“Next stop, Pacific Shore,” Ava tells her brother. “Ruby needs to find her mom.”
He grins at me. “I take it you’re Ruby?”
I nod. “I am. Thanks for helping.”
“No worries. I’m Luke, by the way.”
“I know. Ava told me what the two of you have been doing. I’m impressed.”
He shrugs the same way Ava did. The same way Nurse Cathy did about working all week. Like they wouldn’t have it any other way. And like it’s nothing that deserves special attention, even though I think it does.
“Ready?” Ava asks me.
I nod and climb into the back of the van. It’s not a cushy minivan with DVD players and automatic sliding doors like my friends’ parents drove us around in when we were kids. It’s more like a delivery van. There aren’t even seats in the back. So I settle onto the hard metal floor as Ava buckles herself into the driver’s seat and Luke settles into the passenger seat with a pile of road maps in his lap.
“Old-school navigation,” he tells me.
The back of the van smells faintly of surf wax, a reminder of Luke and Ava’s life before The Big One, but right now it’s stuffed with tarps and blankets instead of surfboards. Also food and water. Canned goods. Baby formula. Unopened packages of socks and underwear. Plus the empty wrappers of what they’ve already eaten themselves. My mouth waters at a box of snack-bag chips.
“Stop it,” I say.
Ava turns around, alarmed. Like I’m hurt. “What?”
“Sorry. I’m fine. But . . . would it be obnoxious if I asked for Cheetos?”
Luke laughs. “Go for it.”
I rip into a bag like I’ve never had junk food in my life. When the first taste of orange cheese powder hits my tongue, I literally moan with relief. It’s so simple. Normal. I should savor them, but I don’t. I down the whole bag in seconds, then lick the remnant cheese dust from my fingertips. Part of me wants to turn the bag inside out and lick that, too.
The van bounces hard over a big bump, and I almost bite my own finger. I grab tight on to the back of Luke’s seat to steady myself.
“Sorry,” Ava says. “Lotsa road damage.”
“I can handle it,” I say. “It’s better than being in the back of an ambulance, thinking I’m going to die.”
“Ambulance? What the hell? Are you okay?” Ava asks.
I make a fist, and no pain shoots to my wound. “I think so.”
The van’s wheels seem rugged and made for rough terrain. Like they can drive through places other cars wouldn’t be able to go. I keep a hold on Luke’s seat as I’m jostled, my whole body protesting the quick movements. My feet bounce against the floor and I sway. I hope I don’t get carsick.
“Try to make the next left,” Luke says, looking at his map. “And a right after that.”
I suck in a breath when we pass two dead bodies in the gutter, like someone just needed to move them out of the way and keep going.
Luke twists to look at me. “Is this the first time you’re seeing stuff like that?”
“Yeah. I mean, I was in the hospital. I saw things there.” Bodies in stairwells. And lined up along the side of the building. “But I didn’t think I’d see . . . in the middle of the street.”
“Better get used to it,” Luke says.
Ava slams on the brakes.
I lose my grip on Luke’s seat and bang into the box of canned goods. It pummels my shoulders but keeps me from sliding all the way to the back of the van.
“Shit. Sorry,” Ava says.
I scramble up, regain my grip on Luke’s seat, and look out the front window to see what stopped Ava. The street has split, leaving a cavernous hole in its wake.
“Whoa.”
“What do I do?” Ava asks Luke.
He looks at his map, holding his fingertip in place to mark where we are. “Back up. Turn left.”
We reverse to the first corner behind us and turn. It looks like we’re clear for a while. But then the van climbs a hill and the dilapidated sprawl is everywhere.
My town. My home. My life. My rubble.
Roads are split in two, and tar buckles like a wavy ribbon where the neat, yellow-painted line should be. Stop signs bend into the street. Traffic lights don’t flash. I pull my hand to my mouth, stunned into silence as we get closer and closer to the places I recognize. Where buildings I know are burned-out and blackened. Some slanted. Others are hollowed-out shells. More of them are pieces toppled over on top of one another. The Pacific Shore Movie Theater, where Leo and I saw a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The DMV, where I took my driving test.
Are people still trapped inside? Crushed? Dead? Dying?
We drive toward an overpass scrunched up like an accordion. The prongs of the wire fence that would normally run along its sides hang down like tendrils. Precarious. Ready to collapse. Cars have been abandoned in the middle of the road. Some of them are facing the wrong way. Blocking us. We can’t go forward. We have to turn around and try yet another route.
“It’s like a maze,” Ava says, keeping her eyes on the road.
“Or a really screwed-up video game,” Luke says, eyes on the map. “But we’re getting better at figuring it out.”
