“I’m throwing mine out,” Dallas says. “But first I have to write my father and tell him I’m headed for Dallas.”
“I thought you were going to California,” I say.
“No. That coast is toast and zombies don’t aspire to acting careers. I’ll fulfill my destiny in Dallas.”
“Because of your name?”
“It’s something a zombie would do, don’t you think?”
“They do whatever they’re told.”
He shrugs. “Mr. Graham said, ‘Go home, Dallas.’ I could have misheard.”
“We’re supposed to be zombies, man. Not morons.”
“Have you got a better idea?”
I admit that I don’t.
I head down the hallway. “I need to say goodbye to Xavier,” I tell Celeste. Xavier sits at his white desk, fingering his projection and muttering. “He’s doing really well,” Celeste tells me. “He’ll be ready for school in January.”
I nod. “I’m sure he’ll be fine eventually.”
That’s what Mom says about everything now: It’ll be fine eventually. She has nightmares about the kids in detention that day she gave the shots. She says Tyler is haunting her, and I think she’s right. That’s what I’d do if I were him.
“Xavier?” I say. “Can you help me with something?”
He stiffens and turns to me, annoyed. He’s still shockingly handsome but he looks all wrong, like a businessman instead of an angel.
“I need to take the batteries out of my RIG so no one can find it for a while.”
“You shouldn’t do that. People may need to find you.”
“Sure, but I’m playing hide-and-seek with somebody who cheats and I want to make sure I’m not sending any signals out so they don’t find me. How do I do that?”
He frowns but holds out his hand. I pass him my RIG as well as Mom’s and Ally’s. He doesn’t question them. He just says, “I need some tools.” He opens a kitchen drawer, takes out a toolkit, removes the backplate from each RIG. He stares at the interior workings with his tongue between his teeth. He removes six silver squares with a pair of tweezers and replaces the plates. He drops the tiny pieces in my hand. “No one can cheat on you now.”
“Thanks.” I stare at him despondently, knowing this is the last time I’ll ever see him. He smells of lemons, but I don’t find it reassuring. “I always liked knowing you, Xavier. I hope you make a new friend when you go back to school.”
“All our schoolmates are our friends.”
“Not really, man. Most of them would like to see you fail. But I always liked you. You were always my friend.”
He nods. “We ran cross-country together.”
“That’s right, man. We ran together.” I would shake his hand but mine are full, so I press my left shoulder into his in a clumsy armless hug. I turn my head toward his neck, look over his shoulder through the space where his hair ought to hang, and watch Celeste stream an ancient movie onto the big screen. “I miss running with you, Xavier,” I whisper.
“I haven’t been feeling well,” he says.
“Yeah. Me neither.”
Dallas shoulders my backpack and nudges me down the hallway. “We can’t be late, son.”
Mom locks our door for the last time. I never have to smell this dirty carpet again, never have to wonder what made the smears on the wall. “Get going, boys,” she says.
“Daddy isn’t a boy,” Ally says. “He’s a man.”
“That’s right, honey.” Mom waves us on ahead.
Lucas enters the building just as our taxi pulls up. “Hello, Maxwell. How are you?” He stares at Dallas with his head cocked, like a confused but excited dog.
“I’m fine, Lucas,” I say. “How are you?”
“Fine. Are you going away?”
“Yes. We’re spending Christmas in Atlanta. We’ll be back on Monday.”
Lucas stares at Dallas while I speak. He turns to Ally, like he knows she’s the only one who’ll give a straight answer.
“Who is this?”
“That’s my daddy,” Ally says.
Lucas squints at me. “Your father died before you moved here. You told me that.” He looks from me to my mom, then back to Dallas. Dallas doesn’t move, doesn’t say a word, doesn’t act like anybody’s father.
“They lied,” Ally says. “Daddy’s not dead.”
I push Dallas ahead of me through the lobby door.
Lucas watches us through the glass. I turn around before I get in the cab and wave goodbye.
“Hello, again,” the driver says. “Nice to see you.”
Mom looks at him in confusion, clutching her handbag tightly. “Hello?” she says.
