Roxy's in the passenger seat, sucking on her usual lollipop while scrolling through the images on her camera that she took last night. The motel room is behind us, another anonymous box with peeling wallpaper and a bed that smells like must. We never stay more than one night or use the same name more than once.
I glance at her screen. She's reviewing a shot of an abandoned store we passed yesterday, it’s one of the ones you see with boarded windows and weeds growing through cracked asphalt. The composition is perfect. The light hitting the broken glass just right, creating shadows that look like fingers reaching.
"Are you going to sell that one?" I ask.
She doesn't look up. "Maybe. Depends on the buyer."
"How much?"
"Five hundred. Maybe more if they want exclusive rights."
Five hundred dollars for a photograph of a dilapidated building. It should seem absurd, but it's not. Her buyers aren't paying for the image, they're paying for what it represents and the story it tells. The truth of a decaying life and a dying society of people who actually give a shit.
She's been doing this since before I met her. Selling her art on the dark web, people who want the unfiltered world. People like us. But her drawings are more popular, specific in their uniqueness.
"How many buyers do you have?" I ask.
"Active? Maybe twenty. But there's a waiting list."
"For what?"
She finally looks at me, and there's something in her eyes, is it pride? Satisfaction?
"For the new work, a mixture of photographs and drawings."
The new work. The photographs she's been taking since we left the small town. The aftermath and empty roads. The places we've been. She hasn't shown me all of them, but I've seen enough to understand what she's doing. Then there are thedrawings of strangers, human interactions and all the other shit she picks up.
She's creating the story of our journey. The trail we're leaving, and she’s clever enough to turn it into currency.
"You're not worried about the trail?" I ask, keeping my voice neutral.
"The buyers are anonymous. Encrypted and untraceable. Trust me, they will want anonymity as much as I do." She tilts her head, studying me. "Why? Are you worried?"
"I'm always worried."
"That's why we're still ahead."
She's right, because the paranoia is what keeps us alive. The constant awareness, the planning, the refusal to get comfortable. I've been running routes in my head for days now, alternate highways, back roads, places we can disappear if we need to.
We're in New Mexico now, heading west. Arizona next, maybe California. Somewhere with enough transient population that two more faces won't stand out. Somewhere we can blend in while we figure out the next move.
Because there will be a next move. There always is.
I pull into a truck stop, one of the big ones with multiple gas stations, several food options and rows of semis parked in the back. Plenty of people with plenty of noise, so it’s easy not to be noticed.
"Stay here and I’ll grab us something," I say.
Roxy raises an eyebrow. "Ashamed to be seen with me?"
"You? Never. I want to be quick and need to make some plans in my head."
"I want a large coffee and a sandwich."
"You got it."
She holds my gaze for a moment, sucking on the last part of her lollipop in the most sexual way possible. She knows what she is doing.
I leave her with the engine running and the doors locked, and I walk into the coffee shop with my hands in my pockets and my head down. The place smells like the first place we have come across that actually makes decent coffee. It’s a decent place.
