"Pioneers" 2/2
Not sure how much I like this section or if I want to add the plot back in and make it longer. :| idk idk. Here's the second half though.
part one here
"Pioneers" 2/2
Sometimes Sonia was lucky enough, with the right amount of silence, in the sweet few hours between the freezing desert night and the blistering heat of its morning, to find a kind of meditative space in their walk. The cramp in the arches of her feet was still there, but it ceased to clench and seize her muscles. She could will the emptiness in her stomach to stop its constant churning, its clawing insistence on being noticed, on being fed, and instead convinced herself this was only an exercise in self-discipline, that through her hunger and aching and exhaustion she became something better than human. The hunger, she imagined, made her light and fast; the pain made her hard and unbending like an arrow in Nina’s pack. The silence, the loneliness she felt within this group, the back of Tal’s sunburned neck as he ignored her - all this made her invisible to the rovers and to the destroyed world. In those few morning hours she was an arrow. And an arrow did not have to feel the wide emptiness of everything that had been lost. An arrow did not acknowledge the creeping terror the night dragged in, or the absence of animals, or green life, or water, or her dead family. An arrow shot across the sky couldn’t fathom the distance it traversed. These silent hours grew in her a small hope.
And then they would have to stop to set up a discreet camp off-road, or break to eat the nuts or stale crackers or canned peaches, turned to hot syrupy mush by the sun, from their packs, and her hope was dashed. The arrow snapped. Unpacking the supplies, trying not to look at Tal, trying not to feel the others staring at her, the vigilant listening for rovers - all this brought her back to reality. She was not some arrow. She was Sonia, barely seventeen, not halfway through her last year at the Institute, hadn’t taken her exams, had never been kissed, had not been assigned a job. Might never be assigned. Might never be kissed. She was Sonia, and she was alone, and no one believed her, and they were all going to die.
*
The road ended and turned to desert. They stopped to decide whether to turn east or west. She took the opportunity to rest and sat cross-legged on the hot gravel road, consulting her map alone.
“We have to cross,” Sonia made herself say. No one heard her, or they collectively ignored her. She made herself stand and approach them. “We have to cross,” she said louder. Tal and Lin stopped arguing and stared at her.
“Cross?” Lin gave her an incredulous glare. He pointed out at the desert, the sun poised to sink over the far horizon, and no hills or crevices to hide behind. “You want us to cross that.”
Sonia didn’t speak. She knew she couldn’t convince them. Nothing would. No argument was extant that could convince anyone with an instinct to live to cross that interminable stretch of desert when a road lay right before them, an open path with two better options: east or west. Roads lead somewhere. That expanse was pure, wild risk. But she had to try.
“I know how it sounds.” She tried to keep her voice from shaking. She tried to sound like Nina did when she had addressed the group - certain and calm and ready. “But there will be rovers on the highway. They won’t waste the fuel to cross all that,” she said, indicating the desert. “And besides, the map says-”
“The map says?” Lin was still glaring, his face red. “We’re not followin’ your dad’s idea of a sick joke, OK? Have you been paying attention, kid? This little squadron won’t make it a mile in.” He waved a hand behind him. “Look at them. You think they can last a night in the cold without a fire?”
She glanced at them all. Tal was still staring at her, expressionless. Pree was drawing shapes in the sand with her index finger, blinking away tears. Johanna was quiet, standing with Amy, who could barely keep from swaying to the ground, her eyes only half-open. Jo had an arm wrapped around her waist and another under her arm, and Amy, emaciated and pale, seemed to sink into her, letting her head rest on Jo’s shoulder. Sonia doubted Amy could make it on the road, hidden behind a boulder and warming her hands at a fire. She folded the map and took a defiant step toward Lin.
“It’s the more secure route,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady. “S-strategically-”
“Lot of military experience, this one, huh?” he laughed. “No, no, I’m sick of her dragging us miles out of our way.” His face fell and he rushed up to her with a finger in her face. “Not until she tells us how she knows.”
