The Awakened

by Sara Elizabeth Santana

  He said softly, “Z, I’ll get our things ready to go.” He paused. “You should say goodbye to your mom.” He smiled again and headed out of the room.

  I glanced out the window, seeing the fresh mound of dirt that was just outside the garden, and swallowed hard. As if they had a mind of their own, my feet started moving, out of the room, down the stairs. I paused at the kitchen, noticing that the mess I had made was gone. I felt another wave of affection for Ash and continued out into the garden.

  Her grave was simple, no marker, and perhaps, as time went on, something would grow on top of it, but it was something. It was much more than I had been able to give my father. Ash had done the best he could for her. I sunk to my knees, feeling the soft, cool dirt through my jeans.

  I had a chance here, a chance I hadn’t had before. I had a chance to really say good-bye to one parent where I had not had the chance before. But what could I say? What could I say to a mother that I spent so much of my life resenting and was only beginning to know?

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the dirt in front of me. “I’m sorry that we didn’t have more time. I’m sorry that I could not protect you. I wanted so badly to protect you. We were just beginning to know each other again and…and…” I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “I love you, Mom. I love you so much. Say hi to Dad for me, okay? Tell him he owes me some pizza.”

  I wasn’t sure how long I stayed there. It could have been five minutes, or it could have been five hours. I just sat there, staring at the grave in front of me, wondering how it was possible that I was now an orphan.

  Ash came out, dressed in a dark blue hoodie and jeans with a pair of Caspar’s boots laced tight on his feet. He had a backpack hoisted on one shoulder and his gun strapped to his waist. He was carrying a second backpack in his hands. “I have your stuff. I was sure you would want to change though.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking down at my sweatpants. I didn’t remember putting these on. I raised my eyebrow at Ash. “Did you change me?”

  Ash raised his own eyebrows in response as we made our way back to the house. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I shook my head, a small smile at the corner of my lips. We made our way back into my room. I started pulling clothes out of the drawers, reaching for the hem of my shirt. “Turn around,” I told him.

  “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” he said, a small smirk on his face.

  It felt wrong to smile, so incredibly wrong, but sometimes I couldn’t help but smile around him. He made me smile. “Turn around, Ash,” I repeated.

  I reached for the hem of my shirt and tossed it across the room. I pulled a white t-shirt out of the pile and wrinkled my nose. It would be dirty in a day. I settled on an olive green shirt instead and yanked it over my head. I grabbed a sturdy pair of dark jeans and slipped them on. I looked around for my boots and found them under the bed. My hair was a tangled mess and I dragged a hairbrush through it before pulling it into my standard ponytail. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt like Katniss for a moment.

  Ash came over to sit on the bed, setting my backpack aside. “Where do you want to go?”

  I bit my lip, hesitating before turning around to face him. “I was thinking…I was thinking Sanctuary.”

  He looked at me for a moment before a smile spread across his lips. “You’re joking, right?” I didn’t answer. “Z, we don’t even know if that’s real.”

  I sighed, sitting on the bed next to him. “I know. God, I know. But how can so many believe in this if it didn’t have even an ounce of truth to it?”

  “Z,” he said, sounding a little frustrated. “Tons of people think Area 51 is real, right?”

  “We don’t know that it isn’t real,” I said weakly.

  He sighed, his arm coming out to snag me around the waist. I squeaked but didn’t protest. “I just…I don’t know about this. We’re going off what we heard from Memphis, Julia and Liam.” He said Liam like it left a bad taste in his mouth.

  “You just don’t like Liam,” I said, looking up at him.

  He avoided my eye contact. “I don’t like anyone who flirts with a girl just days after his fiancé died from a nuclear bomb. And who thinks that this magical place exists.”

  “I’m not saying a magical place exists, Ash,” I said, impatient. I brought my knees up to my chest. “But what if a bunch of people are there? What if people went to Colorado to find this place and stayed? What if there’s…something safe out there? It may not be Sanctuary, but it’s something.”

