Page 54 of Chaos

Middle of the night, just the three of them, needing one more person Jacquetta trusts, there’s only one likely place we’re headed—to the drop spots for the emissaries we sent out to gather information.

I double check my handgun is on my hip, my backup on my thigh, and fall in beside them.

Rey studies me covertly as we cross the lobby and outside into the cold night air.

Jacquetta slides into the driver’s seat of a charged-up truck. Rey takes the front. Kelly and I climb into the back.

“Drop one is from DC,” Jacquetta says. “Shouldn’t be anything there yet. But we’ll check anyway.”

Back when Frankie first went missing, we sent two spies to DC.

One to enter the city, the other to stay outside and relay messages across the two hundred and fifty miles, many of those miles span the mountains currently covered in snow, from here to there.

“Drop two is Charleston. Most likely, also empty.” Rey glances back at me, suspicion and curiosity written in her gaze. “But we have to check.”

“Okay,” I say.

No one speaks as Jacquetta shifts the truck into gear and steers us down the drive, past Frankie’s vegetable beds, to the gate where we wait for them to slide the heavy wood open, soldiers watch us from the perch, a combination of clementine-colored torches and ghost-blue solar-powered LEDs lighting the way, but I can feel Rey analyzing me.

When we hit the road, Jacquetta doesn’t turn on the headlights. Rey acts as a second set of eyes, pointing out branches and potholes.

“I wish we had someone in with the Caps,” Rey says when we’re about halfway there. She glances back at me, almost like she’s blaming me that we don’t. “We should send Plumberger, let him sabotage their pork supply with beet tacos.”

“I could do it,” Kelly says. “I know that area. My grandma lived there.”

Rey stiffens. “I was joking. I don’t want to—”

“I could go in civvies.” Kelly’s voice picks up speed. “Tell them I was looking for Gran.”

I catch Jacquetta’s face in the rearview. She’s watching the road, but she’s listening.

Something about the darkness brings back the memory of Scraggle’s final garbled grunt.

I flinch, turning away to look out at the darkness, the silver moon.

“Maybe we’ll do it,” Jacquetta says quietly.

The moonlight is the same as it was when I spoke to Frankie, silver and gleaming off overgrown roads riddled with cracks and roadside powerlines draped in vines from summer storms.

We pass the burned ruins of town, the surviving brick structures, mountains of collapsed roofs, the odd stairs jutting into the sky, a mess of moon-glazed embers and rubble, and head down the valley in the direction of the state park with the farmhouse where Ben kept Frankie.

The truck hits the railroad tracks, doing the same dip and shudder at each axle it did last time I drove over it with Frankie sick and filthy in my arms, and we drive through a town called Hebron, where the moon shines off the distinct iridescent burgundy-and-blue of solar panels as we slide by.

The first drop site is under the visor of an old tractor that was defunct before the apocalypse, sitting in a nest of tangled weeds.

Jacquetta pulls off the road and parks in the shadows of a copse of overgrown bushes.

Rey turns in her seat. “Cover me?”

Kelly and I climb out, leaving our doors open, and we cover Rey as she jogs to the tractor, my breath billowing up in thick clouds that feel alarmingly white in the night.

No planes in the sky.

No distant traffic.

No jets in the atmosphere.

Just wind in tree branches, a coyote somewhere in the hills, an owl closer in.

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