Kristen Simmons - Article 5

DON’T fight me, Ember.

Absently, I rubbed my right temple with my thumb. I had to stop thinking of the person Chase had been.

“How did Mom look when she was released?” I asked, shaking off the memory.

“What?” His shoulders hunched, and he glanced out the side window.

“How did she look? After the sentencing.”

“I never said she’d been sentenced.”

My back straightened. “You implied it. You said people either get sentenced or sequestered. And you said they let her go, right? So she fulfilled her sentence?”

“Right.”

I groaned. The vague commitment to an explanation was almost worse than the earlier vow of silence.

“How long did you hold her for?”

“Just a day,” he said.

“Don’t give me too many details, okay? I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

He was quiet, brooding again. What did I do to you? I wanted to shout at him. Why won’t you just talk to me? It would be so much easier to accept this person if I didn’t know him before he was guarded and wary and cold. If I couldn’t remember that once he’d been an open book and that the days had been too short to hold all our words. It was infuriating, and worse, it made me question if I’d grossly misjudged everything there had been between us.

He stretched his stiff neck from side to side.

“She looked…” he hesitated. “I don’t know, she looked like your mom. Short hair, big eyes. Little. What do you want me to say? I only saw her for a little while.”

I snorted at this summation. Leave it to a boy to be so literal.

“How did she seem ? Was she scared?”

He considered this, and I could see a slight change in his face. A strain, pulling on the corners of his eyes. I was instantly worried.

“Yes. She was scared.” He cleared his throat, and I could tell her fear had pierced that callous shell. “But she was clearheaded, too. Not crazy, like some people get when they’re afraid. She was good under pressure, considering everything that had happened. She was absolutely determined we follow this plan.”

“Huh.” I slouched into the seat.

“What?” he asked earnestly. It crossed my mind that this was the first time he’d been interested in what I was thinking.

“I just never would have described her as clear-headed. I… I can’t believe I just said that. That’s terrible.” I cringed, feeling like I’d just betrayed her. “I don’t mean that she’s not capable of making decisions or anything. It’s just, under pressure, she’s usually… not.”

I saw a flash of our kitchen. Of her crying on the floor when I’d made Roy leave. Of all the times she’d brought home contraband, or gotten it in her head that she would tell off a soldier at the next compliance inspection. I was the safe and steady one. Not her. Now he was saying she didn’t need me, during the scariest time of our lives? That she could do this on her own? What had I been worrying about?

I pinched my eyes closed. They were burning, hot with tears I wouldn’t set loose.

“You’d have been proud of her,” he said quietly.

My heart cracked wide open. What was wrong with me? His words should have been a relief. But here I was, feeling inadequate because she could manage on her own. As if I were codependent or something.

Just as the wave rose, it receded, and left in its place was clarity.

I didn’t need her to feel strong, because she had made me strong. And I had made her strong, too. She was a big girl, like she’d told me countless times when I’d gotten fed up with her rabble-rousing. She’d make it to South Carolina; I just needed to get myself there.

“SORTof makes you feel short, doesn’t it?” I said as the highway approached an enormous wedge cut into the mountainside. The mustard-colored walls stretched up over three hundred feet on either side, so that only a band of silver sky was visible overhead. Trees and vines, in various states of maturity, reached their crooked fingers toward us, having been long without the care of city maintenance workers. Chase was forced to reduce our speed as we jostled over a mudslide that had spewed out onto the road.

A large sign on my right that read SIDELING HILL VISITOR’S CENTER, NEXT EXIT , had been tampered with: Just below the words, a cross and a flag had been spray-painted with a big neon green X through it. I’d seen symbols like this on the news when we’d had a television, but never in my hometown. It made me feel like a domesticated housecat thrown out into the wild.

“You are short,” he commented, so late I’d forgotten I’d said anything. I tried to make myself taller in the seat, as if to say Five four isn’t that short, but the truck bounced so hard over the ground it was impossible to stay rigid.

We passed through the gap of Sideling Hill and continued on toward Hagerstown. Thirty-three more miles, the sign said. It was evacuated so quickly that most stores had been abandoned, full of merchandise. We’d see how intact that merchandise still was, eight years later, then catch the connecting highway south to Harrisonburg.

“Do you think it’s safe?” I’d heard about gangs in the empty cities. The original purpose of the MM had been to reduce crime in these places.

“Nowhere is,” he said. “It’s been cleared by the FBR though.”

“That makes me feel so much better,” I said.

He connected to Interstate 81, a vigilant eye on the road as we entered Hagerstown. The first houses we came upon were large, surrounded by rolling properties and stout trees. As we drew closer to the heart of town, little neighborhoods sprouted, then lines of track homes and condos. A supermarket. A restaurant. All covered by a gray film of ash, like dirty snow, that had grown impenetrable to weather.

No kids played in the street. No dogs barked in the yards. Not a single car on the road.

The town, preserved by time, was absolutely still.

I noticed a shopping center on the right and pointed to it. Chase took the nearest exit, turning onto a street called Garland Groh Boulevard. Within a minute, he had pulled into an alley beside an old sporting goods store. We’d had one of these at home, but it had closed during the War. The MM had turned it into a uniform distribution center.

I could see the empty highway just beyond the parking lot, a straight shot to the checkpoint. My heart pounded in my chest. It was a little more than five hours before the MM would report Chase AWOL. We’d have to get what we could and get out. Fast.

Chase unhooked the wires near his knees, silencing the engine. Before he opened the door he removed a slender black baton with a perpendicular handle from beneath the seat. His face grew dark when he caught me staring at it with wide eyes.

The other weapon was in the front pouch of the bag. In case we ran across people, he didn’t want anyone seeing we had a gun. It would have been like hanging a hundred-dollar bill out of your pocket and hoping someone didn’t steal it.

“Stay close, just in case,” he told me.

I nodded, and we stepped outside the safety of the truck. Our shoes left footprints in the thin layer of gray ash over the asphalt.

I stayed close beside Chase as we rounded the front of the building. The store’s tall windows had been shattered, the remaining glass forming icelike stalactites that hung from the green-painted frames. The columnar handles of two French doors were bound together by a thick metal chain and a padlock, but the glass on either side was missing.

I scanned the parking lot behind us as Chase stepped through the doorframe. Apart from a scorched Honda that someone had set fire to years ago, it was deserted.