  He looked down at me, his blue eyes bright, and ran a hand over my head, his fingers brushing the strands of my ponytail. “You really want to go?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I just think…where else do we have to go? What else can we possibly lose? We should try.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” I asked.

  He smiled, his lips pressing against my forehead. I felt a shock go through me, and I bit my lip. I was having a hard time adjusting to this new Ash. “Yeah, okay. We’ll go.”

  I nodded, leaning into him.

  We stayed like this, comfortable in our close proximity for a few moments longer before we both sat up and made our way downstairs. I glanced out the window and thought of something. “Hey, Ash?”

  “Yeah?” he said, peeking out of the kitchen.

  “We should take the jeep,” I said. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I walked into the kitchen with him, grabbing the keys off the hook where they had hung for months. I rifled through the junk drawers, looking for the maps my mom kept in there. I found one and took it to the dining room table, unfolding it, tracing the route from Constance to Mesa Verde. “It would take us about 12, maybe 13 hours. Walking…it would take a week, probably more.”

  “The jeep,” he repeated. “God, why didn’t I think of it?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t either until I saw it outside. But it makes sense, and it’s definitely safer.”

  “You’re so smart,” he said, giving me a squeeze around my waist. “And we can take more things in the jeep. Just in case.”

  We spent the next twenty minutes packing things in the back of the jeep, clothes, blankets, flashlights, all sorts of things and as much of the nonperishable food as we could find in the house. I placed the map on the front seat and turned back to the house. I spent so little time here in my life. I had kicked and screamed every time I was forced to come out here, and it wasn’t home like the brownstone was, but it was the place that I was able to say goodbye to, and I would.

  “Are you ready?” Ash asked, coming to stand next to me.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “Let’s hit the road.”

  THE CAR WOULDN’T START.

  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. It had been sitting on the driveway, idle and unused for months. My forehead was resting against the steering wheel and I wondered if my brilliant idea hadn’t turned into the biggest disappointment.

  Ash was sitting in the passenger seat next to me, not saying a word and I was happy for that. I might have bitten his head off. I grumbled under my breath. The gas tank was, miraculously, full, and we could easily make it most of the way to Colorado. We could always walk the rest of the way, if it was absolutely necessary.

  That is, if the car wanted to start.

  “Try it again,” Ash said finally. “You never know.”

  “Yeah, right, you never know,” I said bitterly. I slid the key back in the ignition throwing a prayer up. “Come on, baby; I believe in you. You’ll take us to Colorado.” I turned the key, and it made the same familiar whining noise. “This is absolutely ridiculous.”

  Ash sighed, leaning over to reach for the keys.

  “It’s not going to turn on,” I said firmly, sitting back in the driver’s seat. We hadn’t even left, and we were already hitting roadblocks. What did this say about this crazy trek we were making to Colorado?

  He ignored me, reaching across me to turn the key. The engine sputte
red a bit, whined and then roared to life. He grinned triumphantly, turning to look up at me. I was torn between smacking him in the head and making out with him. I smiled grudgingly at him, and pushed him back into his own seat.

  “Let’s just get out of here, okay?” I said, putting it in gear and starting to back out of the long driveway. When we reached the road, I turned and looked one last time at the house, saying a silent goodbye to my mother before driving away.

  The first five hours of the drive went by quickly in a comfortable silence. Ash fiddled with the radio every half an hour or so, trying to catch a signal of something. It had been so long since we had contact with anyone besides each other and my mother that I think we were desperate to know that there were others out there.

  The roads were empty of people, but like the roads we had seen back in Nebraska, there were empty cars everywhere, abandoned. Every time we passed one, I turned away, afraid to look at it.

  The first time we passed a real city, we slammed on the breaks and looked down at the ruins that were left. There was nothing, just…nothing. I stared at it for a long time before forcing myself to turn away and drive.

