My mind starts running. What if the city is a mess? What if there are people there? What if Jamie wants to stay with them for a while? So many possible delays. I’d have to leave him again.
The thought makes me nervous because he would probably try to come after me like he did before. Only this time I can move a bit faster and he might not be able to catch up. And this close to Alexandria I wouldn’t be able to talk myself out of it.
I’ve come all this way. And yes, Jamie was never supposed to be here with me, but I couldn’t have made it so far without him. But I do need to start thinking about how I get to Alexandria without him knowing.
The best way is to just keep on our path and hope that by the time he realizes something is up, it’s too late.
I say, “Let’s just take the route that stays on 95 and see how it is. If it’s bad, we can go your way.”
“That’s a lot of backtracking.”
It is, but this route is the most direct. And I have no intention of backtracking.
“It’s better than going out of our way and through the city. I don’t think Baltimore was super safe even before the bug.”
“If the tunnels have collapsed, we’re still going out of our way.”
“We don’t know that there’s anything wrong with the tunnels.”
“There’s also the Francis Scott Key Bridge down here.” He points farther downstream of the Patapsco River to I-695. “If you don’t want to go through Baltimore, we can go back north to follow 695 down to where it meets up with 95 again.”
“Oh my God, you sound like my dad with all these different routes. And that’s still out of our way.”
“I don’t think the tunnels are a good idea, Andrew.”
“They’re the most direct routes. We can take the McHenry and see how it is. Look.” I point up at a peeling highway sign. There’s another one of those white boxes painted over the bottom corner of the sign—again, covering what looks like red spray paint—but it doesn’t block the words “Fort McHenry Tunnel, Toll Plaza 5 Miles.” “We’re almost there, we can check it out.”
“All right.” He folds up the map and avoids my eyes as he puts it away, clearly annoyed.
I don’t want to go out of our way if we don’t have to. We’ve also gotten lucky, as we haven’t run into anyone in over a hundred miles. Part of me believes that avoiding larger cities helps with that. The other part of me is starting to worry that maybe everyone else reallyisdead.
We reach the tunnel a little before noon, traveling mostly insilence since Jamie is, of course, now annoyed with me. But only my own footsteps echo against the asphalt and concrete. I look back and Jamie is gazing up at the mouth of the tunnel.
“You coming?”
“Yeah,” he says, still not looking at me. He takes off his pack and begins digging through it until he finds a small flashlight.
“It’s a straight shot,” I say. There’s legit one, and only one, way to go. It’s not the catacombs in Paris, it’s a tunnel.
He grunts and puts on his pack, then shines the light into the tunnel for me. I turn and we begin walking in, our footsteps echoing together now.
“You know, if you kill the battery in that thing, we’re going to have to dig in the dark from now on.” The flashlight is mostly used when we have to go to the bathroom at night.
“I’ll deal with it.” There’s something in his voice. Is he scared?
I smile, still facing forward. “Jamie, did you ever watch the showChernobyl?”
“Shut up.”
“What if it dies while we are inhere? What if right as we get to the halfway point we’re engulfed in darkness?”
“Shut. Up.”
“You’re scared of the dark,” I say, turning to him. We march into the tunnel, following the darkness.
His voice wavers slightly as his eyes dart around at the shadows. “You’re scared of mannequins, what’s your point?”
“I can’t believe this. Big, bad survivalist Jamie is ascared of the dark. Did you have a night-light as a kid?”
