She leaned farther over, grabbing her knees. She couldn’t breathe.
Her bag slid up and hit her in the back of the head. The sweat that soaked her clothes turned into a prickly bath of ice water. She turned her head up just in time to see Larry get back in the car, and leave Olivia and Emma standing still on the side of the road, shoulders slumped, their bags at their feet.
Probably waiting on Gabby—or someone—to tell them what to do next.
To hell with it.
She was done.
They were on their own. She couldn’t be the boss anymore. She sucked at it and had only got her sisters into a bigger mess than they were in at the beach resort. Olivia should be stepping up; it was her husband after all that was the prepper. With their elderly father now living out of town with his fiancé, Grayson was sort of the new family patriarch. Didn’t that make Olivia the matriarch? Surely, she learned something from Grayson.
She swallowed past a lump in her throat and stood up straight. Mei had stopped, waiting as though in limbo between Gabby and her sisters out on the road. Gabby was ready to explode.
Furiously looking around, she stalked over to an abandoned bike dumped in the ditch. She got on the bike and turned it the opposite way, calling out behind her, “Go. Walk with them. I’m going on my own from here.”
21
GABBY RANTED AND RAVED, throwing her fist into the air and then giving Larry a double one-finger salute to his rear-view mirror. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t leave her sisters—and she’d left her bag. She’d meant to. They’d need it worse than her. But she wasn’t so angry she didn’t realize she needed it too.
She’d only ridden a minute up the road before turning around and pedaling back as fast as she could to try to catch Larry. But he was too far ahead.
He’d driven slowly away, leaving them stranded, answering her one-fingered salute with an obnoxious honk of his horn. She hoped the bikers found him.
“Piece of shit!” she screamed, straddling the bike.
She jumped off of it and let it fall to the ground and whipped around to her sisters. “Why’d he dump us?” she yelled.
Olivia backed away from her.
“Calm down, Gabby. It’s not her fault,” Emma answered. “He’s a coward. When we told him about that gang, he said he didn’t want to be caught with us.”
Olivia held up her arm. “But look, I still have my Rolex. We can find someone else to trade with. Although I’d really like to keep it…”
Gabby rolled her eyes and clenched her jaw and turned, stomping back through the ditch to the tree-line where she’d dropped her bug-out bag. Mei stood beside the bag, silent and wary, staring at Gabby with guilt pinching her eyes.
“It’s not your fault,” Gabby muttered. “Come on.”
Olivia tried to pick up the bike, dropping it on the first try. “Let’s take this. We can take turns riding it,” she said.
Gabby kept walking. “Fuck that bike.”
She snatched her bag up with a heavy hand and trudged back to the road, stepping out in front of her sisters and leading the way.
Again.
Flip. Flop. Flap.
Flip. Flop. Flap.
The slapping of Olivia’s flip-flops was driving everyone insane, on top of the waves of heat rolling up off the asphalt, giving more weight to the feeling of being in hell. To her credit, Olivia had run like the wind earlier in them, but now they were nearly destroyed, the rubber almost completely melted on the soles. Gabby watched as Olivia exhaustedly measured each step while looking down and gripping the stubborn piece between her toes that barely held the shoes together. Her toes were bunched up, crooked and strained, and when she raised her feet, there was a gaping hole in the bottom of each shoe, clearly showing the dirt on Olivia’s feet.
That’s gonna leave a mark.
“Stop, Olivia,” Gabby said, feeling guilty that in her rage she’d stupidly made Olivia leave the bike. She could have ridden it to save her feet some grief.
Olivia didn’t argue. She stepped off the road to the ditch and heavily sat down, stripping off her shoes and rubbing her feet.
Gabby dug through her bug-out bag. “There’s got to be something in here to fix them.”
She found a pencil, wrapped in layers of silver duct tape. “Aha!” Silently, she thanked her husband for listening to Grayson and packing her a bug-out bag. She’d meant to do it herself, but never got around to it. Jake had done well. Quickly she focused on the flip-flops before thoughts of Jake crippled her.
She wound the duct tape around Olivia’s shoes multiple times, covering the holes and giving her more padding to replace what had melted or been worn away. She handed them back to Olivia, not even earning a thank you.
She sighed.
After an hour of arguing, her sisters—and Mei—had lost the fight, and they were sulking. They wanted to step off the interstate, and cut through the country, hoping to get away from the energy-depleting heat and into some shade, and shave time off their long walk home.
But someone had dropped the map.
Gabby cringed again. She’d let Olivia believe it was her, having left it in the car when they’d first arrived at the rest area. But actually, Gabby had picked up the map and the picture of her and Olivia standing in front of Jake’s truck and had put them in her back pocket before their snafu in the woods with the bikers.
Gabby had left the bike. And Gabby had lost the map. And the picture. Three screw-ups. Maybe more… And without the map, she couldn’t be sure they’d find their way home if they left the interstate.
But the girls had another point, too. If and when the bikers fixed their tires, they could be right behind them. They’d hedged their bets, planning to run and hide if they heard motorcycles, and so far, they hadn’t. But their luck had to run out sometime. They would be harder to find if they took a shortcut and got off of the highway. But, they were all directionally-challenged and relied far too much on the modern conveniences of google maps and GPS’s. She didn’t trust them to find their own way home without that map, which had their route highlighted all the way to the homestead.
She watched as they shared a last bottle of water, passing it around between the three of them. Finally, Mei handed it to her.
Gabby shook her head.
Penance for her unspoken crimes.
Let them have it.
“Okay, I give. Let’s get off the road.”
As night began to fall around them, their hearts fell with it. At this point, after hours of walking, they had no idea how close or far from home they were. They’d lost sight of the interstate long ago and only hoped they were still walking the right direction.
Mei was in the front now, where they could prod her along and keep an eye on her. Although they didn’t know exactly how old she was, Gabby felt sure she was very young. Mei should be stronger than all of them, not weaker. She had been through a lot, but in the past few hours she had really slowed down, and even more worrying, she was convinced they didn’t want her there, and didn’t want her to come home with them. Repeatedly, she’d offered to just go it alone and head a different direction.
At this point, Gabby could admit to herself, she didn’t want her there. She had a feeling Mei had some very serious issues. But Mei had said she had no one and nowhere else to go, so Gabby kept her mouth shut when Olivia and Emma stepped in to reassure her she was wanted.