Instead, I was scared. Scared of what would happen if I pulled the trigger and killed him. Would I be just as bad as Mr. LaPage at that point? I don’t know why he killed the man in the street; perhaps he wandered into town. Maybe he held up Mr. LaPage at gunpoint. Maybe Mr. LaPage snuck up behind him barefoot and buried the hatchet into the man’s back. Mr. LaPage had his back to me. If I shot him, it would be the same thing.
I’m wide awake now, my body coursing with adrenaline. I let Andrew sleep until four in the morning, when I finally begin to calm down. I shake him, hard, and he wakes. I decide not to tell him about Mr. LaPage. The way the man was drinking, he must be passed out by now, and will still be passed out by the time we leave in the morning. There’s no need to worry him. Andrew was already terrified seeing the mannequin. This time, when I think of it, I don’t smile or laugh.
I lie on the sleeping bag and close my eyes. I’m able to drift off into a twilight sleep, waking up every once in a while. Each time the sky outside is a brighter shade of blue. At seven in the morning, I sit up.
“Let’s get an early start today,” I say when Andrew looks over to me.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, this place creeps me out.”
Andrew
OUR FIRST DAY OUT OF MAILEY, WEwalk fifteen miles. Part of it is due to the storm cooling everything down; the other part is Jamie. It’s like he’s in a rush. It might have to do with the heat, or maybe he wants to get as far as we can as fast as we can while it isn’t oppressive, not realizing the farther south we get, the more nervous I am.
On the second day I ask if he wants to stop in the next town to look around for bikes. He says no, he likes the walk and we’re making good time. But he means to Reagan National.
Alexandria is about 182 miles from Jamie’s cabin. Then the airport is only ten miles from Alexandria, so if we walk at the pace we went yesterday, we could make it in a little less than three weeks—which would be the beginning of June. We’d be cutting it close, but as long as we keep moving, we should make it by June 10.
We actually do manage to keep the pace. Jamie doesn’t want to stop in most of the towns and we begin sleeping under trucks on the abandoned highway. We open one truck to discover it’s half-full of a supermarket food delivery. Including bottled water!
“This must be one of those pirate trucks,” Jamie says.
I heard about them, too. People would rent trucks and either purchase or steal massive quantities of supplies to sell at a premium on the street. The truck is black and nondescript, but there’s white paint splashed across the side in an almost perfect square, blocking out some kind of writing beneath it in red spray paint. But only three corners of the phrase are visible under the white splatter.
Supermarkets had more staples—dairy, bread, canned goods—than fresh vegetables or meat before the shipping chain started to break down link by link. When they shut down the borders, most of the veggies stopped coming and everyone switched to canned and frozen. Then slowly the frozen foods vanished, too.
The last time I went to the store with my dad, most of the shelves had been picked clean, and they didn’t bother to restock them because they knew the shelves would be barren again as soon as the doors opened. Instead, boxes had been cut open and stacked on dollies for us to pick through. We waited in line with our masks and they let us in six at a time. And of course, the new policy was “you touch, you buy.”
But Jamie and I touch whatever we want in the truck, checking expiration dates and looking for bulges in the cans. After we stock up on what we can carry, we close the door behind us because Jamie’s afraid rodents will somehow get in. Opening a box of Sharpies, he writes over the white paint: “OPEN ME! FOOD INSIDE.”
“Yeah, because that doesn’t look like a trap,” I say.
“Eh, the people who need it will risk it.”
I love how optimistic he is. It works for him, but maybe that’s because he’s never had to deal with liberal parents whostillmanage toshock you when you come out and they say it’s a phase. Or how about that time in sixth grade when it seemed like you were making fun friends who invited you to meet them at the movie theater on Friday night and then never showed up. Or, no! Silly me, theydidshow up. They just went to the earlier showing of the movie so they could come out and find you waiting there after an hour. And then try to gaslight you into thinking you heard the time wrong.
Yeah, optimism isn’t my thing.
Sometimes I wish I could think like Jamie. His logic is sound, but it’s also so full of hope. That makes me smile, and we continue on our way.
It’s our twenty-seventh day traveling and we can see Baltimore in the distance. What’s left of it, at least. New York looked similar. Only the last time I saw New York, the fires were still burning. Baltimore is silent and clear. It’s gotten hot again.
“Here’s where things get interesting,” Jamie says, dropping his pack.
“Interesting how?”
“I was checking the map yesterday and I realized something.” He reaches into his pack and takes out the road atlas I nabbed from a Connecticut bookstore. “All the major highways into or around Baltimore are tunnels. There’s the Fort McHenry Tunnel, which follows 95.”
“All right, so what’s the other one, and how far out of the way does it go?” We’re getting close to Alexandria, but it’s May 29. The first half of our trip was bogged down by my hobbling, so we only have eleven days to get to the Fosters or we risk them not even being there.
If they’re still alive.
Jamie points at the atlas. “It doesn’t really take us out of the way. It’s the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. But I want to suggest getting off here, at Route 40.” His finger moves to the intersection of the highway and the tunnel. “Then follow it over here to where it meets up with 695, and follow that back down to I-95.”
“But that’s going right through Baltimore. We said we wanted to avoid the major cities.”
“Yeah, but I’m a little concerned about the tunnels. We don’t know what kind of state they’re in—they could have collapsed from disrepair, or they could be filled with bodies.”
