by Claire Kent
“Yeah.” Travis shuts the tailgate of the Jeep, and then he reaches out toward me, making me gasp and jerk back.
He drops his hand quickly without touching me. “Sorry. Your arm is bleedin’. You said you weren’t hurt.”
I look down at myself in surprise. “I wasn’t. Not by the guys. I must have gotten cut when I was leaning into the bed of the truck. Didn’t even realize it.”
I take off my overshirt, which now has one torn sleeve, and use the wet wipe he offers me to clean up the blood from the back of my upper arm. Then I turn my body slightly so he can put a bandage over the cut.
I notice his eyes on my tank top, the damp fabric clinging to my breasts, and feel strangely self-conscious as I put back on my overshirt. I stopped wearing a bra a couple of years ago when the underwire on my last one broke. My breasts jiggle as I move, and my nipples are clearly visible through the worn fabric. “Thanks.”
He grunts. Then he picks up a bottle of water and hands it to me. “Drink this. You look like you’re gonna keel over.”
“Thanks a lot,” I mutter dryly, the sarcasm more habit than anything else. Then I pause and say more sincerely, “Thank you. For stopping to help, I mean. I was okay, but I might not have been. So thanks.”
He’s looking down at the ground now, almost like I’ve embarrassed him. But he doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would get embarrassed, so I’m not sure what he’s feeling. “Anyone would.”
“No. They wouldn’t. Not anymore. Hardly anyone would. So thank you.”
He nods and mumbles something incoherent. Then he says in a different tone, “We should get going unless you have more to put in here.”
I stick my hand in my bag to make sure there’s nothing else I should store with the supplies, but everything left is personal items or things I want to have with me all the time. “No. That’s it.”
“Then hop in.”
I’m too tired to do any sort of hopping, but I slowly climb back into the passenger seat.
He looks at me like he’s waiting for something.
“What?” I finally ask.
“Drink the water. I’m not gonna watch you pass out.”
I’m used to conserving water as much as possible, so it feels indulgent to start chugging down a brand-new bottle. But he’s waiting for me, so I unscrew the cap and take a couple of swigs.
He nods, still watching me. Then he puts the vehicle into gear but keeps his foot on the brake.
“Why aren’t you drinkin’?” he asks, sounding unnecessarily grumpy when I lower the bottle and take a few deep breaths.
I give him as much of a scowl as I can muster. “I am drinking. I don’t want to drink too fast and puke again. And I don’t need to be bossed around quite so much.”
“Kinda seems like you do.”
I peer at him in the dim light. It’s only late afternoon, but the perpetual haze of dust and ash causes the last light of the sun to fade far earlier than it should.
I really can’t tell if the man is serious right now or not.
Since there’s not even a hint of a smile, I decide he’s not teasing and my frown deepens.
He makes a soft, snorting noise I don’t understand and glances down to where my bag has slipped to the floor of the vehicle. I left the bag open, and my book is peeking out.
I see what he’s focused on, and I quickly lean over to slide the book back inside my bag and then zip it up.
“Poems?” he asks in exactly the same skeptical way he asked it earlier today.
I narrow my eyes and try to look intimidating. I’m pretty sure it’s not effective. It’s my damn dimple. “Yes. Poems. I told you before.”
“Why do you carry that book around with you?” He’s staring at me as if I’ve lost my mind.
Maybe he has reason for thinking that about me, given what’s happened to the civilization we used to know.
I lost my family. I lost my town. I lost everything, and there’s only a slim chance I’ll be able to stay alive long enough to get to Fort Knox and even a smaller chance we’ll get there before the drove overtakes it. But I’m still clinging to this book.
Everything is about survival now. Poems don’t matter anymore.
There are words I could use to explain it to him. About hope. About remnants of lost beauty. About echoes of meaning in a bleak reality.
But I don’t even try to explain.
Maybe I am crazy.
Reading poems at the end of the world.
I don’t say anything at all.
Two
WE ONLY DRIVE AN HOUR before it’s too dark to keep going.
Before everything happened, I would have called this time of day early evening, but the setting sun is already blocked by a wall of dirty clouds and haze, and soon Travis will have to turn on the headlights, so we look for somewhere to spend the night.
Night is too dangerous to be out in anymore. Travis may be strong and well armed, but it’s just him and me against whomever we encounter in the dark. Daylight’s the only safe option.
We find an old farm with a house set far back behind a hill, barely visible from the road. Most of the windows are broken, which means it isn’t going to have supplies we can use, but there isn’t a town for miles, and the isolation of the farm feels safer than a community anyway.
We hide the Jeep, take our stuff inside, and enter the dilapidated farmhouse.
“Not much chance of finding canned goods or water here.” I look around the front room, which is covered with dirt, spiderwebs, and years-old birds’ nests. Most of the furniture is broken or decaying from the weather that’s gotten inside.
“Nope. Let’s try upstairs. All we need is one intact room.”
The upper floor is in better condition, and one of the bedrooms appears untouched. The door is shut, and there aren’t any broken windows. It was a kid’s room with two twin beds.
