The moment she feels satisfied with the room’s security, a wave of exhaustion washes over her. She plops down on the bed next to Addis and stares out the window into the darkness. After a while she feels Addis looking at her. She senses another round of questions building in him.
“What, Addy,” she mumbles.
He doesn’t answer. She notices a slight tremble in his chin.
“What’s wrong?” she asks more gently.
“Mom and Dad…” he says. “Where did they go?”
Her lips press into a thin line. “I don’t know.”
“Why aren’t we looking for them?”
She hesitates, but she’s too tired to protect him anymore. She lets it out in a breath. “Because they’re not looking for us.”
Addis’s eyes focus on something far away. Nora braces herself, hoping he’s still young enough to accept this and move on the way he does with a skinned knee or a bee sting. A good, hard cry, then back to playing, though the pain is still there.
“They’re mean,” he mumbles, glowering at the sheets.
Nora takes a deep breath. “Yeah, they are. But Addy?” She puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay that they’re mean. You don’t have to feel bad about it.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause you’re smart and you’re cool, and Mom and Dad are just people. Same as Auntie Shirley, Kevin, anyone. Just because they made us doesn’t mean they are us. We’re smarter and cooler than them, and we don’t have to let what they do decide how we feel.”
He looks at the floor, doesn’t answer.
Nora raises an eyebrow at him. “At least…I’m smart and cool. Aren’t you smart and cool?”
He lets out a heavy sigh. “Yeah.”
“I thought so.”
“I’m super smart and super cool.”
“I knew it.” She raises a palm. He slaps it weakly. “You ready for bed?”
Instead of answering, he craw crine rls under the covers and curls into a ball with his back to her. Five minutes later, he’s snoring. She sits there for a while, watching his breaths rise and fall under that hideous teal blanket. How much longer will simple logic and guidance-counselor pep talks be able to numb his wounds? Or hers, for that matter?
She slips under the blankets and stares at the mildewed ceiling. Despite her urgent exhaustion, her eyes won’t close. Then sometime around midnight, she glances out the window and sees a man watching her through the bars.
For Addis’s sake she stifles her scream. Biting her lip, her whole body shaking, she gets up and snaps the curtains shut. She stands there a moment, just breathing. She checks all the locks and turns in a slow circle, making sure there are no other doors or possible access points to the room. There aren’t. And the door, in addition to its six different locks, has steel hinges as thick as her thumb. The owner of this motel must have been an avid reader of the signs of the times. The room is a vault.
Clutching the Colt, she pulls the curtains back for one last peek. The man is still there. His eyes, now pewter gray instead of sky blue, slowly track over to meet hers. Other than the desaturation of his irises and skin, he hasn’t changed physically. He hasn’t begun to rot. But it’s astonishing how different he looks. He’s not quite empty, his eyes still show a dim light of awareness, but whoever he was before, he is no longer. His face fits him like a cheap Halloween mask.
Nora knows she should shoot him right now, tell Addis the bang was just another of his nightmares and soothe him back to sleep, but she decides to leave it till morning. The man could throw rocks through the window, maybe shove a piece of wood through the bars if he’s unusually motivated, but there really isn’t much he can do to hurt them through those narrow gaps. And she has to admit, violence seems to be the last thing on his mind, if he has such a thing anymore. He’s just standing there, hands limp at his sides, looking at her. If she had to take a guess at reading his expression, she would say he looks…lost.
She shuts the curtain and climbs back in bed. She doesn’t put the gun under her pillow as planned. She keeps it tight in her hand, safety off, polished steel cold against her thigh.
Julie watches the sun change from a fierce point of light to a sad orange blob that sags against the horizon like rotting fruit. She shivers when it disappears, imagining evil eyes snapping open in the shadowy trees, hungry mouths hissing at last, at last. She knows this is stupid; her fear of the dark makes her feel like a child instead of a strong and capable twelve-year-old. There are monsters in the dark, of course, plenty of them. But there are just as many in the light.
“Bedtime,” her father announces, and pulls off into a deserted rest stop alongside I-5. Julie’s legs are numb, so she gets out of the truck and paces around, stamping her feet to revive the nerves. Her father opens the rear doors and grabs his shotgun off the ceiling-mounted rack. The rack holds three weapons: a big Army-issue riot gun for him, an automatic twelve-gauge for his wife, and a twenty-gauge Mossberg Mini for his daughter, which he procured after noticing the bruises her big Remington was inflicting on her shoulder. He gave it to her for her tenth birthday. His thoughtfulness almost made her cry.
“What are you doing?” she asks him.
“Perimeter c fry.heck.” He starts toward the bathrooms.
“Hey Dad?”
He stops, turns.
“Is Seattle exed?”
“It’s still a question mark in the Almanac, but probably. Big cities take a while to survey.”