by Summer Lane
Jay rolled his eyes.
“Right, stereotype the big guy.”
“Hey, it’s not my fault that you’re the oldest and the strongest,” Elle said. “We’ll all have an equal load to carry, believe me.”
It took just under an hour to finish packing. Pix, Flash and Georgia were each loaded with a backpack. Jay carried a bigger pack and the biggest duffel bag filled with Elle’s salvaged ammunition. Elle had already assembled her pack. It contained all of the necessary items: Water, purifying tablets, knives, matches, bandages and alcohol for cleaning open wounds, along with needles and thread.
“So.” Georgia blinked. “Are we ready? Can we go?”
Elle looked at the apartment and the view of the Santa Monica Beach. Sadness squeezed her heart like an icy fist. She would probably never come back to this place. She would be separated from the city that reminded her of her family for the rest of her life.
“Yeah,” she said. “We can go.”
Flash and Pixwere the first out the door, followed by Georgia. Jay lingered for a moment.
“It’s going to be okay,” he told her.
Elle met his gaze.
“Yeah,” she replied.
Elle walked out of the apartment last, shutting the door behind her. She climbed down the dark, dusty staircase, and met the others on Ocean Boulevard below. The salty sea breeze rustled her hair. She looked up at the city.
This time, she was saying goodbye for good.
_______________________________________
Elle had carefully charted out their route in her mind. They would parallel the 405 Interstate, the San Diego Freeway, out of the city. They would merge onto Interstate 5, heading northbound. And then they would find themselves in the Tehachapi Hills, at Aunt and Uncle’s house.
“So, are your Aunt and Uncle friendly?” Georgia asked.
Elle shrugged. “If they’re still there, yeah.”
“Where exactly do they live?”
“The Tehachapi Hills. They have a ranch.”
“You left the safety of a ranch hidden in the mountains to go back to the city and look for your family?” Jay asked. “Why?”
Elle made a face.
Why did he think?
“So you think they’ll have food and supplies?” Jay continued, pretending he’d never asked a stupid question.
“That’s right,” Elle replied.
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“Nothing is safe, anymore. Or haven’t you noticed?” Elle sighed. “My aunt and uncle will be able to help us.”
“That’s awesome,” Flash remarked, looking up. “Hey. If their ranch is safe, why don’t we just stay there with them?”
Elle shook her head.
“No. They’re…involved with the military. With the militias that are fighting Omega. It’s too high risk.”
“Oh.” Flash looked crushed.Pix squeezed his shoulder.
“Why didn’t you just go back to live with your aunt and uncle after you escaped the Pits?” Pix asked. “Why did you choose to stay in the city?”
“I was hoping,” Elle whispered. “And I guess I was afraid to leave.”
“Hoping for what?”
Elle didn’t answer. She had been hoping that she would find her mother at some point. That she wasn’t dead. Elle had stayed in the city because it was her connection to the past – the world before Day Zero.
Now she was leaving, and she would put it behind her. All of it.
“So this is the freeway.” Georgia stared at the crumbling remains of a decrepit overpass. “Are you sure it’s okay to follow this out of the city?”
“Of course it’s not okay,” Elle snorted. “But we don’t really have any other choice. I don’t want to get lost, so we’re going to parallel the road.”
“What if there are bandits or something on the highway?”
“We’re very well armed,” Elle said with confidence she didn’t feel. “Come on. We need to start before it gets too dark. The Klan comes out at night, and Omega patrols certain parts of the city during the day.”
They climbed the onramp to the freeway. A Chinese restaurant adjacent to the highway had been blown apart. They stepped onto the freeway itself. Miles of vehicles stretched as far as the eye could see.
“It looks like a river of metal,” Pix commented.
“None of them work anymore?” Georgia sighed.
“Not if they had an electronic ignition,” Pix explained, brightening. “See, an electromagnetic pulse disables anything that functions with a computer chip. A pulse bomb can come from anything – a nuclear bomb detonated in the atmosphere, or even a solar flare.”
“This was no solar flare,” Elle said sharply. “This was an attack.”
Her words hung in the air for a moment.
“Yeah,” Pix said at last. “It wasn’t an accident.”
They walked. In some places, the cars were so tightly packed together that they had to climb on hoods and roofs to get through. There were remnants of a past civilization inside the vehicles – cracked, broken cellphones, GPS devices and MP3 players.
Georgia peeked through the window of a blue hatchback. She stifled a gasp and jumped backward.
“There’s a dead person in the car!” Georgia said.
“Keep it down, will you?” Elle snapped. “Your voice is echoing.”
“But there’s-”
“-I know, I know.” Elle gave her shoulder a brief squeeze. “Keep a sharp lookout, okay?”
Georgia turned to Jay and he murmured something to her – probably words of comfort. Elle wanted to roll her eyes, but she didn’t. These kids hadn’t seen half of the things Day Zero had dished out. They were still getting used to the dead bodies.
They’d learn soon enough.
As they trudged forward, Georgia kept her gaze straight ahead, refusing to look through the windows of any of the vehicles on the road. She had gone pale. Elle remembered when she was like that.
Georgia would harden.
They all would.
