Run For Cover (9 page)

A
few hours later, we wake Alonso and Evelyn for the next shift. But no matter how I shove the army jacket around underneath me, I can’t get comfortable, and I can’t fall asleep. My mind keeps going around and around, worrying about all the things that could go wrong, feeling bad about losing the quarters, missing my parents, worrying about Wren, hoping we can get out of the truck safely, and puzzling over Drew. He’s asleep beside me, his glasses tucked into the neck of his shirt. He doesn’t look like a spy. Why don’t I trust him?

It’s about seven o’clock in the morning when we hear the cab door of the truck slam. After a moment, the
engine starts, and the truck backs up, then rumbles forward, speeding up as we reach the highway. The noise wakes everyone, and we split some of the dried fruit and granola for our meager breakfast. With seven people to feed, the food is going fast. But I can’t exactly complain, since it was the guys who provided most of it.

We’re all tired and sore from sleeping in uncomfortable positions, so it’s a much quieter, more boring ride this morning. Evelyn uses a couple pages of her precious notebook to play Hangman with Maddie and Alonso. Drew and Ryan start an argument in low voices about some book they had to read for English. Louisa rests her head on Maddie’s lap and falls asleep again.

I stare at the clock. It moves painfully slowly. I want to be home so badly. I want to walk into my own house, hug my parents, pet my cat, sleep in my own bed. I want to stop worrying about the Alliance catching up to us, or what they’ve told my parents by now.

Five hours later, the others all go quiet, one by one, as they notice the time ticking past noon. If our calculations
are right, we should be near Chicago. But Gladys isn’t stopping. Evelyn folds and refolds her map between her short, nail-bitten fingers. I wonder if she’s telling herself the same things I am: Well, it’s an old truck. It’s probably going slower than we calculated. We’re probably not
that
close to Chicago yet. We still have time. We’ll still be closer than we were last night, even if we’re on the other side of the city, if she stops anytime in the next couple of hours.

Then, at half past noon, we feel the truck lurch to the right and gradually slow down.

“Pack up,” I whisper, pulling the army jacket back on. “If she’s just stopping to stretch her legs and grab some food, we might only have a couple of minutes.” Evelyn stuffs her map into her pack; Drew finds room for the clock in his. Ryan gets up and carefully slides a couple of boxes aside as the truck jolts and bounces below us. We all brace ourselves as it clatters to a halt and the engine cuts off.

Louisa takes my hand and squeezes it. She has the
flashlight in her other hand, pointed at the boxes between us and the back door. We wait, barely breathing, until we hear the truck door slam again. Gladys’s voice goes past, clipped and muffled with occasional pauses, as if she’s talking on a cell phone.

As soon as we can’t hear her anymore, we all jump up and start moving boxes. It’s faster this time, since we built the tunnel last night and only filled it in with a few boxes. In a couple of minutes we’re all crouched at the back door.

“I wish we had a periscope,” Evelyn whispers. “Like on a submarine? So we could see outside and know what we’re jumping into?”

“Totally,” Alonso agrees. “There could be a whole crowd of people out there. Or an Alliance guard.”

“It doesn’t sound like it,” Ryan says. He has his ear pressed against the back door. “I don’t hear anything. No cars, no voices, nothing.”

“The important thing is not to lose each other,” I say. “So don’t panic. If anyone sees us, we’ll run. But stick
together — if we have to run, everyone follow me. All right?”

No one argues with me. I hope they’ll really do it. I trust myself to assess the situation and figure out how to escape. But it’ll be a lot harder if any of the others take off in the wrong direction. I can’t lead them to safety and run around them like a border collie herding sheep at the same time.

“Here goes nothing,” Louisa whispers. She reaches down, lifts the latch, and rolls the door open.

Bright sunlight dazzles our eyes. The first thing I notice is the mouthwatering smell of food — soy burgers and tofu dogs and things fried in oil. I hop down while my sight is still adjusting and get ready to run. My sneakers hit pavement and I squint around us.

