Frost railed on for another half hour and then the house fell silent. I watched until the lights blinked out of the windows. And by then I’d decided what I was going to do.
Just didn’t see any other option. Sure, I was scared of Crow. And Frost. Scared of being caught and beat. Scared of being thrown out. No job meant no money and not enough juice to go finding more work. But I had a picture in my pocket of my father — wrapped in chains but still breathing, and somehow surrounded by what looked like a stand of real trees. That image burned through every thought in my head. It was damn near all I could see. I knew there’d be no calm without answers. And Zee was the only one who might give them to me.
I went round and round, thinking about Pop, thinking about the photograph. And then thinking about that skinny lass who’d dumped all this on my lap.
Now don’t be a damn idiot, I tried to tell myself as I stared at the house. But I figured if I could sneak Zee out while the others were sleeping, I just might get her to the ocean and back before sunup. And if she showed me the rest of the photographs, I’d start getting some answers. Find out where that camera had been.
I put the wagon in neutral and rolled it silently to the street then halfway down the block, parking it against an iron fence. I stood in the dirt road and studied the steel buildings all bulky in the blackness. Rich-freak homes grown out of the rubble of whatever had gone before.
I hugged the side of Frost’s house when I scooted alongside it. And when I got around back, I hopped onto the porch and waited in the dark.
Nothing. No sound. No action anywhere.
Wasn’t till I started creeping up to the door that the damn thing opened and Crow stepped out on the porch.
I ducked back, pressed down flat in the darkness as the watcher strolled to the steps. He had his headphones on and I could hear the music leaking from his ears. He stopped and stood there, just a few feet from me, humming along to some tune.
I didn’t breathe or move or do anything. I just waited. Frozen. Until finally Crow drifted down the steps and disappeared into the lot.
I wondered if he might look for me in the forest. I wondered if he’d notice the wagon was gone. But then I crouched up and darted across the porch and I slipped right on into the house.
The hot metal walls amped every sound as I groped my way through the gloom. I cut down the hall in one direction and found a room that was full of pots and pans and boxes of corn. Fresh corn, still on the cob.
I spun back the other way, searching for stairs, figuring Zee would be sleeping on the top story. That’s where I’d first seen her anyway, staring at me out the window. But I was starting to realize I’d no idea where the girl would actually be.
A silvery light was spilling into the hall at the far end and I made my way toward it. The silver glow was leaching from under a plastic door, and the door creaked as I pushed it wide. I peered into the room.
My heart thought twice about beating.
It was Frost. Not six feet from me. But he was passed out. Asleep. His face was planted on a desk full of binders and books and I’d never seen that much paper. On one side of the desk was an empty pipe and on the other was a pouch full of crystal, and I wondered if Frost ever went a whole day clean.
The silver light was oozing out of an old television set, and for a moment I watched the gray chips swirling on the screen. But then I saw the maps.
They were huge and crinkled, plastered on the wall. And there was a ton of them. Marked up in ink and labeled. Big chunks of green pointing at each other across patches of blue. Someone had drawn a crude picture of the tattoo tree and taped it in the middle of the wall. I inched closer, straining for a better look. But I heard a door squeaking shut and I froze.
Footsteps. A voice singing.
Crow. Back inside the house.
I left Frost drooling in his pile of paper and I backed up into the hall. I stopped. Listened. I tried to focus myself. Breathe. But it was like my brain wasn’t working. My thoughts were all stuck in the same gear.
I tried the next door. The last door. And there, spiraling up into the shadows, was a tower of metal stairs. I yanked my shoes off and laced them together, and then I slung them around my neck as I ran upward, soft and quick.
The top floor was even hotter and I was sweating now, wiping my hands on my shirt. I found a room with a tub, another with an unmade bed. Three more rooms. All empty. Bare steel walls shiny in the dark. But then I found a room that wasn’t empty.
Jackpot.
Zee was curled up and her momma was stretched out beside her. Neither of them had much on, it being so hot and all, and right away I could see Frost had bruised Zee up pretty good. But there was something else wrong with her. I watched as her chest rose and with each breath she made I could hear the gurgling sound of things growing tight inside.
I could hardly believe it.
She was cooped up in this house. Out of the dust. But that wheezing sound, there’s no mistaking it. Only crusted lungs make a noise like that.
I spotted the momma’s tattoo sticking out, like a flame of color. I crept closer and studied the roots and branches bending across the woman’s belly. And as I looked, I noticed something about the leaves I’d not seen before. Each leaf had a number on it. A long number, printed in tiny black ink.
Zee blinked herself awake and stared at me, a big grin on her face as her eyes grew wide. She grabbed a bag off the floor and crept over to join me, and she was beaming at me the whole time like I wasn’t in the worst place on earth I could be.
We tiptoed down the stairs and crept along the hall, listening to Frost snore and sputter. Crow was down the far end, still singing, rattling at the pots and pans. But then we were out the door, on the porch, bolting around the house and out on the street.
Zee was still grinning as she sprinted toward the wagon, though I could hear her broke lungs all straining and squeezed. I still had my shoes around my neck and they were bouncing and jiggling, whacking me in the face. And I kept thinking about Crow checking each room in the house and him finding Zee missing.
And how, if that happened, there’d be no going back.
The roads were mostly vacant as I steered through the night, heading east toward the ocean. We left all semblance of the city and the shantytown sprawl, and soon the only lights we saw were the odd scruffy settlement or lonely passerby.
Closer you get to the coast, the more nothing there is. Been that way forever. Folk stopped building too close to the Surge a long time back, afraid of everything they had breaking off and slicing into the water. That was the risk in heading out that way, seeing as you never knew when the land might crumble, the cliffs disappear.
“You always sleep in that room with your momma?” I said, spooked to the bone that Crow was going to find Zee missing.
“Not always,” Zee said. “But it helps her sleep.” She’d been snapping pictures with her camera, but they were smudged and dark and she shoved them in the bag at her feet.
I watched the old stone road as it droned beneath the wagon. “And how often you think Crow comes and checks on you?” I said, not being able to quit thinking about it.
“Now and then.”
I tried to picture Crow passed out and snoring. Done for the night. I mean, you got to think positive. That’s what Pop would have said.
I fired up the CD player on the dash and gave it the half dozen thumps it took to play the disc jammed inside. The music made me feel a bit better. I clicked to this track near the end, a song about dead flowers and some girl called Susie. My dad used to drum the steering wheel and we’d holler the chorus at each other.