Robison Wells - Blackout

Jack shook his head. “The Aubrey I knew couldn’t do . . . what did you do again?”

“I can disappear,” she said, her voice shaking. “I can’t explain it, so don’t ask me to.”

“It wasn’t like you disappeared,” he said.

“I know. Here, watch again.”

A second time she vanished, and once again Jack stared, flustered. He reached an arm out, swiping through the air. She grabbed his hand and reappeared.

He flinched as she came back, and pulled his hand away. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t want him to be like this. She wanted him to be impressed, amazed. That’s how Nicole had been. She’d immediately seen how valuable Aubrey could be.

“How do you do . . . that?” he asked.

“I just do,” she said. “Now do you see why I can’t turn myself in? This has to be what they’re testing for.”

Jack nodded blankly.

She couldn’t stand the strange way he was watching her. He was her oldest friend and he was looking at her like she was someone—something—foreign and strange. Like she was a freak.

He was right.

Her fingers clutched the edge of the counter.

After a long pause, Jack spoke. “The Pattens’ cabin.”

“What?”

“Eric Patten’s cabin. His family left town to go be with his grandma in Montana. We could go to their cabin—no one will be there.”

She tilted her head slightly toward him. “What do you mean ‘we’? You should turn yourself in.”

“Yeah, right.”

Aubrey turned around again. He looked tired, but he was standing firm, rubbing the back of his neck while he thought.

“If they’re testing for . . . whatever it is you can do, then that means they aren’t searching for me. If I get caught then I’ll just say I was afraid and running.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not going to leave you.”

Suddenly she was less scared of him than for him. Nate had been killed. What would happen if they found out Jack was helping her? “I can take care of myself. You’re not the only one who knows how to fish and hunt.”

His head was down, staring at the cluttered mess as he rubbed his neck.

“I’ve been to the Pattens’ cabin,” Aubrey continued. “I can find it. They have food storage there.” She didn’t add that she could steal anything else she needed from the grocery store.

Jack still gazed at the floor, not responding.

“I’m going to pack,” she said, and took a step toward her bedroom.

“I thought your dad stopped smoking.”

“Huh? Well, he did for a while.” She hadn’t seen him smoke in a long time. The little spare money he had usually went for cheap beer.

Jack bent over and picked up a paper from the floor. It was wrinkled, with torn corners where it had been taped to something. He handed it to her.

The font was bold and simple, with an official seal top and center.

WE NEED YOUR HELP

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified a highly contagious virus in your area. By order of the President of the United States and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, all persons between the ages of 13 and 20 are to be tested and quarantined for the protection of both themselves and others.

We appreciate your cooperation with this action. Because of the major threat this poses to public health and national security, it is of utmost importance that all citizens comply. Financial compensation will be granted for any help rendered in fulfillment of this request.

Aubrey’s hands began to shake before she got to the bottom of the letter. Finally, she looked up at Jack. “Financial compensation?”

“There’s a bounty on you—on us both. That’s why we kept seeing those roadblocks. Lance and Ian—they were trying to get reward money.”

She ran to the front door. For the first time in her life she hoped her dad was sitting on the front porch smoking. She twisted the knob, then peered outside.

Darkness. No one was there.

Not even her dad.

A blazing light filled her eyes. For an instant she felt Jack’s hand on her arm, pulling her back, but she disappeared, slipping out of his grip. She stumbled through the trailer, blindly forcing herself to the back door. Before she got there a foot kicked it in.

“Aubrey!”

It was Jack’s voice but she couldn’t see anything. Her vision was blurry, trails of the brilliant-white floodlights seared into her eyes.

Something flew through the window in a spray of glass.

She screamed. Jack was yelling. He couldn’t hear her while she was invisible.

The room began to fill with a glowing white light.

Jack bumped into her and knocked her down without knowing he’d done it.

She couldn’t breathe.

Her eyes stung and she wiped at them wildly as tears flowed down her face.

Was the trailer on fire? She couldn’t get any air.

Jack wasn’t yelling for her anymore. She couldn’t see him.

This was her fault. He had wanted to turn himself in.

She reappeared, sucked in a draft of burning air. “Jack!” she called out.

In a moment he was there, grabbing her hand, pulling her from the trailer, away from the bright, stinging smoke.

He twisted her arm behind her back, and the two of them stumbled down the stairs to where she landed, face down in the dirt.

He grabbed her other hand.

She could barely open her swollen eyes.

“Aubrey,” a choking voice said.

She cracked one bleary eye. Jack was beside her, pinned to the ground, his arms bound behind his back.

She felt the tug of cuffs being tightened on her wrists.

“Stay here,” Jack said.

Every impulse in her urged Aubrey to disappear, to slip away from the soldiers and run. But it was too much. She was handcuffed. Her dad had turned her in—sold his own daughter out for beer money.

And as tough as she was—or pretended to be—there was something in Jack’s insistence that he stay with her that she’d liked. They would have been on the run together. A friend who wasn’t using her.

She’d stay.

DAN WAS STILL CRAWLING OUTof the car as Laura hurried to the edge of the cliff, excited about Alec’s unexpected new goal. She peered over the rim of the canyon, into what looked like a black river of darkness. “It says here,” Alec said, shining a flashlight on a plaque next to the rest stop parking lot, “that they named it Eagle Canyon because pioneers thought it was so deep not even an eagle could fly out of it.”

Laura looked down again, at the pitch-black bottom, and at the enormous steel beams that held up the short bridge.

It wasn’t a big target. No one was guarding it, which made it even more perfect. She guessed that most of the people who drove over this bridge never realized they were crossing such a deep gorge. It was maybe eighty yards wide, in a stretch of canyon country called the San Rafael Swell. Interstate 70 swerved and climbed through the rugged terrain, and even Laura hadn’t noticed the bridge when she passed over it. Alec had to point out the turnoff.

“There are two bridges,” Alec said to Dan, who still looked exhausted. “The eastbound and westbound are separate, maybe forty feet between them. The plaque says the rocks are limestone and sandstone.”

Dan stood up and stretched. “Now you’re talking.”

Laura climbed over the edge of the cliff, testing the strength of the notoriously grainy and brittle rock. She slipped her hand into a fissure and clenched a fist, creating an ironlike anchor point.

This was what she loved: using her strength for something real. She’d spent the last month doing nothing but hauling an exhausted Dan over her shoulder like a rag doll. Her parts of the plans were never any fun.