I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, if not for the fact that I’d noticed them doing the same thing the day before. Before my curiosity had time to hit fever pitch, Mrs. O’Malley came out of her house. She had her broom in her hand and she gave the porch a couple of perfunctory sweeps. She stared into middle distance and then raised her head slightly and sniffed twice. Then she fixed her eyes on my mother and gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“Sully,” said my mother, “go get Jules. Tell him you’re going on a trip.”
“Wha…”
“Go now.” When she said it, she used a seldom used voice. It was a voice that made me feel paralyzed for a moment and a second later I found myself off the porch and on my way to Jules’s place.
“What’s happening?” He was bouncing with excitement.
“Dunno. Was told to tell you we’re going on a trip.”
That was all he needed to hear. He laced up his shoes as fast as he could. His mom dropped a duffel bag at his feet. She’d already packed everything he needed. When we got back to my place, I found that my mother had packed for me, too. She was hoisting my bag onto the back of our old, beaten-up GMC. My dad had loaded three coolers and several brown bags of food into the truck.
“What’s happening?” I asked again. “Where are we going?”
“You’re going to the cabin,” said my mother. “And you’re going now. No time for questions.”
“But, but what about the vamps? We should be here. We can fight too.”
“We’ll deal with them. You and Jules are unshifted. You’re strong compared to humans, but you don’t stand a chance against vampires. You need to go now.”
She all but corralled me into the driver’s seat and slammed my door shut. She tugged at my seatbelt and handed it to me to buckle in. I knew I was beaten, so I said, “Fine, just give me the address and we’ll go.”
She gave me a strange little smile. “You know where the cabin is, baby. Just follow your nose. Don’t come back until you’re sure the time is right.”
She jerked her head slightly to the northeast, and with that as my only clue, Jules and I took off.
“Woooohooooo!” cried Jules as we drove off. “Road triiiip!”
“Don’t get too excited. I have no idea where the cabin is. There’s no way we’ll find it.”
I’d been to the cabin once with my parents when I was five or six years old. I had vague memories of it, but believe me, I had no clue how to get us there. I remembered driving for a long time to get there. A very, very long time. Thinking about it, I realized that even that memory was unreliable. I was a child. An hour or two in the car felt like an eternity at that time in my life.
“You’ll find it,” he said with total certainty.
“No, I won’t. I literally don’t know where it is. I’m planning on driving around for a while and then heading home before it gets dark.”
“Nah, you’ll find it. No one tracks better than you.”
“It’s one thing to track an animal, Jules. You can’t track a cabin no matter how good you are. That’s fucking ridiculous.”
Still, to humor him, I drove northeast. The road stretched long and straight ahead of us. The sky was big and impossibly blue. When the road forked, I headed in the direction that looked most likely to take me in the direction in which my mother had cocked her head.
Jules sang “On the Road Again” as I drove. It was clear within seconds that the only words he knew of the song were the words in the title.
“Is that the only line you know?” He threw his head back and sang loudly, confirming my suspicion. “Oh, Jesus, it is, isn’t it?” He sang it over and over until I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “Look, Jules, if you keep singing that shit, I’m going to start playingThe Proclaimersand I’ll play them on repeat. Don’t think I won’t.”
He laughed uproariously and sang even louder. I laughed too. I couldn’t help it. Despite the ridiculousness of our situation, it was pretty neat being on the road with Jules.
After three hours or so, we stopped for gas. We still had over a quarter of a tank, but I’m one of those people who gets twitchy as hell if my tank falls below the halfway mark. We used the restrooms and then went into the shop to buy some lunch and a few snacks.
“Check it out,” said Jules, holding up a touristy t-shirt that had the outline of the Rocky Mountains emblazoned on it, along with the tagline ‘I’ve never been so high’.
I chortled at that. Colorado was one of the first states to legalize recreational weed and as Coloradans, it was something Jules and I had always felt immensely proud of.
When we took off again, we headed north for a few miles and when the road forked, I found myself indicating and taking a left. Jules eyed me curiously but didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything about the next turn I made, or the one after that. I still didn’t feel like I knew where I was going. Not exactly. It was almost as if there was a map in my brain. It was faded and dusty, but if I didn’t think about it too hard, I’d get a feeling about the direction I needed to take. It was hardly even a feeling. More like a knowing.
Eventually we passed a narrow dirt track. I drove straight past it, but something about the way the branches of a large pinyon pine that grew next to the road twisted back on themselves seemed oddly familiar. I turned the truck around and pulled over. I got out and stretched my legs. I took a couple of deep breaths and familiarized myself with my whereabouts. I eyed the sky briefly and then the stones and gravel beneath my feet. Something about the way my feet felt on the ground told me what I needed to know: I’d been there before. I knew where we were. We started driving again. The road was narrow and wound its way up the mountain. I anticipated when it would dip down and when we were coming up to a bend. Jules was uncharacteristically quiet right up until we pulled up to the cabin.
