In the Afterlight Page 7

  “Wow,” I said, “I’ve been seeing those since we left Los Angeles. I had no idea—I just assumed it had something to do with road construction.”

  “What’s funny is that I remember them from before—when we were driving through—” He hesitated. “Through Harrisonburg?”

  I looked up at him, confused. But it hit me soon enough, and the question in his tone registered like the sharp ache of a repeat injury.

  “We did drive through there...together, I mean? I’m not—I’m not remembering the wrong thing, am I?”

  What killed me, almost more than the frustrated expression on his face, was that there was no accusation in his voice. I knew that what I had done to his memory had mostly been—undone, I guess. But he still had moments of overlap between what had really happened, and the story I had planted in his mind. I’d overheard him asking Chubs for clarification a few times, but this was the first time I’d ever been so directly confronted with it. My whole chest ached. If I’d had the option of melting into a puddle and letting myself be carried down into the storm drain, I would have taken it.

  “No,” I managed to get out. “You’ve got it right. We drove through on the way to that Wal-Mart.”

  I started to turn back to the motel, but he caught my wrist. I braced myself for whatever he was about to say.

  Which, apparently, was nothing. He looked down, his thumb stroking the soft skin on the inside of my wrist.

  Finally, Liam said, “I remember the other motel—it looked almost exactly like this one, but the doors weren’t red.” He rubbed the back of his neck, a rueful grin on his face. “I acted like an idiot trying to give you a pair of socks.”

  In spite of myself, I smiled. “Yeah. What about serenading me with The Doors? Come on baby, light my fire....”

  “I probably would have put on a whole song-and-dance routine if you hadn’t started laughing,” he said. “That’s how badly I wanted you to smile.”

  My heart hurt in a completely different way now. I rolled up onto my toes, pressing a soft kiss onto his cheek. There was a sharp whistle from the parking lot. Cole waved us back over from where he stood next to a compact white sedan. Liam rolled his eyes at the sight of it, but started toward the driver’s side. Cole shook his head and pointed to Vida.

  “She’s driving.” He cut Liam’s protest off before he could get a word in. “No attitude. Your shoulder needs to rest. Trade off later.”

  “You’re such an asshole! I’m fine—”

  “Is this what they call brotherly love?” Chubs wondered aloud.

  “Hey, this works for me,” Vida said, ignoring him. “Maybe now we’ll break forty miles an hour. Laters—try not to drive us directly into another military patrol, ’kay?”

  “Be careful,” I called after her, pointlessly.

  “Ready, Gem?” Cole asked. Instead of heading back to the red truck, he turned me in the direction of a new, blue one. “I got us new wheels. Someone probably reported the red one. The Little Prince is already inside and secure.”

  I noticed he was already walking toward the passenger side. “Don’t you want to drive?” I asked.

  “Why? Do you need a break, or are you okay to go a few more hours? I could use a second to close my eyes. We can switch when it gets dark.”

  It startled me a little bit to see how quickly Cole crashed once we were driving again. One minute he was leaning his head against the window, telling me to take the next right and turn up my windshield wipers, and the next he was dead to the world.

  I could do this. The truck was new enough to have an electronic compass on its display, and I really just needed to keep heading north until I started seeing signs for Lodi or Stockton.

  But the only signs I was seeing now were the ones spray-painted onto the sides of buildings. Along walls. On marquees and storefronts in shopping centers. Once my eyes were open to them, I saw them everywhere. They dragged my eyes over to them again and again, screaming for my attention.

  When I saw the next set in the distance, I felt a reckless thought sneak up on me. I hesitated, looking over at Cole, trying to weigh how angry he’d be. We were flying toward the road symbols, and if I didn’t turn now, I might lose the trail completely—

  Does it matter? You don’t even know these kids....

  It did. Because I knew what it was like trying to survive on the road, and if they needed help, I wanted us to be the ones who gave it to them.

