Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (15 page)

Maybe because I’d stolen the bike, I parked it just outside the front door to this convenience store five or six miles away from the checkpoint so I could keep an eye on it while I went inside. People were kind of desperate, and I didn’t want someone else to steal it from me. The store owners were closing because they were supposed to evacuate, too. But they were torn between safety and greed. I wasn’t the only person hoping to buy something quick. There were five of us in line when the sheriff came in, and all of the others had what looked to be the last of the store’s water and Gatorade in their arms. I had, I discovered, two bucks on me, which was just enough for a Tiger’s Milk bar.

The sheriff was a paunchy guy, and he was wearing a breathing mask. The rest of us, of course, were just sucking in plain old radiation air. But he pulled the mask down so it was hanging around his neck when he said to the man and woman behind the counter, “You need to close up shop now. Let these people buy what they want, but no one else comes in. I want this place locked and you folks on your way in two minutes.”

They nodded and the woman, who I guess owned the place
with her husband, said to me, “What’s your name?” when I was handing her my two dollars. She was in her fifties and just trying to be maternal.

“Emily Shepard,” I said. It was a reflex.

“Shepard. I just heard that name on the radio,” the man beside her told me, trying to recall the context. He snapped his fingers and went on, “Your father—your parents—” And then abruptly he stopped. Just shut up mid-sentence.

The person behind me in line, a tall, thin dude in his late twenties with a green John Deere ball cap who was already seriously agitated, took my shoulder and spun me around to look at me. “It was your dad who did this?” he said, part question and part statement. For a second no one said a thing. Then, suddenly, everyone in line was screaming at once, at me and at each other. It was madness. This couple behind him, a man and a woman who were old enough to be my parents but were unbelievably skanky, each grabbed one of my arms, and the woman kind of leaned into me and said with the worst beer breath ever, “We’ve lost our house! Because of your fucking father, we’ve lost our house! What have you done?”

Instinctively I wriggled free and looked at the sheriff, who was already trying to get between me and these two screwballs. He was pissed, I could tell, and at first I was relieved because I thought he was going to give these lunatics a piece of his mind. Nope. He was actually pissed at me. “Young lady, we’re going to need to talk to you. You’re going to have to come with me right now.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“I didn’t say you did. But we need to know what happened. We need to know what you know. Come with me.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“Have you done something wrong?”

Looking back, he was probably just being sarcastic, like,
Why would we arrest you? It’s not like you’ve done something wrong
. But the people in line were staring and yelling about how people were dead and more were going to die and they’d all lost their homes, and
all I could hear were words like “cancer” and “ruined” and “meltdown.” Words like “your father.” These people didn’t know me or my father, but they hated us both. They hated me. And I thought about what I had overheard back at the staging area.

Whole family: fucking despicable
.

There’ll be a cover-up. Blame the dead people
.

They had a daughter. They’ll make her testify. Talk about what an alcoholic her dad was
.

“No,” I answered the sheriff, “I haven’t done anything.” But I don’t know if what I said even registered with him, because the people behind him wanted to lynch me, and other people were streaming into the store to try and buy last-minute provisions and hoping there might be some water and bread left. The sheriff screamed at the owners, “I want these people gone now! And I want that door locked! Do you hear me?”

And that’s when I ran. I took that second to escape. I didn’t know what was in store for me, but it was clear that everyone loathed me and everyone loathed my dad, and even if they didn’t arrest me, they were going to make me say horrible things about my family. When the sheriff tried to herd the mob away from me and get the owners to lock the door, I bolted. I didn’t look back when they were yelling at me to stop, and I didn’t dare turn around because even a millisecond might be all they’d need to catch me. I hopped on the seat of my bike and pedaled as hard and as fast as I could, weaving like a crazy person through the traffic jams. And I mean this: I didn’t look back until I had gone at least a couple of miles.

Like I said, the biking was hard, especially when the adrenaline from my escape was gone. I knew a few boys at school who were serious bicyclists: they clipped into their pedals with those special shoes and wore yellow bike jerseys. Their bikes weighed as much as a fat cat or a small dog.

The bike I stole wasn’t like that. It was a mountain bike. And I figured out pretty quickly that a mountain bike actually sucks if you are trying to bike up a mountain. They should only call them off-road bikes. Or, maybe, really flat-road bikes. But it had lots of gears and that helped. And when even in a granny gear I couldn’t muscle my way up a hill, I would just get off the bike and walk the damn thing. I tried to be happy that at least it wasn’t raining.

