Page 36 of Heart of the Sun

“For the love of Christ, get it together,” Tuck said.

My head came up as anger raced through me. “Youget it together, you smug asshole.”

“I have it together,” he said smoothly.

“Do you?”

His eyes flashed, and another bolt of indignation pinballed through my body. How dare he? I’d been miserable for days and I hadn’t complained at all, despite being the smallest of the group and wearing improper footwear. I reached down, picked up a handful of gravel and hurled it just because. The resulting sound was soft and scattered and mostly unsatisfying, even if both Tuck and Charlie leaned to the side so as not to get hit by a rogue pebble. “I don’t have your muscles and your…stupid long legs,” I shouted, waving my arm in the general direction of his sturdy thighs and well-muscled ass I’d been staring at for days now. “But I’ve been keeping up anyway! And I’m wearing fucking slippers and leather pants!” I practically screeched.

“Are you done?” Tuck asked.

With a loud growl, I elbowed him aside, moved past him, and started marching down the road, Charlie catching up after a moment.

My general rage kept me moving for the next thirty minutes until we made it to the base of an on-ramp at which point I sagged against the guardrail. The sky had turned a gorgeous shade of deep mauve, and despite the dwindling sunlight, not a single light had blinked on over the highway. It was confirmed: we’d walked for miles and miles and were still in the dark.

And beyond that, it was quiet. We were standing right beside a highway, and not a single engine could be heard.

“Damn,” Tuck said. “There are cars up there, but they’re all stopped, just like the other ones we saw.

“What the fuck is that about?” Charlie asked as we followed Tuck up the on-ramp to get a closer look.We’d see more from up there. Maybe a hotel… I didn’t need power. Just a bed. A pillow. Oh my God, carpet beneath my feet.

Vehicles littered the highway, dark and abandoned like the few we’d passed at the gas station. We stood there, looking in both directions. “Whatever happened disabled all these cars and trucks,” Tuck said.

“I saw this movie once where a comet vaporized most of the people on earth,” I said. That explanation seemed ludicrous, but then again, this whole situation felt bizarre and inexplicable. Whatif? At this point, I might even be willing to consider aliens.

“This isn’t a movie, Emily,” Charlie said, gripping the front of his hair and screwing up his face, clearly at risk of having a breakdown too now that we’d arrived at another disappointing location.

“Yes, I’m aware,Charlie,” I retorted. There wasn’t space for both of us to fall apart, but of course, Charlie couldn’t abide by that simple, unspoken rule.

“Kids,” Tuck warned. “No one got vaporized.”

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“Because we’d see their empty clothes where their bodies used to be. I saw that movie too.”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense though, right?” I said as he moved around a big rig blocking our way and I shuffled behind him. “I mean, if a comet vaporized human hair, wouldn’t it vaporize cotton too?”

He shot me a look and then pointed. I followed his finger to a sign up ahead that told us Springfield was eleven miles away. “Oh,” I breathed, even if in that moment, eleven miles felt the same as eleven feet—I could walk neither. Also, which Springfield? I looked from one license plate to another. If these cars were all local, then we were in Illinois. Tuck hesitated for a moment and then climbed up onto the side of the truck, making it to the roof in mere moments. He stood up and peered off into the distance, in the direction where there was apparently a metropolitan area.

It was then that I noticed the logo on the side of the truck we were standing next to. “Charlie,” I said, grabbing for his arm and gripping it.

“Ow. What?”

“This truck.” I pointed to the large red logo that I’d seen on every box of breakfast cereal I’d eaten growing up. We locked eyes for only a moment before we both headed for the back.

chaptereighteen

Tuck

I craned my neck, trying to see as far as I could from the roof of the big rig I was standing on, but I didn’t even see so much as a flickering light. Not one. The power was out for as far as the eye could see. At least now we knew where we were—eleven miles outside Springfield, Illinois. And the highway in front of me was littered with vehicles of all types. Some had made it to the side of the road, but the majority had come to a standstill in the middle of a lane. What in the hell type of event would cause that? This was far from a mere power outage. Of course, our plane practically nose-diving from the sky had clued me in thatsomethingtook place to cause that, as had the fires burning on the ground. But this was even bigger than I imagined. Something much more widespread was going on, and the mild buzz of trepidation that had been rumbling in my gut since we came up on the gas station and the abandoned cars there, intensified.

I hopped down and looked around. Where the hell were Charlie and Emily? I heard some scuffling from the rear of the truck and headed in that direction, stopping when I came upon the two of them. The rear door of the truck was wide-open and a glance inside showed it to be mostly empty except for a few scattered boxes of cereal, two of which Charlie and Emily had snagged and were currently shoveling handfuls into their mouths.

Without ceasing to gorge herself, Emily reached next to her and picked up a third box of cereal and tossed it at me. I caught it and she grinned, her teeth filled with brown cereal flakes and pink dehydrated strawberries. I held back a laugh as she said, “Truce?”

She’d saved me a box. I was momentarily touched. “Slow down,” I muttered. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

Then I tore open the box, tipped my head, and poured the stuff straight into my mouth, trying not to follow Charlie and Emily’s leads, but mostly failing. God, I was so hungry I could feel my stomach eating itself. The crunchy cereal and the tart, chalky fruit were so good I moaned, my jaw working to grind the mass quantity of food enough that I could swallow without choking to death.

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