Rita Mae returned in less than an hour, carrying a backpack stuffed with food and drugs. Floyd woke Darla up and gave her a glass of water, two Tylenol, and a Cipro tablet. I held her hand for no more than a minute before she fell back asleep.
Everyone else bedded down on the cots, close to the small fire. I dragged my blankets into Darla’s room and wrapped them around myself, sitting on the chair by her bed. Soon I was asleep.
Darla haunted my dreams. She was naked and curled into a ball, alone in a vast white space. She curled up tighter and tighter, and her skin turned red and blistered, as if from sunburn. I screamed, “Darla!” but she couldn’t hear me. I ran toward her, but she receded faster than I could run. Purple and green and yellow blotches crawled across her skin, and she hunkered down even further, into an impossibly small ball. Suddenly her skin was black and charring, and then there were flames. Darla was burning before my eyes. The flames jumped and lit Mom, who was somehow beside her, and they jumped again and burned Dad. Everything charred to ash.
Alyssa crawled toward me, blocking the cinders of my family from view. She was naked and above me, her breasts swaying pendulously, hypnotically. I was excited and ashamed. She called to me seductively, “Alex. .,” and I lifted my head toward her.
I woke up. “Alex! Alex!” Alyssa was above me, fully clothed. And she was shaking my shoulder and yelling my name, although it was in no way seductive. And I could hear! Not well, maybe, but well enough to understand her.
“Yeah?” I mumbled.
“You said you wanted to leave in four hours,” she said. “It’s time.”
“Thanks,” I said. Alyssa left, and I stood, turning toward Darla. “You okay?” I asked as her eyes opened.
“Shoulder hurts,” she said. “I’ll live. How about you?”
“I’m okay. Now that I found you.” Suddenly I recalled what finding her had cost. My dad slamming the shifter into reverse. I choked back a sob.
Darla reached out with her good hand, drawing me down into an embrace, and I bawled into the comforting semi-circle of her arm. “Shh,” she said.
When my tears subsided, I whispered, “Things are never going to be the same again, are they?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought that finding my parents would change things. Would. . well, I knew things wouldn’t go back to the way they were before the volcano, but I thought they’d get better.”
“Get better how?”
“I guess I thought I wouldn’t have to carry everything on my own shoulders, every decision. It’s-I don’t always know what’s right. Sometimes I think it’d be nice to be a little kid again, to leave the weightiest decisions to my parents.”
“Alex,” Darla said, her face serious, “you haven’t been a kid for a long time now.”
“And now I never will be again.”
“No.”
I was afraid I’d start bawling again, so I changed the subject. “You, how did you-I was afraid they’d flense you or. .”
“Danny didn’t want to flense me. He thought I was cute.” Darla’s face twisted with disgust. “He was going to let me heal and then make me. . take me to bed.”
“Rape you.” I held the rail of her cot in one hand, gripping it so hard I wondered if it might crumple in my fist.
“Yeah. But Alyssa went missing, and he had to send a girl to the Dirty White Boys as a replacement. I was handy.”
I sat down, rested my head against her shoulder, and listened.
“The truck broke down on the way. Radiator problem. I told them how to fix it. So when I got to Iowa City, I wound up repairing stuff for them instead of filling a bed in their whorehouse, thank God.”
“Yeah,” I replied, as gently as I could manage. “You had a lockpick and a weapon-why were you still there?”
“Look at me. I’m weak. And sick. I wouldn’t eat the meat the DWBs offered me, so I never got enough food to get stronger. And I never found the right moment to use my lockpick and shank until you showed up.”
“The important thing is that you survived,” I said. “Nothing else matters to me.”
“Well it matters to me!” Darla snapped.
An overwhelming gratitude flooded me. I’d been insanely lucky to find her amid the chaos of Iowa. Words failed me, and I hugged her gently instead.
Then she pushed me back out to arm’s length. “I’ve seen the way Alyssa looks at you.”
“I rescued her and Ben. At first I thought she was you.”
“There’s more than gratitude in her eyes.”
“Yeah. She tried to-”
“I knew it! I swear to God, I’ll shank that bitch.”
“Darla, no, it’s okay. She found a way to protect herself and her brother when she was with the Peckerwoods, and she’s still falling back on that-on using sex to survive.”
“It’s wrong.”
“Give her a break. What’s wrong is that she felt she had to-that she had no other options.”
“I don’t trust her.”
“You don’t have to trust her. You can trust me.”
Darla stared into my eyes for a pregnant moment, then pulled me back into a hug.
“I saved this for you,” I said, pulling away from her embrace. I extracted the broken chain from my pocket.
Darla’s eyes shone as she fished the 15/16ths nut I’d given her out of her own pocket. “It was stuck in the layers of my shirts. I fiddled with it when things were bad. It helped.”
I threaded the nut onto my broken chain and knotted it behind Darla’s neck. “We should get moving.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were rolling away from Worthington. Rita Mae had gotten everything I wanted, although she scolded me about not giving her enough time to negotiate properly. She’d also spent part of the night taping plastic over the broken windows of our truck. I hoped I’d see her again-she was one of the few people I trusted.
Mom offered to drive, which I took as a good sign that she might be emerging from her daze. But her hands trembled and her voice quavered, so I told her no. She didn’t argue, which struck me as a strange role reversal.
The black night faded to gray and then to a suppurated yellow as we drove. With the increased visibility, I punched our speed up to about forty. The roads were too uneven and slick to go any faster.
The fuel gauge read three-quarters. I thought that would be enough to reach Warren. Maybe. If we didn’t wreck or have to take a massive detour on the way.
Alyssa navigated. We avoided all the big towns and as many of the small burgs as we could. The few we did pass through were burned and abandoned.
When she wasn’t busy plotting our route, Alyssa brushed Ben. He didn’t seem to need it-given everything we’d been through, he was holding up remarkably well. Maybe she was brushing him to comfort herself.
I didn’t want to cross the Mississippi on any bridge. I assumed they’d all be watched, either by Black Lake or one of the gangs. Nor did I want to get anywhere near Lock #12 and the barges of wheat Black Lake defended. Instead, we found a boat ramp between the lock and Sabula, Iowa, and used it to drive out onto the frozen expanse of the Mississippi.
On the far side of the river, I pulled the truck into a cove where we were sheltered by trees. We ate a breakfast of cold cornmeal mush, beef jerky, and dandelion leaves. I didn’t leave the truck running, but the warmth from the heater lingered long enough to keep us fairly comfortable during breakfast.
As we ate, I sat sideways in my seat, watching Darla. Her face was more angular, her cheeks concave with hunger and illness. But she was here, beside me. The miracle of it left me breathless. I stretched out a hand to hold hers.
After breakfast I asked, “Can I check your fever?” I placed the back of my hand against Darla’s forehead.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I think the Tylenol is working.”
I thought her forehead still felt hot, and she was slumped against the seat. “We should go.”
I started the truck and pulled out of the cove. It took more than an hour to find a way off the ice of the Mississippi. We moved slowly in Illinois, picking our way through the back roads, trying to avoid both Galena, where there was a Black Lake camp, and Stockton, where all the roads were blocked by their crazy wall of cars. It took us almost two hours to travel the last thirty miles to Warren.
We approached my uncle’s farm from the north-the same way Darla and I had arrived last year. I let my speed pick up a little in anticipation. Evidently there’d been a lot of traffic recently-when we left, there had been a few inches of unplowed snow on Canyon Park Road. Now it was packed solid.
I cruised up the last rise before the farm. But when I saw it, I slammed on the brakes, fishtailing to a shivering stop. The farm was gone. In its place there was an enormous, ramshackle tent city, swarming with people.