Doomed (25 page)

It’s a big concession, but I’m not stupid enough to think Theo would let me walk into danger alone. Nor would I want to. In this case, he’s just assessed the danger and decided things aren’t going to get out of hand at this small, out-of-the-way gas station.

Still, I’ll take my victories where I can get them, and as I head inside I feel lighter than I have since I saw my father’s e-mail in my in-box. It’s hard for me to believe that was only a couple of days ago. It seems like a year has passed, at least.

Part of me still wants to go back, to rewind the clock. But it’s too late for that, too late to do anything but follow the course set out for us. It looks like it’s Albuquerque or bust.

It’s my turn to drive and I do, all three hundred miles to Albuquerque while Eli dozes next to me and Theo wedges himself between the seats in the back. It doesn’t look comfortable to me, especially the way he has to twist his body to make all eighty inches of it fit, but I guess it’s better than being stuck in the seat.

Thank God for the atlas, as the highway is backed up with people attempting to go I don’t know where, so I end up taking the side roads most of the way. The last thing I want to do is waste our gas idling on a road to nowhere. At one point I flip on the radio, try to figure out where they’re all going, but only a couple of stations are broadcasting, and it’s just more end-of-the-world stuff, so I turn it off. Maybe it’s stupid, but I can’t take preachers screaming at me to repent right now. Later, when the guys are awake, will be soon enough to face reality again.

For now I just want to drive.

We’re about forty-five minutes out of Albuquerque when I spot a produce stand by the side of the road. Though it’s getting late, it’s still open, a man and woman sitting behind the rows of fruit and vegetables, a few LED camping lanterns illuminating their goods.

I pull over as soon as I realize what they’re selling and back up the van the two hundred or so feet I went past them. Eli wakes up just as I turn the engine off, and he gets out with me, stretches his legs.

I’m starving, and my mouth waters at the sight of all this non-junk food. Every restaurant we’ve run across today has been closed, and we’ve been living on granola bars and bags of chips. It’s no more than what I deserve for letting two teenage guys pack the supplies, but since I now have a chance to remedy the situation, I’m totally going to do it.

“Get some money,” I tell Eli, who reaches into the glove compartment before following me over to the stand.

“I’m so glad you’re still open,” I say to the woman sitting in back of a large bin of oranges. “We’re starving.”

“You poor thing,” she tells me, reaching over and patting my hand. She’s at least seventy, and in her denim overalls and wide-brimmed hat, she looks a lot like those shrunken-apple-faced dolls Emily’s mom used to collect. Only with a nicer smile. “What would you like?”

I glance at Eli, who shrugs. But then he hasn’t been the least bit bothered by the three family-size bags of Cool Ranch Doritos we’ve managed to inhale today.

“How much are the oranges?” I ask.

“What do you have to trade?” Her husband speaks up for the first time, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“Oh no. We don’t need to trade. I mean, we have money.” I point to the forty dollars Eli has in his hand.

The old man snorts. “What are we going to do with your money? There’s almost nothing to buy out there. Besides, the economy’s collapsing and money’s going to be useless in a couple of days, anyway. Don’t you listen to the radio?”

I want to shrug his words off as the ramblings of a paranoid old guy, but I remember what Theo said after the trip to Walmart, about how I have no idea what goods are going to be in high demand in the near future. This must be what he meant.

“What do you need?” I ask, not sure how to choose stuff to barter from our stockpile. Not sure what we need to keep and what Theo bought for just this purpose. I want to tell Eli to wake Theo up, but they’re even more pissed at each other than usual, and the last thing I need is for Eli to know that I trust Theo’s judgment more than I do his.

“Henry, these children are hungry!” the woman snaps. “I’m going to feed them.”

“And we’re going to be hungry soon enough,” he answers.

“It’s okay, ma’am. We have things to trade. Honest,” I tell her.

“You got any batteries?” Henry asks.

“Actually, we do.” Eli grins at him. “What kind do you need?”

“Double A. Some Cs and Ds if you have them.”

“Sure. No problem.” Eli walks to the back of the van, opens the trunk and starts rummaging inside.

“How much will batteries buy us?” I ask.

