Chapter 4-2
2016 Words
I turned away, muttering nonsense to myself as I put the flannel shirt back into the truck bed.
As soon as they thought I couldn’t see them, the Black boy brushed up against Rat-face, punching him with magic.
“Guess we’ll settle”—Rat-face yawned and slid to the ground—“right here tonight?”
The three boys grouped themselves around him, shoving their backpacks under their heads and curling up on the blacktop with an ease I envied.
As the fire burned low, I wriggled myself onto the foam mattress hidden under a pile of rags.
There were more treasures in my truck bed than anyone would guess.
Maybe the man and the boys would be gone in the morning.
I could hope.
Only one explosion had woken me in the night, and since it wasn’t close enough to do more than shake the ground and the truck, I’d gone right back to sleep and slept until the pain along my left leg woke me. I tried stretching it—I always did—and it helped some but not enough to go back to sleep, so I downed another mason jar of wine, then wormed my way out of the truck bed in the predawn light.
My left knee almost buckled when I eased myself to standing, but that, too, was normal now, so I limped toward the remains of the fire.
Snores and lumps on the ground told me the boys and the man were still there.
As I headed for the opening, one dirty hand shot out of the pile and gripped my ankle.
Magic slammed into me, subtle as a bus.
The Hispanic kid—the girl pretending to be a boy—shouted soundlessly, Where are you going? What are you doing? Are you going to turn us in to the guards? Maurice won’t like that.
The accompanying image showed me Maurice was the Black boy.
I crouched and felt her—him; better to think of him as him or I might slip at a bad time—wince at the backlash of my pain. Mustering the tiny bit of telepathy I had, I shouted, Going to pee, kid. If you don’t let me go, you won’t like the result.
He glared at me, then let my ankle go.
A tiny groan escaped me as I stood, but I hobbled away anyway. I hadn’t lied.
I found a corner of the gas station that was fairly well hidden from view but still open enough to allow escape, and peeled off three layers: baggy outer cargo pants, insulated cold-weather gear, and the custom compression tights that supported my knee and kept the varicose veins from getting worse. Business attended to and the wine kicking in on an empty stomach, I was able to rise and dress more easily.
A bag of chips had been missed by previous scavengers, so I pried it from under the shelves and took it with me.
When I returned to my truck, the man and boys were still there.
Dammit.
Rat-face was still sleeping, but the boys were sitting up, watching me. I softened my scowl and rummaged in the bed. Extracting the small bag of jerky I had tucked into one corner, I took a couple pieces, then handed the bag to the Hispanic kid.
He watched me carefully.
I opened the chips’ bag, dumped some onto the makeshift plate I usually called a tailgate, then handed him that bag, too. I shifted so I wasn’t looking at him and started eating.
Young ’uns never expect old people to have good peripheral vision. It was one of the few things on me that was still good.
The kids portioned out the jerky and the chips into four equal piles, then wordlessly ate theirs, l*****g their fingers clean of orange dust when they were finished. I swigged from my water bottle, sighed, and gave up the second bottle from my pockets.
At this rate, the kids would go through my food before I made it to my boy’s house.
Two of the three kids were sixers, with plenty of power even though they didn’t have any training. In the next year or two, the army would find them, whether they liked it or not. Was the third a strong sixer too? Was Rat-face taking them all to the three-letter-agency facility in the city? Was he a sixer as well? Or was he taking them away to protect them? Or was he using them for something else?
Protecting them didn’t feel right, but—argh. Sometimes I wished I’d gotten just one strong gift instead of this stupid smattering of everything. Of course, then I would be in the facility, or in the army, or dead. Not on my way to my boy’s house.
The Hispanic kid nudged the Black kid—Maurice is what he’d called him during our little sixer chat—and Maurice glared back but brushed his fingers over the back of Rat-face’s arm.
The man snorted and woke. He held out one hand. “Aram, help me up.”
The Indian boy stuck his shoulder under the man’s hand and let him clamber to his feet. I made a show of struggling to get the tailgate up, then headed toward the driver’s side of the truck.
“Where you heading?” Rat-face asked.
I waved vaguely southeast.
“Us too.” He gazed into the distance, then snapped his head around as if an incredible thought had just occurred to him. “We could join you? Protect you?”
I strangled my laughter even before my eyes could crinkle, opening them wide and arching my eyebrows. “Protect me?”
“Yeah—I’ve got some errands to run, but the boys? They could take care of you?”
Right. The way his eyes cut back to my truck, I knew what he wanted. Why hadn’t he tried to take it yet? And why hadn’t the boys protested? They just watched us with dark eyes.
