Hope and Undead Elvis (8 page)

In spite of the hot sun, she shivered. "I wish Gabe was still with us."

Undead Elvis touched her breastbone in an intimate but nonsexual way, the touch of a friend. "He's still with you in here. That was a hell of a shot to avenge him, Li'l lady. Where'd you learn to shoot like that?"

"You taught me."

"How many bullets you got left?"

"Five." She stared back at the patch of flowers where Gabe had fallen, and the blackening crimson stain where the man-bird-thing had crumpled. "What is that?"

"The enemy."

"Is it a bird or a man?"

"Neither, I'd guess."

"You didn't see it fly or walk in?"

"No, Li'l lady. I wasn't payin' attention. Got lost in my songwriting. I'm awful sorry about that."

"Two fewer eyes without Gabe around," she said. "If we're going to survive a trip all the way to Graceland, however far that actually is, you're going to have to work harder."

He nodded. "I'm not afraid of a little hard work. Never was."

"Do you think he was an angel?"

"I don't know, but he was a good person. He came to your aid when you needed it."

Hope sat in the driver's seat of The Way and adjusted the bench as best she could. The car wasn't comfortable, but at least that should help her stay awake. She yawned. "I wish I could take a nap. That short one didn't get me rested at all. Do you want to drive?"

"I don't think so, Li'l lady."

"Are you sure?" Hope wiggled the shifter. "I've never driven a stick before. Don't even know how, honestly."

"It's not hard. And you're right. I don't think we should stick around here any longer." He pointed toward the trees. Hope followed the line of sight from his finger.

A black bird perched on a low branch, watching them with its beady little eyes.

With Undead Elvis coaching her, Hope managed to let out the clutch slow enough not to stall the car. She turned around on the gravel patch and ran The Way down the road in first gear until remembering to shift up. Paradise faded away behind them, swallowed up by the sea of sand dunes as if it had never existed. As she looked in her rear view mirror, the gravel track seemed to vanish. She suspected that if they stopped, the disappearing road would overtake them and leave them stranded in the middle of the desert. That fear made her hammer down the accelerator until The Way fishtailed around a corner like a skittish wild mare. She panicked, jammed both feet on the brake, and stalled the engine.

"Easy, Li'l lady," said Undead Elvis into the silence marred by the ticking of hot oil in the motor. "We don't have to get there tonight."

Hope made herself relax her hands, which were wrapped white-knuckled around the dirty white plastic steering wheel. "I'm sorry," she said. "I was afraid of this road disappearing and then we'd be stuck in the sand again."

"It is disappearing, but it's waiting to advance until we move again."

Hope looked behind again and couldn't see the gravel track any longer. She opened the door and leaned out to look back. The gravel stopped under The Way's rear bumper.

"God," she said. "I don't understand anything about how the world is supposed to be now."

Undead Elvis leaned back and laced his blue fingers behind his head behind his head. "I wouldn't even try too hard, Li'l lady. Otherwise, I might up and disappear on you too. And I'm pretty sure neither of us wants that. Uh-huh."

"Will it ever make sense again?"

"I dunno." He turned his head a little. "Don't forget the clutch when you start it up again."

"I won't. I'm not really blonde."

Undead Elvis snickered.

"Probably the last bottle job I'll ever have. I'm sure there aren't any more now." She pulled down the visor and checked her reflection. God, she looked so old. Or maybe she was just tired. Either way, her mouse-brown roots were already peeking from underneath locks the color of corn silk.

When would her face start showing her pregnancy? She'd always heard about the healthy glow of pregnant women, but Hope saw nothing but exhaustion in her eyes and skin. She stuck her tongue out at herself, a juvenile gesture that made her feel a little better, and then slapped the visor back up to the roof.

Clutch in… key turned… and The Way's engine returned to its throaty rumble once more. Hope drove with more caution and had no further losses of control. As she glanced in the mirror from time to time, she could see the gravel track disappearing into the dunes behind them as if it had never existed. "Hey, the fruit isn't vanishing, is it?"

"No, Li'l lady," said Undead Elvis after checking the bed through the broken window.

"Well, that's something."

"Sure is."

"There's the road up ahead." The paved two-lane highway stretched through the desert sands like a black ribbon on a pale golden package. "Which way to Graceland from here?"

Undead Elvis didn't hesitate. "Left."

"Left it is." As Hope slowed, she flipped on the turn signal. Just because the world had ended didn't mean she couldn't follow the old rules. It made her feel comfortable to do so. She even kept her speed at fifty-five once on the main road, not because she expected to get pulled over, but because she needed to feel something hadn't changed.

She glanced down at the fuel gauge. It hadn't moved in all the time she'd been in the car. Maybe it was frozen in time like the sun. Did that mean they could drive forever? "Hey, Elvis, how much gas do you think we have?"

"More than none."

"Enough to get to Graceland?"

"I dunno."

"What if we run out?"

"We can try to find some more."

Hope shivered. "What if there isn't any more?"

"Then we'll walk."

Hope sighed. One thing she already understood about the change to the world was that questioning Undead Elvis was about as effective as shaking up a Magic Eight Ball. Sometimes it infuriated her how vague he could be, even though he was giving her the best answer he had.

To stop thinking about gas and mileage, she said, "So if I'm Mother Mary, does that make you Joseph?"

Undead Elvis shrugged. "I don't know, Li'l lady."

"Because we're not, you know, married. I never understood that part of the story, anyway. Why get married to someone and then not consummate it?"

