I was tired, my calves hurt from all the fricking hills, and I was ready to yell at this poor girl who had never had a stable moment in her life because I’d forgotten it wasn’t about me, it was about her.
Lana must have known something was up, had read whatever was on my face and interpreted it correctly even then, before she knew me, and threw herself between sweaty-faced me and Jerri. “Whoa,” she’d said, her gloved hands up in surrender before me, her chestnut hair in a net. She had a glob of potatoes on her right boob and beautiful, expressive eyes. “Everything okay here?”
I jabbed my finger over her shoulder at Jerri and to this day I could still remember my frustration that this girl was doing everything she could to get herself killed, or worse, still remember wanting to shake the shit out of her despite having never, not ever, laid my hands on any kid I’d ever worked with.
“It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.” Those words were like a pin to my anger balloon. I remembered that vividly too, that sudden de-escalation of all that stupid anger. I realized where I was, what I had been doing, and wondered how in the hell I ever thought I was good at working with kids.
Lana shifted so she could see Jerri. “You guys look hot. Would you like some iced tea?”
I’ve told her that story, the way she’d defused my anger with her calm interference, and she laughed at me. It hadn’t been momentous to her the way it had to me. So many things had shifted for me that day, not the least of which was my relationship with Jerri. I’d been chasing her out of a misplaced sense of responsibility, but she hadn’t needed a mother hen. She’d needed someone to help her see her own capabilities.
I thought about that day after Lana’s outburst because I didn’t want to be angry with her and whenever something she said or did pissed me off, that memory calmed me. Some days it worked better than others and this time I couldn’t help but wonder where Jerri was now, if she was dead and roaming the world looking for something to eat, or if she was scared and holed up somewhere in the city.
So many of the kids I’d helped were out there too. Some homeless, some in tenuous living situations … I guessed everyone was in a tenuous living situation now.
“Damn it,” she whispered as I slowed the car at yet another roadblock. This one was an accident, a UPS truck spilled sideways across two lanes, packages spread across a third, trucks and cars jammed around. There were bodies, some dead, some not-so-dead. One guy was trapped under the flipped package truck. He craned his neck to see us, his mouth moving like a dead-eyed fish in a tank. I didn’t know if he was saying anything. We had the radio on so we wouldn’t have to hear them.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, though I wasn’t sure we would. We might have to go on foot if we wanted to get out of the city and oh, how that terrified the shit out of me. On foot with these things out there ready to kill us? Hell no. I turned us around and went through a nearby parking lot hoping we could exit on the other side of the jam but it extended farther than I expected. There was a grass median that wasn’t too gnarly, so I eased the car over it and into the next parking lot. We traveled that way until the road cleared and it looked like we might make it out of town after all.
“I wish we’d never come,” Lana said in a small voice. “Rod has screwed us over time and again and what do I do when he wants to make amends for the fiftieth time? ‘Oh, of course, Rod, whatever you need Rod. Forgiveness is important, Rod.’” She hit the door with her fist and when that didn’t satisfy her, she did it again. “And don’t you dare say, ‘That’s what you do, Lana,’ like I’m some fucking saint. I’m just an idiot. An idiot he walked over all his life and now look at this! Look at it!” She jabbed out the window at a group of them huddled together by a crashed truck looking for all the world like a prayer circle … until we saw the bloody remains they were passing around. “He lured us here with his bullshit and you called it. You knew. You didn’t want to come. Oh god. If I’d listened to you, we’d be with the boys now instead of halfway across the god damned country!”
After a minute, after I’d thought up and then discarded half a dozen things I could say, I ventured, “Are you saying that Rod wanted to screw us over so badly he engineered the zombie apocalypse?”
Her eyes, her lovely expressive eyes flew to mine and in them I saw the exact second the absurdity hit her and the bloom of hopeless amusement that made her want to laugh a little bit more than she wanted to cry. “Yes. Yes, I fucking am. If anyone would, it would have been Rod. The bastard.”
In that, I thought, we were in perfect agreement.
12
Then
We didn’t see the police until it was too late to back away unseen. Lana immediately tensed and I knew she was thinking of that man we saw shot in the road last night. Her hand snaked over to clutch mine as guns were raised and pointed in our direction.
An older man with silver-white hair made his way over to us, his face grim, his shirt speckled with red. He gestured for me to roll down the window which I did, though it made me nervous, not just because he had a shotgun in hand, but because I didn’t know