“I don’t-” she started and he grabbed her arm.
“Because you’re one of them!” he screamed. “You’re leading us right to them!” He shoved her and she stumbled back, slamming into the ground. Tal was there before she opened her eyes again, seizing Lin by the arms and heaving him back.
Sonia looked up at them all, desperate, her heart hammering against her chest. Tal stood between her and Lin with an arm out as if to force him back away from her. Lin spat in her direction and wiped a sleeve across his dirt-streaked mouth. Amy, standing on her rolled ankle, leaned half her weight on Johanna. Lin was right. Taking the right route would kill Amy. So would walking the road, though more slowly. A rush of cold came over her despite the pressing heat.
“I believe you, Son.” Johanna said quietly, crying. Sonia walked over and stood on her toes to hug them both, putting an arm around Amy’s waist to help hold her up. “I do,” she whispered, burying her head in her shoulder.
“I believe her,” whispered Amy as she raised her eyes to meet Tal’s. Sonia looked at her parched lips, broken and bleeding, forcing an encouraging smile. She felt that hollowness open in her chest again with the idea of losing them both to rovers or to thirst, the horrifying image of leaving Amy’s body in the desert, of trying to convince Johanna to keep walking without Amy beside her.
Tal dropped his eyes to the ground in acquiescence. A long, tense silence hung between them. Lin gave Tal an absurd, dumbfounded look he refused to return and instinct made Sonia cross her arms over the map tucked in her jacket pocket. Finally Lin swore at them, gathered up his pack and started off down the highway alone.
*
She layered herself in all the clothes from her pack and curled up under the blankets. She smoothed over a hill of sand to rest her head on, like she and her sister had done once at the beach. At home her bed had been next to the heater. Sonia tried not to think about home, because with those things came all the rest. The slinking grey cat that hid from them all until nighttime, when he came to sleep on her outstretched legs. Her mother, her sister. Her father, whose face she couldn’t conjure unless it was the day she left the city, as he pushed the map into her hands, forced her to trace the route, once, twice, then screamed at her to go, to run.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember the beach. The waves rushed in over their feet and they shrieked in reply to the ice cold water - or had they? Had the water been warm that day? A new lost detail. She tried to clamp down on the thought as it appeared, expel it, but it came anyway. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, racking her memory for another scene to fill her mind, to memorize. The starlings. The day on the lake.
She must have been a child, four or five; the orange life vest sticking to her skin in the afternoon heat. She could hear her father’s voice but not see him. Maybe he had been holding her. Her sister sat twisted, half her body hanging over the edge of the boat, staring into the lake, perhaps imagining the sea monsters they read about at night undulating below. Sonia let her hand drag across the water, skimming the surface. Her mother was rowing at the front, the wind making a mess of her graying hair, strands of it flying across her laughing face. Sonia saw them first. She shrieked and pointed in alarm and excitement as the birds approached over the edge of the mountain and collected above their heads.
Blue starlings filled the sky and spun, clustering together and then spreading far apart, repeating the pattern again and again, moving like a singular and sovereign being. Their collective movements were unpredictable; first making tiny revolutions, and then breaking apart so you could distinguish the individual birds again. They soared northwest and suddenly, jointly, broke toward the south, a mesmerizing dance that reminded her of drops of ink in water, or the cloud of milk her mother poured into her cup of tea each morning.
It had been so long since they’d seen an animal alive. Were there starlings anymore? No, don't think that. Sonia turned onto her back and stared up at the boundless black, seeing nothing but the faint evidence of her warm breath in the freezing desert air. She imagined the sky were a clean, cerulean blue and starlings spilled into her line of vision, hundreds of thousands of them, spinning and breaking apart and then joining so tightly they appeared to her a single dancer in a black gown twisting in the clear sky.
*
“Are you awake?”