____________________
“I had a whole network built,” Georgia explained, grinning devilishly. They were camped on the side of a foothill, tucked away in a crevice, out of sight of the road. Elle and the others warmed their hands in front of a small fire they had built.
“What kind of a network?” Elle asked.
“Business connections,” Georgia replied. “My brother had a hefty stash of drugs, and he was high half the time, so I’d swipe them and sell them to my own customers. It was great. I always had cash in my pocket.”
“Right. It was great until you went to jail,” Pix smirked.
“You should talk, you little hacker,” Georgia shot back.
“At least I wasn’t selling dope to thugs on the street in Los Angeles.”
“Hey, calm down,” Jay interjected, hiding a smile. “We all made mistakes, and it’s over now. What we did back then was in the past. This is the apocalypse, remember?”
“What happened to your brother?” Elle asked Georgia.
“Don’t know,” Georgia sniffed. “He was a half-baked lunatic any way you slice it. I’m guessing he died when everything collapsed. I wouldn’t know. I was inprison when it all went down.”
She acted nonchalant, but Elle could hear the emotion in Georgia’s voice.
“What about you, Jay?” Elle asked, the flames throwing shadows over her face.
Jay held his hands in front of the fire.
“Doesn’t matter,” he shrugged.
“Come on. We’ve all confessed,” Georgia prodded. “You can, too. We’re not going to tell anybody. I mean, there’s ain’t anybody left to tell, anyway.”
Jay just shook his head.
“Not every story’s worth telling,” he murmured, looking down.
Hmm. Elle knew how that worked.
“We should all get some sleep,” she said. “You guys go ahead. I’ll take the first watch. Jay, you want to take the second watch?”
They kept the fire burning as they curled up and went to sleep. Elle stationed herself above the campsite, huddled in the darkness. She pulled her hood around her face and scanned the horizon. The freeway wound around the curve of the mountain. If they traveled fast, they could reach the ranch in three days.
If they could stay alive long enough, that is.
Chapter Ten
As they followed the 405, they bypassed abandoned rest stops and gas stations. Elle warned the kids not to stop at any of the buildings. Oftentimes roadside stops had become traps for wandering travelers. It was a great way to get robbed and killed.
Neither of which were appealing. At all.
“Here we go,” Elle announced, pointing to an off ramp. “We follow this road and by this time tomorrow, we’ll be there!”
She was excited. Aunt and Uncle would be so surprised to see her. They probably thought she was dead. She had disappeared such a long time ago…what if they had forgotten about her?
No, Elle thought. They would never forget about me…right?
Elle was far more comfortable as soon as they left the freeway. The road that they were following was older, and as they progressed, became smaller. It was hardly ever traveled, and the lack of tire tracks made it obvious that there had been no recent traffic in this area.
To Elle, that meant just one thing: Omega hadn’t been here.
Yet.
They pushed on, walking until their feet hurt. The open space of the mountains was a huge change from the snug confines of the city. Elle felt exposed, like she was walking around with a huge target on her back that said: SHOOT ME. It put her on edge, but the fresh air and the stunning scenery was terrific.
“I almost forgot what it was like to have this much space around me,” Elle commented. “I’m so used to Hollywood and Santa Monica. Everything is squished together there.”
“It’s a good change,” Jay replied. “There’s freedom out here.”
Yeah. Maybe he was right.
They traveled all day, making camp at nightfall. Elle wrapped her hands in strips of cloth to keep them warm, pulling her hood around her face. She leaned her head against her backpack. The earth was slightly damp, leaving streaks of dirt on her pants. Jay made a small fire when it got dark, enough to warm the kids’ pinched, red faces.
Sleeping in the wide-open spaces was different than sleeping within the confines of an apartment building. The sky was dark, deep blue. Elle stared at the stars. The longer she watched them, the more she seemed to see. She fell asleep, sucked into the mesmerizing swirl of the Milky Way.
Early morning came too quickly. It was bitterly cold. Elle sat up, flexing her stiff fingers. She nudged the others awake. They moved slowly, shivering in the frigid temperature. The remains of the fire smoldered in the coolness of the morning. Jay stamped it out with his boots, hiding traces of their presence.
“Breakfast,” Elle muttered, opening her backpack.
She took two sealed granola bars and split them between the five kids. It wasn’t appetizing, but it was heavy enough to tame the hunger pains. For now.
They left the campsite.
As they followed the road, they wound upward around wide, dry hills. Drought-resistant foliage was clumped together in places and patches of forest lined the mountaintops. They stopped once to eat a snack and drink water, then kept moving again. They didn’t want to stop. Stopping was dangerous. Constant movement gave them a better chance of survival – this was something Elle had learned the hard way, after months of living in the city, being hunted by bloodthirsty Klan members.
In late evening, they finally arrived.
“We’re here!” Elle said.
She jogged forward, up the last part of the road. It flattened into a gravel driveway. The driveway led to a ranch house. It was painted in muted tones, blending with the hills. The house was surrounded by a chain link fence.
“Nice place,” Georgia remarked. “Were your folks rich?”
“My parents weren’t rich,” Elle corrected. “But my Aunt and Uncle were.”
