Summer Lane - Day Zero

This time, she was saying goodbye for good.

Elle had carefully charted out their route in her mind. They would parallel the 405 Interstate, the San Diego Freeway, out of the city. They would merge onto Interstate 5, heading northbound. And then they would find themselves in the Tehachapi Hills, at Aunt and Uncle’s house.

“So, are your Aunt and Uncle friendly?” Georgia asked.

Elle shrugged. “If they’re still there, yeah.”

“Where exactly do they live?”

“The Tehachapi Hills. They have a ranch.”

“You left the safety of a ranch hidden in the mountains to go back to the city and look for your family?” Jay asked. “Why?”

Elle made a face.

Why did he think ?

“So you think they’ll have food and supplies?” Jay continued, pretending he’d never asked a stupid question.

“That’s right,” Elle replied.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“Nothing is safe, anymore. Or haven’t you noticed?” Elle sighed. “My aunt and uncle will be able to help us.”

“That’s awesome ,” Flash remarked, looking up. “Hey. If their ranch is safe, why don’t we just stay there with them?”

Elle shook her head.

“No. They’re… involved with the military. With the militias that are fighting Omega. It’s too high risk.”

“Oh.” Flash looked crushed.Pix squeezed his shoulder.

“Why didn’t you just go back to live with your aunt and uncle after you escaped the Pits?” Pix asked. “Why did you choose to stay in the city?”

“I was hoping,” Elle whispered. “And I guess I was afraid to leave.”

“Hoping for what?”

Elle didn’t answer. She had been hoping that she would find her mother at some point. That she wasn’t dead. Elle had stayed in the city because it was her connection to the past — the world before Day Zero.

Now she was leaving, and she would put it behind her. All of it.

“So this is the freeway.” Georgia stared at the crumbling remains of a decrepit overpass. “Are you sure it’s okay to follow this out of the city?”

“Of course it’s not okay,” Elle snorted. “But we don’t really have any other choice. I don’t want to get lost, so we’re going to parallel the road.”

“What if there are bandits or something on the highway?”

“We’re very well armed,” Elle said with confidence she didn’t feel. “Come on. We need to start before it gets too dark. The Klan comes out at night, and Omega patrols certain parts of the city during the day.”

They climbed the on ramp to the freeway. A Chinese restaurant adjacent to the highway had been blown apart. They stepped onto the freeway itself. Miles of vehicles stretched as far as the eye could see.

“It looks like a river of metal,” Pix commented.

“None of them work anymore?” Georgia sighed.

“Not if they had an electronic ignition,” Pix explained, brightening. “See, an electromagnetic pulse disables anything that functions with a computer chip. A pulse bomb can come from anything — a nuclear bomb detonated in the atmosphere, or even a solar flare.”

“This was no solar flare,” Elle said sharply. “This was an attack.”

Her words hung in the air for a moment.

“Yeah,” Pix said at last. “It wasn’t an accident.”

They walked. In some places, the cars were so tightly packed together that they had to climb on hoods and roofs to get through. There were remnants of a past civilization inside the vehicles — cracked, broken cellphones, GPS devices and MP3 players.

Georgia peeked through the window of a blue hatchback. She stifled a gasp and jumped backward.

“There’s a dead person in the car!” Georgia said.

“Keep it down, will you?” Elle snapped. “Your voice is echoing.”

“But there’s—”

“—I know, I know.” Elle gave her shoulder a brief squeeze. “Keep a sharp lookout, okay?”

Georgia turned to Jay and he murmured something to her — probably words of comfort. Elle wanted to roll her eyes, but she didn’t. These kids hadn’t seen half of the things Day Zero had dished out. They were still getting used to the dead bodies.

They’d learn soon enough.

As they trudged forward, Georgia kept her gaze straight ahead, refusing to look through the windows of any of the vehicles on the road. She had gone pale. Elle remembered when she was like that.

Georgia would harden.

They all would.

“I had a whole network built,” Georgia explained, grinning devilishly. They were camped on the side of a foothill, tucked away in a crevice, out of sight of the road. Elle and the others warmed their hands in front of a small fire they had built.

“What kind of a network?” Elle asked.

“Business connections,” Georgia replied. “My brother had a hefty stash of drugs, and he was high half the time, so I’d swipe them and sell them to my own customers. It was great. I always had cash in my pocket.”

“Right. It was great until you went to jail ,” Pix smirked.

“You should talk, you little hacker,” Georgia shot back.

“At least I wasn’t selling dope to thugs on the street in Los Angeles.”

“Hey, calm down,” Jay interjected, hiding a smile. “We all made mistakes, and it’s over now. What we did back then was in the past. This is the apocalypse, remember?”

“What happened to your brother?” Elle asked Georgia.

“Don’t know,” Georgia sniffed. “He was a half-baked lunatic any way you slice it. I’m guessing he died when everything collapsed. I wouldn’t know. I was in prison when it all went down.”

She acted nonchalant, but Elle could hear the emotion in Georgia’s voice.

“What about you, Jay?” Elle asked, the flames throwing shadows over her face.

Jay held his hands in front of the fire.

“Doesn’t matter,” he shrugged.

“Come on. We’ve all confessed,” Georgia prodded. “You can, too. We’re not going to tell anybody. I mean, there’s ain’t anybody left to tell, anyway.”

Jay just shook his head.

“Not every story’s worth telling,” he murmured, looking down.

Hmm. Elle knew how that worked.

“We should all get some sleep,” she said. “You guys go ahead. I’ll take the first watch. Jay, you want to take the second watch?”

“Sure.”

They kept the fire burning as they curled up and went to sleep. Elle stationed herself above the campsite, huddled in the darkness. She pulled her hood around her face and scanned the horizon. The freeway wound around the curve of the mountain. If they traveled fast, they could reach the ranch in three days.

If they could stay alive long enough, that is.

As they followed the 405, they bypassed abandoned rest stops and gas stations. Elle warned the kids not to stop at any of the buildings. Oftentimes roadside stops had become traps for wandering travelers. It was a great way to get robbed and killed.

Neither of which were appealing. At all.

“Here we go,” Elle announced, pointing to an off ramp. “We follow this road and by this time tomorrow, we’ll be there!”

She was excited. Aunt and Uncle would be so surprised to see her. They probably thought she was dead. She had disappeared such a long time ago… what if they had forgotten about her?

No, Elle thought. They would never forget about me… right?

Elle was far more comfortable as soon as they left the freeway. The road that they were following was older, and as they progressed, became smaller. It was hardly ever traveled, and the lack of tire tracks made it obvious that there had been no recent traffic in this area.