We’re in another parking lot, next to a greasy-looking pizza place with a couple of bicycles locked up out front. It’s right off what used to be a busy highway, six lanes divided by a concrete barrier, although now it’s probably only used by military and supply trucks, and buses like
the one that took us to CMS. There are no cars in sight in either direction. Across the highway I can see a large building with walls of broken glass that used to be a supermarket. Some of the big orange letters in the sign swing loose in the wind.

I scan the area, planning our escape.

Big old stores and abandoned strip malls in each direction. A bridge with a tall fence for pedestrians to get over the highway. Patches of grass growing wild, spreading over the old concrete walkways. An old bus stop, covered in graffiti, with cracked plastic walls.

The pizza place looks like the only functioning business in sight. It must get all the truck drivers who go through here.

The others hit the ground beside me. Ryan pulls the truck door shut as soon as we’re all out. He’s clanking the latch back into place when the door of the pizza place opens.

Gladys steps outside, holding a paper plate with a limp slice of soy-cheese pizza on it in one hand and a can
of soda in the other. No matter how much the country falls apart, you can always find soda wherever you go.

She sees us at the same time as we see her. Her whole face falls open: eyes huge, mouth agape. The pizza and the soda can crash to the ground. Even in her shock, she starts fumbling for something at her waist. A phone? A gun?

I’m not waiting around to find out.

“Run!” I yell.

I
bolt toward the highway. My muscles feel weak and useless after sitting in the truck for so long, but fear makes me fast. I don’t look back. I hope the others are behind me.

I fly across the first three lanes and sail over the divider. My backpack slams against my ribs as I run. Chilly air whips across my face and I feel like a runaway train, blasting ahead with no way to stop. I’m far too scared to stop.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a figure running beside me. I throw back my hair and glance over; it’s
Drew. I wish it were Louisa or Maddie. I want to be sure that they’re safe. Neither of them would be all right on their own, or if they got caught.

I burst ahead of Drew, skid into the supermarket parking lot, and risk a look back. The others are only a few steps behind me — I do a quick count — all six of them. Gladys is standing where we left her, shouting after us. Clutched in her hand is a cell phone. Which is better than a gun, but still bad.

“Come on!” I call to my friends. Evelyn’s the slowest, but Maddie looks like she’s about to faint or collapse in terror or something. I dart back and grab Maddie’s hand, dragging her after me. We pound across the lot and I kick aside the broken glass so we can jump through one of the walls of the abandoned supermarket.

Empty shelves loom up around us in the dark. We hurtle past the wide bins where vegetables used to be, past the cold glass doors that used to lead to ice cream and frozen waffles. There are still a few sale stickers and
flags sticking out, relics of a time when there was enough food to throw away tons of it every day.

In the back corner, behind the deli counter, I find a door to a dark kitchen and even darker storage closets. The others follow me through and I slow down for the first time, trying to figure out where each of the doors around us might lead.

“Maybe we should hide,” Alonso suggests. “There’s enough room for all of us in that old walk-in freezer.”

“Worst idea ever,” Drew says, and I’m so glad I don’t have to say it myself that I want to hug him. “The one thing Gladys knows for sure is that we went in here. The Alliance will check this whole place first.”

“So we go out the back,” I say, nodding at the employee exit door, “and keep running.”

I swing open the door and peek out into the parking lot behind the supermarket. The bulk of the building shields us from view of the pizza place. Gladys won’t know which way we’ve gone.

Still, we stay low as we dash across the sunny pavement. Soon we’re running behind one of the strip malls. Nondescript doors and rusty fire escapes flash by. The next large building has a sign on the side that says it used to be a bookstore. For a moment I wonder why they needed all that space for e-readers and flash drives, until I realize it must have sold actual books — old-fashioned ones made of paper, like my copy of
Julie of the Wolves
and the others at CMS.

Then there’s a stretch of trees, and I risk a look back across the highway. The pizza place is out of sight. No sign of a truck chasing us down, so that’s lucky. But I’m sure Alliance agents are going to come swarming into the area within minutes to find us.

