Chapter 56

When I awoke, Alyssa was up, cooking corn porridge for breakfast while Ben tended the fire. “Why didn’t you wake me up to take a turn on watch?” I asked.

“There was no need,” she said.

“You stayed up all night? You want to sleep now?”

“No. I couldn’t stay up.”

“Somebody should have kept watch.”

“Nothing happened,” she replied.

I grunted, mildly disgusted but unwilling to continue arguing.

After breakfast, I struggled to my feet. “I’m going to check the barn.”

“You can barely move,” Alyssa protested.

“There might be something useful out there. Maybe a jack.” I took a faltering step toward the door.

Alyssa got up and tucked herself under my left shoulder. “I’ll help.”

“Shouldn’t you stay with Ben?”

“He’s fine.”

We stumbled outside with my arm slung over her shoulders for support. A rusted tractor sat in the center of the barn. In one corner there was a huge pile of brown-and-yellow cornhusks, useless except to feed to goats or pigs.

On the way back, I looked into the bed of our truck. The wooden crates were a jumbled mess. “What’s in the crates?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Alyssa answered. “The Peckerwoods loaded them before they loaded us.”

“Help me get up there.”

Alyssa let down the tailgate and boosted me up. I hacked at the nearest crate with my hatchet. Opening it one-handed proved to be difficult—I struggled fruitlessly for fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally I got the blade of the hatchet jammed under the lid and used the handle as a lever.

Inside, it was full of steel chains. I picked one up—it was really four chains with manacles attached, identical to the set Ben had been wearing. The key was affixed to one of the manacles with a strip of duct tape.

I hacked open another box. It was packed with neat rows of identical brown paperboard boxes. I opened the flap of one at random. Gleaming rows of brass shotgun shells, stacked upright, filled the box. There must have been one hundred shells in that one box. Thousands in the whole crate.

“Too bad I lost the shotgun,” I said. “Anyway, I guess we’re rich.”

“Those are worth a lot?” Alyssa asked.

“Yeah. A fortune—if we can find someone to trade with. I was hoping the barn would have something we could use as a jack and maybe a wrench.”

“Can’t we just drive real slow?”

“Yeah. But it would take all day to get to Worthington that way. You’d run out of gas.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe we can cut a beam out of the barn. Use it as a lever to lift one side of the truck and block it up.”

“Will that work?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see any way to try it right now, as beat up as I am. I wish Darla were here. She’d know how to do it.”

“She was good with trucks?”

“Yeah. She’s a wizard with any kind of machine.” I turned from Alyssa to hide the trembling in my lip.

“She’ll be okay. The Peckerwoods . . . well, the crazy ones, the most brutal ones, they’re already dead. The guys that are left . . . some of them are plenty nasty, but they’re smart, too. They won’t kill her. They won’t destroy something that has value.”

Something. That word sparked my fury. It filled me like the deep breath you take before a scream. But the Peckerwoods weren’t Alyssa’s fault. She hadn’t created this ash-cursed world. I swallowed on my anger. “You’re not really helping,” I said as mildly as I could manage. “Oh. Sorry.”

• • •

We spent the rest of the day cooking, eating, and resting. Just the short walk out to the barn and truck had left me exhausted, and I couldn’t do anything but sleep. The weakness in my body infuriated me. Darla might be suffering far worse than I, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’d abused my body so badly that I couldn’t keep going, no matter how much I wanted to—I was completely out of gas.

After dinner, I offered to take the first watch while Alyssa and Ben slept. After waking up completely unguarded the night before, I didn’t trust either of them to do it.

As they arranged themselves around the fire to sleep, I wondered how I was going to know when to wake Alyssa. In the past, sometimes I’d paced, counting steps and estimating time that way. Now, I was too weak to pace.

I started counting slowly on my fingers, trying to time a second per finger. As I tapped my pinky against the floor, a nursery rhyme came to mind, unbidden: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home. . . .” I started muttering the rhyme instead of counting.

Reciting the nursery rhyme brought my mother to mind. She used to singsong it with my sister and me, grabbing our toes and wiggling them with each line of the poem. In my worry for Darla, I’d almost forgotten about Mom and Dad. They were the reason we’d left Warren, the reason Darla got shot. Just a week ago, I’d been determined to find them. Now, leaving Warren seemed like a stupid idea. The dumbest thing I’d ever done.

Maybe ten seconds passed each time I said the rhyme. Six rhymes a minute. Three hundred and sixty mind-numbing rhymes an hour. Fourteen hundred and forty before I could wake Alyssa. I’d probably have nightmares about stupid little piggies.

By the time I finished, I was speed-mumbling, saying the rhyme in seven or eight seconds instead of ten. My fingers hurt from tapping the floor, but if anything, I hit it even harder. The pain helped keep me awake.

I grabbed Alyssa’s ankle and shook her. “Your turn to keep watch.”

“Uh? ’kay.” Alyssa slowly sat up. She’d taken off her coat to use as a pillow. The lavender sweater she wore underneath wasn’t exactly form fitting, but it looked good on her.

I rummaged in my pack, looking for a pair of jeans to use as a pillow. “Good night,” I said once I got settled. “And please don’t fall asleep. We need to stay safe.”

“You know, I never did thank you. For rescuing us.” Alyssa squatted by my head, feeding the fire.

I would have shrugged, but I was resting on my left shoulder and my right hurt too badly. “I thought you were Darla.”

“I think you would have helped us, anyway.”

“Maybe so.”

Alyssa put a hand on my shoulder, and I winced. “Oh. Sorry. I forgot.” Her hand wandered up to my neck.

“It’s okay. Goodnight.”

“How did you beat Clevis? And learn to climb around on moving trucks like an action movie star?” Her hand caressed my cheek. I wasn’t sure how to feel about her touch—my mind was annoyed and wanted to sleep, but at the same time, it felt somehow reassuring. And maybe something else, too.

“I’ve been training in taekwondo since I was five. Although we never practiced climbing around on a moving truck, that’s true.”

“You could, you know, come to Worthington with Ben and me.” Alyssa was whispering, bent over me so our faces were close.

“I can’t. I have—”

She kissed me. I knew it was wrong, was appalled with myself, but still I returned her kiss, my lips open, drinking in her hypnotic softness. I rolled away, onto my back, which Alyssa took as a sign of encouragement, kissing me more fiercely, her hands busy at my chest, spreading the warmth from my lips down toward my groin.

I pushed her away. “No.”

“Why not? I could make you happy.”

“No. You could make me feel good. Not happy. There’s a difference.”

“Most of the guys I’ve met don’t think so.”

I shrugged.

Her face scrunched, as if in pain. “You’re just going to get yourself killed chasing after her.”

“Probably.”

I rolled back onto my side and stared into the fire, waiting for the tempestuous mix of desire, regret, and shame to subside. Alyssa was silent, staring at me. I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to take me.

• • •

I dreamed of pigs. A hog squealed as Darla slashed its throat. Blood fountained out as the pig cried, sounding exactly like my sister in the midst of a full-blown temper tantrum. Darla’s arms and face were splashed, dripping red in my candlelit dream. She smiled then seemed to see me. Her head turned and her sanguinary visage shifted, mouth open in a little O, eyes wide with pain and betrayal.

Then the dream shifted and suddenly Darla was naked, suffocatingly beautiful. Her arms and face were still covered in blood. She drew a finger through the blood, painting herself, writhing suggestively, and whispering, “Alex . . . Alex . . .”

I woke up. Alyssa was spooned against my back, her arm resting on my shoulder, which hurt. On the other side of the fire, less than ten feet from me, a strange man stood, aiming a rifle at my chest.