It was silver, the For-Lease sign still on the front. Neither garage Is open, which means breaking in. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Gloria asks.
“Yes,” he says. He pulls them around the back and parks, then they sit for a long while watching for them. It’s quiet.
“Maybe it’s because it’s on a hill,” Alex says into the silence.
Everyone nods, not because they agree, but because it makes as good a sense as anything in a world gone mad.
“Look,” Peter says. He points to the fire escape that sits just out of their reach. “We pull the SUV up there, climb on the roof, and voila.”
He makes it sound easy, but Dee can’t help but remember another time when another companion climbed on top of the SUV. Heart in her throat, she watches as Peter, then Gloria, then Alex gain the fire escape with ease. The pounding doesn’t ease when she’s safely over the metal rail. Too easy, her brain insists. It’s too easy. What’s waiting for us inside then? Because things are only easy when the universe is waiting to spring its trap.
They each have their backpacks and they climb to the third floor, tapping on the window and waiting. Waiting. Nothing comes to investigate the noise, so Peter holds a folded shirt against the window and smacks it with a hammer. The glass tinkles to the floor and then he knocks away the rest of the glass.
They pair up and search the building top to bottom, then trade and do it all again. None of them want to wake up to a dead thing eating their faces, so they take care and make absolutely certain they are alone.
Unless they figure out how to climb, the survivors will be okay.
“All right,” Peter says after they are in the room they’ll sleep in for the night, the door barricaded with a stack of pallets. “Tell us how you blew the other station.”
Dee gives them the full story, detailing the rope, the gas, the prayers to deities she didn’t believe actually existed. “Since there are three stations, I think we should blow all three,” she finishes.
“All three.”
“Is that necessary, do you think?” Gloria asks.
“Think of all those dead things back there. We have to do something big. Really big,” Alex says. “We need something that can be seen for miles to clear them out from where we want to go. And we need an escape route. We need to plan that. I don’t want to get blown up. And maps aren’t good enough, either. I want us to drive the route, all of us.”
“Not bossy at all, are you?” Peter teases, then they get down to work, planning exactly how they will blow the three gas stations without blowing themselves up in the process.
40
Now
The explosion is … epic. It’s bigger than Dee’s, bigger than any of them expect, and they watch from their second hideout as fire and smoke billows up into the sky. The boom is so loud it rattles the windows where they watch and Dee guesses many of the houses nearby lost their glass when it blew.
“Come on. The dead things will be headed this way. We need to get farther away before they clog the streets and trap us.”
Dee takes one more look before letting herself get tugged away.
They are all in a giddy mood. Once again, things have turned out their way and Dee fears this means the bad is barreling at them from the misty future. She almost tells Alex she wants to go back to the Complex, opens her mouth to say just that three or four times, but manages to keep it inside.
“You okay?” Alex asks as they drive the near-empty streets.
“No.”
Alex doesn’t try to fix things and she doesn’t spout empty platitudes; she just squeezes Dee’s hand and leans her head on her shoulder. Dee shuts her eyes and prays.
“This it, honey?” Grace asks after a few minutes and Dee opens her eyes to see her cul-de-sac.
She can only nod.
All this time. It’s been so long. She’s gone through so much to get here, lost so many people, and now that she’s here she can’t quite believe it.
Peter eases the SUV around a couple of cars abandoned in the road, and then they are moving toward her home, toward the place where she and Lana raised their boys. So many memories flood her: teaching Jackson how to ride his bike in the big, empty circle in front of their home, racing RC cars with both up and down their driveway, watching Tucker try to handstand in the yard, planting flowers with Lana, hosting their friends for cards and barbecues in the backyard. They’d lived here forever, and the memories pile up and up until they threaten to choke her.
“Just breathe,” Alex says. “You’re almost there. Soon you’ll have answers.”
“I don’t want them,” she says, her voice small.
“Yes, you do. You do,” Alex insists when Dee stares at her. “Everything you’ve fought for, what you’ve survived for is in that house. I won’t let you turn back now.”
Dee almost argues. She almost says that if she turns around now, her boys will always be alive in her head. If she goes in and finds them dead, she thinks she’ll go mad.
She knows she’ll go mad.
They all wait and watch, but the explosion did its job; there are none of them around, at least none they can see. Finally, they get out of the SUV and walk up the sidewalk Dee walked many times in her lifetime. She’d never felt like this before, though. This feels like doom. It feels like hope. It’s terrifying.
‘This is it, Lana, my love. What we fought for since leaving Omaha. I wish you were here with me.’
“If wishes were
