Racking up the felony charges over here. They’ll take him away from her—for good this time—arrest her, throw away the key, or worse. Is the death penalty a thing again in the current climate, what with the Reprohibition Accord to preserve life? Reckless endangerment of a male citizen is probably the worst crime. Worse even than what happened with Billie back there. Forty-eight, no, forty-nine minutes ago. She was so angry, so scared.
I never liked that sister of yours.
“Mom?” Miles says in the smallest voice, reeling her back from the memory, from going full panic stations.
“Sorry, tiger. I got lost there for a moment.” She holds his shoulders, admires his reflection. Tries to smile. “Looking good.”
“Really?” Sarcasm is healthy. Higher functioning. Not brain-damaged.
“You don’t have to like it. But this is who you have to be right now. You’re Mila.”
He flutters his thick eyelashes, purses his lips at the mirror. The duckface of contempt. “Mila.” She should get mascara, Cole thinks, distracted. Add it to the list. Food, money, gas, shelter, probably another car, keep switching them up, and then they can hit up the local Sephora for all the girly cosmetics a boy in drag could require.
“Wash your hands, you don’t want to get sick.”
“I’m immune, remember?”
“Tell that to all the other viruses out there. Wash your hands, tiger.”
When she cracks open the dented door to the outside world, there are no drones, no choppers, no sirens, no women in Kevlar with semiautomatics surrounding the perimeter. They haven’t found them—yet—and the SUV is still parked where she left it, under the shade cloth, ready to go.
“All clear.” She hustles him toward the car. Sorry, her. Get it right. She can’t afford to make a mistake. Any more mistakes.
Miles clambers into the vehicle obediently. She’s so grateful that he’s going with the flow, not asking questions (yet), because she’ll break if he does.
“You should lie down,” Cole says. “They’ll be looking for two people.”
“But where are we going, Mom?”
“Home.” The idea is ridiculous. Thousands of miles, whole oceans and now multiple felonies between them and ever seeing Johannesburg again. “But we gotta lay low in the meantime.” She says it for her own benefit as much as his. Hers.
“On the run. Like outlaws,” her daughter says, trying to rally.
“Even better than conartists! Cowgirl Cole and Mila the Kid.”
“Isn’t it ‘Billie the Kid’? Won’t she be mad I took her name?”
“You’re holding onto it till she catches up to us. Think of it as joint custody.”
“That’s not how names work.”
“Hey, last I checked, end of the world means normal rules don’t apply.” Levity as defense mechanism: discuss.
“Mom, where is Billie? I don’t remember what happened.”
Shit.
“She got in a fight with one of the guards when we were leaving.” Too glib. She can’t look at him. Sorry, her. “That’s why my shirt was messed up. But don’t worry! She’s fine. She’s going to catch up with us, okay?”
“Okay,” Mila says, frowning. And it’s not. Not really. But it’s what they’ve got.
They peel away from the gas station. The sky over Napa is a pastel blue with dry paintbrush swipes of cloud over vineyards run wild. Pale fields of grass twitch and shiver in the wind. These things make the fact of a murder distant and unseemly. Beauty allows for plausible deniability. Maybe that’s beauty’s entire function in the world, Cole thinks: that you can blind yourself with it.
2.
Vanishing Point
A city skyline is visible through a haze of heat in the distance like a mirage in the desert, promising junk food, a bed, maybe even TV—if all that still exists, Miles thinks. The roads are coated with bright yellow sand and scored with at least one set of tire tracks, so someone must have been through here before them, and they’re not the Last People Left on Earth, and they didn’t make The Worst Terrible Mistake leaving the safety of Ataraxia, even if it was like being in the fanciest prison in the world. #bunkerlife. It was definitely better than the army base, though.
“The sand looks like gold dust, doesn’t it?” Mom says, with her on-off telepathy. “We could pile it up and swim around in it and throw it over our heads.”
“Uh-huh.” He’s tired of being on the run already, and it hasn’t even been one day. His stomach clenches, although maybe that’s from hunger. He needs to get over his absolute hatred of raisins and eat the snack bars in the kit Billie put together for them. His mind does a record scratch on his aunt’s name…
There’s a thickness in his head he can’t shake, trying to piece together what happened last night, how they got here. He has to wade through his thoughts like Atreyu and Artax in The Neverending Story, sinking deeper into the swamp with every step. The fight with Billie. He’d never seen Mom so angry. They were fighting about him, because of what Billie said, her big idea, and he flushes with shame and disgust all over again. So gross. And then: nothing. He fell asleep on the couch, wearing headphones, and then Mom was driving like a maniac and crying and all the blood on her t-shirt and a dark stripe across her cheek, and now they’re here. It’s probably fine. Mom said it was fine. And she’ll tell him all the details, when she’s ready, she said. When they’re safe. Keep trudging through the swamp, he thinks. Don’t drown here.
He stares out the window, at a field of handmade crosses, hundreds and hundreds of them, painted in all different colors. More memorials to the dead, like the Memory Tree at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where everyone could put up photos of their dead dads and sons and brothers and uncles and cousins and friends who had died of HCV. Miles hated that stupid tree, him and his sorta-sometimes-kinda friend Jonas, the only other kid his age at the army base.
A pale square against the sky resolves itself into a faded billboard as they get closer, featuring a silver-haired guy and a blond lady wearing golf shirts and staring out across the desert with devout joy, like Moses and Lady Moses, looking toward the promised land, except someone has scrawled all over the man’s face, x-ed out his eyes, put scratchy lines over his mouth, like a skull or stitches. But why would you stitch up someone’s mouth, unless you were making shrunken heads? The image is letter-boxed with bold type: “Eagle Creek: Where Living Your Best Life Is Par for the Course!” and “Hurry! Phase Four Now Selling. Don’t Miss Out!”
Don’t miss out, Miles mouths to himself, because that’s how advertising works, and it’s got into Mom’s head too, because when they come up to the sign two miles down the way, the one that reads “Eagle Creek: Now On Show!,” she takes the turn.
“We’re going to check this out. Hole up for the rest of the day.”
“But the city’s right there!” he protests.
“We’re not ready for civilization yet. We don’t know what’s out there. It could have been annexed by a colony of cannibal bikers who want to turn us into tasty, tasty human bacon.”