"Maybe Joseph was undead, like me."

Hope brayed unexpected laughter. Undead Elvis's deadpan delivery had caught her like the best standup comics. She wiped tears of amusement away. "If you weren't already dead, you might go to hell for saying something so sacrilegious."

Undead Elvis looked down at his boots. "I shouldn't have joked about it. My momma raised me better than that."

Hope smiled. "It's all right. If anybody's going to hell here, it's me."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because it's true. I haven't lived a very good life. I'm a stripper. That's maybe one step up from being a whore. I've done things with men, things I'm not proud of. Things a girl sometimes has to do to survive in this world. Or at least, as it used to be."

"But you never slept with any of them."

"No."

"Why not?"

Hope didn't answer right away. She let the hot desert air lick the moisture from her skin and whip her hair through the open window as The Way ate up the road. "I don't know, exactly," she said at last. "It's like I was saving myself for someone important. Maybe I was saving myself for this and just didn't know it. It's not like I never had any opportunities to put out. Strippers get propositioned all the time. And there were other men when I wasn't working, and boys before them. I just never felt like going all the way with any of them." She sighed. "I came close a few times, though. And I've sucked more cocks than I care to think about."

Undead Elvis shifted in his seat and she wondered if she'd made him uncomfortable. On the heels of that thought, she wondered how an undead person could even be uncomfortable.

"I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that. You're a good listener. Easy to talk to."

"My pleasure, Li'l lady."

The Way rolled on down the highway as it followed the lay of the land. On occasion the road would wind around a dune of exceptional size or dip between them, but for the most part their course remained straight. Hope drove in silence, letting the drone of the engine drive uncomfortable thoughts about motherhood and the state of the world from her mind. The sand to either side of the road became less distinct as The Way covered mile after mile. Hope couldn't tell how far they'd traveled, for the odometer was frozen at 65,536 miles.

She jerked awake in sudden fear. She'd been asleep at the wheel!

Undead Elvis sat beside her, a calming paragon, one hand on the steering wheel.

"You let me fall asleep!"

"You looked like you needed it."

"I do! God, I'm tired enough to sleep for a week, but you let me fall asleep while I was driving!"

"I'd have awakened you if something came up. You were doing just fine. I just had to nudge it left or right once in awhile."

"Don't ever do that again! I've got a b—" Hope's eyes widened as she realized what she'd been about to blurt.
I've got a baby to think about!

So there it was. Maybe her biological time card got punched after all. She was pregnant, and she felt protective of the little cluster of cells embedded somewhere within her uterus. She took one white-knuckled hand from the wheel to touch her tummy, wondering what it would be like to be a mother.

"I'm sorry, Li'l lady."

"It's okay. You meant well. Scared me half to death, though." Then Hope really
looked
at the world beyond the road and realized it had changed.

Red rocks poked up through the sand. As they drove, the rocks became more prevalent until they'd replaced the sand as the predominant landscape feature. The Way's engine took on a more plaintive note. Hope's ears popped and she swallowed hard and then yawned to try to clear them. She let up on the accelerator for a moment and The Way slowed. "Feel that? I think we're going uphill."

"Sure seems like it."

"What do you think we'll find?"

"The top."

Hope rolled her eyes. "Funny man."

What they found, it turned out, was a bridge.

Chapter Nine

Hope and the Bridge

At one point, the bridge would have crossed a canyon lined by rocks in a thousand shades of red from pale salmon to dark cherry. The central span had collapsed, leaving only the steel ramps and miscellaneous torn support structure on either side of the chasm.

Hope shut off The Way and got out. Undead Elvis followed her to the cliff edge and they looked into the canyon in silence. The air was cooler than it had been amid the sands, but as still as ever. The unmoving sun beating down upon them was tolerable instead of miserable. The myriad colors in the rocks felt like a vacation for Hope's eyes after the unending golden blur of the desert below.

A pale stripe along the canyon floor, hundreds of feet below, suggested whatever river had carved such a gash in the world had dried up to leave only more sand behind. Hope toed a small rock over the edge. It clattered down the face, dislodging a few pebbles along the way. She watched it fall until she lost sight of it.

Hope said, "When I was a kid, my mom took me to the Grand Canyon. I remember standing with my face pressed against a guard rail, looking down into it, and thinking that giants must have made it because nothing else could make such a deep hole. It might have been ten times as deep and wide as this. It was beautiful. This one here just breaks my heart." She looked over at the broken bridge. "What do we do now?"

"
Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.
"

"What does that mean?"

"Just a line from a poem. Seemed like an apt metaphor for our situation, Li'l lady."

"I don't need a metaphor, Elvis, I need a bridge. What do we do now? We can't go along the edge looking for another way across. This could go on for hundreds of miles, and The Way can't drive along that edge." She motioned to the jagged rocks that made up the landscape to either side of the road.

"We could go back and try to find another way."

"What if there isn't one?"

"What if there is?"

Hope stamped her foot. "You're not helping. We were lucky to find this road at all. Which way is Graceland?"

Undead Elvis pointed toward the far side of the canyon.

"Then that's the way we need to go. Somehow." She yawned so hard she thought she might split her head in two. "God, I'm so tired, I can't think. Will you watch me, Elvis? Watch me while I sleep?"

"Of course."

They found a protruding rock behind which lay a narrow strip of shade. Hope didn't mind the rough ground in the least as she flung herself down into the shadow. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, taking comfort from the fetal position. She fell asleep in between the inhalation and exhalation of her first deep breath.