The trip to the cave went quickly once they left I-70 and its roaring trucks that kept them on the shoulder. The route was mostly downhill. Eric pedaled as fast as he could, then glided for minutes, the new knobby tires buzzing on the asphalt, before pedaling again. Dad kept close. Their shadows raced ahead as the sun dropped behind them.
When Eric reached the path to the cave, he hopped off the bike. Mother was not at the lookout, as far as he could tell. Dad skidded to a stop beside him. “Wait,” he said. “I need to show you something first. Turn around.”
Eric fidgeted as Dad dug in the pack. He heard the crackle of paper. “Here,” Dad said. Eric took the pharmacy bag from him, opened the top and shook out a bottle of pills. There was no label on the bottle. Cyanide, Eric thought. Dad’s flipped like that Jim Jones fellow in Jonestown. He shook the bottle. “What are they?”
“Pain killers. Tylenol four. Tylenol with codeine in them. I want you to know about them in case you have to be on your own.” Dad took the bottle from him. “I made a deal with the pharmacist. I paid fifteen bucks a pill, and he didn’t ask to see my prescription. People were lined up out the back.” Mom was sleeping behind the lookout rock. She’d made a bed with their blankets and set up a beach umbrella they’d taken to Florida the summer before to shade herself. Eric yelled when he saw her. She jerked awake and grabbed for the shotgun before she realized who he was. He hugged her for a long time, letting go only when he heard Dad struggling on the steep path with the two bikes. Mom and Dad sat up late, talking by the light of the Coleman lantern. Their voices rose and fell in a gentle mumble. Twenty feet away, Eric lay on his sleeping bag, looking at the shadows deep in the cracks of the cave’s ceiling high above. He’d washed in the river as the sun set, the water so cold that the shampoo wouldn’t lather, and when he finished, his jaws ached from shivering. Now he was warm and clean. The cassette player rested on his chest. He’d put the batteries in an hour ago, but he wanted to delay listening until his parents went to bed. Their talk, probably stupid stuff about mortgages or car payments he figured, sounded comforting.
I wonder where Amanda Grieves is right now, he thought. I wonder if she ever thinks about that day in the doorway. I wonder what she thought as she walked down the hall with her friends. Mom coughed once, and the conversation stopped. She coughed quietly again. Eric rolled to his side and propped himself on his elbow. The Coleman lantern glowed brightly on a rock shelf behind his parents who faced each other. They were very close, their foreheads almost touching, not saying anything. Eric watched them for a long time before he realized, there in the darkness of the cave, surrounded by boxes of canned goods, shotguns close by, miles from home, Dad held Mom’s hands.
Chapter Five
PHIL’S PLACE
Eric woke slowly and saw a slim shaft of dust-filled light slanting across the stone room. He thought for a moment he was back in the cave high above the river and that the soft bubble of breathing by his cheek was his father. “Dad?” he whispered in the dark room. How could light come into the cave? A crack in a wall we’ve never seen before? A place from where bats come and go, the seam invisible every day of the year except this one when the long hole in the wall lined up exactly with the sun? He puzzled over this question until slowly he remembered he was in a hut a few hundred yards from the intersection of Bowles Avenue and C-470. He closed his eyes and savored the feeling of being fifteen, of sleeping beside his father and mother. But the image slipped away until he barely felt it, until all that remained was the breathing, the gurgle that reminded him of Dad, but wasn’t. It was Dodge, head covered in his sleeping bag. Today they’d start north.
Eric rolled and the stiffness in his back woke him further. Rabbit slept beside Dodge, the scar side of his face down. In the shadows of the room, Rabbit looked angelic, like a baby and unlike the silent, brooding boy he was.