She didn’t answer, but sat up to stoke the fire. Tal kneeled beside her. Her hands were shaking with fear and hunger as she threw the stick to the side. He shifted closer to her and grasped her hands gently. A spike of defensiveness went through her, but she did not pull away. The small fire spit and cracked beside them. Slowly, with care, he pulled off her gloves an inch at a time and turned her hands over. Her palms were ripped and bloodied from catching herself when Lin had thrown her. He pulled a bandage from his pack and silently began wrapping her hands with it.
When he finished, he sat back and ran a hand over his shaved head absent-mindedly, staring out at the black before them. She saw Tal’s hands were shaking like her own. The night was mute except for their shared breath and the dying fire between them.
“Jo believes you,” he said finally, searching her face, looking for something in it he could not seem to find. She remembered him regarding her this way when they first started out, the first time she had shown him the map, like he was trying to make her reveal something. She remembered arranging her face in a set expression, trying to convince him of a confidence she didn’t possess. She didn’t have the energy now to try and persuade him. She felt the exhaustion like a force of gravity in her bones, pulling her down, and she let him look, and looked back.
“Jo believes you,” he said again. He swallowed hard and his face changed; now he was looking at her like he’d never seen her before. “So we’re following you, Sonia. Because I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know where to go next. I don’t know what… I never asked for these people. They just - just started following me after Nina - after they took Nina. Like I knew something they didn’t, and now… Now I owe them something I don’t have to give.”
He couldn’t have been older than 22, an age that once seemed to her adult, endowed with the privileges of autonomy, freedom, the peace of being alone. But now she saw 22 was just a kid.
“I used to want all this,” Sonia said. “The time alone, I mean, the quiet. To just start out and go somewhere without a destination. It used to seem so… I don’t know.” She searched for the right word. “Romantic.” She braced herself for him to laugh at the irony, to make some dismissive sound, but when she raised her eyes his face was filled with a kind of grief. She had an impulse to throw her arms around him in thanks for not laughing, for not even cracking a smile, but instead she kept still, watching him, half-lit by the fire.
“I’m sorry I-” he struggled to form the words, looked away from her. “I shouldn’t have left you. I shouldn’t have left any of them.” She tried not to think of the bodies likely still wrapped in their sleeping bags back at the old camp, forced the image out of her mind. She didn’t know what to say. Finally he stood and nodded at the jacket where he knew she kept her father’s map.
“I hope he knew more than I do.”
*
There was no sign of the rovers for days as they crossed the expanse, following the sun in the day, trying to map the stars through the sickly black clouds at night. It was when they fell off course somehow, lost track of the mapped route. Tal said he was surprised it hadn’t happened earlier.
The rovers came before they set up camp one night, in a battered Jeep, and five or six of them walking alongside. Jo and Amy tried to run, and Sonia watched Pree racing in the opposite direction.
Panic emptied her mind; she couldn’t think fast enough. Tal. She ran after him, crouched beside him as he assembled the weapons from his pack. The pounding - was that her heart? - muted the world, but he screamed, go, run, and pointed away. Sonia remembered her father thrusting the map into her hands and mouthing the same words, mouthing them because the world had turned silent the same way it was now. He held up the last of the grenades to show her, his eyes desperate and pleading, saying something she couldn’t hear. She turned and ran and forced herself not to look back. As she sprinted, weighed down by her pack, the others out of sight, Sonia thought of the starlings spreading out across the sky just as their group spread now, breaking across the desert expanse.
He pitched the grenade into the Jeep and the gunfire, and the sound blasted through the air like nothing she had ever heard before. The impact sent her reeling. She saw the starlings make a rapid turn east, rejoin, and fly over the lake as a single, spinning dancer.
*
Highway Elm, Mile 12. Tal showed her the sign. Two miles from the city where her father’s map led them. The ink-drawn house under the star. Somehow they had found their way back onto the route. Their ragged gang passed the marker just as the sun inched halfway below the horizon. “Let’s rest here. Must be good luck,” Tal said, nodding at the sign.
