“Jamie, stop it.” Andrew steps in front of me, putting his hand on my chest. It has almost an instant effect and my blood pressure lowers. “Can you just...” He gives me a “cut it” gesture with his hand and turns back to Cara.
He moves around the desk but stops himself.
“Do you mind if I come back here? I’ll help you clean up.” He points to the ground where the pens and highlighters are. Cara doesn’t answer him and bends over to pick it up herself.
Andrew disappears behind the desk and I hear him talking quietly,only picking up a few words here and there. I pace the office slowly, trying to breathe calm into my mind while I formulate a plan. Wherever they took our stuff, it’s gonna be guarded. And we already stand out because we’re the strangers. They also took our ammo, which they said would be rationed out.
Andrew pops up with Cara and puts the coffee can back on the desk. “Can you tell us how to get there?”
She glances at me as if I’m the asshole who stolehershit and reaches behind the desk to take a paper from a stack on the counter. It’s a crudely drawn map of Fort Caroline. Cara circles a building in red marker she pulls from the coffee can.
“Supply warehouse is here.”
She puts the red marker back and picks up a pencil and circles the motel. “This is where we are, and you make a left on Cherokee Avenue, a right here on Glower Road, then a right on Morgan Lane, another left on Magnolia Road, another right on Berks Street and it’s ahead of you on the corner of Berks Street and Broad Avenue. You can also cut through the park here on Morgan.” She puts a graphite star at the corner of Morgan and Glower, then provides three different routes. “But the first way is quickest. Unless you want to cut through the park.”
This explains why she’s stationed at the motel. She might be shy and not a people person, but she knows her way around. Maybe she was in this motel even before the flu hit.
Andrew gives me a look that says he’s got an idea. “Wait here.” And he leaves us.
I take the map, gently, and look back over it, following herdirections. There’s a cross on a large square on the bottom corner. “Is this the hospital?”
Cara glances. “Pharmacy. The hospital has the caduceus.”
“The...” I don’t even know what that word is. She points quickly. Oh, I’ve seen it before—it’s two snakes wrapped around a winged staff. “I didn’t know that’s what it was called.”
She’s leaning away from me and doesn’t even respond or look up when I speak. I feel bad for yelling at her and I’m trying to be friendly, but the damage is done. She doesn’t like me, which is fine. She lives here so she can’t be all that great herself. But there’s still something about Cara that doesn’t seem to fit this place. Everyone else seems happy to be here—or at least they’re excited to pretend things are going back to what they saw as normal. Cara almost seems to be sleepwalking. Answering questions but only providing the information needed, nothing more.
Andrew is still gone and the silence is getting uncomfortable.
“Is this the sheriff’s department?” I point to the building with the six-pointed star. Judging by the questionnaire, I don’t think they’d mark the Fort Caroline synagogue, if it even exists.
“Yes.”
That’s where they’ll have taken our ammo. They wait for us to come register our weapons before we get the ammo rations. The battery-powered clock on the wall says it’s almost one. The sun sets in a little more than eight hours. We have eight hours to get our ammo, and our food, without raising suspicion.
Andrew comes back with the road atlas in his hand. Cara watches with curiosity as he puts it down in front of her. She even seems towarm a bit to Andrew’s presence. She seems less wary while he’s in the room.
“We’re trying to get here.” He points at the map. The page is turned to the southern half of Florida and his finger is on the Keys.
“Andrew.” He’s telling her exactly where we’re going when the entire point was for us to make a quick, quiet escape.
He holds a hand up to silence me.
“Could you map out a route for us from Fort Caroline to the Keys?”
Cara glances at me and then at Andrew, before falling back on the road atlas. She scans the map and then reaches for it but doesn’t touch it. Her hands hover over it and she asks, “Can I borrow this? I can have an answer for you in a few hours. I just have to know the scale, then measure out the distances and find the quickest route.”
Andrew looks at me and I shake my head. I try my best to communicate with a look that I don’t like this idea, but he tells her yes.
She immediately takes the map and begins looking it over, reaching for a ruler on the desk. Andrew joins me outside the office.
“Why did you tell her where we’re going?”
“Because we need her. Maybe you think these people are going tolet ussteal food from them, but I don’t. They will come after us, Jamie. And if they moved the cars on the road north to Virginia, who knows how far south they’ve cleared it? That means they’ll be driving after us. We can’t stop to check the map every few exits if we hope to outrun them. And at night it’s going to be even harder.”
I sigh. He may have a point. We’re going to have to get as far away as we can as fast as we can. “And if she tells them where we’re going?”
Andrew looks back at her. She’s hunched over the map, writingquickly on a piece of scrap paper. “I don’t think she’s going to tell anyone.”
