Georgia said nothing for a long time.
Then, “You think so?”
Elle smiled.
“Yeah. I think so.”
Many sour experiences with looters and vandals had taught Elle to stay away from abandoned rest stops. The general store in the valley with Sienna and Bob had been a freak thing. She hadn’t been thinking straight. She’d been starving and dehydrated. She blamed it on that.
Blame it on anything you want, she told herself. It was still stupid.
So Elle stood on the edge of a massive truck stop. How many idiotic gas stations was she going to have to look at now that Day Zero had destroyed the world? This one was unusually large. There were six rows of pumps and an oversized red barn, the general store. The windows had been broken out. The entire store had already been looted.
That’s when she saw the star.
It was gold, five-pointed and sloppy. It was spray painted on the ground, obnoxious. The color was bright, though. It was fresh. Very fresh. Elle bent down and touched it.
I don’t believe it, she thought.
They were marking their trail.
The yellow stars were the breadcrumbs and Elle was the bird.
She stood up. Had there been other stars that she had missed along the way, zoned out and glued to the monotony of putting one foot in front of the other? No. She would have noticed. She had been looking for a clue. Something.
Well. At least she knew Sienna had been telling the truth.
She was headed in the right direction.
Elle walked to the back of the barn gas station store. She stopped dead in her tracks. It was a graveyard. The plot was riddled with dozens of old graves, covered haphazardly with piles of dirt. Someone had made a crude wooden cross and forced it into the ground.
It was silent. Very, very silent.
Elle grabbed the side of the red barn. There was so much death here. Yet someone had gone to all the trouble to give the people who had died in this place a grave. Who would do that? Not the Slavers. Not Omega.
Maybe there was a militia in the area. A real militia.
A school bus sat behind the plot of dirt. It was streaked with dried blood. Windows were shattered and there were rows of bullet holes riddled throughout the side, making the name of the school illegible.
Elle shuddered.
She walked closer to the bus, taking each step with caution. The driver door was hanging open, broken. It had been forced. Elle took a step into the bus. She pulled her scarf over her nose and mouth, climbing up. She stopped at the front of the aisle. The seats were empty. There were no children, no bodies. Elle sighed, relieved. She walked down the aisle. There were random notebooks and pencils — even a computer tablet with a shattered screen. In the last row, she sat down.
For a split second, she imagined herself on a bus in Hollywood, on her way to Beverly Hills High School. Not that Elle’s mother would have ever allowed Elle to ride a bus — they’d had a private driver for that — but still. The image was normal. Something from the old world.
Something glinted out of the corner of Elle’s eye. She tensed and drew back. And then she laughed aloud. A pair of cheap aviator sunglasses lay on the floor.
She grinned and put them on.
How fortuitous. She walked out of the bus, back into the sunlight. The sunglasses were a little bent, but she didn’t care.
Ask and you shall receive. That’s what her mother had always said.
A toy-hauler trailer lay on its side beyond the bus, hidden behind a concrete garbage building. The truck itself was painted black, unmarked. The windshield on the truck hauling the trailer had been smashed open. It looked like it had been lying there since the EMP. Elle walked around the rear of the trailer. The rolling door had been forced open by someone, leaving a gaping hole. It looked dark inside. Elle squinted and walked closer, peering into the maw of the trailer. There were tires and mechanical parts. It smelled of old rubber and WD-40 inside.
Elle climbed into the trailer. It was cool, but she could clearly see the outline of boxes and tools. It looked like someone had rifled through the entire truck, taken what they needed, and then taken off. Had Omega done it? Probably not. Omega had no use for tools or supplies scavenged from a place like this. They had enough troops and weapons to take over the most powerful nation on Earth… they didn’t need to forage.
Elle walked to the back of the trailer, where it was darkest. There were piles of boxes here, most of them empty. And in the very back, just out of view, was what looked like a wheel. She wrapped her hands around the wheel and pulled. She managed to drag it forward a few inches. The seat was worn and torn, but still usable. It was painted white with strips of green on the sides. Elle pulled it out of the pile. She forced the kickstand down with her foot. She walked in a circle around the bike. It didn’t weigh much more than Elle, and it wasn’t much bigger than her, either.
She tapped the tires. They were solid.
The bike was in good condition. It had been shielded from the elements inside the truck, protected from rain and harsh sunlight. Elle wondered if this truck had been full of bikes when the EMP hit…
Elle looked around, hyperaware of her surroundings.
She knelt down and popped open the gas tank. She took a quick sniff. There was gas. How? She shook her head. A new dirt bike with a tank of gas was still no good to her in a post-EMP world. She paused, wondering… this truck had been sealed when the EMP hit, judging by the way the truck had slid off the road. It hadn’t been totaled until after Day Zero, in the chaotic aftermath of the electromagnetic pulse.
Elle wheeled the bike out of the truck, into the sunlight. She checked her surroundings again, stopping to listen for any unnatural sounds. There was nothing, so she continued.
She threw her leg over the seat of the bike. Living in Beverly Hills as a child, she hadn’t had any major experience riding bikes or ATVs, but she knew enough to start the bike. She flipped the ignition switch. There were no indicator lights, and it appeared to have a dead battery. Elle bit her lip. She knew that with gas in the tank and an otherwise undamaged engine, she could roll-start the bike. She looked down, searching for the kick-start.
Nothing. She tried jamming her heel into the starter again. Again, nothing. She grappled with it several times, rolling the bike forward when the engine suddenly sputtered and roared to life, a fierce contrast to the unearthly silence of the truck stop. It smelled like gasoline.
Elle gripped the handles tightly. She leaned on her left leg, casting a final glance behind her. She snapped the throttle; the bike rumbled with power. She looked at the handlebars, puzzling out the different levers and gauges. It made little sense to her — but she was smart enough to figure out the basics.
She had only two theories as to how this bike had survived the EMP. One, it had been protected from the destructive electromagnetic wave while ensconced in the metal trailer or two, it was an old enough bike to forego an electronic starter. Probably the latter.
That would explain why it still works, she thought absently.
She shifted into first gear with her left foot, releasing the clutch. The bike leaped forward. Elle yelped, surprised. She let off the throttle and the bike slowed, puttering and spitting. She tested her weight on the bike again, getting a feel for it.
She twisted the throttle again, wobbling onto the road. Elle leaned forward, into the wind. She accelerated quickly as she shifted gears, dizzy with the speed. The rush of moving so quickly was just as exciting as it was terrifying.