He peers into the backseat. Ally is tucked behind his chair, staring at the seat fabric. Dallas sits tall and tense in the middle. I sit behind Mom, with a clear view of the driver, and for some reason I’m happy to see him again. “Abdal-Salam, right?” I say.
He smiles. “You have a good memory.”
“It’s on your id,” I tell him.
He nods. “To the airport shuttle?”
“No!” Mom almost shouts. “To the southwest carpark, please,” she adds politely.
The driver raises his eyebrows at me, then pulls away from the Spartan. We all stare sadly out the windows at the streets we’re leaving behind. They’re gray and empty. People are holed up in their houses, glued to their RIGs, indifferent to our departure.
The driver holds his tongue for as long as he can stand it, but finally he asks, “Are you moving to the carpark?”
Mom ignores him.
He shifts his rearview mirror to catch my eye in it.
“No,” I say.
“You selling things there?”
“No.”
He nods, watches the road a bit, looks back at the mirror. “Buying things?”
“You should take the underpass here,” I tell him.
He drives underground and speeds us west across the city, and I’m thankful that I don’t have to see the beautiful cold core of my world disappear behind us. We come back up to ground level and head toward the city walls.
We show our ids at the gates. The guard barely glances at us before he hands them back and nods us through. We’re outside the city at last, and the reality of this journey hits me like a cold shower. I’m chilled and sweaty and scared to death.
“You want me to wait for you and take you back home?” the driver asks.
“No, thanks,” I tell him.
“I don’t have any calls to go to. I could wait,” he says.
“Thanks, but we don’t know how long we’re going to be.”
I don’t like being dropped off outside the walls in the dark. I wish we were carrying weapons instead of luggage. I wish the taxi would take us straight to the car, but Mom doesn’t want the driver to know where we’re going or who we’re meeting in case Dr. Richmond tracks us down.
We unload our luggage outside the carpark fence. Abdal takes his payment and looks around in confusion.
“You should go,” I tell him.
He shrugs. “Good luck, architect.”
We watch him drive away.
“Seven thirty,” Mom says. “We’re late.”
Live music and laughter rise from the carpark. Dallas runs toward it so fast I think he’s leaving us, but he stops at a recycling bin just outside the fence. He stands under a streetlight in Mr. Lavigne’s suit and black woolen coat, his hair feathery blond, his face bent to his screen. He looks so much like my father I can barely breathe. He turns to us with a smile and holds up a finger, telling us he’ll be a moment. Mom takes a sharp breath and looks away.
I look down at the black bin and shiver. Fear crawls along my spine. Over the usual notice of pickup times and fines and acceptable deposits, someone has written the word, WITHSTAND.
Dallas fiddles with his RIG, scratches inside his ears while he reads, fiddles some more, removes his storage chip, then drops the RIG in the recycling bin.
�
�Everything okay?” I ask when he returns.
He moves away from Ally. “My dad says I can’t go to Dallas because I have to finish school. He says I need to come home because something’s wrong with my patch.”
“That’s it?”
“Coach Emery says we should hustle.”
“Hustle?”
“His exact word was ‘Run.’”
I glance at the garbage can containing Dallas’s RIG.
I expect police cars and helicopters to swarm in on it.
“Go!” Mom shouts.
It’s a five-minute hustle down the road to the car. Our baggage is heavier than it looks. I drop the tent four times.
Everyone thinks I’m a recall for taking it, but no one says a word, not even Ally. We have our jackets unzipped and our mitts in our pockets by the time we arrive. “Thank god,” Mom mutters.
Churchill sits on a lawn chair beside the only car on the road. A lantern and thermos wait at his feet. His butt is perched on the edge of the seat and his head rests on the back bar. He could be sleeping. He wears a black ski cap pulled down over his eyes. He has tattoos up and down his neck and rings in his ears and nose. Not what I expected. I thought he’d be like his mom, all chipper and zesty. He looks like he spends most of life lying down.
The car is shiny like it’s just been washed, but it’s hideous— huge, old and fat, like a giant toad on wheels.
“We had a car like this when I was a kid,” Mom says.
