Chapter 6: Down the Highway, Pt. 2

Days passed in an indistinguishable blur as they followed the ancient highway toward the setting sun. They hauled the wealth of food and water behind them on a makeshift sled, and every time Lily took her turn she was unavoidably aware of how much lighter it was getting.

Huge machines with iron teeth rusted in barren fields, and the crumbling remains of vehicles lined a road that disappeared and reappeared like a magic trick. Once Lily saw a single intact house off in the distance, standing alone on a vast plain of dust.

It was better than nothing. It had to be a sign. Maybe as they pushed on west the ruins would become intact buildings. Maybe they'd find living plants, real people, rivers…

Optimism was addictive, but it was a poison. If Lily filled her stomach with dreams she would starve to death.

Two weeks after leaving the raider camp she watched an unseen sunset leech the light from the charcoal sky. Part of a sandblasted brick wall stood here in a shallow depression, maybe the cellar of a vanished house. It would do as a windbreak. The ground was too hard to pitch their scavenged tent.

Michael dropped his pack and Lily dropped herself, canteen sloshing.

"I think we're close," she said, wetting her lips without drinking and holding it out.

He didn't take it, just lowered himself down and patted dust off his coat. "Maybe.”

There was no distinguishing where the land ended and the sky began; everything was the same shade of blackening grey. Sometimes Lily saw flickering lights in the distance, a sobering reminder that they weren't alone, even here.

Tonight there were no lights. She felt very small.

Michael coughed, too long and too deep. Lily offered the canteen again and this time he took it, holding it against his chest.

"You have to drink," she said. "And eat. We’ve got enough."

Enough for what, she thought as he complied. Enough for another week or two of careful rationing? Not enough to get them out.

How long before they sought out the small fires burning at night and took whatever they could carry from whoever was there. How long before he left. How long before her bones joined the rest…

Michael coughed again. He set the canteen down. "I'll take first watch.”

“It’s my turn,” Lily protested.

He pushed himself up with the crossbow and went to sit on the windward side of the wall in silence.

She pillowed her head on her pack, huddling inside her coat. He was going to leave. She’d noticed a few things.

First and most worrying was the fact that he claimed to need less food and water than she did. She’d tried his pack once and found it significantly heavier than her own, like he was holding back his share for later.

And he wouldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the dreams; he suffered from quiet nightmares, shaking and tensing like a dog. Or maybe he was looking for an opportunity to cut his losses and move out.

Instead of Castor, Lily’s own nightmares of late were of wandering alone in a white void, calling out, never hearing an answer.

In spite of cold, hunger, and lingering worry, she drifted away. It felt like she'd barely closed her eyes when she woke to Michael urgently shaking her shoulder.

“G’off me,” she slurred, sneezing dust away. The light looked different, pale and cold.

Michael's hand stayed on her arm, but Lily's protests died half-formed. He was smiling.

"Look," he said, pointing up.

She looked. Then she scrambled to her feet and craned her neck, mouth open.

The clouds had peeled away from a slice of inky sky, and a spray of stars surrounded the pale disc of the moon like sparks rising from an unseen fire. It was cold, so cold, and it was beautiful.

“There are so many,” Michael said. “I didn’t know.”

There was an odd quality to his voice; awe, maybe. The words were distant, questioning. Lily got the feeling he was talking to someone else, and wished…

He sat next to her on top of the wall, never taking his eyes off the sky. Lily recoiled as their arms brushed and then pressed together, but he didn’t seem to notice what he’d done. His face had softened. Or maybe it was just the moonlight that did it.

She should tell him about something: a red sunrise bloodying the cold, pale Coalition concrete, her eyes and heart burning at the savage beauty of it. Maybe he’d seen the same one. It was nice to think about.

The wind kicked up. Clouds scudded in. One by one, as impossibly as they had appeared, the stars winked out. At last even the moon flickered and was extinguished.

The words had not come. It was too late. Instead, Lily said, “Let me finish your watch.”