Rat-face smiled. “You’ll let them ride in your truck? I’ll join you just a few blocks farther on? Just past the checkpoint?”
Ah. He wanted me to get the kids through the checkpoint. Then what? What was he planning? Looking at them, how could I say no? They were only a few years older than my grandchild would be, if she had survived.
“Sure.” I looked them over: Aram, Maurice, and the yet-to-be-named Hispanic kid. Then opened the door wide and shoved my seat forward. I hoped this didn’t get me killed. I had things to do. “Hop in.”
We drove through the b****y dawn, me squinting and swearing under my breath, and the boys silent in the back. They huddled together like their backpacks and each other were the only things they had in the world … which might be true at this point.
The dust wasn’t so bad today. Gold sunshine shot up through the crimson clouds bumping against the mountains to the east; maybe we’d get some rain later. I hardly needed my goggles, so I left them high on my head to give that raw spot a chance to heal a bit. Still, I covered my mouth with my filter. A woman has to breathe.
The streets were eerily still. Most people had hunkered down where they were, and the ones who were out were trying not to be seen. I suspected anything that moved that couldn’t defend itself was being captured for food: dogs, cats … people.
Eventually Aram called the third boy “Juan,” and I gathered from their whispered conversation that Rat-face was no relation but had promised them safe transport to the other side of the city where some sort of safe haven for sixer kids was supposed to be.
They’d given him all the money their families had sent them with, and now he’d left them with me. A crazy old lady who had no idea what she was doing or where she was going, according to their mutters.
After an hour or so, I told them to look in the bag at their feet, and within minutes more of my food supplies were gone. At least the naan loosened their tongues.
“Look out, abuelita,” Juan snapped and pointed when I veered too far to the right.
A snarl of nails that looked like an improvised caltrop sat in the lane to the left, with a beat-up rusty bus skiwampus across the middle three lanes. The blast—or someone else passing this way—had pushed downed light posts and a hunk of twisted metal that might have been a bench off to the right up against a boarded-up bar, leaving just enough space on the shoulder to get through. Felt like right was safer than left, so I let the truck tire roll up on the curb and we bumped our way through. “Sorry, boys!” I caroled. “That bus is so big!”
Maurice clutched the headrest in front of them, his fingers digging into the hideous crocheted seat cover. “Abuelita,” he said, copying Juan’s tone. “Do you need me to drive?”
“Hole.” Aram pointed and Juan yelped.
I left my turn until almost too late, just to see their reactions. The truck bounced and jumped, and for a blink, I thought I saw Aram smile.
My heart ached. My son had been like these boys, so smart, so sure of himself. And then his wife and daughter had died in a car accident, and he’d withdrawn from me, and thrown himself into work, and the war had started.…
Wrenching my attention back to the road, I let the truck stall out again.
This part of town had been choked with skyscrapers. Now what had been tall buildings were small piles of sludge. Half the shorter buildings were rubble, and anything still habitable was boarded up and barricaded.
The checkpoint was ahead, but this one wasn’t two soldiers standing in the road.
Highway debris had collapsed into what used to be an underpass. Someone had cleared a vehicle-sized hole in the natural barricade and set a warped chain link gate into it. There were six … seven … at least eight guards, male and female, and one of them—
I squinted.
One of them had that peculiar tight silver aura that meant she was a trained sixer. Another wore a backpack right out of an old ghost-busting movie, but this one wouldn’t shoot light from the wand; it would sense sixers.
“Get in the seat behind me, boys.” I shifted, spreading my legs wider and holding my elbows out a little farther than normal. “Huddle up close. They’ve got a sixer sensor, and you don’t want them noticing you.”
Silent again, with terrified side-glances to the guards, they did as I instructed. I let the truck lurch forward, stall, and lurch forward again until we were right where they wanted us. Then I cranked down the window and handed over my IDs.
“Where y’all heading, ma’am?” The soft southern drawl tickled my ears.
“My son lives across the valley,” I said, sticking to the script. “I haven’t heard from him in a few days.”
The guard’s voice sharpened. “Those three in back … they weren’t with you at the last checkpoint.”
The man with the sensor was walking around the truck with the sixer woman. The woman pointed, and the man waved the wand.
“I found ’em,” I claimed, trying not to watch the important two in my mirrors. “They say their families are over near my son’s place. They wanted to help an old woman out, and I need the help.”
The sixer woman finished her route around the truck and muttered in the guard’s ear, “There’s a sixer in that truck. A strong one.”
- Writer