Churchill lifts his head a smidgeon, pushes back his cap, smiles. His teeth are not what you’d call white. “You the people with the apartment?” He holds the lantern up, looks at each of us, settles the light on me. “Nice hair,” he says, which is more of a compliment to his mother than to me. He nods a few times, then slowly removes his ass from the lawn chair.
He’s my height, I’m pleased to see. He holds out his hand for me to shake, pumps mine a few times before pulling back and shaking Dallas’s. “Thank you, sir, for making this trade. You will not be disappointed with this car. Here’s your bill of sale and permit, which I believe are under your wife’s name. Registration and insurance are in the driver’s visor.”
He turns to Mom. “You couldn’t find a better car, ma’am. It’s in mint condition. What it lacks in efficiency, it makes up in cargo space. It’ll take you wherever you want to go.” He turns to Dallas again and adds, “So don’t hurry back.” He sticks his hand in his jeans and pulls out a key dangling from a metal ring. “You want to try it out?”
Mom holds out her hand. “I’ll drive.”
He drops the key in her palm. “You’re the lucky one.”
She steps behind the car and opens up the back.
“Now I understand why people live in cars,” I say, peering inside. It’s not a proper trunk, more of a gaping maw that could sleep two. Mom shoves two jugs of gasoline to one side and says, “Put your bags in here, kids. Hang on to what you want to keep for the ride.”
“There’s ten gallons of gas there,” Churchill says. “Funnel’s in the can.”
“Thank you,” Mom says. When we’ve stuffed in our bags, she unrolls a vinyl sheet that stretches from the backseat over the contents of the cargo space.
“That’s the flimsiest storage system I’ve ever seen,” I say.
Mom is entirely unconcerned that our luggage will fly into our skulls when she taps the brake. She smiles and pats my arm. “It’s a station wagon, Max. They’re perfectly safe.”
It’s roomy, I’ll give it that much. Even with the tent on top of our bags, the view out the rear window is clear.
“You don’t have much stuff,” Churchill says. “You’re sure you’re not coming back soon?”
Mom opens the back door for Ally. “Get in, honey. You too, guys.” She stops Dallas from climbing in beside me. “You should sit in the front, dear.”
He looks confused, then he laughs. He pulls in his chin and lowers his voice. “Are you kids sure you’ll be all right back there on your own?”
“Yes, Daddy,” Ally says.
Dallas raises his brow to me.
“We’ll be fine, Dad.”
He lowers himself into the seat in front of me. He fiddles with a lever by his feet, then slides his chair into my knees. “Lovely night for a drive,” he says.
Mom turns to Churchill and says something I can’t hear through the glass. She pulls her house key out of her bag, smiles and pats his arm.
He folds up his lawn chair while Mom starts the car. It ignites right away, doesn’t catch fire, sounds all right.
Churchill bangs on Dallas’s window. Dallas presses a button and the glass slides down. “Take it easy,” Churchill says, like that’s sage advice. He points to the glove box and adds, “I put my number in there, and the numbers of some other mechanics in the region if you need them.”
“Will we need them?” Mom asks.
He shakes his head. “It rides like a dream. But just in case.”
Dallas closes the window so fast that Churchill has to cock his head to pull it free.
“That’s not nice, Daddy,” Ally says.
Dallas laughs. I laugh with him. Mom shakes her head.
Churchill just stands there looking confused as we leave him behind.
It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive north to the border, but time passes slowly when you’re terrified and disconnected.
We encounter toll booths every twenty minutes, and I’m thrilled to see them. Not Dallas-he breathes out a sigh after we pass each one. I know we might be caught for kidnapping, but if the police catch us, the worst they’ll do is turn me into a zombie. I’m more afraid of being eaten or sold by the locals. Cameras and guards have always been there to protect me, or so I thought. In their absence, I fidget and groan in the backseat until Mom has to shush me.
Most of the houses we pass are dark, but the odd one is lit like a billboard. I figure those homeowners are waiting to ambush any cars that break down. A few cars pass us on the highway, headlights blazing like demon eyeballs. I expect each one to slam its brakes, skid to a stop and tear up the highway after us, scythes and pitchforks hanging out the windows.