Besides, there were some stretches during the first two hours when I couldn’t go very fast anyway. The roads were still packed with people trying to get away. It was so sad. Just these long lines of Vermonters who were terrified of the radiation or terrified that they were about to lose every single thing they owned. Sometimes people who were better bicyclists than I was would pass me, and sometimes people on motorcycles would pass me. Sometimes I would pass walkers. We would all just kind of grunt at each other. No one with a vehicle offered to give me a lift because often I was making better time than they were—which, as I said, still wasn’t all that fast. I would peek into the cars and trucks, and people’s faces said it all: numbness and horror and shock. I would glance at the things they thought were important and had chosen to bring: the computers—laptops and desktops—the paintings, the photo albums, the pillows, the quilts, the brown bags of groceries. The gallon jugs of water. Water and computers: it fascinated me. Lots of the people who weren’t driving were staring at their iPads and tablets for news.

And then there were all those animals, and every one of them made me think of my Maggie.

It was like we were all trying to reach some seashore with an ark before everything fell completely apart.

When I thought about anything other than my family or running away myself, I thought of how I had stolen the bike I was on. I’d never stolen anything before. I wasn’t even the kind of kid who would pocket a tube of Bubble Yum from the general store in Reddington. I guess the bike was the start of my whooshing down the
slippery slope that eventually would have me stealing pretty much whatever I needed to survive.

Was I more scared than everyone in those cars and trucks? I guess in some ways. I mean, unlike all of them I was positive that my parents had just died. And I was convinced that somehow my dad was responsible for this nightmare. Or at least partly responsible. And, yeah, I felt like a marked person. I felt like people were after me, too. Does that excuse my stealing a bike? Probably not. But it explains it. I really was on the edge of delirious. I may have looked like just another refugee on a bike, but I was close to the kind of emotional meltdown that would have made my outburst at the checkpoint look downright mild.

Eventually, of course, the traffic opened up. While a lot of us were going west, we would hit different roads going south and cars would peel off. There was always a steady stream and it was always going in one direction (away, away), but it started to move. By now it was late afternoon, but this was June and so the sun wasn’t going to set for hours. There was a part of me that was beginning to wonder what I was going to do after dark: Should I stop? Should I sleep? Should I just keep going? And if I did stop, where? I had no idea if I was still getting dumped on by radiation, so I decided I would just forge ahead. Like everyone else, now I just wanted to get as far away from the Kingdom as I could.

When I reached another hill at about five-thirty, I got off my bike again and started pushing it up the shoulder. I had gone maybe half a mile when a bread truck pulled up beside me and stopped. I didn’t really have the antennae for bad shit then that I do now, but fortunately it didn’t matter. The fellow driving it was wearing a brown jacket with both his name and the bakery’s on it. His name was Sandy and he looked about fifty-five or sixty, but he had thick white hair and the sort of deeply lined hands I always associated with the dairy farmers I knew.

“Need a lift?” he asked me.

I paused and he must have sensed my hesitation.

“I don’t bite,” he said. “I understand if you don’t want to get in. But I have three granddaughters and a pair of grandsons. Some are in Jeffersonville and some are in Essex Junction. I promise you, I’m harmless.”

Suddenly I was exhausted. All the air went out of me like a popped balloon. I was tired and hungry and thirsty. Unbelievably thirsty. It had been hours since I’d had even a sip of water. I nodded. “Yes. Thanks,” I muttered, my voice beaten and hoarse.

He pulled off the road a few feet ahead of me so the cars behind him could pass and turned off the ignition. He jumped out, opened the back doors, and then lifted the bike into the back, leaning it between the racks of bread and English muffins and hamburger buns. When I got in the front of the truck beside him, he must have sensed that I was in a bad way. Without asking me what I wanted, he reached into a little red Igloo cooler and pulled out a bottle of water for me. Then he reached behind him and grabbed a loaf of bread off the nearest rack. He unspooled the twist tie and handed me a couple of slices.

“Obviously we’re not supposed to do this,” he said, and then he took a piece for himself. “But I don’t think today anyone’s going to care.”

So, the robbery—the one where we almost wound up like Bonnie and Clyde’s gang in that very scary black-and-white photograph. It’s the one where a gang member is sitting in this field in his underwear with half his head shot off, but he’s still alive, and his wife is being dragged away from him by a guy in a necktie and another policeman. There are policemen everywhere in the photo, but Bonnie and Clyde have gotten away. I saw it on a special about the Clyde Barrow Gang I watched one afternoon with Ethan on the History Channel. How weird is that? There was actually a time in my life when I was watching the History Channel after school.

Anyway, Missy pulled off her gloves with her teeth and was
about to start trying to punch in the code to disarm the alarm at her aunt and uncle’s house with her fingers, but Trevor stopped her.

“No!” he hollered at her, and batted her arm down. “Fingerprints!”

She screamed that the code was gone, just gone, meaning gone from her head, but by then it was too late anyway. It went off, a car alarm but it seemed a lot louder: the horn was on the front porch, so it was practically over our heads. It was deafening and I know I screamed. Andrea did, too.