. Pollack?”
“It’s going all right, but we’re going to need gas soon. There’s no way we’ll make it home on what we’ve got, not even close.”
Some of the other students heard her, and a buzz of concerned murmurs spread through the truck.
“We’ll probably hit a gas station soon,” said Kayla in what she hoped was an upbeat voice.
“I doubt gas stations will be functioning,” Ms. Pollack replied.
“Maybe we can stop and syphon some from a car,” Kayla suggested.
“That’s probably a better bet,” her teacher agreed. “But this thing runs on diesel, which we can’t get from a car. We’ll stop at the next freighter truck we see.”
Steph moved from across the bench over to Kayla. “People are getting antsy. We need a distraction, like a game or something.”
Kayla shrugged. “We’re a choir. Didn’t you say something about singing in perfect pitch being our job?”
Steph nodded and laughed a little. “Right.” She stood by the cab of the truck and began singing the first few bars of one of their songs. It didn’t take long for the rest to join in. That seemed to calm everyone for the time being.
Kayla couldn’t focus on the song. She was concerned about the gas. So far they’d only passed cars, which were no use. She was afraid the engine would putter out at any moment. She knew they wouldn’t be able to get it started without Orlando.
They drove for a few more miles before Ms. Pollack shouted, “Something coming up!” Kayla squinted at the road ahead. Is that a road block? she wondered.
As Ms. Pollack slowed the truck and the obstacle came into focus, Kayla saw that two cars had been pushed onto the road so no one could drive past that point.
Kayla got a sinking feeling in her gut. Something about this felt wrong. But in she knew they couldn’t turn back. They hadn’t passed any gas stations yet, and they would likely run out of gas in the time it took to find a different route. The truck slowed, and Ms. Pollack pulled up to stop a few yards from the roadblock.
She got out, leaving the truck running. “Some of you come help me—let’s see if we can move these cars.”
As she watched their teacher and a few other students walk over to the cars, Kayla heard a rustling in the woods off to the right of where the truck was parked. Is it the Visitors? she thought nervously. Her heart sped up. “H-Hello?” she called out.
“Hello.” A man stepped out of the woods. At first Kayla felt relieved to see it wasn’t the Visitors, until she noticed the baseball bat hanging at his side. Several others came lurking out of the woods—a woman holding a knife, a guy gripping a pipe, another holding a wrench.
“Kids, stay in the truck!” Ms. Pollack shouted. She turned to the first man. “What do you want?”
He smiled, and Kayla felt a chill run down her spine. “Nice truck you got there. We could really use it.”
Ms. Pollack stood perfectly still. “We’re just trying to get home.”
The man let out a bark of laughter. “We’re all trying to get home. We owe you a thank you. You brought us this truck, and now we’re going to get home a lot faster.”
He looked from student to student, his smile growing bigger. “Why don’t y’all hop out? That truck’s ours now.”
Chapter 13
“Please, we need this truck.” Ms. Pollack stood between the man and the students standing with her on the road. Meanwhile, the other adults were closing in around the back of the truck.
“I’m afra
id we can’t let you have it,” the man said. He leaned on the bat, using it as a kind of cane while he spoke. Something about his casual demeanor made Kayla more nervous than if he’d just been threatening them.
“Maybe you can come with us,” Ms. Pollack said. “We’re headed—”
“Doesn’t look like there’s enough room,” he said, eyeing the choir. “Come on. Get out.”
Kayla saw the defeat on her teacher’s face. Ms. Pollack looked at the students in the truck and nodded. They stood up and hopped off the back of the truck one by one. Once they were out, the adults started filing in.
The man with the bat jumped into the driver’s seat and leaned out the window. “Thank you kindly,” he said to the choir, and the people in the back chuckled. With that, the truck made a U-turn and drove back the way the choir had just come from.
They stood in the middle of the road for a bit, everyone stunned by what had happened. Just minutes ago they’d been well on their way home. And now their hopes were crushed. The distance they had to travel felt much longer, their situation much more hopeless.
Kayla broke the silence. “How far are we from home?”
Ms. Pollack was rubbing her temples and looking at the ground. “About a hundred and twenty miles,” she said flatly. “Give or take. It’s hard to tell exactly where we are on the map.”
“How long would it take us to walk?” Steph asked.
“Like three days,” Luke said.
“I don’t have enough food for three days,” one student said.
“Me neither,” Maddie said.
“Yeah,” another student added, “If I don’t—”
“We can’t stay here!” Ms. Pollack shouted. The rest of the students quickly stopped talking.
Kayla was surprised at her sudden outburst. She’d never seen Ms. Pollack like this. Kayla had always thought their choir director was incapable of losing her composure. She’d kept her cool through everything that happened, but losing the truck must have been the last straw.
Ms. Pollack continued, “We have to keep moving! If it takes us three days, it takes us three days, but we have to go. Now!” She walked around the cars that were blocking the road, and the students followed.