A bullet had skimmed his thigh. Sonia removed the bandages from her hands and wrapped the wound while Pree dug through the packs to distribute the last of their food. Fearing more rovers would follow the first set, and left with nothing else to fight them with but Nina’s bow and arrows, they had walked west, through the brush and into the setting sun, back up to the dirt road. There had been no time to carry Amy’s body.
Sonia had expected Jo to be inconsolable, but she kept up with the others and only stared like she didn’t remember any of it. She seemed a ghost gripping Pree’s hand, sometimes leaning into her for balance. It scared Sonia. She would rather have seen her emote or scream, anything but this blank white page.
No one mentioned sleep. They walked all morning to reach the city. When Pree saw the buildings, the first sign of civilization they’d passed in weeks, she became a child again, transformed, and she skipped and raced ahead of them and then back again. Sonia smiled at her new boundless energy. But at the same time, since reaching the city, she felt her muscles begin to knot with anxiety. Her father’s map made no indication of where to find the others, or what the house drawing meant. She glanced at Tal and then at the rows of houses ahead, pairs of windows like eyes staring back. Who was waiting for them? Was there anyone left?
The four of them threaded through the cars abandoned on the street. Pree wanted to climb them all at first, stomp across the hoods and roofs, until Jo realized they were not all empty. Tal carried her like a child, her arms wrapped around his neck. He shielded her eyes whenever they passed a body.
The first house they came to was an empty old Victorian, all the windows shattered, the inside littered with burnt books and papers and overturned chairs.
“Do you think this is it, Son?” asked Jo, looking up at the place. She shrugged in response. The house on the map was nothing more than a cartoon, a box with a triangle roof sketched in a dead man’s panic. Tal climbed the porch steps first and Jo followed. “Door’s locked.” She kicked through the storm door and cleared the shards of glass and debris out of their way.
They unpacked in the upstairs room, the one with the burned books. Pree sat at the shattered windows and looked out at the city and Jo huddled in a corner beside her, pulling her knees pulled in tight against her chest. Tal brought them what canned foods he could find downstairs.
“Hey.” She caught him wince as he bent beside her, accommodating his bandaged leg.
“Hi.”
“So. What do you think? Could this be the house?”
Sonia shook her head. This whole time, her entire purpose had been that map, the blue route she memorized, the ink drawn house. But now that they were here, there was no way to tell which house out of hundreds, thousands, it might be. Or what it might mean. If whatever savior they imagined there remained. If it was waiting for them.
“I don’t know,” she said with a forced smile. “We’re back to the start.”
“Like the first pioneers,” said Pree. She turned from the window to smile at them. Sonia walked to the window to look out at the city. Ash covered the street below. The inescapable desert sand dusted the streets, taken up and spun in miniature cyclones by the erratic wind. She studied a rusting bicycle still locked to a post and thought after its rider.
A flash of movement. Instinct forced her back flat against the wall. Tal had seen it too, and shouted for them all to get down. Sonia dropped to her knees, but at once she was aware of an absence - an empty space where panic should have swelled. Curious, she stood slowly and searched the square picture of the city that the window framed.
“Sonia!” Tal whispered. “Get down!”
Instead she leaned out the window. A sound escaped her throat when she saw it, a cry or whimper, and a hand flew up to cover her mouth.
“Son. Sonia?” breathed Jo.
She turned to look at them. Jo was crouched with her arm thrown protectively around Pree’s back. The two of them stared at her, incredulous, as Sonia waved them over. Tal was the only one who stood.
The pair approached the window and looked down. Below, fifty or sixty feet away from the house, he caught the flash of movement - a pair of jackrabbits, their ears standing nearly as tall as their tawny bodies. Tal seemed to stumble beside her and grabbed her shoulder for support. A smile spread across Sonia’s face. She looked at Tal as he broke into a laugh and his eyes filled, following the rabbits as they bounded off together, out of sight.