  We stopped later that night, pulling over and taking the time to get some sleep. Ash reached for my hand before falling asleep, and I let him, feeling comforted by his soft, warm palm against mine.

  My dreams were restless, not quite nightmares but enough to make me toss and turn in the hard driver’s seat. I woke up more than once, distracted by the bright moonlight streaming through the large windows. I sighed, looking over at Ash, who looked so peaceful in sleep. He shifted a bit; his hand tightened around mine, and I felt for a moment like he was squeezing my heart. When we got to Sanctuary, we would figure it out. I would tell him how I felt, and we would figure it out.

  Sanctuary, the possibility of it being real seemed so far-fetched, like the stories I was told as a kid of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Could a place of safety, of utopia even exist? What would we do if there wasn’t anything there? I had a vision in my head, of the two of us in animal pelts living off the land like Adam and Eve or something. I bit back a laugh at the image. There had to be something there. There just had to be.

  I sat in comfortable silence, keeping a watch outside while Ash slept silently beside me. He slept so quietly that I felt the need to check on him constantly, to make sure that he was still breathing. We were both orphans now, and he was all I had left in the world. Even if he didn’t feel the same way (and my heart clenched painfully at the thought), I needed him. I could not survive if I lost him as well.

  He woke up about an hour later, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Have you been up for long?”

  I nodded. “I couldn’t sleep.” He frowned at me, but I shook my head. “It’s okay. There’s only about seven hours left until Mesa Verde, and I can drive that straight.”

  “No way, Z,” he said. “It’s my turn to drive. You’re not driving the whole leg. You need to rest.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he reached over and grabbed the keys from the ignition before I could stop him. “We’re not going anywhere until you switch places with me.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’m not going to fight you that much. If you want to drive, you can drive.”

  He smiled widely at me, the first real smile I had seen from him in days, and I found myself smiling back. He got out of the car and walked over to the driver’s side as I climbed over to the passenger seat. I buckled myself in and grabbed the map from where it had fallen on the floor.

  We drove for another hour before we spoke again. Ash yawned, rubbing his eyes and looked over at me. “What’s your favorite color?”

  I looked at him, surprised. “Excuse me?”

  “What’s your favorite color?” he repeated, yawning even bigger than the last time.

  “Are you really asking my favorite color right now?” I asked, kicking off my boots and propping my legs up on the dashboard.

  “Yes,” he answered. He noticed my silence and looked over at me. “I’m tired, and I don’t want to fall asleep. And I realized that there is just so much I don’t know about you, Zoey Valentine. I want to know more.”

  I paused for a long moment before I nodded. “Okay. Why not? My favorite color is orange.” He smiled widely, and I couldn’t help it; I had to smile back.

  We played for about an hour before I fell asleep, right in the middle of a story about Ash’s most embarrassing moment. My sleep was restless, so I woke easily when I heard the sound of Ash’s hurried voice. “Zoey. Zoey, wake up!”

  I came to with a start, looking around. “What? What is it?”

  “There’s a car,” he said in a hushed voice, his hands tight on the steering wheel. He was driving faster than he had been earlier, his eyes constantly darting to the mirrors.

  I felt a drop in my stomach as I turned around slowly to look out the back window of the car. There, in the just near distance, I could see the pinpricks of headlights heading in the same direction as we were. “How long have they been back there?”

  “About twenty minutes,” Ash answered, his voice shaking. “I thought maybe it was just someone on the road, like us. Like that couple that gave us a ride to Constance. So I started taking random roads, random turns, and they’ve remained behind us the entire time.”

  “Maybe…maybe they’re just curious about another person on the road. I mean, we’ve been driving for hours and haven’t seen anyone…” I said, my voice shaking as I watched the pinpricks grow a little larger as the vehicle grew closer.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Ash said softly, his eyes flashing back and forth between the road in front of him and the rearview mirror.

