It was about the five hundredth helpful tip he’d given me in the last mile—after he’d whined about there not being enough room in the back and couldn’t he just take out the baby seat—Henry’s seat—and I’d said no. No way, no. And don’t lean on it like that either.
“You need to change up a gear. Put it in second!”
“Do you want me to drop you somewhere?” I snapped. “Like here?”
“I’m just trying to help,” said Darius.
“Yeah?! Why don’t you drive, then?!”
“I can’t,” he said. That figured. Probably he still rode a bike with training wheels or something. “I’m not allowed to right now.”
“Allowed?! Hello?! Allowed? Guess what, Darius Spratt—”
Saying his name shouldn’t have mattered ONE BIT, but I knew as soon as I’d said it—like, YEURCH! He knew I knew his name.
“I’m not allowed to drive either!” I yelled.
The GBK rustled a little.
Not in front of the kids, huh? I stalled the car, flung open my door, and got out. I breathed for a second—for not enough time at all—and I knocked on his window and beckoned him. I beckoned him like one of Dan’s gaming-fantasy–hero types challenges a victim to a fight.
He got out.
“This is not a good idea, Ruby,” he said, looking at the sky.
It’s fairly humiliating to have to say this, but the cloud army had kept up with us. It was as if we hadn’t moved at all.
“What are you, my dad?!” I blurted. The weird thing was I meant Simon, and not my dad dad, who would basically never say something like that. No matter. I raged on. “I’m not allowed to break into police stations! I’m not allowed to break into shops! Or other people’s houses! I am not allowed to STEAL DOGS and I am not ALLOWED to dye my hair RED.”
Before he could get one word out about that, I finished my hissing, spitting rant: “In fact, I am not allowed to do anything!”
“I’m epileptic,” he said.
What?! What? You what?! My mouth gaped open and shut, open and shut, like a goldfish. Beanpole Boy turned crimson.
There was this really terrible, awful pause. Then we both looked at the sky and got back in the car.
“I like your hair,” he said quietly. “I think it could really suit you. The thing is—”
“I know my face is kind of orange, all right? I know,” I snarled.
I started up the engine, and we lurched off down the road. Darius Spratt leaned forward to speak to me.
“So, the thing is I was going to ask if you have anything to eat or drink, Ruby?” he said. “It’s just I looked in the back and…”
We stopped in Ashton village, on the pavement, right outside the shop. The door was wide open. When I took my hands off the steering wheel, they left behind serious driver’s hand sweat.
We got out; the cloud army was behind us now. I gave the Spratt this big, fake smile, one I usually saved for Simon, on the rare occasion that he got something wrong—triumphant with a hint of withering smugness.
The shop had not been looted like the shops in Dartbridge; nothing was smashed. Stuff had been taken, but the shelves weren’t stripped bare, and nothing had been left strewn about on the floor. No windows had been shattered by bullets; no dead people lay about. Probably the people who had come there had even paid for what they had taken because there were little piles of money left on the counter by the till.
Ashton village; that’s the kind of place I would like to live someday, a place where people don’t go NUTS and trash stuff and threaten to kill each other, etc., etc., just because the world is being destroyed by a killer space bug.
“Wait a sec,” said Darius.
I dunno where he went, off foraging for more backwash peanuts, I expect. I didn’t pay attention—like normally I wouldn’t pay attention to newspapers either, but I got kind of mesmerized by them. It was just weird: Saturday May 23—all of them. There was some National Health Service scandal thing splashed all over the big papers, but the little ones all stuck to the main story: “BBQ BRITAIN SIZZLES” (with a picture of the outline of the country burned onto a giant, greasy sausage); “MAY MELTDOWN” (Retirees in swimwear). Then the news had stopped.
The magazines were still current, though. I loaded up with every fat, glossy, drool-worthy, style-soaked magazine I had never been able to afford, and some celebrity dirt-dishing mags I probably could have afforded but wouldn’t have been caught dead buying—even though what was in them was, like, totally fascinating and you desperately wanted to know about it.