*
part one here
"Pioneers" 2/2
Sometimes Sonia was lucky enough, with the right amount of silence, in the sweet few hours between the freezing desert night and the blistering heat of its morning, to find a kind of meditative space in their walk. The cramp in the arches of her feet was still there, but it ceased to clench and seize her muscles. She could will the emptiness in her stomach to stop its constant churning, its clawing insistence on being noticed, on being fed, and instead convinced herself this was only an exercise in self-discipline, that through her hunger and aching and exhaustion she became something better than human. The hunger, she imagined, made her light and fast; the pain made her hard and unbending like an arrow in Nina’s pack. The silence, the loneliness she felt within this group, the back of Tal’s sunburned neck as he ignored her - all this made her invisible to the rovers and to the destroyed world. In those few morning hours she was an arrow. And an arrow did not have to feel the wide emptiness of everything that had been lost. An arrow did not acknowledge the creeping terror the night dragged in, or the absence of animals, or green life, or water, or her dead family. An arrow shot across the sky couldn’t fathom the distance it traversed. These silent hours grew in her a small hope.
And then they would have to stop to set up a discreet camp off-road, or break to eat the nuts or stale crackers or canned peaches, turned to hot syrupy mush by the sun, from their packs, and her hope was dashed. The arrow snapped. Unpacking the supplies, trying not to look at Tal, trying not to feel the others staring at her, the vigilant listening for rovers - all this brought her back to reality. She was not some arrow. She was Sonia, barely seventeen, not halfway through her last year at the Institute, hadn’t taken her exams, had never been kissed, had not been assigned a job. Might never be assigned. Might never be kissed. She was Sonia, and she was alone, and no one believed her, and they were all going to die.
*
The road ended and turned to desert. They stopped to decide whether to turn east or west. She took the opportunity to rest and sat cross-legged on the hot gravel road, consulting her map alone.
“We have to cross,” Sonia made herself say. No one heard her, or they collectively ignored her. She made herself stand and approach them. “We have to cross,” she said louder. Tal and Lin stopped arguing and stared at her.
“Cross?” Lin gave her an incredulous glare. He pointed out at the desert, the sun poised to sink over the far horizon, and no hills or crevices to hide behind. “You want us to cross that.”
Sonia didn’t speak. She knew she couldn’t convince them. Nothing would. No argument was extant that could convince anyone with an instinct to live to cross that interminable stretch of desert when a road lay right before them, an open path with two better options: east or west. Roads lead somewhere. That expanse was pure, wild risk. But she had to try.
“I know how it sounds.” She tried to keep her voice from shaking. She tried to sound like Nina did when she had addressed the group - certain and calm and ready. “But there will be rovers on the highway. They won’t waste the fuel to cross all that,” she said, indicating the desert. “And besides, the map says-”
“The map says?” Lin was still glaring, his face red. “We’re not followin’ your dad’s idea of a sick joke, OK? Have you been paying attention, kid? This little squadron won’t make it a mile in.” He waved a hand behind him. “Look at them. You think they can last a night in the cold without a fire?”
She glanced at them all. Tal was still staring at her, expressionless. Pree was drawing shapes in the sand with her index finger, blinking away tears. Johanna was quiet, standing with Amy, who could barely keep from swaying to the ground, her eyes only half-open. Jo had an arm wrapped around her waist and another under her arm, and Amy, emaciated and pale, seemed to sink into her, letting her head rest on Jo’s shoulder. Sonia doubted Amy could make it on the road, hidden behind a boulder and warming her hands at a fire. She folded the map and took a defiant step toward Lin.
“It’s the more secure route,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady. “S-strategically-”
“Lot of military experience, this one, huh?” he laughed. “No, no, I’m sick of her dragging us miles out of our way.” His face fell and he rushed up to her with a finger in her face. “Not until she tells us how she knows.”
