Page 89 of Everything Under the Sun

But I already did.

“I don’t want you to die, Atticus, because I…well, not because I can’t make it on my own, but because I don’t want anything to happen to you. I want us to make it to Shreveport together.”

Her hand fell away from my arm.

“We both deserve a shot at life,” she said. “I’m not the only one of us you should be fighting for.”

I looked away; removed two pieces of bread from an aluminum foil pouch.

“Let’s eat and rest,” I said, putting a piece into her hand. “And then we should get moving.”

I both liked and rejected her feelings. The latter I did with swiftness.

Thais took the bread, but she never looked at it.

“We’ve been traveling for hours,” she said. “And you haven’t looked at this once. How do you even know we’re going in the right direction?”

I glanced at her and saw my compass dangling from her hand by the silver chain.

I shrugged.

“Right now”—I took the compass and pocketed it—“I don’t think it matters much which way we go. I want to lose the men following us. We’ll keep going west, and then we’ll head south.” My plan was to make it to the river and lose the raiders there—water was the only surefire way to cover our tracks. Though the particulars of the plan I would have to figure out on the way.

We ate and we boiled water to drink and when we and the horses needed rest, we stopped and slept. Thais slept. I only pretended to, otherwise Thais wouldn’t either.

Another twelve hours. Fifteen. Twenty—I couldn’t be sure of the time, but it sure as hell felt like twenty. Nothing much changed in our travel. I was still pissed at her. Or was it something else? Maybe the silent treatment I gave her had nothing at all to do with what I made myself believe. I was angry, yes, but more than that I was trying to keep my growing attachment to Thais at bay. I didn’t want to care about her more than I already did, or it would make it that much harder to bear if I failed to protect her. Our chances of making it to Shreveport, much less making it anywhere alone, were next to nil, but I decided I would do everything I could to beat the odds. I just never planned to tell Thais what I really thought: we weren’t going to make it.

“I’ve been meaning to ask about those red circles on your map,” Thais said another hour later, sitting on the ground with her legs crisscrossed. She kept her hands folded between her legs.

I laid the map of the United States on the ground in front of us. The horses were tethered to a tree nearby. More wide-open fields awaited us just beyond the trees we took shelter beneath, and I grew troubled by the fact we’d no longer have the luxury of concealment once we set out again.

“The circles,” I said as I ran my index finger along the map, “are fallout zones.”

I dragged my finger down the East Coast from New York to Florida where most of the circles were drawn.

“Before everything went down, the rest of the country was finally catching up to Texas when it came to wind and solar power. Most of the nation’s nuclear power plants had been decommissioned”—I ran my finger westward, stopping at different states—“Tennessee. Mississippi. Louisiana. Arkansas. And Texas.” My finger moved northward, over Private Masters’ blood. “Missouri. Kansas—none of these states relied on nuclear power when the world ended, and that saved over half of the country from a much worse scenario than The Sickness caused.”

I raised my finger from the map and set it down on the East Coast again with a heavy smack. “Can’t say the same for some of the eastern states though. When the population started dying off, the virus didn’t care much who it infected, and the people who kept those plants from melting down were at as much risk as the rest of us”—I flicked an ant away from invading Georgia—“and every plant still in operation melted like ice cream on a hot sidewalk. No one goes east anymore. Sometimes I wonder how many got out before the fallout.” I stopped, and my gaze veered off thinking of my family.

But Thais must’ve caught the look on my face.

“Did you know someone on the East Coast?” she asked.

I nodded, still looking toward the field.

“Most of my family lived in Virginia.”

I paused, swallowed hard, and then turned my attention to the map again as I tried to shake off the grief. The map shuffled in my hands as I folded it back down compactly.

“After my parents divorced, my sisters and I moved to Kentucky with our mother.” I reached for the backpack and stuffed the unevenly folded map back inside the front zipper. Then I stood.

“I’m sorry that your family died,” Thais said after a moment.

My eyes found hers, but lingered only seconds before I started for the horses.

“I’m sorry that your family died, too.”

Neither of us said anything more on the matter.

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