Darius came back. He had stuff. (Healthy stuff.) For a moment, he just stood next to me; I thought that in spite of the fact that he was Nerd Beanpole Boy, we were somehow sharing some weird moment, about how everything had stopped and seemed like it never would be the same again. I bit my lip; I kind of wanted to say something about it all, but I didn’t know what.
“They didn’t even get the weather right,” said Darius.
“They never do,” I said. I swear those Simon words came out of my mouth without even calling in on my brain. I didn’t pay any attention to weather forecasts; I just moaned when it was rainy or cold, and was glad when it was sunny.
“Still, I suppose we ought to take some papers,” he said. “To show our kids.”
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!
I looked at him in complete and utter horror.
“I don’t mean our kids,” he said, turning crimson again. “I mean kids kids…any kids…kids in the future.”
“Oh,” I said. If I hadn’t been orange already, I think it would have been obvious that I had gone bright red too. Did he seriously think that I had seriously thought…that I would EVER…
“I mean, these papers might be worth something one day,” he said. “But probably not… It’s not like there won’t be tons of them left. Dead people don’t buy papers.”
I looked at him again then, ready to tell him that was a horrible thing to say—YEURCH!!!! He was looking up at the top shelf, at the bare-boobed-and-bottomed smut-fest magazines even polite Ashton villagers must have read…and the stuff no one in their right mind would want to read, like Trainspotters Monthly, or whatever. He reached out and took the last—hey, probably the ONLY—copy of New Scientist.
“Oo, great,” he said, eagerly leafing through it.
I mean really—REALLY—is there no end to the monstrous cruelty of the universe? I truly was in the company of a nerd. Possibly the last boy on Earth…and he was a nerd. Not a geek—geeks were useful and cool and kind of hot—but a nerd. A deeply unsexy nerd who had just thought I had thought—really, I can’t even repeat it.
That snapped me to my senses; for the sake of the GBK, I scooted around the shop; I loaded fizzy drinks, chewy candy, cheap chocolate, chips, and bubblegum into one of their plastic bags. For the sake of shocking Darius Spratt, I also took a packet of cigarettes.
“Ready?” I said, grabbing a lighter and testing it.
“Yeah,” he said. He closed that pervy science magazine and stuffed it down the front of his garbage bag. “Ruby,” he said, “would it be OK to put the big dog in the back? It’s just…I think…maybe it’d be better if the kid sat in the front.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” I said, casually loading a bottle of vodka into my goodie bag.
Outside, there was kind of an alarming sight. The cloud army had gained on us, advancing relentlessly. A fresh battalion was sliding into position below the others, massing overhead. Until you have to pay attention (or die), you don’t realize that: how scarily fast some clouds move. When it feels like it, altocumulus stratiformus is particularly quick. It’s a sprinter.
“!” I said and dragged Whitby out of the front seat.
Darius helped the GBK to take his place, getting her to climb across the gap, so she wouldn’t have to get out of the car, while I attempted to bundle Whitby int
o the back. The Spratt climbed into the backseat.
“Come on, Ru!” he had the nerve to shout at me.
The hatchback clunked down on Whitby’s big dumb head; I wished it was Nerd Boy’s. By the time I’d got into the driver’s seat, Whitby was already blundering his way out of the back.
“Aw! He likes you!” I sniggered, as he tried to barge his way onto Darius’s lap.
I didn’t laugh when Darling scrambled out of my lap to get to the GBK—and that was before the snacks came out.
I dumped my bag of goodies down (on top of Fluffysnuggles), started up, and lurched out into the road.
“Help yourself,” I told the kid.
It was no contest; she chose my selection of delights in favor of the whole-wheat things Darius had got. Fizzy drinks and chips and candy disappeared into the black plastic.
“Can’t she take that stuff off?” I asked.
“We’d better wait until we’re safe,” said Darius.
That was news to me: I thought we were safe. My passengers didn’t seem to notice how skillful my driving was getting. None of them. Darling rustled about on the GBK’s lap and was fed tasty junk morsels.
