CHAPTER 9
When I wake, Isaac and Mary are gone.
“Isaac needed to stretch his leg,” Eve whispers next to me. “She offered to go with him.”
Eve’s still tucked under her blanket as if she’s been waiting in this exact position for me to open my eyes so she can blurt these words.
“Thanks,” I whisper.
Isaac and Mary arrive minutes later, her face flushed with either exhaustion or exhilaration. Isaac offers me a hand to help me up from where I’m sitting under the tree, but I push myself up on my own.
I hand him his piece of rabbit jerky and his backpack. “Let’s go.”
I walk a few paces ahead of Isaac, closer to Daedric and Eve, for over an hour. When we stop to rest at the foot of the valley, Isaac glares at me from where he sits atop a small boulder. Everybody notices the tension between us.
I throw down my backpack and curl up against the trunk of a pine tree. Eve sits cross-legged a few feet away from me.
“Remember when you caught that possum in your trap and it nearly bit your finger off,” I say to her.
She smiles and nods. “I thought I was going to die. My mom told me possums carry diseases.”
“My mom told me the same thing,” I say.
For a moment, Eve and I sit in silence thinking about our moms. Then I think of Mary. Her mother didn’t die in the storm. She died when Mary was a baby. Her father abandoned her during the storm. The only reason I know this about Mary is because she confided in Isaac and Isaac told me. At the time he was using it to explain her intolerable attitude. I still don’t find this a convincing excuse. I’m the only one of us who can relate to the feeling of rejection from being abandoned by a father. Eve’s father died during the flooding while attempting to save Eve’s little brother. I know this because Eve told me herself. I guess my tragedy résumé just wasn’t impressive enough for Mary to confide in me.
I glance at Isaac and he’s still glaring at me while Mary sits at his feet combing her fingers through her hair. I look around and find Daedric sitting alone on the other side of the pine tree.
“Daedric, how did you get all the way here from the Salton Sea?” I ask. “Weren’t you ever attacked by thugs or Guardians?”
Daedric scoots around the pine tree so he can see me better. “I got mugged by scavengers twice,” he says. “I didn’t have much for them to take, so they let me off easy. How about you?”
“What about me?”
“You ever been attacked?”
I glance at Isaac and think of the day he saved me when Vic nearly choked the life out of me. “Yeah… but I’m still here.”
We finally reach the residential streets where the charred, looted remains of sprawling estates litter the hillsides. Squatting in empty houses was dangerous a year ago when there were still a few things left to steal, but everything’s gone or burned to a crisp now. We find a large home that’s only half-burned to the ground and camp out for the night.
We lay our blankets down in what used to be a dining room. A gaping hole in the vaulted ceiling marks the place where looters ripped out the chandelier and the electrical wiring. I sit next to Isaac and we stare at each other for a moment before we lie down.
He doesn’t wrap his arms around me. He just lies on his back and stares at the ceiling.
I’m the first to wake so I start divvying out the rations of jerky. A soft whimpering behind me draws my attention. Daedric must be having a nightmare.
“Please don’t take her,” he mutters in his sleep. “Please… please…”
He wakes with a start and we lock eyes. He ruffles his golden hair and rubs his face to wake himself up.
“Bad dream,” he says, as he grabs a piece of jerky.
“My sister used to have nightmares,” I whisper, and I realize I’m talking about my sister for the second time in four years. I’ve only ever spoken to Isaac about her once.
Lara was shot during one of the many burglaries on our home the year before the storm. After the first burglary, she began having nightmares about drowning, which I dismissed as a side-effect of reading her favorite undersea adventure one too many times. She was just ten years old and she understood what was coming better than I did.
“Elysia’s never been alone and now… who knows what they’re doing to her,” he says.
It’s been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to feel anger for something so utterly hopeless and unchangeable, but I can’t help it now. The world may never be the way it once was, and the thought of it fills me with rage.
Isaac’s eyes flutter open and I hand him his jerky. He tosses it aside and pulls me close to him. “I’m sorry,” he whispers in my ear.
The rage subsides and my eyes well up. A tear falls onto Isaac’s arm and he sits up to get a better view of my face.
“What’s wrong?”
I want to tell him about Lara. I want to thank him for saving my life two years ago. But most of all, I want to thank him for bringing me back to life when I had nothing to live for.
Instead, I pull him toward me and kiss him hard. He seems surprised at first, but he quickly gives in, his tongue moving slowly inside my mouth.
He pulls away and stares at me as if my face is covered in green spots.
“What?” I ask.
He plants a kiss on my forehead. “Nothing.”
We make it to what used to be Burbank Airport. All the planes were evacuated long before the storm, so all that remains are the gutted terminals and runways overgrown with weeds. We strut down the runway like rustic supermodels, though Daedric is probably the only one pretty enough to pass for one. We’ve been lucky not to run into anyone so far, but I have a feeling our luck is about to run out.
A plume of smoke rises behind an empty hangar and I stop in the middle of the runway. Everyone else stops behind me.
“It could be Guardians,” Mary says. “We should go back.”
“She’s right,” I say, trying not to look at Isaac. “We can’t risk it.”
Daedric continues toward the hangar. “We don’t got time. We already wasted enough time at that damn cave.”
“We don’t have time,” Mary corrects him.
Isaac’s pride kicks in and he walks on. “He’s right. We’re running out of time. They’ve had her for over a week. That’s a long time to figure out how to leverage her.”