Just as they had when they left the airport, they walked in a loose cluster. They moved over one hill just to head for the next one. No one mentioned their food situation; nobody needed to. We all know what a disaster it will be if we don’t find some source of food soon, Kayla thought.
One boy grabbed some corn off a stalk in the field they were walking next to. He pulled the husk back and took a big bite, but quickly spit the kernels out. They were far too hard to eat. Some kids grabbed some anyway.
When dusk fell, they made camp in a barn that looked like it hadn’t been tended to in decades. Parts of the roof were gone, and there weren’t any doors. They ate some of the little food they had left, and Kayla fell into a restless sleep. When she woke the next morning, it felt as if she hadn’t slept at all.
They walked into the afternoon. The scenery never changed. The repetitive landscape made Kayla feel like she was walking on a treadmill. They may have been getting closer to home, but it never felt like they were making any progress. She took to looking at the ground as she walked.
Suddenly she bumped into Ms. Pollack’s back. The teacher had stopped moving, looking hard at the horizon.
“What’s up?” Kayla asked.
She didn’t answer, but her eyes narrowed, focusing harder on whatever she was looking at. The rest of the choir had stopped as well.
“What is that?” one of the students asked. Kayla still couldn’t see what they were talking about.
All at once, the teacher’s eyes went wide, and she darted to the side of the road. “It’s a truck!” she said. The fear in Ms. Pollack’s voice sent a chill up Kayla’s spine. “It’s coming this way—everyone hide!”
Chapter 14
They concealed themselves as well as they could. Most of the students ran into the nearby cornfields. They crouched low to the ground and waited.
Kayla’s heart felt like it was beating a mile a minute. There’s no way they didn’t see us, she thought. We were a big group of kids standing right in the middle of the road. If we saw them, they must have seen us.
The rumbling came first. Kayla couldn’t see much of the road because of the corn stalks, but she heard the sound of the truck. It was getting closer and louder . . . much louder, too loud. It registered with Kayla that she wasn’t listening to one truck—there were many. She imagined the people who’d stolen their truck coming back with others to take the few supplies the choir had left.
The sound got louder and louder until Kayla heard the screech of brakes. Kayla heard a door open and footsteps on the gravel of the road.
“Who’s out here?” It was a woman, her voice direct and authoritative. “This is Colonel Amanda Lewis of the United States National Guard. If you need assistance come out now!”
Ms. Pollack snapped up from her kneeling position. “We’re here! We’re here! Help—we need help!” She rushed out from the corn field.
Kayla slowly stood up. This seemed too good to be true, and she wasn’t ready to trust it yet. But she saw her friends moving out of the field, so she followed.
As she came out of the stalks, she saw that the woman was telling the truth. She was wearing the camouflage fatigues of the military, and the trucks behind her were filled with men and women dressed identically.
“We walked from McKenzie to the camp you set up south of here,” Ms. Pollack explained to Colonel Lewis.
“We took one of your trucks,” Maddie blurted out. “But someone stole it from us.”
Colonel Lewis brushed off Maddie’s comment. “We left that camp three days ago to assist with a power plant that exploded nearby.”
The explosion we saw in McKenzie, Kayla realized.
“Where are you heading?” the colonel asked.
Ms. Pollack explained while the colonel listened without any emotion. Once she’d heard the whole story, Colonel Lewis nodded. She pulled a radio out of her pocket and started speaking into it. “Unit five-one-seven, pull up to me. You’re gonna be taking a high school choir home.”
Everyone stared at the radio. It had been days since they’d seen working electronics. “Your radios work?” Maddie asked.
“Some of them,” Colonel Lewis answered. “We have a number of emergency bunkers with supplies in them. They were protected from the EMP blast.”
Kayla felt days of tension evaporate from her body all at once. She’d be home soon, home with her family. Some members of the choir hugged each other while Ms. Pollack thanked Colonel Lewis over and over again.
One of the trucks pulled up to them, and everyone hopped into the back.
Kayla leaned over to Steph, who was sitting next to her. “I suppose we can’t blame you for not being able to predict a power plant exploding,” she said with a smile.
“You know,” Steph said, “between us, this could have gone a lot worse.”
Kayla laughed. “Seems like things go better when we can figure out how to work together.”
“Just try not to get in my way,” Steph teased.
They laughed together as the truck took off. Kayla looked over to Luke and Maddie, who were seated across from her. “We’re gonna be okay,” she said.
Ms. Pollack leaned back where she was sitting. “I’m just glad we’re finally getting home.”
“Not quite the field trip you thought it would be, Ms. Pollack?” Luke asked. She just closed her eyes, and everyone else laughed.
Maddie looked around the truck. “I’d still take this over an airplane any day.”
About the Author
R. T. Martin lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. When he is not drinking coffee or writing, he is busy thinking about drinking coffee and writing.
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