“That’s bad for her,” I said.
“It’s bad for her too,” said Darius, meaning the kid.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the GBK do what I would have done. She fed stuff to Darling anyway, pretending it was an accident when it so wasn’t. Whitby refused Darius’s more wholesome offerings and poked his stinky head over the gearshift, so the kid could feed him junk too. I didn’t go on about it.
What with the kid being mute and Darius being Darius and the world having been destroyed, the general conversation wasn’t up to much either.
“So how come you’re not dead, then?” I asked, by way of an ice breaker. You know, the kind of question you ask someone when you don’t know what else to say. I’d seen my mom do it a thousand times, ask people, “So how was your trip?” or “So how do you know Mr. and Mrs. Such-and-Such?” Even if the answer was totally embarrassing—like “I live next door” or “Actually, I am Mrs. Such-and-Such”—it was OK; people’d just laugh and have another drink and ask the same question back.
My ice breaker, it was crap. The second I asked that question, the most horrible thing happened. I felt everything that had happened and everything I felt about it come welling up inside me. It felt like…like a tsunami coming, carrying everything—EVERYTHING—with it.
I felt myself choke. I turned the choke into a cough.
“Just lucky, I guess,” he said. “You?”
“Same,” I said.
I was driving. I didn’t even know him; that tsunami, it had to be stopped or I would start blubbering so hard I’d crash the car and kill us all anyway. I—HAD—TO—GET—TO—MY—DAD. I drove on, steely eyed. Steely hearted.
“I was inside, studying,” said Darius Spratt.
“WHAT?!” I shrieked.
I got into a gear confusion and the car swerved around a little.
“I was studying,” repeated the Spratt when I’d shoved Whitby’s head out of the way and discovered where third gear was. “You know, for exams?”
Did he think I was an imbecile? Who could not know about the horror of exams? It’s just that—
“It was a holiday!” I screeched.
“So?” he said.
I looked at him then in my rearview mirror. He looked kind of like he was having his own tsunami issues. He glared up at me.
I looked away—back at the road, where I suppose I should have been looking all along.
Behind me, I heard him speak.
“I was inside,” Darius Spratt said, “and my parents, my whole family, all our friends, all our neighbors, everyone, except me, was outside.”
I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything to Darius about Exeter either. When I saw the signs for it, when I saw where I could turn off, I thought about Caspar. I made a choice: I would go find my dad. Then I would look for Caspar. After everything I had seen, after everything I knew, I still couldn’t quite put it in my head that Caspar wouldn’t be alive. So I would find him after.
That’s how it is, isn’t it? I mean, really, until you know for sure that someone is dead, there’s always—isn’t there?—this tiny little flickery wisplet of hope. A cirrus floccus of hope. This tiny little lone brain cell—maybe connected by weensy fairy-silk strands to a tiny lone heart cell—that will forever believe that they could still be alive. And will never, ever give up believing that. No matter how much it hurts.
Even if that person is Saskia, right? Even if you never did much like them in the first place, that’s what it’s like. You just hope.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I stomped on the accelerator more than I suppose you should. When we hit the highway, the driving was a lot easier. Less gear changing! Less braking! Less steering! There were cars stopped here and there; there were cars crashed, but most had pulled over, and I got really good at zooming around anything that hadn’t.
I was driving! It was easy! The thing that had seemed so impossible, to get to my dad, seemed more possible with every mile. Easy: up the highway, get to Bristol, turn right onto the other highway.
The “what happens when we get to London” part was a little unclear—because it wasn’t as if I’d ever actually driven to my dad’s before, was it?—but I’d figure it out when we got there. Basically, it was all going swimmingly.
Ha ha ha ha. Do you think anyone will ever say that kind of thing anymore?
I felt as right as rain. I was on cloud nine. Ha ha ha ha ha.
And then the gas-indicator thingy flashed red.
I wanted to ignore it; I would have ignored it. It was not part of my plan. DUR.
