Six Months Later
Without AC, we travel with the windows rolled down, and the desert air turns our van into a mobile rotisserie. But none of us complains. Not Lara, who is curled up on the dashboard in a puddle of yellow light. Not Kyle, who drives us onward, her hair now dyed sky blue.
She smiles and says, “I think we’re almost there.”
Up ahead, a small convoy of cars and RVs is headed in a straight line through the desert nothingness. I’m about to crane forward until something falls into my lap. A Polaroid photo of Kyle, Lara, and me. I reach up to stick it back on the ceiling above, where dozens of other photos have been taped to the felt lining.
What I see are photographs of all our visits to best worst places. Our trips to ghost towns damaged by Hell Portal Day. Our journey to an illegal underground museum full of monster remains. It’s been six months since Black Friday, and we’ve seen more fucked-up weird shit than we could ever have imagined.
But today could be something else.
A crunch draws my attention as we roll over the remains of a Vanguard mesh barricade. Lara stirs and says, “Huh? We there yet?”
“Almost,” I reply.
I look around to see what must have once been an enormous Vanguard fence. The guard station is abandoned.
“Look!” I call out, pointing to my right at where a quarantine zone stands empty. “That would’ve been where a portal once stood.”
In the months since Black Friday, VC never found out what happened at the mart, since all the CCTV cams were fried. The store was permanently closed under the excuse of a salmonella outbreak. But Kyle and I refused to let everything stay hidden. We anonymously uploaded the Vanguard research video on portal closure to WikiLeaks. And people have started to close portals everywhere. No one knows how many have been shut, but it’s happening. The world is healing.
But for now, that’s a job we’re letting other folks handle.
Kyle parks our van near some other vehicles. We step outside into the hot-hot air, and Lara plays dead under my arm. Only then do we spot Pete and Edwin waiting nearby, leaning against an old sedan. The pair see us and hurry over.
“Hey, guys!” says Kyle and Lara.
“About time!” says Pete.
Pete is wearing jeans and a T-shirt that reads, I SURVIVED BLACK FRIDAY AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS DUMB T-SHIRT—the same thing he’s worn for weeks now. These days, his only prized accessory is a Polaroid camera that hangs on a chest strap that he’s used to document our adventures.
“We thought you’d gotten lost,” says Edwin, with a wide smile that still looks weird on his stern face.
I’m about to greet them, but my attention is distracted by a distant crater . . . of fire. “Whoa!” I gasp. “So there it is! The natural gas field.”
Edwin nods. “Yep.”
On Hell Portal Day, a fire demon apparently broke a hole in the ground here and ignited the gases below. VC could not extinguish the flames, so they just walled it up and let it burn. But now that Vanguard has abandoned this place, that wall has long since come down.
Pete and Edwin rush farther ahead, but Kyle and I waver when we catch sight of a nearby chunk of metal sticking out of the sand. A jagged scrap covered in human blood.
I turn to face Kyle, and she whispers, “We’ll never be able to fix everything.”
I was actually thinking those exact words, and I wonder: Was that sentiment ours, or something sparked by the abyssal still lurking deep inside us? I don’t know.
Even though it’s been months, Hopelessness remains trapped deep inside Kyle and me. He’s still dangerous, still a shadow on my thoughts, and surely hers too. But I take in a breath and remind myself, We’ll continue to hold him back one day at a time.
I take Kyle’s hand and whisper, “Maybe we’ll never be able to fix everything. But that’s okay.” A smile comes easily to me. “Maybe that’s much more than okay.”
Kyle smiles back and squeezes my hand. We continue to stroll on ahead, and minutes later we reach a huge sign that reads, WELCOME TO THE GATES OF HELL. FIREPROOF SUITS ONLY $50. A dozen yards to the left, a makeshift building of scrap wood bears the word MOTEL.
Kyle and I chuckle. Until she leans in to kiss me.
We head closer to the Gates of Hell, and only then does my gaze catch sight of something far, far ahead on the horizon—a sliver of turquoise blue. Kyle shifts as she too catches sight of the ocean in the distance.
“We’ll get there too,” I whisper to her. “We’re going to see it all.”
And she turns to me and smiles and says, “I hope so.”