Georgia picked up a can of peaches and studied the label.
“Wish I knew,” she shrugged. “He won’t tell.”
“He’s keeping secrets?” Elle zipped her backpack shut, doing a final sweep of the supplies in the kitchen. “How bad do you think he was?”
“I don’t know.” Georgia threw the peach can into her own pack. “The thing is, most of the kids in juvie weren’t bad, they were just… lost. Like me. We didn’t mean to get off track, we just didn’t have anybody there to tell us we were doing the wrong thing.” An expression of profound sadness spread across her face. “It took the end of the world to change us.”
Elle bit her lip.
“The end changed everybody,” she whispered.
Jay slammed a duffel bag on the counter.
“That,” he announced, “is a freaking huge bag of ammunition for a girl your size. Where did you get all of this?”
“I’ve been collecting it,” Elle replied. “We don’t have much food, but we’ll have plenty of ammunition.”
“For two guns,” Georgia chuckled. “That’s overkill.”
“If you’ve got something good, don’t waste it,” Elle said. “Ammunition and food are the two most important things we could bring with us. The ammo goes. The blankets stay.”
“But it’s cold out there, Elle,” Pix complained.
“Trust me, you’re better off with more bullets than blankets,” Elle assured her. “There are bad people out there — people worse than the Klan. We want to be able to protect ourselves.”
“What about this bag?” Georgia asked.
“We’ll divide the ammo up between our packs,” Elle said. “And then the rest of it can stay in the duffel bag. Jay, you can carry it because you’re the strongest.”
Jay rolled his eyes.
“Right, stereotype the big guy.”
“Hey, it’s not my fault that you’re the oldest and the strongest,” Elle said. “We’ll all have an equal load to carry, believe me.”
It took just under an hour to finish packing. Pix, Flash and Georgia were each loaded with a backpack. Jay carried a bigger pack and the biggest duffel bag filled with Elle’s salvaged ammunition. Elle had already assembled her pack. It contained all of the necessary items: Water, purifying tablets, knives, matches, bandages and alcohol for cleaning open wounds, along with needles and thread.
“So.” Georgia blinked. “Are we ready? Can we go?”
Elle looked at the apartment and the view of the Santa Monica Beach. Sadness squeezed her heart like an icy fist. She would probably never come back to this place. She would be separated from the city that reminded her of her family for the rest of her life.
“Yeah,” she said. “We can go.”
Flash and Pixwere the first out the door, followed by Georgia. Jay lingered for a moment.
“It’s going to be okay,” he told her.
Elle met his gaze.
“Yeah,” she replied.
Elle walked out of the apartment last, shutting the door behind her. She climbed down the dark, dusty staircase, and met the others on Ocean Boulevard below. The salty sea breeze rustled her hair. She looked up at the city.
This time, she was saying goodbye for good.
Elle had carefully charted out their route in her mind. They would parallel the 405 Interstate, the San Diego Freeway, out of the city. They would merge onto Interstate 5, heading northbound. And then they would find themselves in the Tehachapi Hills, at Aunt and Uncle’s house.
“So, are your Aunt and Uncle friendly?” Georgia asked.
Elle shrugged. “If they’re still there, yeah.”
“Where exactly do they live?”
“The Tehachapi Hills. They have a ranch.”
“You left the safety of a ranch hidden in the mountains to go back to the city and look for your family?” Jay asked. “Why?”
Elle made a face.
Why did he think?
“So you think they’ll have food and supplies?” Jay continued, pretending he’d never asked a stupid question.
“That’s right,” Elle replied.
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“Nothing is safe, anymore. Or haven’t you noticed?” Elle sighed. “My aunt and uncle will be able to help us.”
“That’s awesome,” Flash remarked, looking up. “Hey. If their ranch is safe, why don’t we just stay there with them?”
Elle shook her head.
“No. They’re… involved with the military. With the militias that are fighting Omega. It’s too high risk.”
“Oh.” Flash looked crushed.Pix squeezed his shoulder.
“Why didn’t you just go back to live with your aunt and uncle after you escaped the Pits?” Pix asked. “Why did you choose to stay in the city?”
“I was hoping,” Elle whispered. “And I guess I was afraid to leave.”
“Hoping for what?”
Elle didn’t answer. She had been hoping that she would find her mother at some point. That she wasn’t dead. Elle had stayed in the city because it was her connection to the past — the world before Day Zero.
Now she was leaving, and she would put it behind her. All of it.
“So this is the freeway.” Georgia stared at the crumbling remains of a decrepit overpass. “Are you sure it’s okay to follow this out of the city?”
“Of course it’s not okay,” Elle snorted. “But we don’t really have any other choice. I don’t want to get lost, so we’re going to parallel the road.”
“What if there are bandits or something on the highway?”
“We’re very well armed,” Elle said with confidence she didn’t feel. “Come on. We need to start before it gets too dark. The Klan comes out at night, and Omega patrols certain parts of the city during the day.”
They climbed the on ramp to the freeway. A Chinese restaurant adjacent to the highway had been blown apart. They stepped onto the freeway itself. Miles of vehicles stretched as far as the eye could see.
“It looks like a river of metal,” Pix commented.
“None of them work anymore?” Georgia sighed.
“Not if they had an electronic ignition,” Pix explained, brightening. “See, an electromagnetic pulse disables anything that functions with a computer chip. A pulse bomb can come from anything — a nuclear bomb detonated in the atmosphere, or even a solar flare.”
“This was no solar flare,” Elle said sharply. “This was an attack.”
Her words hung in the air for a moment.
“Yeah,” Pix said at last. “It wasn’t an accident.”
They walked. In some places, the cars were so tightly packed together that they had to climb on hoods and roofs to get through. There were remnants of a past civilization inside the vehicles — cracked, broken cellphones, GPS devices and MP3 players.
Georgia peeked through the window of a blue hatchback. She stifled a gasp and jumped backward.
“There’s a dead person in the car!” Georgia said.
“Keep it down, will you?” Elle snapped. “Your voice is echoing.”
“But there’s—”
“—I know, I know.” Elle gave her shoulder a brief squeeze. “Keep a sharp lookout, okay?”
Georgia turned to Jay and he murmured something to her — probably words of comfort. Elle wanted to roll her eyes, but she didn’t. These kids hadn’t seen half of the things Day Zero had dished out. They were still getting used to the dead bodies.
They’d learn soon enough.
As they trudged forward, Georgia kept her gaze straight ahead, refusing to look through the windows of any of the vehicles on the road. She had gone pale. Elle remembered when she was like that.
Georgia would harden.
They all would.
“I had a whole network built,” Georgia explained, grinning devilishly. They were camped on the side of a foothill, tucked away in a crevice, out of sight of the road. Elle and the others warmed their hands in front of a small fire they had built.