“Ru,” said Darius, leaning over my shoulder. “We should turn off, huh?”
He spoke quietly; the GBK had fallen asleep—I think; it was hard to say for sure. She’d sort of slumped a little and the plastic around her mouth was sucking in and out in a steady sort of way. Darling, on her lap, had also crashed. Whitby snored on the backseat.
“No,” I said. And don’t call me Ru, I thought.
It was getting dark, but I wasn’t going to stop. Didn’t Simon always go on about how there were fifty miles left on empty?
I swerved around an abandoned car—harder to see them coming when you’re zooming, and it’s getting dark, and you can’t work out how to switch the lights on, and you’ve just realized there’s a bit of a major problem with your plan.
“Turn off,” he said.
No, no, no, no! I would not! I could not! It was FINE. I got the lights on—just in time to show me that there was a body in the road. I swerved. I kept going.
“If you don’t turn off, we’ll run out of gas.”
No!
“We’ll get stuck on the highway.”
No!
“In the rain,” said Darius Spratt, leaning forward to tap on my shoulder.
Startled by this random assault upon my person, I turned to demand that he refrain from poking me and saw his finger pointing, practically in my face. I shoved it out of my face.
. From the side of us a fat blanket of gray was rolling in low, tucking the land into a lovely space-bug-infested bed. (Stratus nebulosus—creeping up from the sea, I guess. It really likes to hang out there.)
I’d only been looking straight ahead, hadn’t I? We’d outrun one storm only to have another sneak up on us. The car weaved about dangerously as I peered at it. All I could think about was what the clouds had been like being trapped in that car at the supermarket. I stamped on the accelerator.
Next exit, I turned off. We zoomed up on to a roundabout. I braked; I stalled. The GBK woke up; the dogs woke up. I restarted. I was so panicked I just drove.
“Ruby, where are we going?” aske
d Darius.
“Weston-super-Mare,” I snapped, slamming my foot down on the accelerator.
I’d been there before, with Leonie’s family. With any luck, we’d get to the pier and be able to spend the night in the video arcade. Brilliant! Except nothing would be working, I suppose…
“This is the wrong way,” said Darius.
“WHAT?!”
“Wrong way!”
“!”
I searched for a place to turn—for a while there was nothing but hedgerows—then there was a track on our left. I braked—
“What are you doing?!” squeaked Darius.
I reversed.
“I AM TUR-NING A-ROUND!” I bellowed.
We bumped backward along the track. I stalled.
The car would not restart. I did that thing I’d seen my dad do too many times in his old beater. I banged my hands on the steering wheel—but it was Simon I was thinking about. “It’ll do fifty miles on empty.” Yeah, right! I knew, instantly, the only reason he ever said that was to stop my mom from panicking. Simon, it turned out, did make things up—what a great time to find that out.
“Brilliant,” said Darius. “Just brilliant.”
I took my seat belt off so I could turn around and yell at him properly—and then I saw it: looming in the gloom, there was one of those plastic greenhouse tunnel thingies they grow stuff in.
“I’m going in there,” I said.
I jumped out and slammed my door, then opened his.
“C’mon, Whitby,” I said; Whitby, who’d been sprawled on Darius, trampled all over him to get out.
“Ruby, I don’t think—”
I didn’t hear what the Spratt didn’t think because I slammed the door on it…but I can guess. As I said before, it’s really stupid to go anywhere at night, even just hardly any distance at all—and especially when you do actually know it’s cloudy. I knew that already; I just didn’t care. NO WAY was I spending the night in that car.
I barged into the plastic tunnel and…I’m not all into gardening and stuff (OK, I pretty much hate it), but it was gorgeous. There were long metal tables filled with pots and pots of flowers; it smelled like heaven. My mom would have loved it. And it was deliciously warm. Perfect—no, better than perfect. There was a bank of switches by the door. I flicked them on—LIGHT! Beautiful, beautiful elec-tric light! Flower heaven lit up in a rainbow of color.
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