There’s a long silence.
“Thank you,” Ben finally says. I can hear the emotion thick in his voice.
“Flo wasn’t my only sister,” Charlie says suddenly. “I had two other ones, Daisy and Rebecca. Flo was the oldest. I was the youngest.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say into the darkness.
I can hardly believe we’ve all been beside each other so long without getting to know the fundamentals. It’s just another thing the war stole from us: socialization, communication, friendship. When your life is reduced to fighting and surviving, there’s never really a good time for a chat.
“That’s why Flo wanted me to be stronger,” Charlie adds. “She didn’t want me to get taken like they were.”
“Was it slaverunners?” Molly asks.
“Yes,” Charlie says. “Slaverunners.”
No one asks anymore. The very fact that we’ve even spoken feels like the beginning of a healing process has begun. It’s like we’ve stepped over some invisible line, broken down one of our guarded barriers. In this awful, terrifying world, opening up to each other about our pasts has been one of the scariest things we’ve done.
Despite our exhaustion, no one sleeps well that night. Bree wakes several times, sweating and screaming. She used to have night terrors all the time when we lived alone on the mountains but they stopped when we were at Fort Noix. I feel terrible for putting her in a position where she is so scared again. The only difference now is she has Charlie to comfort her. I can’t help but feel a little pang of jealousy as I realize she leans on him more readily now than she does on me. It’s partly her growing up and becoming independent—she’s starting to realize she can’t rely on me forever—but it’s also partly because of me, because of how I’ve had to shut down my emotions to get through it all. I’ve been through so much, I don’t have anything left in me to give.
As I lie there in the darkness, my mind mulling over everything we’ve been through, it dawns on me that I’ve become the soldier my dad always wanted me to be, the practical, tough, emotionless son he never had. But I also know that my emotionless exterior will only last so long. I won’t be able to keep it up forever. One day, all the heartache will hit me at once, and when it does, I’ll cry enough tears to refill the Mississippi.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I’m almost surprised when I wake the next morning, still alive and in one piece. No disaster befell us during the night like I’ve come to expect. I even slept at some point.
I still have the heavy metal neck brace on that the slavers put on me and have no idea how I’m going to get it off; I can’t exactly get Molly to take her axe to it. It’s irritating and cumbersome, but it’s just another niggling pain I’m going to have to endure.
My wounds are sore as I start to climb the ladder. When I reach the trap door, I push up with my hands and discover that it’s stuck. I push again, putting more strength into it. But it doesn’t budge.
I start to panic. The darkness down in the bunker seems to suddenly envelop me, and the stagnant air seems to grow even hotter. I can’t help but think of the prison cell Ben and I were locked in back in Arena 1 in all those months ago.
Finally, I jam my shoulder in the trapdoor hard enough for it to give. The hinges ping off as I slam my palms into it.
Quickly, I ascend the ladder, and the sight that meets me makes me cry out in despair.
Everything is gone.
From the floorboards beneath me, I can hear people jerking awake, scrabbling to get to the ladder and find out what’s making me wail. Ryan’s the first to emerge out of the hole. He looks at where I sit crumpled on the floor with an alarmed expression on his face.
“He took everything!” I cry. “Craig. He stole everything.”
The others begin filing out of the underground bunker, and look around at the empty room with dismay. The food, the weapons, our backpacks, everything has gone. Then I realize, with an even greater despair, that our map has been taken as well.
Ryan comes over and drags me back up to my feet.
“We can’t stay here, Brooke. We don’t know who he will have alerted to our presence. We have to leave.”
I know he’s right but I can hardly stand. The shock of losing our possessions is too great for me to bear. All that food, gone, and the means with which to hunt stolen from us too. What are we going to do?
Finally, I manage to stand and stagger out of the shack and into the bright daylight. At the very least, our bikes remain. Craig must have left them knowing the engine noise would wake us up.
Without the map to guide us to Houston, we have no choice but to follow the Mississippi south. The roads are so destroyed here that there aren’t even any signs we can follow, and the bombs have flattened everything, meaning there aren’t even any distinguishable landmarks. It may add some more hours onto our journey but at least we’ll end up in Louisiana eventually, and then it’s just a case of heading west until we hit Houston.
We mount the bikes and go, my heart falling as I lose a bit more faith in the kindness of mankind.
After several hours driving, our gas gauges start to get low. It worries me to think we might have to make the last leg of the journey on foot.
We’re in a town built on the banks of the river that hasn’t been completely flattened. It’s called Baton Rouge and the road here is still intact. There’s a road sign informing us that Route 10 heads all the way west right to Houston. I can hardly believe our luck. The road sign tells us it’s 271 miles, which will take about six hours if the road holds out the whole way. As long as we don’t have to detour or run out of gas we should be there by nightfall.
It seems like everything is finally looking up. But a feeling inside of me says it won’t last for long.
We’ve been riding for another four hours when something up ahead gets my attention. I can’t quite tell what it is I’m looking at yet, but something about the view ahead of me isn’t quite right.
The closer we get, the better my view becomes, and it dawns on me that we’re approaching a series of massive craters that have completely obliterated the road.
We drive up to the precipice and stop. One by one, we dismount from our bikes and stand side by side in a row staring at the chasm before us, the latest hurdle blocking our way.
“It looks like the Grand Canyon,” Bree says.
I don’t know how she can find beauty in it at all. To me, it looks like a scar in the earth. A war-inflicted wound. A gash that will never heal, violently blighting the world.
I can’t help the disappointment that bites at me. We’re less than two hours from Houston and now we’re facing another massive detour that might add who knows how many hours onto our journey. We’re so low on gas, I don’t even know if our bikes can handle going off course again. The last thing we need is to be stranded and have to proceed on foot. It would be a cruel trick for fate to play on us when we’re so close to the Texas border.
“What are we going to do?” Molly says. “We can’t go around it. It looks like it stretches on for miles.”
She’s right. The crater goes on and on, as far as the eye can see.
“We’ll have to find a way down,” I say.
“You want to drive through it?” Ryan questions me, an eyebrow raised.
“What about the radiation?” Ben adds. “It will be worse down there. We can’t risk exposure.”
As much as it frustrated me when the two were arguing, having them team up against me is even more annoying.
“Do either of you have a better plan? You know how to make a bridge?” I say sarcastically in response. When I’m met by a wall of silence, I add, “Didn’t think so.”