“As much as you want, darlin’.” There’s steel in the
woman’s voice, and in the look she gives her husband, as she pats my hand. I smile at the sight of her hot-pink nails. They look nice, happy, even with the loose paper-thin skin of her hands. “Without refrigeration, a lot of this food is going to go to waste in a couple of days if we don’t trade it.”

Henry nods, looking much more relaxed now. “Ginny’s right. Help yourself to whatever you like.”

I don’t want to be greedy—I don’t know how many batteries Eli’s planning on parting with—so I grab only a few of the paper bags they have on the side. I fill one with plump ripe strawberries, another with peaches, and a third with big bright oranges that make my mouth water just from looking at them. All can be washed without much water, and none of them have to be served with utensils or bowls.

At the end of the table, I grab three bags of pecans (for the protein), a jar of honey, and a couple of thick wedges of cheese that are resting in a barrel of melting ice. It will make the box of crackers in the car much easier to choke down.

Eli comes back with two handfuls of batteries—enough to power three or four flashlights. Henry nods happily, but I feel bad. They aren’t enough, not for all the food I got. I know what I want to give them, so I carry a couple of the bags to the trunk, leaving the others for Eli. Once there, I pull out one of the three packs of walkie-talkies Theo bought. They’re bright pink and decorated by Barbie, but they’ll get the job done.

I add two 9-volt batteries and carry them back to Henry and Ginny. Ginny squeals like a young girl when she sees them, and presses more food on us. Raspberries and plums, grapefruits and figs.

We thank them, wish them luck, then head back to the van. Eli climbs into the driver’s seat, and I sit in the passenger seat, peeling an orange. We split it after Eli pulls back onto the road, and then eat a second and a third, laughing and talking about music and movies and school—pretending that it’s just a normal day. Pretending that we didn’t just step back a thousand years in time, to when bartering for goods was the norm and not the exception.

Theo wakes up about a half hour later, as I’m holding a plum out the window and pouring water over it to wash off the dirt. “Where’d you get the fruit?” he asks, his voice still husky with sleep.

I tell him the story as I pass him a peach, and preen a little under the look of approval in his eyes. I’d worried that he’d be upset about the loss of the walkie-talkies, but I should have known better. He’s proved to me over and over again just how generous he is.

Our good moods dissolve around the outskirts of Albuquerque. We’re in a fairly nice area of town, judging by the store names at the mall, but you wouldn’t know it. As we drive by strip mall after strip mall each one reflects back at us the same experience of human desperation—broken shop windows, shattered bottles and unusable goods strewn over the parking lot. Blood glistening on the sidewalk as our headlights sweep past. The looting’s getting worse.

I close my eyes. I don’t want to see this—it’s too unsettling, too reminiscent of scenes from the news that I never thought could happen here. This is one of the biggest, most bustling cities in New Mexico, and in about forty-eight hours, it’s been turned into a ghost town. I wonder
where the looters are. Have they moved on to another area of town, or are they, too, all tucked up inside, terrified of the coming apocalypse?

Theo’s arm brushes against me, and I open my eyes in time to see him switch on the radio to AM, scanning until he finds a station. The time for burying our heads in the sand is over.

A man’s voice comes over the radio, and Theo pulls his hand away, leaves it on this station. The news is even worse than we imagined—yet reflective of what we’re seeing. “All over America, the scene is the same. Looting, pillaging, deserted streets whose isolation is broken up only by episodes of brief and intense violence. Communications have not been restored, will
not
be restored, according to a source from the largest telecommunications provider in the country. The network has been decimated, and even if electricity is restored tomorrow—something that is impossible considering the state of the electric grids—it will take months to rebuild things, as they will have to start from the ground up.

“Authorities in all areas are baffled. The Pandora worm has caused catastrophic damage. Irreparable damage. Again, just to clarify the state of emergency we are now in, understand that even if the worm self-destructs tomorrow—and there are no indications that such a thing is even possible—we are months, maybe years, away from getting our infrastructure back where it was two days ago.”

“What’s the point of playing the stupid game, then?” Eli demands, slamming his hands against the steering wheel in frustration. “If everything’s screwed, why are we even bothering? There’s nothing left to save.”