My stomach twists as I stare down at the small beds, still neatly made with Batman comforters and matching sheets.
A family made a life here. Not very long ago.
“This’ll do good,” Travis says, letting the pack of supplies he’s carrying slip to the floor. He’s watching me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You sick again?”
“No. I’m fine.” I clear the poignancy from my head, my throat. Then I go over to open the dusty curtains to let in what little light remains from outside. “It’s kind of stuffy in here. Do you think we can crack a window?”
Travis walks over to frown down into the backyard that leads into what was once pastureland. It’s all gray rolling hills now, marked only by pieces of broken fence. “Guess so.” He pushes up the window partway. There’s even still a screen.
I sit down on the bed and take off my shoes and belt. Breathe in the thick evening air.
“You need to eat somethin’.” He rummages through his pack and offers me a protein bar and a bottle of water.
“I’m okay for now.”
“You’re not either. Eat.”
I stare at him blankly.
He thrusts his hand in my face. “Now.”
I accept the water and protein bar, although I grumble softly about his bossiness. I force down the food and sit for a minute to make sure none of it comes back up.
It doesn’t. Idly I read the label on the bar and see it’s almost a year past its expiration date. It tastes fine. Expiration dates are irrelevant. If food looks okay, you eat it.
I watch Travis as he pushes a dresser over in front of the bedroom door to barricade it in case of an intruder. Then he sits down on a child-size chair and cleans his shotgun as he eats a protein bar.
I’m perched on the edge of one of the beds, finishing the last of my water, when he stands up, stretches, toes off his shoes, and unbuckles his belt.
My stomach churns but not from the food.
If Travis is going to turn into a creep, this is when it will happen. I’m trapped with the man now. At night. In a secon
d-floor room. With a door blocked by a heavy dresser.
If he thinks he deserves payment for the help he’s been giving me, this is when he’ll demand it.
He stands and looks down at me silently for a long time. Finally mutters, “Get some sleep, girl.”
I let out my breath as he stretches out on the other bed, and I finally take off my overshirt, pull back the sheet and comforter, and lie down too.
He’s got a few candles and a lantern with one of those batteries that’re supposed to last forever, but there’s no sense in wasting the light tonight.
We’re not going to be doing anything in the dark.
I’m glad my instincts weren’t wrong about him.
I’m glad what he told me wasn’t merely a line to get me to comply.
Travis really is a decent guy.
I can smell him from where I’m lying, the scent of his body mingling with the sootiness of the air coming in through the window. The strong fragrance of him is oddly reassuring. It means I’m not alone.
I’m in a place as safe as I can hope for with a man who’s capable of protecting me. The door is blocked. No one can get through the window without a ladder. And we’re in the middle of nowhere.
I feel my body relaxing in a way it hasn’t for weeks.
“I feel better,” I say into the silence. It’s not completely dark yet, and I know Travis is awake because he occasionally shifts position.
He grunts.
“I mean after eating. Thanks for making me.”
He grunts again.
I turn my head and frown at him. “You can do more than grunt, you know.”
He’s lying with one arm bent and tucked behind his head. The other is fiddling with the comforter. He hasn’t pulled it over himself. His gun is on the floor beside him, next to his belt, which has his sheathed hunting knife attached. He doesn’t turn to look at me as he mumbles something incoherent.
“That was just a multisyllable grunt.”
He turns his head and glares at me with narrow eyes. “I said go to sleep, girl.”
I roll my eyes and turn over onto my side with my back to him.
I was trying to be nice. Friendly. Make conversation in an awkward situation. But evidently that’s beyond Travis’s abilities or interests.
He talked more earlier today. He told me about himself, but that was when I was pointing a gun at him. Since then the only things he’s said have been purely practical. He doesn’t want to get to know me.
I shouldn’t complain.
If he doesn’t want to be my friend, he doesn’t have to be. He can lie there in silence and stare at the ceiling till the sun comes up for all I care.
He hasn’t asked for anything in exchange for letting me ride along with him, so my payment will be putting up with his annoyingly closemouthed personality without complaining.
If he wants a silent traveling companion, he’ll get one.
It’s getting cooler in the room, so I cover up. Overall, this bed is pretty comfortable.
And I do feel safe.
I close my eyes and amuse myself with everything I’d say to Travis if I were allowed.
He needs a haircut.
He should respond to polite comments with more than a grunt.
I’m almost twenty-one. He doesn’t have to call me “girl.”
I’m so sorry his little daughter died.
I hope his ex-wife is okay in Fort Knox. Hopefully we’ll be able to find her and the rest of Meadows before it’s too late.
Does he still feel the urge to smoke cigarettes, or has he kicked the habit for good?
Does he think we have any chance of reaching Fort Knox before the drove overtakes all the people we know and love?
He’s got really good arms.
Maybe he’ll be friendlier tomorrow.
I’m glad he isn’t a creep.
It’s on that thought that I fall asleep.
I SLEEP BETTER THAN I have in months. I wake up once or twice, barely orient myself to my surroundings, and then fall right back to sleep when I catch a whiff of Travis. I don’t wake up for real until I feel a hand on my shoulder.
