Summer Lane - State of Emergency

I give him the whole story, leaving out no detail, and by the time I end my sad tale, I’m crying into his shirt over Bree’s death all over again.

“I didn’t even know her,” I choke. “But nobody deserves to die like that.”

“No, they don’t,” Chris agrees, weaving his fingers through my hair. Soothing me. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I tried to tell them,” I say, guilty. “But they wouldn’t listen.”

“Hey, look at me,” Chris says, tilting my chin up. “You went back and saved those kids’ lives when you could have kept running. You didn’t do anything wrong. Forget about this, okay?”

I nod slightly, Chris kissing the tip of my nose.

“You feel like moving?” he asks.

“Where are we going?”

“To your cabin. Or has there been a change of plans?”

I blink a few times. It honestly hadn’t crossed my mind that Chris was going to help me find my dad. I thought he would come here to try to drag me back to the Young farm.

“You’re coming with me?” I exclaim, a smile creeping across my face.

“Cassidy,” he whispers, taking my hands in his, “where else would I be?”

There’s something about tromping through the wilderness that really makes you feel good. It’s the kind of feeling you just can’t get if you’re walking down a sidewalk in LA or New York. It’s a feeling of absolute freedom. Plus, the lack of pollution might make it easier to breathe so you just naturally feel better.

Who knows?

Chris was able to find the highway in record time, making my navigational skills look worse than ever before. I asked him why he didn’t take the Hummer we stole from Omega in the Valley to find me, and he said he wouldn’t have been able to track me in a car.

I didn’t even bother to ask how he tracked me, anyway.

As we get higher, it gets colder. The air gets drier and I swear the elevation change makes me hungrier. Note: Hungrier than usual . Chris has got more supplies from his mother’s food cabinet in his backpack, which means my chances of starving to death are a little smaller than they were when I was on my own.

There are still no cars or signs of humans. There isn’t even any sign of evacuation. I guess there just aren’t very many people up here. Besides, how many people who live way back in the hills are even going to know about the EMP or the takeover? They could still be living so isolated from the outside world that they have no idea about the kind of crap that went down.

We cover about four miles. I just can’t go any farther. I’m exhausted. We reach some pine trees so there’s a place for us to camp off the road.

I curl up in a tight ball next to Chris. In this way I can siphon off his extra body heat and keep from turning into Frosty the Snowman during the night. Not to mention it makes me feel a lot safer holding onto him while we’re lying in the middle of a dark forest.

“You ever been camping before?” I ask.

“Yeah.” Chris shifts his arm underneath me, pulling me just a little tighter against his chest. No complaint here. “You?”

“No.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“But you and your dad have a cabin up here,” he says. “Haven’t you ever been up here before? To a campground?”

“Believe me, our cabin is pretty much the same thing as camping,” I reply, smiling. “The only difference is the roof and the mattresses. Other than that, it’s like sleeping outside.”

Chris nods, kind of a pointless gesture since it’s too dark to see anything.

“What are you going to do if he’s not there, Cassidy?” he asks after a long silence. I finger the zipper on his jacket, listening to the calm beat of his heart against my ear.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“You need to. We’re lucky that it’s a dry season,” he says. “But all it takes is one big storm to trap you somewhere. You need to decide if you’re going to stay there and wait for him, of if you would come back to the house with me.”

“Can’t I just decide when we get there?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer, which is his way of saying, “You can, but you shouldn’t.”

So that’s what I decide to do. I’ll just wing it. I’ve never been one for laying out plans or plotting courses. I just ride the wave, so to speak, and go from there. My dad is exactly the same way, which makes me wonder what he’s been doing if I show up at the cabin and find out that he’s been there for a few weeks, waiting for me.

Depressing.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Chris says, changing his tune. He probably felt my heart rate speed up just thinking about making the decision. “It’ll work out.”

“Yeah,” I reply, unconvinced. “Sure it will.”

We actually sleep pretty well in the dirt until twilight, when everything is covered in a dusty gray light. Prime bear-roaming time. I wake up with a neck ache from being so tense sleeping in the cold. Chris seems unaffected.

That’s a Navy Seal for you. Oblivious to cold temperatures.

We eat a breakfast of biscuits and cured homemade jerky from Chris’s backpack. After that we saddle up (theoretically) and hit the road again.

The highway starts becoming windier the higher we climb. Chris says it smells like a winter storm, and the sky is now covered with thick, dark clouds.

Great. And I didn’t bring an umbrella.

Every once in a while the road will peek out of the trees and give us a great view of the landscaping below. Chris likes to walk right over to the side of the road and put his boot up on the guardrail. I, on the other hand, am way happier just staying as far away as possible from the thousand-foot cliff. Observing from a distance.

It’s better for me and my fear of heights this way.

My second day with Chris finds us about twelve miles closer to my cabin, and a lot deeper into the forest. There are still no signs of cars or humans, which is just fine with me. That means there won’t be any Omega creeps sniffing around.

We sleep off the road again, but instead of a bed of dirt we settle down on a bunch of bouncy — spikey — pine needles. It could be worse. I mean, I do get to sleep with my head on Chris’s chest all night long.

Yeah. Things could be a lot worse.

At the beginning of the third day, I start to get worried about the cloud cover.

“Look at those clouds,” I say, tilting my head up. The sky is totally covered with dark, fat clouds. “Do you think it’s rain?”

“I think it’s snow,” Chris replies. “How far is your cabin from here?”

“I’d say about two days. We’re in deep.”

He grunts. I fall into step beside him, pulling my hat a little tighter over my ears. “Do you think we’re heading into a snowstorm?” I ask. “You can tell me. I’m not afraid of the truth.”

“It’s likely,” he replies.

I bite my lip.

“Great. We don’t even have a sled,” I quip.

“We’ll be okay,” he replies, “as long as keep moving and try to get out of the storm as soon as we can.”

I nod. It’s not that I’m scared of a snowstorm, per se, it’s more like I’ve never seen snow, so I don’t know what it’s going to be like. I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles, and the worst weather we got there were thunderstorms. I’ve only seen snow on TV or in the movies. And of course it always looks so fluffy and cute when Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is playing around in it.

“Are you sure we’ll be okay?” I ask.

“Yes, Cassidy,” Chris replies, a shadow of a smile on lips. “It’s just snow, not a nuclear explosion.”

He slips his arm around my waist and kisses my cheek. I blush, which just makes him grin wider, and cross my arms. Trying to conserve heat. It’s just so dang cold. I can literally feel the cold air scraping down my throat every time I take a breath.