“Back across the highway,” I order the others. “Hopefully they’ll concentrate their search on this side first.” We dash across the wide lanes again, vaulting over the concrete barrier. We pelt through several more parking lots and then hit another patch of trees, where Maddie
calls for us to stop. She leans over with her hands on her knees, gasping for air.

“I can’t run much farther,” she says.

I take out my canteen and pass it around; everyone takes a quick gulp of water. Evelyn collapses beside a tall pine tree, rubbing her legs and grimacing. “We need to figure out where we are,” she says. “Are we running in the right direction?”

“Or maybe we shouldn’t,” Ryan says. “Run in the right direction, I mean. Maybe that’s what they’ll expect us to do.”

“I can’t believe she saw us,” Louisa pants, holding her hair off her neck. “That was the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

See what I mean? She has no idea what it’s like to really be scared — to think your sister might be dead, to worry that you’re going to get caught and lose everything at any moment, to watch your whole life get swept away in an instant. I
wish
Gladys were the scariest thing that had ever happened to me.

Although I’ll admit that doesn’t make me any less scared right now.

“There are signs along the highway,” Drew says. “Let’s find one that tells us how far the nearest big city is — and hope it’s Chicago.”

We find one after another ten minutes of running: a rectangular green sign with sunlight reflecting brightly off its silver back. We duck around to the front of it and discover that Chicago is twenty-eight miles away — and we’ve been running in the wrong direction.

Maddie sighs heavily.

“It’s a good thing,” Ryan says encouragingly. “They won’t expect us to be going this way.”

“Unless they count on us being idiots,” Louisa says, looking glum.

“We should get away from the highway, anyway,” I say. “Now that we know which way Chicago is, you can use your compass to get us there, right, Evelyn?”

She perks up, nodding as she digs the compass out of her pocket.

“So let’s head away from the road and try to circle around.” I lead the way down an off-ramp and soon we find ourselves in a suburban-looking neighborhood with lots of trees in between the cute little houses. Louisa visibly relaxes, as if it reminds her of home, but all I can think of is the faces that might be behind any of those sweet lacy curtains, watching us and wondering why seven teenagers are roaming the streets together unsupervised. Who will find us first, the Alliance or the cops? Which would be worse for me and my parents?

We don’t see any people out and about — maybe nobody lives here anymore — but I’m still relieved when the houses get more spread out and the trees take over. It’s easier in the woods to travel in a wide arc, swinging back around to the far side of the pizza place, aiming for Chicago. Evelyn forgets to grumble about her aching legs as she reads the compass intently.

We’ve been moving as fast as we can for about forty-five minutes when we hear the distant growling above us.
I stop and look up. Cloudless blue sky, warm sunshine, air as clear as you can find these days when everything’s so polluted.

Exactly the worst conditions for hiding from a helicopter.

O
kay,
now
we have to hide,” I say, picking up the pace. “Somewhere indoors. These trees are too scattered to give us enough cover.” Especially since there are freaking
seven
of us — though I manage not to say that part out loud.

“Inside someone’s house?” Louisa asks. She hurries to keep up with me. “Do you think anyone will help us?”

“Not safe,” I say. “There must be somewhere else —”

“There!” Maddie points through the trees. A large concrete structure squats beside the road, several yards
away. It’s our only option. The thunder of the helicopter blades is getting closer.

We race through the trees and across a small stretch of bare pavement. As we get closer, I realize it’s a multistory parking garage. I dart into the shadows of the entrance and turn around to yank Louisa and Ryan in after me. The others just manage to make it inside before the helicopter bursts into view, churning ferociously in our direction.

They can’t have spotted us yet. They’re just searching, hoping to catch a glimpse of us from the air. We hurry farther into the garage, past thick concrete columns, over painted yellow lines. Space after space, level upon level. It’s hard to believe there used to be so many cars on the road that they had to be stacked and packed into garages like this.

“This garage must be attached to something,” Louisa points out. “All these parking spaces must be here so people could go somewhere.”

