My brain tells me none of this is true. It insists that the world is small, that I have flown around it many times, and that it takes only fifty hours to drive across America. But I find this easy to doubt as we plunge into the Martian deserts of this vast and unfathomable continent.
A bullet-pocked road sign flashes by in the headlights:
We’re a quarter of the way there, my brain tells me. Thirty-seven hours to go.
As the sunset darkens like a rotting orange, Tomsen breaks the long silence. “It’s different with people,” she says, as if un-muting her internal dialogue in the middle of a thought. She has said very little since we left the last town, focusing on the road as she pushes the RV to sports car speeds.
“What’s different?” Julie says.
Tomsen waves her hand over the highway, the sky, the interior of the RV. “I’ve driven…thousands of miles through this country. Thousands of thousands. Back and forth, up and down. Always alone, except that first year with Dad. Very different, alone. Talk to myself, to Barbara, to the road. Sing songs, go into trances, see things. Wake up two states away.”
“What’s it like now?”
Tomsen thinks for a moment. “I feel you sitting there. I feel those two behind me. The kids in the back. And I’m not floating anymore. You’re all ropes holding me down.”
Julie winces, looks back at the road. “Sorry.”
Tomsen shakes her head. “No. After ten years alone you can float too far. Out of the atmosphere and into space and on and on until you see that giant mouth that’s waiting behind the stars…” She drops her eyes and looks intently at the steering wheel. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Julie smiles. “Can’t say I’m glad to be here…but since I have to be? I’m glad you’re with us.”
Tomsen is quiet for a moment. “My name is Huntress.”
Julie blinks, then her smile widens. “Cool name.”
“It’s stupid. My dad was hoping I’d be gonzo fearless, sex and drugs and danger, seize the world by the throat and squeeze till it tells the truth.” She shrugs. “I tried. Kind of. Went a different direction with it.” She rubs her scalp. “But it’s stupid. You can still call me Tomsen. I just wanted to tell you.”
Julie’s smile turns tender. “Thanks, Huntress. It means a lot.”
Huntress Tomsen keeps accelerating. Dishes rattle in the cabinets.
I glance at M, expecting to find him smirking at the girls’ little friendship chat, but he’s staring at the back of Julie’s head with a strange intensity. He hasn’t spoken in hours.
“M,” I say. “You okay?”
He blinks like I just woke him up and turns to the window. He watches the landscape flickering past in varying shades of black. “I don’t belong here,” he says.
I frown. “Where?”
“Here. With people like that.” He jerks an elbow toward the cockpit, where Tomsen is laughing at Julie’s attempts to sing along with the BABL squeal on the radio.
“People like what?” I press. “Happy people?”
“Kind people.” He watches the dark plains outside flicker into trees, then hills, then plains again. “Good people.”
I watch him in silence for a moment. “What kind of person are you?”
He shakes his head. “I get it now. Why you fought your memories. Thought I was wide open, but…I was hiding the worst.”
I keep quiet, letting him unpack.
“Did bad shit with the Marines. Worse with Gray River. Even worse with…her.” He looks up at me with an unsettling smile. “Remember my girl, R? Big smile, fashion model body?”
Faded memories fill with nauseous color. A withered, eyeless face. Leathery lips peeled to a grin as she watched my first feeding. A charismatic force who made obedience feel inevitable, until her skin finally sloughed off and she disappeared into the airport swarm, indistinguishable from all the other skeletal despots ruling empires in their minds.
“You remember,” M says with a grim nod. “So imagine her alive. Tough…mean…hot as hell.” He shakes his head. “Did war crimes for her. Killed and stole. Had to prove myself. Couldn’t be…lover boy. Piano boy. Had to be the big man. And then…Nora…”
He keeps his face turned away from me, but I can see his reflection in the glass. A glint of water in his bruised eye.
“I’ve been thinking,” I tell him. “About our new lives. How we got here from there. And I think…dying isn’t so bad.”
He turns his head just enough to look at me sideways.
“Dying…halts your momentum. All those wheels set spinning in childhood…determining what you do…who you are…they stop. You stop. You see where you’re standing. And then you can turn around.”
He’s facing me now, and there’s fascination in his damp eyes. I feel winded, like I’ve just delivered a two-hour speech. But I don’t feel self-conscious until I notice that the radio is off. Julie is looking at me. Then at M. Then back at me.
I shrug.
Night creeps toward morning. Conversation dwindles to idle comments that receive no replies. Eyelids droop, heads sag, and I wonder how long we can maintain this pace. When Tomsen drifts onto the highway’s rumble strip for the third time, Julie finally calls it.
“We should stop. This isn’t smart.”
“The train won’t stop,” Tomsen objects, but weakly. “If they reach their destination while we’re asleep, might never find them.”
M taps her shoulder. “I’ll drive.”
She sizes him up. “Don’t you need to sleep?”
“I slept when I was dead.”
Tomsen pulls over. With great reluctance, she surrenders the driver’s seat. “Keep her below sixty, and don’t brake too hard. Don’t jerk the wheel to avoid potholes; her joints are sensitive. But do avoid potholes.”
“I’ll be gentle,” M says, giving the wheel a caress.
Tomsen hovers over him, scrutinizing his every move until we’re safely cruising again, then she sighs and collapses onto the couch. Julie staggers back to the bedroom, fighting a huge yawn, and I realize I’m feeling it too.
“You’ll be okay alone?” I ask M.
He nods. “I’ll listen to some tunes.” He turns on the radio and rich, multi-timbral static fills the speakers. “Maybe do some thinking.”
I stare at him for a moment. Not even half a year ago, he and I were two dusty corpses grunting at each other in the ruins. Hungry, I said. Eat, he said. And that was our friendship. That was our existence. How astonishing that we’re here now, real people with real thoughts, stumbling through the choreography of living.
I leave my friend to his thinking and join Julie in the bedroom. We roll the sleeping kids against the wall and squeeze into the space beside them, lying on our sides with our faces close. I feel her studying me, and I try not to flinch.
“R,” she says, barely a whisper. “You’re different.”
I watch her eyes glint in the dark as they explore my features.
“When your heart started beating, I thought that was it. I thought you were ‘cured’ and whoever you were then was the real you. But you’re still changing, aren’t you? You’re still… forming.” A fragile smile touches her face. “Who are you going to be when you’re done?”
Our foreheads are an inch apart, and I wonder why words are necessary. Why do we need those humid blasts of air to reach each other’s minds? Can’t the electricity of our thoughts arc this narrow gap?
“Julie.” My larynx is a crude noisemaker, my mouth a primitive tool. “I need…to tell you.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and presses her forehead against mine. “I know. But just…not yet.”