Finally he looked at her. He leaned away like he’d only just realized how close he was sitting, and after a brief hesitation he handed Lily the crossbow and slid down.

“I’m not tired,” he said, but a broad yawn betrayed him.

Lily pointed at the blankets she’d recently vacated, feeling her dry face crack into a smile. She thought he smiled back before he went, but the light was bad.

What if he didn’t vanish in the night? What if he stayed and they survived to the edge of the Wasteland? What if everything turned out all right.

Lily looked down. Michael had rolled himself in the blankets, and already his breathing had evened out.

She pulled her hood up and settled the crossbow over her knees, listening to the wind blow across a landscape that seemed a little less bleak.

—

Omaha Base had lain in the floodplain of a broad river, but on clear days Lily had been able to see distant blue smudges to the east and west. Mountains. A concept impossible to visualize: take a rock, make it massive. But what did that mean?

The largest things she’d ever seen were the slumped and tumbled remains of old world skyscrapers and bridges. And a grain silo, once.

A mountain, she’d reasoned, could not be so much larger than those. It would rise abrupt and unannounced from the flat Wasteland plain like the wall around Delphi but perhaps three times as high, with an obvious access point like a city gate.

Instead the mountains were insidious. They came like a thief.

Lily had paused for a short rest, sweat she couldn’t afford to lose streaming down her forehead and tickling between her shoulder blades as she wondered why her lungs weren’t working.

Michael, who somehow looked just as bad, had said something about elevation gain as if she knew what that meant.

“We’re in the foothills,” he’d added.

“Foothills of what?”

And he’d looked at her like she’d started speaking backwards before answering, “The mountains.”

It was infuriating how much she didn’t know. She’d seen maps, but that had been almost a decade ago and she’d been worried about other things. Like the man they’d belonged to.

The wind whipped and bit. They tied dust cloths over their faces, and on the first bad day Michael gave Lily his goggles. Her pride stung less than her eyes, so she wore them, but breathing through the rag was a secondary agony. It clung to her face, growing heavy as her exhalations transmuted the dust to mud. The goggles frequently fogged. Her lungs were full of knives.

But if these were mountains…if the shadows looming in the middle distance were the mountains, then they were almost out. Lily had a waking dream of cresting a final rise and seeing dawn break over a green valley, but she had no frame of reference for that either.

One night Michael created a map for her. They’d made camp beneath an outcropping of rock to the side of the road, piling loose stones on top of the tent spikes so it wouldn’t take off like a startled bird.

With the sun setting it was easier to tell how high up they were. Little fires speckled the plain below them, scattered like fallen stars. That had been them. They’d been down there, fighting and walking and starving. Now they were in the air.

Lily ate with her fingers from a tin of anonymous brown mush as Michael sketched a vaguely familiar shape with the can opener, clawing up the hard-packed earth. He added a line for the Brown River, an X for Delphi, and a deep gouge down the western edge of the map.

He glanced up at her. “We’re here, somewhere.”

“You got a good memory,” Lily remarked.

Michael faded. Not just the spark behind his eyes, but all of him. He began to erase the sketch from east to west, wiping out Delphi first.

“No,” he replied, as the flat of his palm obliterated the suggestion of mountains too, leaving only a faint scar behind. “Not really.”

Lily left it alone. “You gonna eat?”

He shook his head, so she opened her pack and picked an unlabelled can at random, rolling it to him.

Michael could have been smiling; whatever it was, it was happening only to his eyes. He picked up the tin, tapping the top with two fingers.

“Don’t ask me how much is left,” Lily warned, returning to her own dinner. “Open it, tell me what it is.”

He obliged, prying up the lid. “It’s green.”

“Lucky you.”

It wasn’t just his eyes anymore.

They’d been going on like this. Something had eased, and Lily's whole body felt lighter despite the thinning of the air. She’d been alone so long she’d forgotten there was any other way to be.