We passed through places I’d always heard of but never expected to visit. I wished I could have appreciated it more. Or even a little. Here we were, traveling across America, but rather than getting a glimpse of all the different cities and places of interest, we saw nothing but abandoned cars, empty skies, and weeds growing up through the roadbed.Nature was already hard at work, trying to take back control. It would have to get in line behind the Retros, SYLO, and anybody else who wanted to stake a claim on the planet.
We guesstimated that it would take us three days of driving. We could have made it in less, but we didn’t dare drive at night. The first night we stayed in a hospital east of St. Louis in a town called Independence. There were plenty of signs all over the empty town that boasted it as being the birthplace of Harry S. Truman. It made me wonder what a former president of the United States would think of the mess his country had become.
We planned to spend the second night near Denver then push on to Nevada the following day.
Very few words were spoken the entire trip. At least very few between me and anybody else. I think they were all pissed at me for abandoning them and then acting as if I didn’t care. Kent and Olivia cozied up in the third row whenever they got the chance. I heard them whispering and giggling but could never make out what they were saying, not that I wanted to know. A couple of times Jon turned around to look at them, and Kent immediately smacked him and told him to mind his own business.
Tori barely acknowledged my existence and kept her baseball cap down low over her eyes. She had once again become the sullen girl from school who rarely spoke to anyone. I knew by now that it was her way of protecting herself.
I may have been traveling with four other people, but I was alone.
A few times along the way we passed the wrecks of some Retro jets, as well as destroyed Navy fighters and bomb craters. Each time it meant that a battle had taken place nearby, but there was no way to know whether it was a SYLO base or another construction site where the Retros were erecting a gate to hell.
A gate to hell.
What did that mean? I didn’t believe for a second that it was literally a gate into the afterlife. That made even less sense than Kent’s alien-invasion theory. But if Granger was telling the truth, SYLO would do anything to stop them from building another one. Based on what had happened at Fenway Park, I believed him. That left the question: What were they? What was their purpose? What power did they give the Retros?
Was the “gate to hell” another monstrous killing machine?
Weighing it all kept my head spinning.
The morning of the second day we got up early, well before dawn, and started on our way to Denver. It was over eight hundred miles away, and we wanted to get there in time to find a place to spend the night. One great thing about driving in an abandoned world was that there were no speed limits. A few times when I was behind the wheel I hit a hundred miles an hour. We all did at one time or another. I don’t know if we were in a hurry to get there or to end the torture of being in the car together.
Of course, we had to stop several times to gas up. I usually siphoned the gas while Tori and Kent hit stores for food. Kent loaded up on jerky, which was basically dried meat sealed in plastic that would probably last a hundred years. It was salty and a little too chewy for my taste, but it provided protein. I think.
We had gotten our stops down to a science. Between gassing up, grabbing food, and going to the bathroom, we were never stationary for more than fifteen minutes.
The silence was making me crazy, but I didn’t want to make conversation with people I didn’t trust. I couldn’t discuss plans or strategy for fear that the information would go right to the Retros. For all I knew somebody was using our walkie-talkies to contact them. I decided to hold anything I had to say until we hit the Valley of Fire.
We made incredible time into Colorado and were closing in on Denver before three o’clock in the afternoon—plenty of time to find a place to stay. Kent was behind the wheel, and without any explanation, he took an exit off of the interstate.
“What are you doing?” Tori asked. “We’ve got plenty of gas.”
“Side trip,” he said.
That got everybody’s attention.
“What are you doing, Kent?” I asked sternly.
“Relax,” he replied calmly. “I want to check something out.”
“You can’t make that call,” Jon said nervously. “Tell him, Tucker. That’s not how it works!”
“Either tell us what you’re doing or get back on the interstate,” I said adamantly.
“Look,” Kent said. “We’ve been on the road for hours. My butt is killing me. I just saw a sign back there, and I want to check it out, that’s all. No big deal.”
“Sign for what?” Olivia asked.
Kent turned around to us and smiled. “It’s a surprise.”
The rest of us exchanged worried glances that all said the same thing: We’d already had far too many surprises for one lifetime.
I had an added worry: Was Kent leading us into a trap?
“You’ll like this,” he added. “Trust me.”
Unfortunately, trusting him was the one thing I couldn’t do. But while we were arguing, Kent was driving us closer to whatever it was he wanted to see.
“Do you have your gun, Tori?” I asked.
“Whoa! Easy there, Rook!” Kent exclaimed. “Don’t get all paranoid.”
“Then tell us what you’re doing,” I demanded.
Kent huffed and said, “Fine. This trip has been torture. We all know that. Rook, you’re always saying how we have to be careful not to lose our sense of civilization, or something like that. It’s not normal to be stealing cars and eating out of cans and living on floors and peeing in pits. I get it, but there’s more to it than that. You know: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Remember that? I don’t know about you guys, but I haven’t been happy in a long time, and that’s about as important to me as anything. So if you’d all just rela x, I say we stop worrying about SYLO and Retros and survivors and Armageddon for a couple of minutes and have a little fun.”
“What kind of fun?” Tori asked suspiciously.
“This kind,” he said and turned the car into a huge, empty parking lot.
There wasn’t much to see other than wide-open spaces and a few one-story buildings. As Kent drove us toward the structures, I spotted a sign that actually made me smile.
“The Track at Centennial,” I read aloud.
“The what?” Tori asked, confused
“Go-karts!” Kent exclaimed.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Olivia said sourly. Apparently racing go-karts wasn’t on her list of fun things to do.
Tori didn’t seem too thrilled either.
But I kind of liked the idea.
“What do you think, Rook?” Kent asked hopefully.
I hadn’t seen him this enthusiastic about anything in a very long time.
“I think… we ride.”
“Yeah!” Kent exclaimed.
“You’re both crazy,” Olivia exclaimed.
Kent parked in front of the low buildings, where there was a snack shop, an arcade, and the track office.
“I’ll go find the karts,” he said and hurried off.
The rest of us were left in the car.
“What exactly are go-karts?” Olivia asked, perplexed.
“Little cars that you drive around a race course,” I replied.
“Oh. Like we haven’t been driving enough?” she shot back.
“Let’s give it a try,” I said. “We haven’t had fun in a long time.”
“Yeah,” Tori said sarcastically. “That darn genocide thing really got in the way of my playtime.”