“I don’t-” she started and he grabbed her arm.
“Because you’re one of them!” he screamed. “You’re leading us right to them!” He shoved her and she stumbled back, slamming into the ground. Tal was there before she opened her eyes again, seizing Lin by the arms and heaving him back.
Sonia looked up at them all, desperate, her heart hammering against her chest. Tal stood between her and Lin with an arm out as if to force him back away from her. Lin spat in her direction and wiped a sleeve across his dirt-streaked mouth. Amy, standing on her rolled ankle, leaned half her weight on Johanna. Lin was right. Taking the right route would kill Amy. So would walking the road, though more slowly. A rush of cold came over her despite the pressing heat.
“I believe you, Son.” Johanna said quietly, crying. Sonia walked over and stood on her toes to hug them both, putting an arm around Amy’s waist to help hold her up. “I do,” she whispered, burying her head in her shoulder.
“I believe her,” whispered Amy as she raised her eyes to meet Tal’s. Sonia looked at her parched lips, broken and bleeding, forcing an encouraging smile. She felt that hollowness open in her chest again with the idea of losing them both to rovers or to thirst, the horrifying image of leaving Amy’s body in the desert, of trying to convince Johanna to keep walking without Amy beside her.
Tal dropped his eyes to the ground in acquiescence. A long, tense silence hung between them. Lin gave Tal an absurd, dumbfounded look he refused to return and instinct made Sonia cross her arms over the map tucked in her jacket pocket. Finally Lin swore at them, gathered up his pack and started off down the highway alone.
*
She layered herself in all the clothes from her pack and curled up under the blankets. She smoothed over a hill of sand to rest her head on, like she and her sister had done once at the beach. At home her bed had been next to the heater. Sonia tried not to think about home, because with those things came all the rest. The slinking grey cat that hid from them all until nighttime, when he came to sleep on her outstretched legs. Her mother, her sister. Her father, whose face she couldn’t conjure unless it was the day she left the city, as he pushed the map into her hands, forced her to trace the route, once, twice, then screamed at her to go, to run.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember the beach. The waves rushed in over their feet and they shrieked in reply to the ice cold water - or had they? Had the water been warm that day? A new lost detail. She tried to clamp down on the thought as it appeared, expel it, but it came anyway. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, racking her memory for another scene to fill her mind, to memorize. The starlings. The day on the lake.
She must have been a child, four or five; the orange life vest sticking to her skin in the afternoon heat. She could hear her father’s voice but not see him. Maybe he had been holding her. Her sister sat twisted, half her body hanging over the edge of the boat, staring into the lake, perhaps imagining the sea monsters they read about at night undulating below. Sonia let her hand drag across the water, skimming the surface. Her mother was rowing at the front, the wind making a mess of her graying hair, strands of it flying across her laughing face. Sonia saw them first. She shrieked and pointed in alarm and excitement as the birds approached over the edge of the mountain and collected above their heads.
Blue starlings filled the sky and spun, clustering together and then spreading far apart, repeating the pattern again and again, moving like a singular and sovereign being. Their collective movements were unpredictable; first making tiny revolutions, and then breaking apart so you could distinguish the individual birds again. They soared northwest and suddenly, jointly, broke toward the south, a mesmerizing dance that reminded her of drops of ink in water, or the cloud of milk her mother poured into her cup of tea each morning.
It had been so long since they’d seen an animal alive. Were there starlings anymore? No, don't think that. Sonia turned onto her back and stared up at the boundless black, seeing nothing but the faint evidence of her warm breath in the freezing desert air. She imagined the sky were a clean, cerulean blue and starlings spilled into her line of vision, hundreds of thousands of them, spinning and breaking apart and then joining so tightly they appeared to her a single dancer in a black gown twisting in the clear sky.
*
“Are you awake?”
