A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,70

mine. Yes. I’ll do with it what I like.

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It felt so strange and unnatural to think of Miss Peregrine as anything other than our protector and champion, but today she felt like an adversary. When she found out that we had left, it was inevitable she would come looking for us, and she’d do it the best way she knew how—from the air. Her speed, the heights she could fly to, her precise, long-distance vision, and her inbuilt radar for peculiar children meant that we wouldn’t be hard to find if we were within a hundred miles and out in the open. That’s why I didn’t stop at all for the first three hours, not even to let Bronwyn use the bathroom. I wanted to put as much distance between the headmistress and us as possible. After two hundred miles, I finally relented to the rising chorus of complaints from the back seat, but even then I was wary, glancing at the clouds as we exited the highway into a shopping center parking lot. I saw Emma do the same thing.

I filled the Aston’s tank while the others used the bathroom in the filling station’s convenience store. Through its big windows, I could see the clerk and a few other customers checking out my friends as they waited their turn for the single restroom—craning their heads, whispering to one another, outright staring. One guy even took a picture of them with his phone.

“We’ve got to buy you modern outfits,” I said when they came back outside. “Now.”

No one objected. And anyway, I had chosen this highway exit with that in mind. Across the street from the filling station was the biggest of all big-box stores: a twenty-four-hour Super All-Mart. It was the retail mother ship. A city unto itself.

“My God, what is this place?” Millard said as we pulled into its endless parking lot.

“It’s just a store,” I said. “A big one.”

We crossed the parking lot to the entrance, and a bank of automatic doors hissed open before us. Enoch leapt with fight-or-flight surprise.

“What, what, WHAT!” he shouted, raising his fists.

Now people were staring. We hadn’t even made it inside.

I took my friends aside and explained about motion sensors and sliding doors.

“What’s wrong with using a handle to open a door?” Enoch asked, irritated and embarrassed.

“It’s hard if you have a lot of stuff,” I said. “Like this guy.” I pointed at a man pushing a full cart out through the whooshing doors.

“Why would anyone need so many things?” said Emma.

“Maybe he’s stocking up for an air raid,” said Enoch.

“I think you’ll understand once we’re inside,” I said.

I’d grown up shopping at stores like All-Mart, so the essential strangeness of them had never fully occurred to me. But as my friends followed me inside and came to a dead stop at the checkout stands, shock and wonder on their faces, I began to understand.

Aisles stretched into a hazy distance. A kaleidoscopic array of items sang out for attention from every shelf. A small army of sullen stock clerks patrolled in uniforms emblazoned with giant yellow smiley faces. It was a thousand times larger than the corner store Millard had stolen groceries from. Of course my friends were overwhelmed.

“Just a store, he says,” Emma said, craning her neck to take it all in. “This isn’t like any store I’ve seen.”

Enoch whistled. “More like a blimp hangar.”

I grabbed a cart, and, with some cajoling, managed to get us moving again, if not quite in the right direction. Once they got over the sheer size of the place, they marveled at the huge and bizarre variety of things for sale. I was attempting to navigate us toward the clothing section, but my friends kept getting distracted, splitting off from the group, and plucking random things from shelves.

“What’s this?” Enoch said, waggling a pair of slippers with microfiber knobbles on the bottom.

I took it from him and put it back. “It’s so you can dust the floor with your feet? I think?”

“And this?” said Emma, pointing at a box labeled TALKING BIRD FEEDER—NOW WITH BLUETOOTH!

“I’m not really sure,” I said, feeling like a harried mom herding toddlers, “but we only have seventy-two hours to complete these tasks, so we shouldn’t—”

“Sixty-two now,” said Emma. “Or maybe less.”

A display of books came tumbling down at the end of the aisle, and I had to run and stop Millard—naked and thus invisible—from trying to right it again. I kept an especially watchful eye