  I made that first right turn when the arrows suddenly shifted. They took me away from the two highways that would have gotten me over and through the mountains to Oak Creek Road, which in another life might have been the scenic route to take through these parts. Another right turn, onto Tehachapi Willow Springs Road, which skirted the city of Tehachapi. All of the signs announcing the approaching city were marked with a large X with a small circle around the letter’s center. The shape reminded me enough of a skull and crossbones that I didn’t want to risk ignoring it.

  It was up near an aquatics park that my mind started to go a bit soft. I caught my eyes closing and jerked back awake more than once. Stop it, I thought, wake up wake up wake up. Cole needed to finally be able to recharge after the two hellish weeks we’d had on the run in Los Angeles. I could handle this. I could at least stay awake until we had to stop again for gas.

  The light dimmed with every minute that passed, the winter sun setting even earlier behind the silver storm clouds. In the gray-blue light, the cement sign for the recreation area seemed to glow, and the tags there seemed especially dark in comparison. The initials I saw gave my brain something to play with, at least, while I watched the road.

  PGJR...Paul, George, John, and Ringo...parrot, giraffe, jaguar, rabbit...pistol, Glock, Jericho, rifle...

  HBFB...Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver, Blackberry...hash browns, bacon, flapjacks, bran flakes...Harrisonburg, Bedford, Fairfax, Bristol...

  Below that line of initials was another faint one. I slowed the truck, squinting through the sheet of rain at it. The downpour had nearly carried the letters away, but I could still see the faintest hint of KLZH.

  Kia...Lexus...Z-something...Honda...Okay, that one didn’t exactly work. Kansas, Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, The Hollies. Damn, Z was hard—zebras, zoo, zero, zilch, and Zu. And that was it. That was all my brain had.

  I yawned through my smile. K-something, Liam, Zu, Hina. Oh—Kylie, Kylie from East River, that worked. Kylie, Liam, Zu, Hina. Or even Kylie, Lucy, Zu, and Hina—

  The air whooshed through the vents, louder now that my mind was completely still and silent. It filled my ears until my heart started banging against my ribcage, hard enough for the sound to reach my ears.

  Kylie, Lucy, Zu, and Hina. My mind was singing out the names over and over again until I felt almost delirious. Stop it. I tried to move on, tried kangaroo, lion, zebra, hyena, but I couldn’t shake the fizzing sensation in my blood.

  If they were kids leaving that tag, then we couldn’t have been far behind them. And if they knew how to follow the code, then they were...they had to be from East River, right? I’d only seen one group of kids actually leave East River, and that had been Zu’s group.

  Stop it, I thought, sucking down a long gulp of the air coming through the vents. I reached over to turn the heat up slightly, trying to drive out the chill. There were other kids, plenty of other kids, with those same first letters. And regardless of who the other girl had been, if it was Zu’s group, then there should have been a T there for Talon, the teen boy who’d gone with them. I tried to call up each of their faces, but Kylie, Lucy, Talon, and Hina were blank. Weird how I could remember their hair, the way they’d worn their black bandanas, the sound of their voices, but not what any of them really looked like. My mind had blocked out so much of our time at East River as a defense against the pain, it all might as well have happened to a different person.

  But Zu—I remembered everything
about Zu, from the way her hair spiked up first thing in the morning to each freckle across her nose.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw yet another code tag—two of them, on a sign with directions to the nearby freeway that was counting down the miles to the next city. One was the crescent moon in a circle, the other was a set of arrows, pointing right—east—not straight ahead like the others.

  I switched the truck’s headlights on, letting them flood the clusters of trees on either side of the road. I started to pull the truck over onto the shoulder, wishing I had some other way to talk to Liam and Chubs, but I stopped myself.

  These past few days had been hard enough on Liam already. Giving him this thrill only to have it ripped away seemed especially cruel. Chubs could bear the disappointment, but Liam...I didn’t want to see his face fall when it all turned out to be nothing. I’d already let him down so many times, in so many ways. I couldn’t add this to the list.