Mary shakes her head. “Idiots,” she mutters.
We approach the hangar slowly.
“Nada, you stay with me,” Isaac whispers. “You three go around that way and we’ll check out this side. We’ll all meet here to report back on what we see.”
“Why do you get Nada?” Mary asks.
“Because she’s the best,” Isaac replies, and I want to either disappear or slug him in the face.
Mary skulks off with Daedric and Eve. As soon as they round the corner of the building, I punch Isaac in the arm.
“Ow! What the hell!”
“Stop being a jerk.”
We tiptoe to the corner of the building and peek around. I can glimpse the glow of the fire near the rear of the building, but I can’t see anyone.
“How’s your leg?” I whisper, in case we need to run.
“Right now, better than my arm.”
We move closer to the source of the light trying to stay conscious of the dry weeds beneath our feet. I can hear voices now.
“I couldn’t believe he said that,” says a girl with a gravelly voice. “He actually wanted me to do that for two freaking bottles of water.”
“What did you tell him?” asks a deep male voice.
“I didn’t say anything. I punched him in the sack and got the hell out of there.”
These aren’t Guardians. If she were a Guardian, she wouldn’t need to trade anything and she would have shot the guy. This doesn’t change the fact they could still be dangerous. Our best bet was to let Isaac work his charm.
We head back to the other side of the hangar and the other three already back.
“They’re scavengers,” Isaac says. “I don’t know how many there are, but they won’t try anything if they know we’re willing to trade.”
“We don’t got enough water to trade,” Daedric says.
“We don’t have a choice,” Isaac replies, ignoring Daedric’s poor grammar.
Together we scrounge up three gallons of water we can trade. Isaac holds two gallons in one hand and I hold the other.
“Don’t say anything,” I say to Daedric.
We approach slowly until we can see the entire group. There are eight of them: three girls and five guys. Only one of the guys appears strong enough to take us. The rest of them look like they’re about to dissolve from thirst and hunger.
Isaac walks ahead of me holding up the two bottles of water. “Good evening,” he says and my shoulders tense at the surprised expressions on the scavengers’ faces.
I think they’re more afraid of us, except the big guy. He stands from his lawn chair and immediately pulls a knife from his pocket.
“Just looking for a trade, gentlemen,” Isaac says, and I fear he’s being too chummy for his own good. “We’ve got water and rabbit jerky, if you’re interested.”
“What is he doing?” Daedric whispers behind me.
A skinny girl with a shaved head stands and looks Isaac up and down. “What do you want, cutie?” she says and I recognize her gravelly voice.
She was at Whitmore two years ago.
“What do you have, Amy?” I say. “We have three gallons.”
She throws a look at the big guy with the knife and he sits down and lays his knife on his lap. “We’ve got soap,” she says. “A whole hangar full of soap. Nobody gives a damn about hygiene nowadays.”
“Ten bars for two gallons?” Isaac replies, setting the two gallons of water at her feet.
“Deal. What else do you have?”
Ten minutes of negotiations later, we leave the airport with ten bars of soap, a candle, and two pounds of almonds exchanged for three gallons of water and a pound of jerky.
“Have you seen any Guardians come through here?” Isaac asks after we’ve packed our bounty.
“We haven’t been raided for weeks,” the girl replies. “It’s summer. They’re too busy getting baked on the shores of the Salton Sea.”
We find an abandoned McDonald’s with all the windows boarded up. As we lay out our blankets, Isaac grabs my hand and leads me into the kitchen area.
“I got those almonds just for you,” he says with a grin. “I’ve noticed you trying to choke down that jerky.”
“Thanks.”
“I have something else for you,” he says, and he reaches into his pocket and holds out his balled fist.
“What is it?”
He opens his hand slowly and my body goes cold as all the blood rushes to my head.
I wake with four faces staring down at me.
“Are you okay?” Eve asks in a small voice.
I nod and realize my head is resting in Isaac’s lap. I sit up and the candlelight swims in my vision.
The necklace. My mother’s necklace. The ruby set inside the gold pendant in the shape of an S… S for Sara. Vic ripped it off my neck the day he almost killed me. I didn’t know until I woke up in the cave with Isaac.
How did Isaac get it back? Where did he get it? Is this why Vic is after him?
Isaac knows I’m trying to work this all out in my mind. “You need to lay down,” he says. “The bed is made behind you.”
My blanket and Isaac’s pillow are laid neatly in the middle of the McDonald’s dining area. I lay down and watch as Isaac sits in the corner of the restaurant with his leg propped on a table.
We make it through old Pasadena and Covina in one day. The following day we make it to the old farms in Chino. The smell of cow manure is long gone with the cows.
“Are you going to say anything about the necklace?” Isaac whispers when we reach highway 15, which will take us straight to the Salton Sea.
We won’t run into the Guardians out here. We’re too far from what used to be L.A. and too far from the Salton Sea. We won’t need to worry about running into them for another thirty miles or so. It’s a small relief.
“How did you get it?” I ask. “Please tell me you traded someone for it.”
“You know that’s impossible,” he says. “Are you not happy? I got it for you.”
“That necklace isn’t worth your life,” I say.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls it out. He places it in my hand. “Do whatever you want with it. I just wanted you to have it.”
We walk for a while before I hand it back to him. “Can you put it on me?”