Page 62 of Heart of the Sun

“Younot well-versed on something? Wow, hard to believe,” Charlie said sarcastically, pressing down on his shoe so that water leaked out. Despite the fact that the shoes were still soggy, and he’d had to tie the sole on one, he didn’t seem to have too much trouble walking in them, especially since we were on pavement. I could smell their stench but decided commenting on it wasn’t worth more of Charlie’s sulking.

“Are we just going to keep following this road indefinitely, then?” I asked. While I still found myself randomly reaching for my phone, and I could see Charlie doing the same, Tuck seemed to be having withdrawals from the map. I kept seeing his hands moving toward the pocket of the backpack where he’d kept the one Isaac stole, stop mid-reach, and fall to his sides. Whether Tuck would admit it or not, that map had been a source of comfort. Maybe it’d kept his mind occupied with roads and routes and was the only certainty regarding the future that we had. And if he felt lost now, then I guess I did too.

“Following this road indefinitely could be dangerous,” Tuck said. “It might lead us directly into large groups of desperate people.” He squinted out at the road stretching beyond me, as if he could see those hordes of people walking toward us now. “No, we need to find another map.”

“Then we have to find a store or a gas station, right?”

“Maybe.”

“Even on back roads like this, there’ll have to be gas stations nearby. Surely, they’d give us a map.”

He was quiet for a minute as he slid the last bit of meat off with his teeth. He’d always had beautiful teeth. Always had such a beautiful smile. Sweet but secretive. I suddenly remembered how his mom had given mine one of his school photos when we were about fourteen, months before Mariana was diagnosed with cancer. Such a golden time. I’d taken that photo that my mom had stuck to the side of our fridge and slept with it under my pillow. Sometimes I’d take it out and allow my gaze to wander over every detail of his face. It’d made my heart beat faster as tingles had spread all over my body. The first sexual awakening I’d experienced, and it had happened from simply staring at a photo of Tuck’s face.

I looked away, feeling a remnant of those tingles now, which was really embarrassing considering I was dying of hunger in the middle of nowhere and still couldn’t shake the last vestiges of that teenage crush.

“A house might be safer,” Tuck said, his mind clearly miles away from where mine was. Hadn’t that always been the case though?

He used the stick to break up some hardened dirt, then put a handful on the fire. As he smothered the flames, Charlie and I stood and both begrudgingly turned to face the road. “We could go grab a handful of those mushrooms,” Charlie suggested. “Swallowing poison might be the less painful option here.”

I gave a surprised laugh and looked over at him. Maybe I’d been judging him too harshly. He was as out of his element as me. Of course he wasn’t going to be functioning at his best. Perhaps I should save any definitive plans for…later. “I’m not ready to give up just yet. You?”

“No, not just yet.” He grabbed my hand and when I looked up, I saw Tuck glance at our joined hands before quickly turning away.

As we walked, Charlie leaned toward me and said quietly, “We don’t need him, Emily. Let’s just ditch him as soon as we get to the next town.”

I looked up with surprise. “Leave? We need him to protect us.”

“Do we? I mean, look where we are!” He swept his hand around, indicating the empty road and miles of nothing surrounding us, and then down to his shoes wrapped in socks to hold them on.

“We’re alive,” I told him. “Not everyone is.”

“Our lives have been in danger several times. Is that a reason to stay attached to that psycho?”

I felt a bolt of defensiveness. Tuck was the one who’d saved us more than once, be it by jumping on a moving horse-drawn buggy and fighting a man with a gun or hunting for scarce food that he’d shared with us. Charlie was threatened by him, and honestly…he should be. Not only was Tuck far more equipped to lead us on this journey, but over the last six days, my feelings for Tuck had only grown, while my feelings for Charlie had soured, almost completely.

chaptertwenty-seven

Tuck

Several hours later, the sound of a clattering engine met my ears and we all turned, the sight of a white pickup coming toward us. We stepped out of the road, and I waved, the older truck with an emblem that advertisedElrod Coltrane, General Contractorsurprisingly slowing and then coming to a stop. I reached out, signaling to Emily to stay back until I’d determined the people inside were safe. A young man rolled down the window, another guy his age in the passenger seat leaning forward to see around him. “Professor Tecton! Holy shit!”

I could practically feel the glow of Charlie’s grin from next to me. He moved past and reached out to the driver for a handshake. “At your service.”

The guy laughed and as Emily and I approached the window, I saw that both men were wearing sweatshirts with the University of Tennessee logo. “Damn, this is crazy as hell,” the driver said. “Charlie freaking Cannon is just walking down the road all normal-like.” The young man laughed again,a sound of both amusement and disbelief. “I’m Emilio and this is Wells,” the driver said, hitching his thumb over to the guy next to him.

I introduced myself and Emily did too, and then Emilio leaned his arms on the window frame. “Wait, Nova, right? Charlie’s girlfriend?”

Emily nodded and mumbled something that sounded affirmative.

“You’re coming from Tennessee?” I asked, gesturing to Emilio’s sweatshirt. I glanced at the logo on the truck. I was going to assume that whoever Elrod Coltrane was, he hadn’t given these two young men permission to borrow his work truck.

“Yeah. We’re engineering students there. We all got evacuated because of the flood. A dam upstream of the Tennessee River broke and the entire campus was knee-deep in water. The wreckage from homes was floating past. We didn’t want to wait and see what else was gonna be in that water.”

“A dam broke?” Charlie asked, his voice incredulous.

“Yeah. The hardware and software systems that control everything from pipelines to chemical processing plants to dam operations had to have gone down with the power surge or whatever it was,” Emilio said. “There’s not much in modern society that those systems don’t control. We’re fucked.” He leaned back and gestured to his friend. “We mostly get how it works but have no idea how long it’ll take to get fixed over such a large area. All we know is we gotta get home where the lights are hopefully on. Our folks have gotta be freaking. What about y’all?”

We’re fucked.I swallowed, overcome again by yet another piece of information that sounded too big to truly grasp while we were standing in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road. “We’re trying to get home to California,” I said. “From what we’ve been told, the power is down from Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania to here.” And now we knew it extended down to Tennessee too.

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