“Layne. Layne. Time to wake up.”
I blink and snuffle and try to figure out what the hell is going on.
“It’s gettin’ to be light. We should get going.” Travis is still standing over my bed, but he’s withdrawn his hand from my bare shoulder.
“M’kay.” I make myself sit up, rubbing my face and smoothing down the flyaways that have escaped my braids. When I look outside, I see he’s right. The dingy light of sunrise is already breaking through the darkness. “I must have slept for ages.”
He makes a wordless sound that I take to be affirmation.
“Did you sleep?” I ask him. He’s got his shoes on, and he’s moved to the other side of the room to open a can of peaches with a pocketknife. He looks exactly the way he looked yesterday.
“Yeah. Some.” He uses his fingers to eat half the peaches in the can, and then he hands the rest to me.
I sigh since they aren’t very appetizing after throwing them up yesterday, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to waste food. I eat the peaches, and they actually taste okay.
Since he’s obviously not woken up in a talkative mood, I don’t try to chat. When I’m done, I put on my overshirt, belt, and shoes, and he moves the dresser away from the door. We collect our stuff, go downstairs, and pack up.
He takes longer going to the bathroom than I do, so I look at my map pages as I wait.
When Travis returns, he slides into the driver’s seat and leans over to look at them with me. “See a good route? Can’t get anywhere close to the interstates, and we’ll want to avoid here and here since those towns were pretty big.”
He doesn’t have to explain to me why we need to avoid the former interstates and cities. “I was thinking we just head straight through this way.” I run my finger along the map, following an old two-lane state road. “Wouldn’t that work? It will take us right through West Virginia.”
He analyzes the map another minute and nods. “Yep. Looks good. We’ll need to find more gas today, or we’ll have to ditch the Jeep. Be lookin’ for little towns that might not be looted.”
“Shit. It’s going to take us forever to get to Fort Knox, isn’t it?”
“Yep. But droves move even slower than us, as long as we can find gas.”
“All right. Well, let’s get going.”
THE DAY ENDS UP BEING long and kind of boring. We occasionally pass people, but most of them are walking, and the two times we see another vehicle approaching, Travis immediately drives us off the road as far he can get so we don’t encounter them. We have to stop in three different abandoned towns before we find a car in a garage with gas in the tank. Travis has a better siphon pump than me, so we use his to move the gas into our Jeep. In that same house, there’s no food or clothes, but I find a few bath towels and an unopened tube of toothpaste to add to our stash.
Other than that, we spend the day on the road, and Travis barely says anything at all.
I try—I really do try—not to get annoyed with him.
He doesn’t owe me anything. Certainly not conversation.
But still... Would it kill the man to chat a little or crack a smile?
We stop in the middle of the afternoon so we can pee and stretch our legs. Travis checks over the engine. It seems to be running fine to me, but maybe he fiddles around with engines simply to amuse himself.
I look at the map for the hundredth time that day.
“See anythin’?” he asks as he closes the hood and returns to the driver’s seat.
“Nothing new.” Sweat is dripping down my neck and into my cleavage. I pull my tank top away from my skin and try to fan myself with it.
Travis jerks his head to the side so abruptly I blink at him. Then I realize he probably got a good view beneath my shirt.
I’m not naturally a skinny person. Both my mom and my grandmother were sho
rt and curvy, and I probably would have been too if I had a healthy diet. I’ve gone years without getting enough calories, but I’ve still got decent boobs.
At least I’ve always thought so. Peter, the only boyfriend I’ve ever had, told me with a teasing smile that they made him want to pant and slobber.
Travis looks uncomfortable but not particularly blown away by whatever he sees down my shirt.
“Sorry.” I try not to be embarrassed. I like to think of myself as a mature, no-nonsense person, but I can still feel my cheeks flushing slightly. “I can’t stop sweating.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He lifts the bottom of his T-shirt and wipes his wet face with it.
I’d like to do the same, but the amount of skin it would expose would probably cause Travis to leap out of the car and run for the hills.
I giggle at the mental image. I can’t remember the last time I’ve done that.
He shoots a quick look at me.
“Sorry.” I giggle again.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” I cover my mouth with my hand in an attempt to hold back the laughter, but it doesn’t work.
“What the hell? You havin’ hysterics or something?”
“Maybe.” I choke back another laugh. “Sorry. Just thought of something funny.”
He starts the engine and begins driving. After a minute, he asks, “You gonna share what’s so funny?”
My lips part slightly. Does he really want to hear what made me laugh? He obviously doesn’t know how to smile, so what’s he going to do with the information?
I shake my head. “Better not.”
That might be a bit awkward since I’d been laughing at him.
AN HOUR LATER, WE RUN into problems.
Several communities along this road haven’t left or abandoned their towns. And, quite understandably, they don’t want strangers driving through their protective perimeter. They’ve set up roadblocks and won’t let us through.
They’re decent people, just like Travis and me. They’re trying to stay safe and live their lives in the best way they can. We don’t argue or try to convince them to change their minds about letting us through.