World After

24

IT’S DARK when I wake. I float back into reality, still mired in my dream.

I stroke the soft fur of the teddy bear. My dream had more comfort in it than a fighting lesson has any right to have. It’s as if the sword picked a soothing memory on purpose and I’m grateful.

It takes a minute before I remember why I’m sleeping in the backseat of a car.

Right. We’re prisoners in a police cruiser.

Then the rest of it floods back and I’m wishing I could return to my dream.

Outside, hulks of cars dot the roadway and moon shadows of branches shift back and forth in the wind. Like many places, the streets turn surreal and creepy at night.

Something moves outside the window.

Before I can identify the shadow, it taps on the window.

I yelp.

Silently, my mother clutches my arm, urgently dragging me down into the footwell with her.

“It’s me, Clara,” whispers the shadow.

A key turns and the driver’s door opens. Luckily, someone has turned the car’s overhead light off so we’re not a beacon.

Her too-thin form slips into the driver’s seat.

“You’re the dead woman,” says my mother. “All shriveled up and looking like you crawled out of the grave.”

“She’s not dead, Mom.” I climb up from the footwell and sit on the seat.

“I sometimes wish I were,” says Clara. She turns on the engine, which sounds startlingly loud.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Getting you out of here. Away from these horrible people.” The car moves into a wide S-curve to avoid other cars.

“Turn off the headlights,” I say. “They’ll attract too much attention.”

“It’s the daytime lights. They can’t be turned off.”

As she swerves around the obstacles, our lights hit Mom’s stack of bodies. Apparently, no one wanted to touch them despite Obi’s orders.

The gruesome-looking body sitting on top of the stack sluggishly tries to raise his hand to shield against the light.

“The dead are being resurrected,” says my mother. She sounds excited, like she always knew this would happen.

“He wasn’t dead, Mom.”

“You were the first to be resurrected,” says Mom. “The first of the dead.”

“I wasn’t dead either,” I say.

“I hope he finds his family and they accept him back,” says Clara. Her tone makes it clear she doubts it.

I try not to think about the rest of the victims.

Ironically, my mother may have saved the only scorpion victims who will survive this night.

ONCE WE put some distance between ourselves and the Resistance headquarters, Clara stops the car so I can sit shotgun. Since my mother doesn’t want to be in the backseat jail any more either, we all cram into the front seat with me in the middle.

“Thank you, Clara,” I say. “How did you get the key?”

“Dumb luck,” she says. “Those twins with the funny names dropped it just a few feet away from me.”

“They… dropped it?” Those guys are the most skilled sleight-of-hand tricksters I’ve ever seen. Hard to imagine either of them dropping anything.

“Yeah, they were juggling a bunch of things between them as they walked. The key just fell and they didn’t notice.”

“But you did.”

“Sure.”

“How did you know it was the key to our police car?”

She lifts the key tag to show me. It’s a clear plastic holder that’s probably meant for pictures. This one frames a piece of paper with a note scrawled in little-kid block letters: “Penryn’s police car—Super Secret.”

If I ever see the twins again, it looks like I owe them a zombie-girl mud fight.

“I hope they don’t get in trouble,” says Clara. “They seem like good guys.”

“I’d be surprised if anyone knew they ever had the key. Don’t worry, they won’t get in trouble.” But I’m guessing one of their archenemies might.

Mom whispers urgently beside me into a cell phone, having a conversation with someone who isn’t there.

“So where should we go?” asks Clara.

That darkens my mood. Such a simple question. I can’t even begin to think through this. Both Mom and Clara are older than I am, but somehow they assume I’ll figure it out.

Paige is gone. And that dead body she was standing over…

I shut my eyes to try to blot out the image, which only makes it worse. The blood on her face wasn’t hers, I’m sure of it. Either she will hunt people or people will hunt her. Maybe both.

