an open gas station and some food. I didn’t want to leave without telling you.”
I nod, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. There’s a sour taste in my mouth I recognize as hunger. “How are you going to do that?”
“I have vouchers for the gas. We’re good for at least a few more tanks….Food will be harder.”
“Vouchers?”
Sam stands up for a moment, tugging something out of her back pocket. It’s a small wad of silver paper with black type on it. She’s angled it just enough that I can read the words GASOLINE VOUCHER and a barcode with numbers filling the space beneath it. Printed over everything is a kind of iridescent ink with the words UNITED NATIONS printed over and over again, the way you sometimes see images and words printed on money.
“How’d you get this?” I have a hard time imagining they’d just give it to a kid, especially one who’s just out wandering around, not getting the procedure, not under the thumb of any adult.
For a second I just stare at her, watch her look away and stuff the vouchers into her pocket again. I can feel the guilt coming off her in waves. She’d told me before, towards the end of her story about getting Lucas out of Thurmond, that she didn’t want to go back to her parents—she didn’t even want to think about them. But I can see in her face that she’s doing exactly that now. She’s dueling with one of their Sunday school lessons.
“How do you think?” she gets out between gritted teeth. “I stole them. I took them out of someone’s pocket. They left their jacket on the back of a chair, and I just…”
Survival is a choice, the monster whispers.
“Whatever,” I say, “we need them more. That person is an idiot for leaving them.”
The monster is right about this one. It would be one thing if the usual rules still applied, but there’s nothing usual about life now. We have a temporary government that’s been appointed, not elected, that serves governments from a half dozen other countries and their combined militaries. They’ve chopped up the country into four zones to try to manage it. No one wants to drink from our poisoned wells. Everyone is on some kind of journey—trying to get home, trying to find their families, trying to get to that place where they can start again. We are all trying. But sometimes you have to cheat to get there. Just a little.
Sam shakes her head. “Everyone is having a hard time right now, not just us.”
“Whatever you say.” I shrug. “How long are you going to be gone?”
I don’t love the idea of her going out by herself, but this will give me a chance to study Lucas, try to find some kind of hidden seam I can use to crack him open.
“It might be a while,” she admits. “There’s still some canned soup left for dinner, and Lucas will probably sleep most of today—”
“I’ll be okay,” I promise.
She starts to rise, but reaches down at the last second, ruffling my already insane hair. My curls always spring out in every direction, like they’re trying to escape my head. “Go back to sleep.”
I do. I crash back down into the Never Never Land of sleep with ease, and the next time I open my eyes, the sun is coming through the bedroom’s lace curtains, warming the blanket. I throw it back, straining my ears to catch Sam’s voice. Nothing. She’s still not back.
Of course not, stupid. She said she probably wouldn’t be back until it was time for dinner.
I’m not scared of the quiet, and I’m not scared of my brother; it’s just so strange to feel so alone when there’s someone else here with me.
Lucas is still on the couch, turned onto his side. I can’t tell what he’s looking at as I pass him—the painting of the flowery meadow above the bricked-over fireplace, maybe? I head out through the door in the kitchen, hugging my arms against my chest, trying to firm up my armor against the cold. Sam warned me about the lack of running water—that if I needed to go, I had to find a place outside in that tiny pocket of trees—but the actual thing is even worse than I imagined it being. At least we had functioning toilets at Black Rock.
I give up on trying to scrape the frozen mud off the bottoms of my shoes, and bring it inside with