I put the peach I’m holding back in the bag. I’m not hungry anymore. I’m not anything, really. Not afraid, not hopeful. Even the disbelief has worn away, until there’s just this incredible numbness filling up every part of me.

Is this acceptance, then? Or just submission? I don’t know. I just know that I’m tired, that there’s no more fight in me. I rest my head against the desert-warmed window and wonder if I’m ever going to see my mother again.

“You guys,” Theo starts, and I wait for him to tell us it’s going to be okay. That we’ll find a way to fix this, to beat this. I expect him to outline the next step of the endless plan he has in his head. But he doesn’t say any of that. He doesn’t say anything, and after a minute I turn to look at him.

His head is down, his forehead resting on the heels of his hands, and I can tell this is it. He’s tapped out, finished. He’s got nothing left to give himself, let alone us.

Looking at him like this burns through my numbness, bringing panic in its wake. I glance at Eli, realize he’s feeling pretty much like I am. We’ve all contributed on this trip, all pulled our weight, but from the beginning, we’ve both known that Theo is the leader. The man with the plan.

Now that he doesn’t have one, everything seems even worse, even more terrifying. My heart speeds up, and I feel like there’s a huge weight on my chest, crushing me. I fumble for the door handle, not caring that the van is in motion. Not caring about anything but getting out.

We’re not moving fast, so even as I tumble out of the van, I’m not in any danger. Not that I would notice if I was.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I claw at my tank top, convinced the neckline is strangling me. But it’s nowhere near my throat.

Theo’s out of the van after me before Eli has even pulled to a stop. He grabs my arms right above my elbows, turns me to face him. “Pandora.”

Again, I wait for him to tell me that everything is going to be okay.

Again the reassurance doesn’t come.

And in the midst of the panic, the hysteria, a stray thought flits through my mind.

I know what Ayn Rand is talking about now. In
Atlas Shrugged.
I read it last month for AP English and only got a B on my project because I hadn’t understood what she was getting at.

But here, now, watching Theo give up, I realize this is it. This is what it feels like when Atlas tires of holding the world on his shoulders, when he gets as confused and lost as the rest of us. He shrugs, and our world, the one we always thought was so safe with him, goes spinning out of control.

Suddenly, Eli’s there, forcing me to bend over, to give the blood a chance to rush back to my head. He rubs my shoulders in soothing circles, and as the panic attack, or whatever the hell it was, recedes, I’m embarrassed. Nothing like being the weak link, right? The one everyone else has to worry about and pander to.

I flush with shame as I remember my words to Theo at the gas station. So much for me being able to handle things. What a joke.

When I can breathe again, I straighten slowly. Eli’s
standing next to me, his mouth curved down in a worried frown, his usually humor-filled eyes watchful in the shadows cast by the headlights. “You okay, now?” he asks.

“Yeah, fine. Sorry for freaking out.”

“No big deal. We’re all entitled to a little panic occasionally.”

“I think I’m over my quota.”

He grins. “Nah, I got you covered.”

Reaching for me, he pulls me into his arms and just hugs me for the longest time. Then he skims his mouth over my hair, drops a tender kiss on my temple.

I hug him tightly, then pull back, look for Theo. He’s standing about twenty feet away, hands in his pockets, his broad shoulders slumped as he stares into an empty parking lot that looks like a war was fought in it.

I can’t leave him like that. Can’t leave any of us like this.

“We need to find a hotel room.” I pitch my voice louder than usual, so that he’ll hear me. “It’s late and we’re all tired, hungry. Let’s find someplace to sleep that does not involve four wheels. We’ll take showers and then we’ll figure out what we need to do tomorrow. Where we can start looking.”

Theo doesn’t move, doesn’t by so much as a flicker let on that he’s heard me. I glance at Eli, realize he’s as lost as I am about how to deal with Theo. Not knowing what else to do, I walk over to Theo, reach for his hand.

“Come on, let’s get in the van.”

“What if I don’t want to go?”

“Tough. You’re outvoted. I know that’s a novel experience for you, but just go with it. No one likes a sore loser.”