I can’t bear the thought of either. If they catch her, they’ll treat her the way the Resistance people did—tie her up like an animal or kill her. If she catches them…

Don’t think about it.

But I have to think about it, don’t I? I can’t leave her out there alone, desperate, and scared.

The Resistance will probably be looking for her in the morning. If we can find her first, maybe we can somehow figure out a way to deal with her problems. But how do we find her?

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s go a few towns away from the Resistance, then hide out until we can figure out what to do.”

“Good idea,” says Clara, who is looking at the sky as much as the road.

“No,” says Mom pointing ahead with one hand and holding the cell phone in the other. “Keep going. Paige went this way.” She sounds sure of herself.

There’s something odd about her cell phone. It’s bigger and clunkier than normal. It looks vaguely familiar.

“Is that a phone?” I reach for it.

“No!” Mom snatches it away and cradles her body protectively around it. “It’s not for you, Penryn. Not now, not ever.”

My mother has a different relationship with inanimate objects than most of us do. Sometimes, a light switch is just a light switch. Until it isn’t.

Out of nowhere, after years of using the same switch to turn on the light, she became convinced that she needed to flip it back and forth to save the city of Chicago. After that, it was just another light switch. Until the day when she needed to flip it back and forth to save New York City.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’s the devil.”

“The devil is a small black box?” It doesn’t matter, of course. It never does. But for some reason, I want her to tell me about it. Maybe it will jog my memory about what it is and where I’ve seen it before.

“The devil talks to me through the small black box.”

“Oh.” I nod, trying to think of something else to say. “How about we throw it away then?” If only it could be that simple.

“Then how are we going to find your sister?”

The conversation is bound to go in big circles. I’m wasting time.

My mother shifts and I get a glimpse of the phone’s screen. It’s a map of the Bay Area with yellow arrows pointing to two spots.

I know that display. I remember it from something my dad brought home once. “That’s Dad’s prototype.”

Mom shoves it behind her back as if worried that I’ll take it.

“I can’t believe you stole this and let him get fired for it.” No wonder he left us.

“He didn’t like that job anyway.”

“He loved that job. He was totally broken up over losing it. Don’t you remember him looking everywhere for this thing?”

“His company didn’t need it as much as I did. The devil wanted me to have it. It wasn’t theirs to keep.”

“Mom…” What’s the point?

If he hadn’t gotten fired for losing the prototype, he would have gotten fired for something else Mom did anyway. It’s hard to be an engineer when your wife calls you every two minutes. And if he didn’t answer the call, she called the receptionist or his boss or random coworkers to find out if he was okay. And if nobody answered, then he might get a surprise visit from the police, wanting to talk to him about how his wife freaked out in public, screaming and yelling that they had gotten to her husband.

“What is that?” asks Clara.

“A prototype device for tracking pets,” I say. “It uses a tiny tracker. Waterproof and impact resistant. My dad showed it to us once. Apparently, my mom liked it a lot.”

“He was an engineer?”

“He was,” I say. I don’t tell her that by the time he finally left us, he was working night shifts at 7-Eleven, our nearest convenience store, where Mom could sit in the corner while he worked the cash register.

“My husband Brad was an engineer, too,” she says wistfully, almost to herself.

On my mom’s device, the arrow blinks and follows a path. Its target is on the move.

“What are we tracking?” I ask.

“Paige,” says Mom.

“How do you know this is Paige?” I ask, pretty sure this is another fantasy. It’s one thing to have Dad’s tracking device. It’s another to actually be tracking Paige, considering she needs to have the transmitter on her.

“The devil tells me.” She lowers her head, looking troubled. “If I promise him certain things,” she mumbles.

“Okay.” I rub my forehead, trying to be patient. There’s a certain art to getting information out of my mom. You need one foot in reality and one foot in her world to get a better picture of what she’s talking about. “How does the devil know where Paige is?”

She looks up at me as if I’d asked the dumbest question in the world.

“The transmitter, of course.”