“What’s so hard?” he asked. “You point this end and bang!”
He held the gun loosely and pretended to shoot.
Tori grabbed his gun hand and held it firmly.
“If you shoot like that you’ll miss, and the recoil would probably kick the gun out of your hand.”
“How do you know so much about guns?” Kent asked.
“My father,” Tori said as she let Kent loose and started loading bullets into the magazine. “We had to protect our property. Our lobster boats. He wanted me to be totally safe with the weapons in the house, so he taught me well.”
I saw the hint of a tear growing in Tori’s eye, and her voice cracked. It felt like a couple of lifetimes since her father was gunned down by SYLO, but it was only the day before. She wiped her eye quickly and cleared her throat, as if embarrassed to have shown her emotions.
“You a good shot?” Kent asked.
“That’s irrelevant,” she replied, back in control. “These guns are only accurate to ten yards, tops. Even then you have to be good to hit anything. These are for our protection. We’re not going to be playing James Bond. Hopefully we won’t need them, but if we do, we’ll have them.”
“They still make me nervous,” Olivia said.
“Not me,” Jon said. “I’m feeling safer already.”
“Until I check you out, nobody touches these but me,” Tori declared. “Understand?”
She looked at each of us in turn. Everyone nodded, including Kent.
“Now we can go,” she said. “Jon, take the ammunition.”
She swooped up the guns and headed for the door.
Jon obediently grabbed the boxes of bullets.
I had mixed feelings about having the guns. I could see that we might need them for protection. That made all sorts of sense… as long as somebody didn’t do something stupid and shoot one of us in the foot. Or worse.
When we got to the car, Tori put the second gun and the ammunition in the rear compartment near the spare tire. She kept one box of ammunition and put it in the glove box up front. She expertly pulled the loaded magazine from the gun’s grip and placed it next to the ammunition. She then did a quick check of the gun to make sure no bullets were in the firing chamber. Satisfied that it was safe, she put it into the glove compartment and slammed it shut.
Tori was now riding shotgun. Literally.
Olivia opened her mouth, ready to fight for her spot in the car, but thought better of it. With a huff, she got in the back seat next to me.
“I can reach the gun back here if you need it!” Jon announced from the third row.
Nobody responded.
Kent fired up the engine, then turned to face us.
“Are we ready now?” he asked.
“Let’s go to Boston,” I said.
Kent hit the gas, and we were finally on our way.
SIX
It took two hours to drive from Portland to Boston.
It felt like two days.
We were on edge the whole way because none of us knew what we would find there. Or not find. Would the city be surrounded by the military to protect it from attack? Which military would that be? Would SYLO have surrounded Boston like they did Pemberwick Island? Or would the Air Force and their killer planes be in control?
Would Boston even be there?
For the entire trip, we constantly stole quick, nervous glances to the sky for fear that an Air Force plane would come swooping in after us, but none appeared. Was their mission complete? Or had they moved on to another target?
I kept staring at the glove compartment, knowing a gun was inside. I’m not a wuss or anything. We needed to protect ourselves, but the idea of having a weapon so close that could easily take a life was disturbing. I know how dumb that sounds. After all we’d been through, it didn’t make sense that I should be so obsessed with a pistol that held seventeen bullets, but I was. I can’t honestly say whether I was afraid of the gun, or worried that I wouldn’t have the guts to use it.
I leaned forward between the two front seats, turned on the radio, and scanned the frequencies. There was nothing to hear but a whole lot of static.
Olivia gave me a weak smile and a shrug.
“It was worth a try,” she said sympathetically.
She rubbed my arm as if to console me. I didn’t mind, until I saw that Kent was staring at us from the rearview mirror. I quickly twisted away from her without making it seem as though I was twisting away from her.
After we had driven for over an hour, Kent asked, “Should I say it first?
I knew what he meant. We all did.
The deadly Air Force storm hadn’t stopped in Portland.
“It’s the exact same,” Olivia said, hardly above a whisper.
The entire length of the highway looked like the stretch leading into Portland. Abandoned cars were everywhere, with far more wrecks than we saw in Maine. Vehicles had driven into ditches, slammed into guardrails, flipped into the medians, and crashed into each other. It felt as though we were driving through an auto graveyard.
Or an actual graveyard.
Yet there wasn’t a single person to be seen.
“No jet fighter wrecks,” Kent pointed out. “Or bomb craters. Maybe there wasn’t a battle here.”
“Well, something happened,” Olivia said. “I mean… look.”
It was grim enough that the population of Portland had been wiped out. Boston had ten times more people. When you added in the suburbs that stretched from Maine to Massachusetts, the possibility of what we were headed toward was too much to comprehend.
Olivia said it best without saying a word.
She started to cry.
“There have to be survivors,” Tori said, numb. “An entire population can’t just be… erased.”
“There will be,” I said hopefully. “Just like in Portland.”
“We’ll find them,” Jon said, doing his best to sound positive.
We were all trying to think practically. It was the only way to keep from going totally out of our minds. I did my best to focus on the present because to think of the big picture was overwhelming. None of us said the obvious, but I knew we were thinking it: If Boston had been attacked by the black Air Force planes and another population center had been obliterated, what did that mean for the rest of the country?
Or the world?
We drove on for several more minutes, moving closer to Boston and deeper into the desolate horror. Kent had to swerve a few times to steer clear of cars that were stopped dead on the interstate. When we passed through the town of South Lynnfield, we were hit with a new grim vision.
“Is that what I think it is?” Kent asked with trepidation.
Ahead of us was a structure that at first appeared to be a partially collapsed building. As we drove closer, the truth became clear in the form of a logo: Delta Airlines.
“Oh no,” Tori said with a gasp.
It was the wreckage of a commercial jetliner that had crashed into a strip mall. The tail was kicked up into the air, and the fuselage had been broken in two. The entire wreck was scorched black from a fire that had long since burned out. The only thing missing were bodies.
As we moved closer to the city, we passed no fewer than ten similar burned-out plane wrecks.
“It’s like they just dropped out of the sky,” I said, hardly believing it could be possible.
“Boston’s going to be empty,” Olivia said, sounding shakier than Tori. “We’re not going to find anybody there to help us.”
“I don’t understand,” Tori said, her voice quivering with emotion. “What kind of war is this? How can you invade a city, wipe out everyone, and then just… leave? What’s the point? It’s insanity!”
“I knew we should have gone to Nevada,” Jon said.
Tori shot me a sideways look. I didn’t return it.