That doesn’t happen. No one notices us at all.
“Will you stop with the groaning?” Dallas mutters.
“You’re keeping your sister awake,” Mom adds.
I am never going to make it in a town without walls.
“Why can’t we cross the border at Buffalo?” Dallas asks when we start heading east.
“Too risky,” Mom says. “Rebecca says Freaktown is the safest border crossing left.”
Dallas and I groan in unison.
As we approach Syracuse, the toll-booth operators smile at us. “Christmas shopping?” they ask.
After Syracuse, the highway leads to nowhere but Freaktown and the border, and the guards are not so friendly. “Where are you headed?” a butchy white woman asks at the last toll. She surveys our salt-and-pepper family with a scowl.
“We’re going to a funeral,” Mom says.
Hopefully it won’t be our own.
EIGHTEEN
We hit Freaktown sooner than expected. I thought we’d see blackened forests or glowing craters or shanties on the outskirts, but there’s an ordinary town ahead, flat and dated, at the end of an empty highway. There’s an official welcome sign that says the population is 120,000, but it’s at least thirty years old. It’s been painted over with the words, Welcome to Freaktown, in six-foot letters. I shiver when the headlights reveal the sign. Not because I’m scared of Freaktown, although that’s true enough, but because the bottom of the sign is scrawled with the word, WITHSTAND. We’re driving slowly. The sign does not blur by. I am not imagining things. The word WITHSTAND stares me in the face in my darkest hour. It’s like God is talking to me. I don’t like it.
The highway turns into Freaktown’s main street, the only route to the bridge north. The road is broken and bumpy but not much worse than where we’ve come from. There’s no other way to go forward
. “Maybe we should wait till morning,” I suggest.
“Don’t be silly,” Mom says. She turns down the high beams, dials up the heat, checks that the doors are locked. We breathe shallow and cringe into our seats.
Abandoned fast-food restaurants fringe us on both sides: Denny’s, MacDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, Dunkin’ Donuts, Arby’s, Jack in the Box, Pizza Hut, A&W, Baskin Robbins, Quiznos, Domino’s, Hardee’s, Dairy Queen, Roly Poly, Church’s Chicken, Burger King, dozens of them side by side with gas stations, empty for twenty-five poisoned years. Bits of siding, lights and drainage pipes are torn off the exteriors, and if we had the balls to stop and look inside, we wouldn’t find appliances. But the shells are intact, happy and colorful after all these years under a brutal sun.
I’ve studied North American history but I’ve never imagined anything quite like this. This is a landscape paved in grease and gasoline, prosperity and peace. A world where everybody had a car and a doctor and a right to an education, where entire lifetimes were spent in weekend shopping sprees and drives to the beach just to look at the waves. It boggles my mind, the number of people with cash required to make this street exist. “What do they eat here now?” I ask. “Do you think there’ll be roadblocks?”
“Shut up,” Dallas says. “You’ll scare your sister.”
“She’s asleep.”
“Shut up anyway.”
“They’re not going to eat us, honey,” Mom says, but really she doesn’t have a clue.
After the last fast-food restaurant, the road climbs a hill. Mom slows at the crest, expecting to descend into total darkness. But the town below us flickers with light. Smoke rises from chimneys, windows sparkle in a rainbow of colors.
“Oh my god,” Mom whispers. “I forgot it’s Christmas.”
She eases the car down the slope.
Freaktown does not look like the Freakshow footage. It’s just a rundown town, probably rundown long before the disaster. The main street is lined with three-story stone and brick buildings with stores on the bottom and apartments on top, nineteenth-century styling—patterned brickwork around the windows, recessed entrances, wooden awnings. The original signboards have been painted over in several languages to read, Doctor, Appliances, Food, Housing, Trade, Clinic. Most of the glass in the display windows is still in place, and where the windows are broken, they’re boarded up and painted to look like vistas—forests, oceans, fields of wheat, white gabled houses with rabbits in the yard. This is not what reality programming led me to expect. You need a fully functional brain to transform a broken window into a view.
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