Outside the hut Eric grunted through his morning exercises, his breath fogging the cold morning air. Seven miles east, the Platte River glimmered like a golden ribbon in the rising sun. From this vantage point he saw all south-west Littleton. Most of the buildings along Bowles Avenue were burned down, and even huge structures like South-West Plaza Mall sprawled, a pile of broken bricks and rusted girders on its own weed-covered parking lot, but many buildings miles away seemed untouched by the years. Glass still glinted in their windows. They stood solid and geometric, and Eric could envision them as they had been. People would be going to work about now; cars would stream purposefully along the road. Eric guessed by the sun it was past six o’clock. Helicopters would be buzzing above the main roads, reporting on the traffic. People would be buying donuts to take to the office. Eric had a sudden, solid memory of Winchell’s donuts. Cinnamon Crumb. He used to stop on the way to school for two Cinnamon Crumb donuts, still warm. Even late in the morning after sitting through three or four classes, he might find a grain of brown sugar clinging to his shirt, and his fingers smelled of Cinnamon.
“What’s that?” Dodge asked. He pointed down the long stretch of four-lane highway. Ahead of them the top of a sign peeked over a hill. As they walked closer, more and more of it showed until Eric recognized the familiar logo.
“It’s a gas station. A Phillip’s 66.”
“What was their slogan, Grandpa?” The slogan game was one they played often. Dodge skipped ahead. Eric guessed that Dodge didn’t feel the weight of his backpack the way he did.
“You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.” Eric tightened his waist belt to take some stress off his shoulders.
Dodge laughed. “No way. That’s Texaco. Was it the ‘Hottest brand going’?” Eric said, “Conoco.” He thought as they walked closer. “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t have a slogan.”
“We can find out in the books at Boulder, can’t we?” asked Dodge. They climbed into a gully that had washed away fifty feet of the road. Eric said, “I suppose, but there’s much more important information in books.”
Dodge nodded agreeably as he scrambled up the loose bank and back onto the blacktop. “Books will tell us everything.”
Eric watched where he put his feet, making sure there were no wobbly stones, planting his step firmly before putting his weight on it. More old folks die of broken bones, he thought, than anything else. They’re doing fine right up to the time they break a hip; then they’re doomed. “Well, maybe not everything. Books don’t know everything.”
Dodge grabbed his arm and pulled him the last step. His strength surprised Eric. Good grip for a ten-year-old. Dodge said, “You told us books got stuff about the Gone Times, like cars and computers. What else we need?”
Rabbit had found another spot to get out of the gulch and squatted on the road waiting for them. He had stripped his shirt and tied it around his waist. Sweat glistened on his chest. Eric thought, they’re like horses. He realized that the pace he set must seem terribly slow to them. They were only twenty-two or twenty-three miles from Boulder now. If the boys were on their own, they’d make it by sunset. He figured he might make it by tomorrow evening, but that would be pushing it. A ten-mile day was a lot of walking.
He took a long drink from his canteen. “I’ve been reading books for sixty-five years, and I’ve read amazing passages. Poetry, mostly, and fiction. Beautiful stories about wonderful people living adventures. And there were books on science, and picture books.”
Dodge grinned, “Tell us about how you see pictures in your head.”
“Not really pictures. I mean, reading is like being there sometimes. I’ll be reading along, and I’ll forget that I’m holding a book. Suddenly I’ll be Joan of Arc, or Moses rolling back the Red Sea.” He hadn’t had much luck teaching Dodge to read. Unlike most children his age, Dodge could work his way through a page of a book, but it was painful and slow as he sounded out each word. Troy had been partly successful at limiting Eric’s influence on the boy. Eric could only teach Dodge and Rabbit two or three times a week. He suspected that Rabbit had picked up on the lessons better, but he seldom read out loud.
Dodge said, “I never see pictures.”
“It takes practice. You’ve got to keep doing it. Then one day you’ll be reading along, and the words will vanish off the page and you’ll be in the story.”
“Like that television stuff, right? And all the magic from the Gone Times are in the books, right? Like ’lectricity?”
Rabbit cleared his throat. “You said books can’t tell us everything. What’s wrong with books?” He wondered