She didn’t answer, but sat up to stoke the fire. Tal kneeled beside her. Her hands were shaking with fear and hunger as she threw the stick to the side. He shifted closer to her and grasped her hands gently. A spike of defensiveness went through her, but she did not pull away. The small fire spit and cracked beside them. Slowly, with care, he pulled off her gloves an inch at a time and turned her hands over. Her palms were ripped and bloodied from catching herself when Lin had thrown her. He pulled a bandage from his pack and silently began wrapping her hands with it.
When he finished, he sat back and ran a hand over his shaved head absent-mindedly, staring out at the black before them. She saw Tal’s hands were shaking like her own. The night was mute except for their shared breath and the dying fire between them.
“Jo believes you,” he said finally, searching her face, looking for something in it he could not seem to find. She remembered him regarding her this way when they first started out, the first time she had shown him the map, like he was trying to make her reveal something. She remembered arranging her face in a set expression, trying to convince him of a confidence she didn’t possess. She didn’t have the energy now to try and persuade him. She felt the exhaustion like a force of gravity in her bones, pulling her down, and she let him look, and looked back.
“Jo believes you,” he said again. He swallowed hard and his face changed; now he was looking at her like he’d never seen her before. “So we’re following you, Sonia. Because I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know where to go next. I don’t know what… I never asked for these people. They just - just started following me after Nina - after they took Nina. Like I knew something they didn’t, and now… Now I owe them something I don’t have to give.”
He couldn’t have been older than 22, an age that once seemed to her adult, endowed with the privileges of autonomy, freedom, the peace of being alone. But now she saw 22 was just a kid.
“I used to want all this,” Sonia said. “The time alone, I mean, the quiet. To just start out and go somewhere without a destination. It used to seem so… I don’t know.” She searched for the right word. “Romantic.” She braced herself for him to laugh at the irony, to make some dismissive sound, but when she raised her eyes his face was filled with a kind of grief. She had an impulse to throw her arms around him in thanks for not laughing, for not even cracking a smile, but instead she kept still, watching him, half-lit by the fire.
“I’m sorry I-” he struggled to form the words, looked away from her. “I shouldn’t have left you. I shouldn’t have left any of them.” She tried not to think of the bodies likely still wrapped in their sleeping bags back at the old camp, forced the image out of her mind. She didn’t know what to say. Finally he stood and nodded at the jacket where he knew she kept her father’s map.
“I hope he knew more than I do.”
*
There was no sign of the rovers for days as they crossed the expanse, following the sun in the day, trying to map the stars through the sickly black clouds at night. It was when they fell off course somehow, lost track of the mapped route. Tal said he was surprised it hadn’t happened earlier.
The rovers came before they set up camp one night, in a battered Jeep, and five or six of them walking alongside. Jo and Amy tried to run, and Sonia watched Pree racing in the opposite direction.
Panic emptied her mind; she couldn’t think fast enough. Tal. She ran after him, crouched beside him as he assembled the weapons from his pack. The pounding - was that her heart? - muted the world, but he screamed, go, run, and pointed away. Sonia remembered her father thrusting the map into her hands and mouthing the same words, mouthing them because the world had turned silent the same way it was now. He held up the last of the grenades to show her, his eyes desperate and pleading, saying something she couldn’t hear. She turned and ran and forced herself not to look back. As she sprinted, weighed down by her pack, the others out of sight, Sonia thought of the starlings spreading out across the sky just as their group spread now, breaking across the desert expanse.
He pitched the grenade into the Jeep and the gunfire, and the sound blasted through the air like nothing she had ever heard before. The impact sent her reeling. She saw the starlings make a rapid turn east, rejoin, and fly over the lake as a single, spinning dancer.
*
Highway Elm, Mile 12. Tal showed her the sign. Two miles from the city where her father’s map led them. The ink-drawn house under the star. Somehow they had found their way back onto the route. Their ragged gang passed the marker just as the sun inched halfway below the horizon. “Let’s rest here. Must be good luck,” Tal said, nodding at the sign.