Faded arrows on the wall point us toward broken glass doors and dead elevators. We step gingerly through the doorframes and climb the dingy stairs, following the dim yellow circle of Drew’s flashlight.

“Oh,” Maddie says in a hushed voice as we step out into an enormous open space, crisscrossed with beams of sunshine. A ceiling full of dusty skylights sparkles far above us. Petrified escalators lead up to a balcony lined with glass storefronts. Triangular planters lined with black and silver tiles, crawling with dead vines, are arranged artistically around the walls. All around us, covered in layers of dust, are closed-up carts and door grates and signs in bold, eye-catching fonts.

For a brief moment, looking up at the faraway ceiling and feeling the hushed stillness around us, I think we’re in a church. But then I recognize it from stories I’ve heard my parents’ friends tell.

“It’s a mall,” Louisa whispers, awestruck. I remember the first night I clicked with her, when we joked around about going to a mall like this.

“Oh my gosh,
yay
,” I say, grinning at her. “I so totally need a dress for prom!”

She grins wickedly back. “And new
shoes
,” she squeals. “I mean, I only have, like, forty pairs. My closet is practically empty!”

“I know!” I say. “I was like, should I wear the purple shoes or the pink shoes with this outfit, and then I was all, if only I had shoes that were purple
and
pink!”

Maddie jumps in, her eyes sparkling. “Oh my gosh, you guys, we totally have to find our dresses before we stop for lunch. After all the fro-yo I’m going to eat at the food court, I’m not gonna want to see myself in the mirror.”

“Like, whatever!” I poke her in the ribs. “I bet you can’t eat as many burgers as I can!”

“Shyeah, but you’ll still be the hottest girl at prom,” Maddie says, rolling her eyes. “It’s so totes unfair how many guys have asked you.”

“OMG, we don’t have time for boys!” I say. “We have
shopping
to do!”

“Like, totally!” Louisa says, throwing one arm over my shoulders. “And don’t forget we need new sunglasses! You know, like, for our tennis game later!”

The three of us burst out laughing. Maddie and I collapse onto one of the giant planters, holding each other up and giggling. Louisa tries to sit down next to us but misses and ends up on the floor, which makes us all laugh harder.

“Okay,” Ryan says, “something weird just happened.”

“Maybe it’s in the air,” Drew says, rubbing his chin. “Something that infects girls as soon as they step into a mall.”

“Is it contagious?” Alonso asks. He gives us a worried look that sets off our giggles again.

“Not
all
girls,” Evelyn says. “You don’t see
me
acting like an airhead from a twentieth-century movie.” She shakes her head, trying not to smile.

“Come on,” I say, taking Maddie’s hand. “This is the perfect place to hide. Let’s look around.”

“We can pretend we’re normal teenagers from before the War,” Louisa agrees, taking Maddie’s other hand.

“Does that mean
we
have to giggle about prom dresses, too?” Ryan asks as we start walking along the row of closed storefronts.

“Oh, please,” Louisa teases. “You know you’d look hot in sparkly green taffeta.”

“Sure, but I’d look hot in anything,” he jokes back.

“Oooo, freaky,” Maddie says, pointing at a window display where a couple of mostly naked mannequins are still poised, like actors waiting for the spotlight to turn back on.

She drops my hand to go over and look at them, and a moment later I feel another warm hand take mine. I look up into Drew’s brown eyes.

“So what color dress are you thinking?” he asks. “You know, so I can make sure the corsage matches.”

“Why, you forward young man,” I say. “You haven’t even asked me yet. How do you know I’ll say yes?”

“Resist this face?” he says, pointing to his winning grin. “Impossible. Can’t be done.”

He might be right about that,
I think. I can’t help smiling back at him.

“Can you imagine what it was like?” Louisa says, jumping up on a planter and pirouetting. “All that time for people like us to just hang out? Walking around and shopping on the weekends?”

“Going to the movies,” Evelyn says wistfully. “Enormous vats of popcorn!”