  But there was that small voice rising above the other thoughts, whispering, what if it is her, though?

  Kylie, Lucy, Zu, and Hina. KLZH.

  This was dangerous—this was letting myself think that sometimes life had the near-magical quality of working out. It could unfold in a way that’s so much better and easier than what you could have imagined.

  That paint—it’d been fresh enough to run under the insistent stroke of rain, hadn’t it? They couldn’t have been that far ahead.

  Don’t do this to yourself, I thought. We were farther north than where Liam thought her uncle’s home was, and the initials were still missing Talon’s T. Maybe it was exhaustion, or desperation, or some kind of need to prove that life could sometimes be kind. Whatever it was, I couldn’t ignore it.

  What was the risk in following this trail through, just to see what was waiting for us at the end? What if this was the one chance we’d ever have of finding her?

  Jude would have done it. With him, it wouldn’t have even been a debate.

  I still felt crazy taking the next right, and clearly the others felt the same way. Vida tapped the horn, a quiet question. It was a dark access road, not even paved. The truck settled into the mud, rolling through the fresh tracks left by another set of tires. The overgrown trees lining the road were gnarled and twisted into each other; I kept the truck moving fast enough to tear through them, snapping branches and ripping away leaves.

  It was that noise, not the earlier, inquiring honk from the other car, that finally shook Cole out of his two-hour nap. I saw him tense, running his hands over his face once, twice, trying to clear up the disorientation brought on by such a deep sleep.

  “You should have woken me up!” He squinted at the glowing dashboard console. “Wait...where the hell are we? Why are we going east, not north?”

  “I have a hunch,” I said.

  “Yeah, and I have a pain in my ass—and surprise, it’s you,” he said, glaring at me over Clancy’s prone form. “What’s this about?’

  “I think—” The trees suddenly pulled back, and I saw that the road we’d come in on hadn’t really been a road at all, but a long driveway up to what once must have been a gorgeous mountain home. The thing was massive—two stories, a double-wide garage. The face of the house was stone and wood, as if despite its hulking presence it was still meant to blend in.

  “Still waiting on that answer,” Cole said as I threw the car into park.

  “I think there may be some kids hiding here,” I said. “I just want to have a quick look around—I swear, I swear I’ll be fast.”

  Cole set his jaw, and I wondered what kind of expression I had that ultimately made him nod and say, “Fine, but take Vida with you. You have two minutes.”

  The others had opened their doors, but only Liam had stepped out into the rain. “What’s going on?” he called.

  “I just need Vida for a second,” I said. “No, just her. Her. It’s a quick...thing.”

  Chubs groaned. “What kind of thing? A Ruby-walks-into-mortal-danger thing?”

  I shut the door on any further questions, wincing as I saw the hopeful look Vida shot me as she walked over.

  “Is this about...is it Cate?”

  Her whole face was glowing with hope, almond eyes wide, full lips parted as if she was uncertain if she should smile. God—if Cate hadn’t made it, if she wasn’t there waiting for us, I didn’t think I’d be able to put Vida back together.

  “I think there might be kids hiding out here.”

  That perked her right up. I saw her hand slide back into the pocket of her sweatshirt, reaching for the gun hidden there.

  “All right, cool,” she said. “How do you want to play this?”

  The front door and the first-story windows were all boarded over—the back and side entrances were, too. Vida’s initial excitement quickly faded as we trampled through the mud and tall grass in the dark, slipping and sliding our way around the house a second time. There were no ladders that I could see to help someone up to the second floor. No lights on, no sounds coming from inside the house. The odd, shadowy shape on the garage door took form the closer we got, stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a crude crescent moon, cut out of some kind of metal. Someone had hammered it up with a single nail.

  Safe place. I took a deep breath and reached for the cold metal of the garage door handle. Vida hung back but brought her gun up, aiming—

  At nothing at all.

