Kristen Simmons - Breaking Point

“Baby, come here.” Mom reached out her hand and I slid beneath her arm, feeling how she was damp and trembling. I pinched my eyes closed. Outside, kids were playing. A car drove down the street. How could people be so unafraid?

Chase, I thought. Just his name, over and over. I didn’t know where his uncle lived. I prayed it wasn’t in the heart of the city.

“Ember, if something like this happens, you come straight home, okay?” Her voice cracked. I wrapped my arms around her waist to make her stronger. “I’ll meet you here, and we’ll figure out what to do.”

I HADa hard time sitting back in the leather seat. Between the lingering fear of driving after curfew in a borrowed cruiser, the daunting computer panel beside the steering wheel, and the glass partition behind my back, I had a hard time calming down.

My mind wasn’t helping. The thoughts slapped one atop the next. Flashes of my mom, her hair in clips, wearing clothes from my closet. The similarities in our faces. What did she look like now? Only a couple months had passed, but I knew I looked different. Hardened. Wary. Was she the same? If she’d survived the gunshot, how badly was she injured? Was she getting enough medical treatment? Or was she being forced, like the woman with her son in the square, to scare others into compliance?

Stop, I thought. Stop . She’s dead. Stop fantasizing she’s not. Stop hoping.

My heels hammered the vacuumed rubber floor mats. Cara’s wool skirt made my legs itch.

I turned back to check on Sean. We’d opened the vent in the partition between the seats, but couldn’t hear each other without yelling. He looked out the window, content in the silence. It had been a long time since I’d seen that small, peaceful smile. That was Becca’s smile.

“Talk about something,” Chase said, startling me. His eyes stayed glued to the road.

“What about?” I asked.

“Anything. Your voice… helps.” His thumbs drummed on the steering wheel.

“Do you think we’ll ever see him again?” I asked. “Billy, I mean.” Not Tucker.

“If Tucker doesn’t get to him first.” The way he said that name—it was like he was tearing something with his teeth.

I rubbed my temples. “I keep thinking it’s my fault,” I said quickly. “That I could have stopped all of it—whatever he’s doing—that day at the base. If I’d have shot him he never would have shown up at the Wayland Inn, he wouldn’t have come with us to the checkpoint, he wouldn’t know anything about the safe house. But I couldn’t, you know? I messed up. I was a coward, and now… now something even worse is going to happen, I can feel it.”

It had burst out in one breath—things I’d been hiding from him because I’d hated to admit they were true, even to myself.

“Wait,” he said. “ Not killing someone makes you a coward?”

I shrugged. I didn’t like him turning this around on me. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Em, what you did that day, it makes you better,” he said. “If you’d given me the gun that day, I would have done it. I almost did at the Wayland Inn. And killing someone—even if it’s him —that changes everything. It makes all the good things wrong and all the wrong things seem okay. And it gets easier. To do again, I mean. I’ve seen it.” He took a slow breath. “Look at Wallace. He’s got nothing but Billy and the cause, and when it came down to it, he could only hold on to one.”

In the silence I remembered the Wayland Inn, purged by fire. Remembered how Wallace had forgotten what was most important.

“Be glad you didn’t kill him,” Chase said gently. “Holding back, that was brave.”

I shifted, because brave didn’t fit right against my skin. When it came to Tucker and what I hadn’t done, coward felt right, and failure felt right. At least they had. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

“I wish I knew what he and Cara were doing in Greeneville,” I said.

“You didn’t buy the cousin story either, huh?”

I glanced behind me, but Sean was still blissfully ignorant to our conversation. It wasn’t that I didn’t want his opinion, I just felt more comfortable discussing some things with Chase alone.

“All I know is that she’s hiding something,” I said, picking at my fingernails, frustrated that I didn’t have the answers. Thinking of Cara suddenly reminded me of the copper cartridge I’d shown her in Greeneville. I’d been so distracted by the things she’d said about Sarah and the scars on her chest, I’d forgotten she’d been the last to hold it. Now who knew where it was.

I needed to change the subject.

“It’s strange going home after everything, isn’t it?” In my mind it was preserved, just as it had been when I left, but maybe it was different. I knew I was different. “I doubt anyone would even recognize me.”

“I would,” he said.

I laughed and combed my fingers through my short, dyed hair, catching a new waft of smoke. “Right. I look just like I did when I left.”

“You look beautiful,” he said. “And anyway, I’m not planning on running into anyone we used to know.” He cleared his throat, fixing his eyes on the road. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

All the hard edges within me had shimmered and gone soft.

“You said I was beautiful.”

He smirked and settled back in his seat. “I guess I did.”

I hid the smile in my shoulder.

CHASEdrove fast, simply because he could. We passed no one on the highway. Not a soul. It was desolate, a half-pipe with trash and forest debris and the occasional stiffened roadkill arcing up against the side partitions. We were mostly silent, each lost in our own thoughts. My guarded hope, and his fearful dread.

Three hours in, just after we’d passed the turnoff for Frankfort on I-64, we pulled off for gas. It was dark, and the cold scent of rotten leaves filled my nostrils. Chase removed one of the canisters from the trunk and tipped the yellow nozzle into the fuel tank while Sean and I stretched our legs.

“So this is home,” he said, rolling his shoulders.

“It’s close.” I hesitated. “It’s weird coming back. Not knowing who is going to be there.”

“Yeah,” he said with a strange, strangled sigh. “Sometimes it’s better not to know.”

I frowned. Sean shook his head. “It’s good to check, though,” he added as an afterthought.

My thoughts returned to Tent City, to Sean’s confession that he had lived in such a place, and I wondered if he had family somewhere. He never talked about them. He didn’t look like he wanted to start now.

“What did you find out about Chicago?” I asked. His head bobbed gratefully.

“Marco told me we rendezvous with the resistance at an old airfield in the Wreckage.”

I shivered. During the War, the first places the Insurgents attacked were the airports. I’d seen what remained of them on the news: demolished buildings, concrete dust storms, but never a plane. Not since air travel had been banned at the beginning of the War. Chase shifted nearby. These weren’t just television scenes to him. He’d been there.

“He says it’s a rough bunch up North,” continued Sean when neither Chase nor I commented. “Says they’re crazy. Too much time in the field or something.”

“Will they help?” I asked speculatively.

“Sure. We just shouldn’t expect any hospitality.”

I frowned, wondering what this meant, but imagined that little in our line of work rivaled Marco and Polo’s generosity. They had let us steal their car, after all.