“What did they do?”
“My Aunt’s family was cattle ranchers…probably a hundred years ago.”
“Ah. Lots of money,” Jay muttered.
As Elle approached the chain link fence, she noticed that it was hanging open. She stared at the front door. Weeds were growing around the entrance steps.
“The dogs are gone,” she whispered.
“The dogs?” Pix echoed.
“There were German Shepherds. Lots of them.”
Elle pushed the gate open and whistled softly. There was no answer, no barking. She followed the path to the front door and jiggled the handle. It was unlocked. She pushed the door open and gripped the handgun tucked into her belt.
“Elle…this is wrong, isn’t it?” Flash said, his voice shaking.
“Very wrong,” Elle replied.
The door swung open and revealed a long hallway. The spacious rooms were empty. Curtains were drawn.
“They’re gone,” she breathed. A sob lodged in her throat. “They haven’t been here for a long time.”
“What do you think happened?” Georgia asked.
“I don’t know.”
Elle walked to the end of the hall, turning into the living room – a familiar spot for her. The couches and chairs had been covered with white sheets. Dim sunlight filtered through the slits in the shuttered windows. The house was cold, empty. Elle stared at a mirror hanging above the empty fireplace.
She was alone. Again.
_____________________
Elle huddled against the back of the cage, panting. She was caked in filth. The Klan had taken a knife to her thick black hair and hacked it off. Blood slipped down the back of her neck. She’d never been so dirty before. She’d never been so tired.
She’d just witnessed a fight in the Pits. Two women, both middle aged, thrown into a muddy, deep pit. Thrown against each other in a fight for their lives.
A fight to the death, the Klan called it. But Elle couldn’t do it. She couldn’t kill her opponents. They were prisoners, just like her. Forced into a sick, twisted game used as a form of entertainment.
Sooner or later, she would end up dead, too.
Someone would kill her, out of desperation.
The night was cold. She shuddered and watched the Klan guards round the park, lighting the torches. Tomas stood near the bonfire in the center of the rows of cages, warming his hands. His tattoos and the shadows from the flames became one in the dim lighting. Elle hated the sight of him. He was a sadist – the embodiment of everything Day Zero had done to the world.
Tomas felt Elle’s gaze on him and he turned, offering a smug smile.
She buried her head in her knees, hiding her face.
There had to be a way out of this hell, she thought. There was always a way.
She peeked through the bars and looked at the cages, at the guards making their normal rounds. There was a routine here, a rhythm of operation – even if the Klan was little more than an oversized group of organized thugs.
Elle drew a square in the dirt.
That was the beginning of her map.
____________________
Aunt and Uncle’s rooms were abandoned. Everything important had been stripped and taken from the house. Elle found traces of broken glass and splintered wood in the corners of the rooms. Something had happened. Aunt and Uncle had left suddenly, but someone else had cleaned the house up after their departure.
Who?
It was dark. Elle sat in the large, rustic kitchen.
“Where would they have gone?” Georgia asked.
She sat near Pix and Flash on the countertop, biting off a piece of jerky. Jay sat next to Elle.
“I don’t know,” Elle shrugged. “The only reason they would have left would be if Omega found them. They were working with the National Guard and the militias that are fighting Omega – it was dangerous work. Anything could h
ave happened.”
“But where would they go if they were…well, still alive?” Georgia continued. “They must have had a backup plan that you knew about, right?”
“Not really,” Elle answered. “I only lived here for a few weeks. They were just starting to help the militias when I left.”
“Well,” Jay spoke up, breaking the depressing conversation, “I guess there’s only one thing we can do: keep heading toward Sacramento.”
“It’s hundreds of miles from here,” Georgia sighed.
“It’s safe,” Pix whispered.
“Oh, I know. I’m just saying.” Georgia kicked her boots up on the counter. “It could take us weeks to get there.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Jay replied. “We’ve got to keep moving. If Omega knows where this house is, they might be watching it. It’s not safe to stay here.”
“He’s right,” Elle agreed. “We should get out of here as soon as possible.”
“Are there any old cars that we could use here?” Flash asked.
“I don’t know. We could look.” Elle jumped off the counter. “My Aunt used to keep horses in the stables behind the house, but they’re empty now. I don’t know what happened to the animals.”
She opened the kitchen door. It led to the backyard. Moonlight fell across the overgrown gardens and the dry fountain. Elle bypassed the stables and approached an old shed.
“Aunt and Uncle were smart,” Elle said. “They didn’t keep their stuff out in the open, where people could steal it.”
“They hid it in the shed?” Georgia asked. “That’s so original.”
Elle smirked.
She opened the shed door. It was a fancy building with high-beamed ceilings. It smelled like must and rust. Elle hadn’t been here for a long time. She’d only come inside once, when Uncle had shown her the shed, in case of an emergency…
She flicked the light switch for the heck of it. Nothing happened.
Elle pulled back the thick curtain over the window near the worktable, shedding moonlight inside the building.
She walked to the far corner, counting her steps.
“Help me move this-” she began, but Georgia cut her off.
“Oh, my god!”
“What?” Elle demanded.
“Look!”