Total pages in book: 163
Estimated words: 150878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 754(@200wpm)___ 604(@250wpm)___ 503(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 150878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 754(@200wpm)___ 604(@250wpm)___ 503(@300wpm)
The desperation was palpable. Those people were likely out of food, had no transportation, and were on the wrong side of an already-established line. Parents. Children. Young women my age, alone. I swallowed gulps of air, tamping down my anguish.
Tuck was looking at the map as he drove back around the big rig we’d driven past a few minutes before. “Goddammit,” Tuck swore. “Both roads I was going to take to your parents’ are blocked. We’re going to have to go another way.” He pulled over to the side of the road and I was quiet, trying to process what I’d seen at the barricade as Tuck studied the map. After a few minutes, he set it down and pulled back onto the road. I didn’t ask what new route we’d take, trusting him as I’d trusted him to get me this far.
We drove toward the coast now, the only direction available. “Should we try the highway?” I asked. Maybe back roads had been safest once, and mostly empty in many locations, but perhaps the opposite was true now. I couldn’t imagine what anyone would be trying to protect on a highway, especially one where the cars had been raided.
“Not in a car,” Tuck said distractedly, his gaze constantly moving to the rearview mirror as if he expected to be chased down at any moment. “We probably wouldn’t be able to make it through because of the parked vehicles, but even if we could, it isn’t safe. We’d have to travel way too slow in a car and be vulnerable to attack. It’d be safer to go by foot, but we don’t have enough provisions for that. We’ll need to stock up first, at least on water.”
Not having enough provisions also meant we wouldn’t be able to backtrack to Arizona and attempt to get to the San Fernando Valley from the opposite direction than the one we’d taken. Truthfully, we might not even make it back the way we’d come considering the barriers that seemed to be going up by the hour.
Tuck continued to look extremely unsettled, and it scared me too. “This looks like the only route we can take, but moving north to your parents will mean traveling through Los Angeles,” he said.
Los Angeles.
All this way, we’d avoided cities because they weren’t safe. Tuck had planned to go to Los Angeles alone, but Tuck was strong and street savvy, and his instincts for handling danger were honed. Me, I was none of those things.
That was the old you, Emily. Haven’t you held your own on this journey? Haven’t you proven that you can be an asset too?
“Okay,” I said, giving him a tip of my chin. “Then we’ll check on your uncle together. And then move on to my parents’ from there.”
“We don’t have another choice right now,” Tuck murmured, almost as if to himself. And again, he banged his palms on the steering wheel and cursed under his breath.
We turned onto another road, and then another, finally catching sight of the City of Angels sprawled in the distance.
thirty-seven
Tuck
Day Sixteen
I pulled the car behind a furniture store in a strip mall that had obviously been looted, front windows broken and glass sparkling in the morning sun. I parked behind two dumpsters that looked mostly empty and shut the engine off. “We’ll come back for it if we can,” I told Emily, pocketing the key.
“What if someone hotwires it?”
“They might. But I think it’s safer leaving it here than attempting to drive it into the city.”
We took our backpacks from the trunk, stuffing them with the remaining provisions and then rounding the building. We looked out to the city beyond, or what we could see of it, anyway, from where we stood. Smoke rose from several spots, whether from fires that had broken out naturally for one reason or another, or from people who’d set them, I had no way to know. A set of pops met our ears and Emily looked at me in alarm. “Gunfire?”
Probably. “Let’s go this way,” I said, leading her in the opposite direction, away from the sounds. A distant human wail rose up, and then a few more.
Emily’s eyes met mine, and my guts cramped. I fucking hated walking her into what I knew very well would be a dangerous landscape, and yet, what choice was there? I couldn’t drive into a scorching wildfire burning out of control, one that, in the absence of water or planes to drop fire retardant, would burn indefinitely. I wouldn’t drive around randomly, either running out of fuel or encountering one roadblock after another until so many popped up that we were trapped.
My choices were to head out into the desert, driving as far as a car could go in terrain like that and scavenge for food and water, hopeful that we’d find enough not to starve. Or we could make our way to my uncle’s house, hopeful that we could stock up on provisions there and—with him—begin the journey on foot to Emily’s parents.