Jamison
I CRY OUT, GRASPING IN THE DARKNESSfor Andrew. I feel him jump away from me, startled, but then reach out and grab my hand.
“That’s you, right?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. “I have you.” He links his fingers with mine and pulls me toward him. The water has stopped rising right at my neck, which means Andrew is barely above the surface. I wrap an arm around him and try to lift him up to my height.
“Thanks.” His voice wavers. He must be scared, too. We walk. I hold his hand and he’s holding mine, tight. My arm is wrapped around his waist, holding him up.
I’m cold, I’m wet, and I’m terrified. But with Andrew this close I feel safer, like whatever’s in the dark can’t hurt us. Not that there is anything in the dark. Not even whatever just brushed against my leg. I shiver and Andrew’s grip tightens.
The water has gotten lower, but I don’t notice it at first because my body’s so cold.
We keep moving and when the water’s down to our waists we move faster, splashing as we see light from the curve up ahead. We run untilwe escape the cold river water, the sun within our reach. Our packs are soaked and heavy but we’re running full force.
Gasping for air, we burst into the warm sunlight, and I let out a loud scream of victory. I don’t want to let go of Andrew’s hand but I know I have to at some point, so I pull him into a wet hug and jump up and down. He joins me, squeezing me back and hollering as well. He’s laughing again and I laugh, too. I let him go but I’m still smiling.
Andrew looks smug. “I told you that was going to be our best option.”
“You’re not allowed to make decisions anymore.”
“Not even what we have for dinner?”
“Especially not what we have for dinner.” And now that we’re on the subject, I remember the food we have in our packs. I set the rifle down and take mine off. It’s still leaking dirty river water. Andrew takes off his as well and we unpack our clothes and canned food. The food labels are soaked, our books are soaked, the clothes are soaked, but worst of all, the road atlas is soaked.
“Have I said sorry yet?” Andrew asks. I open my mother’s notebook, turning the pages gently so they don’t rip. The writing is still there and the pages are intact.
“It’s not bad. We can dry it out.” I set the book down in the sun, open to the middle, and Andrew gently unfolds some of the pages of the road atlas and puts it down next to the book in the middle of the road, placing four cans of food on top of the corners.
“Plus, look at the bright side.” I hold up a can, its label missing somewhere in the pack or in the wet piles of them on the ground. “Every night is mystery dinner. I guess I’ll let you choose a can every once in a while.”
We spread out our wet clothes and sleeping bags across the highway, turn our wet packs inside out, and lay out ourselves to dry in the sun. I take the last two batteries in my bag and swap out the dead ones in the flashlight. Andrew makes fun of me again for my claustrophobia and I make fun of him about the Ax-Mannequin while pretending it wasn’t just claustrophobia. I think he thinks I was joking about the night-light. Keeping it well into high school was more out of habit than my fear of the dark. But that fear is real.
We go three more days without seeing another person. I’m surprised at how empty the roads are. Especially when we should at least be seeing other travelers on the way to Reagan National. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to avoid as many people as possible until we get there, but still. It’s eerily quiet on the roads.
In movies and TV shows about the apocalypse, the ones Andrew would be shocked that I’ve seen, the roads are always packed with abandoned cars—bumper-to-bumper traffic at the end of the world. But the reality of it is, when it got bad, no one wanted to go anywhere. We’ve come upon a few abandoned car or truck roadblocks on the highways, but mostly it’s a few cars here and there, usually filled with bodies of people trying to get somewhere—to family maybe, or a favorite vacation spot. I can’t help but feel sorry for them, never reaching their destinations.
We stop for a water break and Andrew takes out the map, again. He’s been looking at it every couple of hours the past two days but won’t tell me why.
“What are you looking for?” I ask, tightening the cap of my water bottle.
“A different way around DC. But it’s hard. Look.” Andrew points to the map and I crouch down to look. “We could take 495, but it looks like it just runs in a circle around the city.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, but look at Route 1.” He points out Route 1, running through Alexandria, Virginia. “It basically starts to run parallel to 95 and if we take that to 495 and then cut through Bethesda, we can avoid taking 1 through DC.”
Alexandria. There’s something about Alexandria, but I can’t quite remember what it is.
“Okay,” I say. “So we go through Bethesda down here and...” I follow the road with my finger a bit, then look over at him. “This still goes through Washington. Look, here’s the Vietnam Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Pentagon, and finally Reagan National.”
He focuses on my finger as I point out each landmark. “Huh, so it does.”
Something’s up with him. “Just to be clear, you want to cut through DC to avoid going through DC?”
“I thought it went around the city,” he says quietly.
I stare at him, trying to figure him out. Usually I can do this; at least it’s been that way since I met him. It’s not that I know everything he’s thinking, but I can tell when he’s annoyed—like when rain is coming and his leg aches. I can tell when he’s thinking about something that happened before the apocalypse because he gets quiet, and when I ask him what’s up, he smiles and says it’s nothing or that he was thinking of a movie to tell me about.