  No cars, no bags, no kids huddled on blankets. Aside from rows of gardening tools and trash cans, there was only trash. The bright wrappers were scattered in heaps around the dark space.

  Vida dragged her boots through the trash, scattering it. Now that my eyes were adjusting to the light, I could see other signs that there’d been at least one person here recently. A small pile of blankets and an abandoned duffel bag.

  “Come on,” she said. “If anyone was here, they must have peaced out days ago.”

  “There were tracks in the mud on the drive in,” I said, wondering if my words sounded more solid than my thoughts did. I started toward the door that led into the house, only to be stopped short by the sight of the padlock hanging from it.

  Cole honked the horn, and it was the slap in the face I needed.

  You are acting crazy, I thought. Pull yourself together. There are more important things—

  No. No there weren’t. Because the truth of it was, I would have walked here. I would have walked here all the way from Los Angeles, alone in the dark in the pouring rain, if it had meant finding Zu again. I wanted it that badly—I needed to know she was safe and that she was okay, and that I hadn’t failed her the way I’d failed all of the others.

  Even the part of me that had expected this felt sad and small and foolish as I followed Vida out. I was glad for the rain now; anything to hide the fact that one wrong word, one bad stray thought, would push me to tears.

  Vida put her hands on her hips, surveying the dark line of trees that formed a high wall around the house. “This would be a good place to crash for a couple days. I saw the signs too, you know. And I think if you hadn’t come and looked, it would have bugged the shit out of you forever.”

  “Sorry to drag you out here,” I mumbled. Vida waved me off as she moved back toward the other car. Liam had left his door open, and the light inside gave me a clear view of two very concerned faces.

  Vida stopped in her tracks, slowly bent down at the edge of the driveway, and picked something up—something white and filthy with mud. “Hey boo,” she called, tossing it over to me. My fingers were shaking and slick with rain, but I somehow managed to catch it.

  It was a small shoe, clearly kid-sized. The white fabric was nearly black with mud and grime, but the laces were still a rosy shade of pink, like not even dirt could put a damper on it. I studied it, running my fingers over the swirled stitching along its side.

  Cole made it perfectly clear my hijacking o
f our drive was over. He’d taken my place behind the wheel, and was in the process of rolling down his window when I tossed the shoe back onto the ground and said, “I know, I know.”

  My whole body shook with how hard my teeth were chattering. Cole took pity on me and redirected the warm air blowing from the vents my way, but he didn’t say a word, and I didn’t offer to start the conversation, either.

  That shoe...God, that shoe with those curling pink laces...

  Vida swung the car around, taking the lead on the drive back out to the main road. Cole followed, fiddling with the radio as the truck’s headlights cut through the trees and foliage. There was a flash of movement as some kind of animal darted away.

  “All right,” Cole said. “Do you have any idea where we are? Did you see a city name? Gem?”

  My mind was fixed on the shoe, obsessing over the stitching, how it had felt warm despite the chilled air and rain, and those laces, those pink laces were like something out of—

  I sucked in a gasp loud and sharp enough to startle Cole into hitting the brakes. “What? What?”

  But I was already scrambling to unbuckle my seat belt, already jumping back out into the rain, running back up toward the house.

  I knew those laces. I had picked those shoes out because of them. I’d dug down deep into that bin at Wal-Mart because I knew she’d love them, I knew—

  The gunshot that boomed out, echoing in the dark mountains around us, was the only thing that could have stopped me—and it did. My momentum carried me forward, my feet sliding through the mud as I threw up my hands in the air. Both cars had stopped; Cole used the open driver’s-side door of the truck to try to stop Liam and Vida from blowing past him. What guns we had were drawn and pointed into the trees.

  I took another small step forward. I wasn’t thinking about skip tracers or PSFs or the National Guard or even the home’s owners. I was thinking about how terrifying it would be for a kid hiding out in those woods, not knowing who was stalking around one of the few places they thought were safe.