And then we’re driving past my school. It’s Friday. Classes should be in session. I should be in third period analyzing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. My hair in a bun, still damp and smelling like chlorine from morning practice.
“This is my school,” I say, gripping one side each of Ava’s and Luke’s seats.
Luke rolls down his window. The air smells like chemicals, dust, and blackened smoke. The marquee that’s usually lit up with the constant scroll of good news and important dates is blown out and bent over like the stop signs. The sidewalks are empty of gardeners with leaf blowers or classmates with backpacks and skateboards and Starbucks cups. Entire buildings are no more. Their guts crumbled to the ground. Their skeleton bones scattered.
“Ours looks about the same,” Ava says.
“Which school?”
“Ocean View.”
“I know your school. We’ve played you in water polo.” I can see their campus and their pool and their hallways. The blue-and-white school-record banners.
“We haven’t seen a high school that doesn’t look like ours,” Luke says. “But Harbor’s the worst of all of them. They had a fire. Burned everything to the ground.”
Harbor. Charlie’s high school. Charlie. I press his journal to my chest.
“I had a friend who went to Harbor.” I knot my hands in my lap. “He was with me before I got rescued. He didn’t make it, but I don’t know if anyone knows he’s there. I want his family to know. I’m sure they’re looking, and I can only imagine how worried they must be.”
“Maybe we can do something.” Ava looks to Luke. “Can we?”
Luke shrugs. “We can ask Mom.”
“I can tell you his name,” I say, my voice ticking up with relief. “The laundromat where we were. He went to Harbor and then Stanford.” My words are tumbling out in a hurry to tell Charlie’s story so it doesn’t get lost to the rubble.
“If we have his name and know where he was, our mom will probably know what to do,” Ava says. “Whether it’s FEMA or the Red Cross, right, Luke?”
“I think so. We can definitely try.”
“Done. It’s our next assignment,” Ava says.
“Really? Thank you.”
We round the corner, and I see the makeshift emergency room on the football field. There are four tents set up same as they were for the earthquake drill I didn’t take seriously enough. Where Mila fake-broke her leg and I ate a Tootsie Pop and Coach tagged the dead. I hope other people paid better attention than I did. And I hope it made all the difference and kept them safe.
Classes were done by the time The Big One hit, but there would’ve still been people on campus doing after-school activities. What happened to the soccer team on this very field? The ground looks fine, free of sinkholes, but there are downed wires and fallen debris from the cracked concrete bleachers. Was everybody okay, or were they the first ones dragged to these tents? Who went to the dead tent? Was Coach here? Did he come running from the pool deck to help? Or was he too hurt to go? Was he helping my teammates instead? I imagine everything broken and people underneath it all. Bloody. Barely breathing. Trapped. Like I was. And Charlie. I hear the screams of terror. I feel the fear.
It will always live here now.
I bend down to look through the windshield, eyes wide and unbelieving. Part of me wants to open the door and get out. To touch the devastation. To feel that it’s real, because the sight of it is too hard to believe.
Ava slows the van to a crawl. Gives me time to look. How can everything we’ve ever known look like this?
It’s a scene that erases hope.
“Go, please,” I say, because I can’t look anymore.
Ava pushes her foot to the gas pedal and the van lurches forward, inching up onto the sidewalk to drive around an orange plastic roadblock that takes up the whole crosswalk.
I grip the side of Luke’s seat. “Are you allowed to go here?”
Ava shrugs. “There kind of aren’t any rules anymore.”
I direct them to my mom’s office, but we can only get within a few blocks of it because the roads are too mangled. Ava kills the engine. Everything goes quiet, but my ears still buzz from the constant vibration of driving in the great big van.
“Can you get there from here?” Luke asks me.
I look out and around. The echo of chaos lives here just as it has on every other street I’ve seen today, but I know where I am.
“I can get there,” I say.
I open the heavy passenger-side door and jump out.
“Here,” Luke says, handing me a pen and a pad of paper. I think of Charlie writing in his journal and feel the weight of it underneath my sweatshirt. I pull my hand to my stomach to remind me I’m still carrying his words. “Write down what you know about your friend.”
I prop Luke’s notebook on my knee and put down the things that matter. “His name was Charleston Smith,” I tell him, “but he went by Charlie because he thought Charleston made him sound like an asshole.”
Luke laughs. “I like him already.”
“Right?” I try to keep from tearing up at the memory of my friend and hand the pad of paper back to Luke. “Please find him.”
Ava nods her head at me. “We’re on it, Ruby. Now you go find your mom.”
“How do I even thank you for everything you did for me?”
“You don’t,” Luke says.
“One day you’ll help someone else when they need it,” Ava says.