  They were just far enough away. “Turn off your lights, and make the first turn you can,” I instructed him.

  He hesitated and then turned off the headlights, throwing us into near darkness. I was never more grateful that the jeep was black; I remember my mom wanting a yellow one. He eased the jeep off the road and began driving in the opposite direction of the highway. He drove slowly, painfully so, but I concentrated on the car that was approaching us, closer and closer. I hoped it would pass us, keep driving. It had to.

  “Stop,” I said, putting my hand out. He crawled to a stop, and cut the engine. We both shifted in our seats, peering over them to look behind us. The car was crawling on the highway, moving painfully slow. They slowed, impossibly, near to a crawl, as they passed near the spot where we had driven off and continued on. I breathed a sigh of relief, but it was premature.

  “Zoey,” Ash said, his voice sounding strangled. I looked at the car, and saw it was backing up, making its way off the road toward us.

  “Oh god,” I said, terrified. “Oh, god. What do we do?”

  He turned back in his seat, his fingers fumbling with the key at the ignition. The engine popped to life and he quickly threw it in gear and took off.

  “What are you doing?” I asked as he sped away.

  “I don’t know, Zoey; I have no idea, But I don’t like that this car is showing way too much interest in us, and we need to go. Now.” His hands were tight on the wheel, and I could feel the jeep protesting as the speed increased.

  “How on earth are we going to lose them, Ash?” I asked, watching as the car behind us sped up, matching our speed and closing the distance between us. “We’re the only cars out here. It’s not like we can get lost with all the cars out here.”

  “I don’t know, Zoey!” he shouted. “But they’re obviously following us, and I don’t like it, okay?”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, breathing heavily. The car was gaining us, getting closer and closer, and it was close enough that I could see that it was a large SUV, black or maybe dark blue, with heavily tinted windows. It looked like a car that my dad would have driven. This made me nervous. This was not a typical car; most people did not drive cars like this. “Ash, they’re right behind us.”

  He didn’t answer; just pushed his foot harder on the gas, but the
jeep only increased speed by a couple miles per hour. It was old, outdated and had been pushed farther in the last few hours than it had in the past few months. We both gasped as the car pulled next to us. “Shit,” Ash said under his breath.

  The window of the SUV rolled down, and a man peeked his head out, motioning for us to roll our own window down. He was older, maybe in his late forties or early fifties, judging by the small amount of gray dotting his hair and beard. He was yelling at us, but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of both engines as they sped along. He was dressed nicely, I could see the beginnings of a tie at the base of his throat, and I felt uneasy, uncomfortable. I hadn’t seen anyone dressed so nice, so impeccably since we had left New York. This wasn’t right.

  The car moved closer and closer to us before bumping into us. The jeep shook, but Ash’s hands were still gripping tightly on the wheel, and he managed to keep us aligned. “Did they just hit us, or was that an earthquake that shook the car?” he asked, a shaky laugh in his breath.

  “No, no, they hit us,” I said, my hands gripping the dashboard tightly. I felt like I was going to be sick. We only had to drive half a day. Half a day to reach Colorado, and we would have been able to find a place of safety. And yet, here we were. A shock ran through my body as the SUV made contact with the Jeep again, this time much harder than before. “Oh my god.”

  “What do you want me to do, Z?” Ash asked, through clenched teeth. His eyes were intent on the rugged terrain in front of us as the Jeep bounced over rocks and grass. I didn’t know where we were heading, whether we would end up in a town or at a cliff. I could see hills in the distance, and I didn’t know what was over there. The SUV hit us again, shaking the entire car.

  “Stop,” I said, the word bursting out of me. “Just stop the car, okay?”

  He looked over at me incredulously but slowed down, bringing the jeep to a stop. We were both breathing heavily, and our eyes met as the SUV came to a stop about one hundred yards in front of us. A couple doors opened, and two men descended from the car and started coming over toward us. “Should we get out?”