A bullet had skimmed his thigh. Sonia removed the bandages from her hands and wrapped the wound while Pree dug through the packs to distribute the last of their food. Fearing more rovers would follow the first set, and left with nothing else to fight them with but Nina’s bow and arrows, they had walked west, through the brush and into the setting sun, back up to the dirt road. There had been no time to carry Amy’s body.
Sonia had expected Jo to be inconsolable, but she kept up with the others and only stared like she didn’t remember any of it. She seemed a ghost gripping Pree’s hand, sometimes leaning into her for balance. It scared Sonia. She would rather have seen her emote or scream, anything but this blank white page.
No one mentioned sleep. They walked all morning to reach the city. When Pree saw the buildings, the first sign of civilization they’d passed in weeks, she became a child again, transformed, and she skipped and raced ahead of them and then back again. Sonia smiled at her new boundless energy. But at the same time, since reaching the city, she felt her muscles begin to knot with anxiety. Her father’s map made no indication of where to find the others, or what the house drawing meant. She glanced at Tal and then at the rows of houses ahead, pairs of windows like eyes staring back. Who was waiting for them? Was there anyone left?
The four of them threaded through the cars abandoned on the street. Pree wanted to climb them all at first, stomp across the hoods and roofs, until Jo realized they were not all empty. Tal carried her like a child, her arms wrapped around his neck. He shielded her eyes whenever they passed a body.
The first house they came to was an empty old Victorian, all the windows shattered, the inside littered with burnt books and papers and overturned chairs.
“Do you think this is it, Son?” asked Jo, looking up at the place. She shrugged in response. The house on the map was nothing more than a cartoon, a box with a triangle roof sketched in a dead man’s panic. Tal climbed the porch steps first and Jo followed. “Door’s locked.” She kicked through the storm door and cleared the shards of glass and debris out of their way.
They unpacked in the upstairs room, the one with the burned books. Pree sat at the shattered windows and looked out at the city and Jo huddled in a corner beside her, pulling her knees pulled in tight against her chest. Tal brought them what canned foods he could find downstairs.
“Hey.” She caught him wince as he bent beside her, accommodating his bandaged leg.
“Hi.”
“So. What do you think? Could this be the house?”
Sonia shook her head. This whole time, her entire purpose had been that map, the blue route she memorized, the ink drawn house. But now that they were here, there was no way to tell which house out of hundreds, thousands, it might be. Or what it might mean. If whatever savior they imagined there remained. If it was waiting for them.
“I don’t know,” she said with a forced smile. “We’re back to the start.”
“Like the first pioneers,” said Pree. She turned from the window to smile at them. Sonia walked to the window to look out at the city. Ash covered the street below. The inescapable desert sand dusted the streets, taken up and spun in miniature cyclones by the erratic wind. She studied a rusting bicycle still locked to a post and thought after its rider.
A flash of movement. Instinct forced her back flat against the wall. Tal had seen it too, and shouted for them all to get down. Sonia dropped to her knees, but at once she was aware of an absence - an empty space where panic should have swelled. Curious, she stood slowly and searched the square picture of the city that the window framed.
“Sonia!” Tal whispered. “Get down!”
Instead she leaned out the window. A sound escaped her throat when she saw it, a cry or whimper, and a hand flew up to cover her mouth.
“Son. Sonia?” breathed Jo.
She turned to look at them. Jo was crouched with her arm thrown protectively around Pree’s back. The two of them stared at her, incredulous, as Sonia waved them over. Tal was the only one who stood.
The pair approached the window and looked down. Below, fifty or sixty feet away from the house, he caught the flash of movement - a pair of jackrabbits, their ears standing nearly as tall as their tawny bodies. Tal seemed to stumble beside her and grabbed her shoulder for support. A smile spread across Sonia’s face. She looked at Tal as he broke into a laugh and his eyes filled, following the rabbits as they bounded off together, out of sight.
*