“And video games!” Alonso says. He hooks his hands through one of the grates and peers in at an old display of computer games.

“Plus staying in school until you were eighteen,” Drew says. “Or even longer if you went to college. No enforced military service. No hiding from the Alliance. No seven thirty curfew, no food rationing, no tanks in the streets.”

We all go quiet for a moment, thinking about what Chicago will be like now that the Alliance is closer and stronger than ever. Everyone goes to work for the war
effort at fifteen, which is only a little more than a year away for some of us. I wonder where we’ll all be in two years. Or in four years, when we should have been getting ready for a prom for real.

Once we get back to Chicago, will I see my friends again? Will we all survive this war?

I shake my head. I should focus on surviving the next couple of days first. Somehow we have to get home without getting caught. We know where CMS is; the Alliance doesn’t want us sharing that information. If they’ve figured out what else we might know — about the cabin, or the prison camp, or the truck full of doped-up food heading for New York — they could get really hard-core about hunting us down.

Suddenly I’m so tired I actually feel myself wobbling. I didn’t sleep all night, and it’s finally catching up to me. Drew takes my elbow and guides me onto a beige padded bench.

“You should rest,” he says. “We’ll travel faster and safer once it’s dark, anyway.”

Evelyn nods. “I’m going to scout around in here,” she says. “Maybe I can find a more detailed map, so I can figure out the best route to Chicago.”

“I’ll come with you,” Alonso says.

Before I let myself sleep, Louisa and Maddie and I find a corner and change into new clothes from our backpacks. It’s just a little thing, but because we’ve been stuck in the truck with the guys for two days, we haven’t had a chance. It’s not the same as showering, but wearing clean black cargo pants and a fresh blue shirt makes me feel worlds better.

“You sleep first, Rosie,” Maddie says. She spreads my sleeping bag out on the bench. “We need you wide-awake to lead us home tonight.”

I give her a sharp look to see if she’s making fun of me, but she seems perfectly serious, as if she doesn’t mind me being in charge anymore. I guess a lot of things about her don’t bother me so much now, either. She’s been more of a trouper than I expected. Especially now that I know
more about her life before CMS. And there’s something about the way she fluffs my pack into a pillow that reminds me of Wren.

“Hey,” I say, touching her shoulder. “Um. I just want you to know — I know what it’s like. I mean — not knowing … losing someone and not knowing what …” I have to stop, since stupid tears are trying to climb up out of my eyes again.

Maddie tilts her head at me. “Really?” she says softly. “Who?”

“My sister,” I say. “Her name is Wren. We don’t know where she is or what —” I stop again and shake my head furiously. “Anyway. The Alliance probably has her. But we’ll find her one day.”

Unexpectedly, Maddie reaches out and hugs me. Her shoulder blades are like bony wings under my hands. “I know you will,” she whispers in my ear. “And I’ll find my mom. The War
has
to end eventually. That’s what I tell myself … and sometimes it helps.”

She pulls back as the others come over. Louisa looks confused but pleased to see Maddie and me getting along so well. Ryan unrolls his sleeping bag on the next bench over.

“Nobody do anything crazy while I’m asleep,” I say.

“Yes, boss,” Maddie jokes.

“We’ll just stand here and watch you sleep,” Louisa says. “That won’t be disturbing, will it?” She grins.

“Nothing can distract me from sleeping right now,” I say, sticking my tongue out at her. “But wake me if there’s any sign of trouble, okay? Or if we need to go. Or —”

“Oh my gosh, sleep already,” Drew says, throwing his sweater at my head.

I grab the sweater and add it to my pillow. As I close my eyes, I can hear him chuckling, and the murmur of Maddie and Louisa chatting quietly, and Ryan snoring already. Overhead, Evelyn’s and Alonso’s footsteps echo as they search the upper level.

We’re not safe yet, not by a long shot. But it’s the safest place we’ve been since we escaped CMS. Even with the Alliance chasing us, I feel like we’re going to make it home soon after all. I let myself relax, drifting into sleep.

And that is my biggest mistake.