Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

“Look,” I said, “leave him here and climb in. If they got any backup—” Boom! Shotguns make a hecka loud noise. Pellets and gravel went pinging off the road. Scared me so much I swung the rolly up into the truck bed by myself. Then I shoved Aim through the door and jumped in after her. Turned the ignition—they had left the key in it—and backed out of there fast as I could rev. Maybe forty feet along, I swung around and switched to second gear. I hit third by the time we made the bridge, jouncing over pits in the asphalt. Some sections were awful low—leaky pontoons. Next storm would sink the whole thing, Aim had said. I told myself if the thing held up on the dudes’ ride over here it was gonna be fine for us heading back.

I looked to my right. Aim had pushed the kid ahead of her so he was huddled against the far door. I braked. “Okay, here you go.” But he made no move to leave. “What’s the matter, you think I’ll shoot? Go on, we won’t hurt you.”

“He’s shaking,” Aim reported. “Bad. I think he’s freaking out.”

“Well that’s great. Open the door for him yourself then, and let’s go.”

“No.”

I sighed. Aim had this stubbornness no one would suspect unless they spent a long time with her. “Listen, Aim, it was genius to keep him till I drove out of shooting range, but—”

“We can’t just dump him off alone.”

“He’s not alone; his brothers are right behind us!”

“One of ’em with a broken leg.”

“Knee.” But I took her point. “So, yeah, they’re not gonna be much use for making this little guy feel all better again real soon. C’est la flippin vie.” I reached past her to the door handle. She looked at me and I dropped my hand in my lap. “Aw, Aim…”

Aim missed her family. I knew all about how they’d gone on vacation to Disney World without her when she insisted she was too old for that stuff. Their flights back got canceled, first one, then the next, and the next, till no one pretended anymore there might be another, and the cells stopped working and the last bus into Pasco unloaded and they weren’t on it.

“Hector—” She couldn’t say more than his name.

“Aim, he’s twelve now. He’s fine. Even if your—” Even if her mom and dad had deserted him like so many other parents, leaving our world to live Otherwise, where they had anything, everything, whatever they wanted, same as when they drank the drug, but now for always. Or so the rumors said. Perfect homes. Perfect jobs. Perfect daughters. Perfect sons.

“All right. Kid, you wanna come with us or stay here with—um, Claude and Dwight?”

Nothing.

I tried again. “Kid, we gotta leave. We’re meeting a friend in—” In the rearview I saw five dudes on foot racing up the road. One waved a long, thin black thing over his head. That shotgun? I slammed the truck out of neutral and tore off. They dwindled in the dust.

Aim punched my shoulder and grinned at me. “You done good,” she said. I looked and she had one arm around the little kid, holding him steady, so I concentrated on finding a path for the truck that included mostly even pavement.

Here came the tunnel under Mercer Island. Scary, and not only because its lights were bound to be out—I turned the truck’s on and they made bright spots on the ivy hanging over the tunnel’s mouth. That took care of that. Better than if we’d been on foot, even.

But richies… more of them had stayed around than went Otherwise. Which made sense; they had their own drugs they used instead of Likewise, and everything already perfect anyways. Or everything used to be perfect for them till too many ordinary people left and they couldn’t find no one to scrub their toilets or take out their garbage. Only us.

When things got bad and the governments broke down, richies were the law, all the law around. What they wanted they got, in this world as much as any Otherwise. And what they wanted was slaves. Servants, they called us, but slaves is what it really was; who’d want to spend whatever time they had before they went Otherwise on doing stupid jobs for somebody else? Nobody who wasn’t forced to.

We drove through the ivy curtain. I jabbed on the high beams and slowed to watch for nets or other signs of ambush. Which of course there were gonna be none, because hadn’t this very truck come through here less than half an hour ago? But.

“Can’t be too careful.” Aim always knew what I was thinking.

The headlights caught on a heap of something brown and gray spread over most of the road and I had two sets of choices: speed up, or slow down more; drive right over it, or swerve around. I picked A and A: stomped the gas pedal and held the steering wheel tight. Suddenly closer I saw legs, arms, bloated faces, smelled the stink of death. I felt the awful give beneath our tires. It was a roadblock of bodies—broken glass glittered where we would have gone if I’d tried to avoid them, and two fresh corpses splayed on the concrete, blood still wet and red. A trap, but a sprung one. Thanks, Claude. Thanks, Dwight.

The pile of rotting dead people fell behind us mercifully fast. I risked a glance at the kid. He stared straight forward like we were bringing him home from seeing a movie he had put on mental replay. Like there was nothing to see outside the truck and never had been and never would be.

“Maybe this was what freaked him out in the first place?” asked Aim. “You know, before he even got to us?” It was a theory.

We came out into the glorious light again. One more short tunnel as the road entered the city was how I remembered the route. I stopped the truck to think. When my fingers started aching I let go of the wheel.

A bird landed on a loose section of the other bridge that used to run parallel. Fall before last it had been the widest of its kind in the world, according to Aim.

She cared about those kinds of things.

The sun was fairly high yet. We’d left our camp in the mountains early this morning and come twelve mostly downhill miles before meeting up with the kid’s brothers. The plan had been to cross the bridge inconspicuously, on foot, hole up in Seward Park with the Rattlers and wait for Rob to show. Well, we’d blown the inconspicuous part.

“Sure you don’t wanna go back?” I asked Aim. “They’ll be glad to see us. And the truck’ll make it a short trip, and it’s awesome salvage, too…” I trailed off.

“You can if you rather.” But she knew the answer. I didn’t have to say it. Aim was why I’d stayed in Pasco instead of claiming a place on the res, which even a mix had a right to do. Now I had come with her this far for love. And I’d go further. To the edge of the continent. All the way.

Rob had better be worth it, though. With his red hair and freckles and singing and guitar-playing Aim couldn’t shut up about since we got his message. And that secret fire she said was burning inside him like a cigarette, back when they were at their arts camp. He better be worthy of her .

“Stop pouting.” She puckered her face and crossed her eyes. “Your face will get stuck like that. Let me drive. Chevies are sweet.” She handed me the gun, our only distance weapon—and I hadn’t even gotten Dwight’s cartridges, but too late to think of that—then slid so her warm hip pressed against mine for a moment. “Go on. Get out.”

The kid didn’t move when I opened the passenger door so I crawled in over him.

Aim drove like there was traffic: careful, using signals. Guess she learned it from watching her folks. The tunnel turned out clear except for a couple of crappy modern RVs no one had bothered torching yet. One still had curtains in its smashed windows, fluttering when we went by. We exited onto the main drag—Rainier Avenue, I recalled. Aim braked at the end of the ramp. “Which way?”