Page 90 of Heart of the Sun

It looked like the entirety of the San Bernardino National Forest was burning, the sky practically black as we crested a hill. My heart sank. As a native Californian I was no stranger to forest fires, but this, in the midst of the current desperation and lack of water, was nothing short of calamitous. Tuck swore and then turned back the way we’d come, finally heading north rather than south toward my parents’ home in an effort to go around the fire. He unfolded the map, glancing at it as he drove on the shoulder of the road by necessity as both lanes were filled with vehicles. We drove on, my hands clenched at my sides as we veered away from what had looked like a valley of hell.

The sky cleared and the scent of acrid smoke dissipated as we drove by a sign for Temecula, the parked cars and trucks becoming more sparse on the stretch of road we were on. But when I reached down to the floor where I had a bottle of water, I felt Tuck slow and come to a stop. I sat up just as Tuck began reversing away from a row of cars that had been arranged to block the road up ahead. In front of the blockade of vehicles were men in hunting gear holding rifles and standing duty at the perimeter. “What is that? Would they not let us through?” I asked as Tuck turned around. “Should we try?”

“No. I doubt they’ll let us through. Everywhere is being sectioned off into mini states,” Tuck said. “Borders are being established.”

“On main roads? They can’t do that.”

“Who’s going to stop them? It’s smart, Em. It’s the only way anyone is going to survive.”

“The military must have a store of gasoline somewhere? Even if it’s taken them a couple of weeks to mobilize. This would be one of the first things they addressed, right? The inability of citizens to travel?”

“Even with gasoline, most of the military’s equipment might not work. And any military that tries to knock down these borders will have a fight on their hands because knocking down these borders is sentencing the people inside to death.”

I looked back at the road. He’d given similar advice to the Pritchards. He’d told them to create a perimeter and have neighbors take shifts guarding it. Protecting their food and water and livestock. And it made sense to guard your own property at a time like this. I just hadn’t realized people would start claiming whole swaths of land, setting up roadblocks into any area that had resources a certain group decided to claim.

“What about the ones outside the lines?” I asked. What about travelers, like us?

He shot me a troubled look but didn’t say more. I supposed I didn’t need him to.

We backtracked an hour and took another route, only to find that one was blocked as well. This one however, had a large group of people standing in front of it, yelling at the men with rifles. At the back of the group there was a man and a woman with a double stroller loaded down with items, a baby and a toddler both crying from the seats. “Fuck,” Tuck swore, banging his palms on the steering wheel. He pulled off to the side of the road and unfolded the map just as the loud crack of a gun made me jump and reach for Tuck, gripping his shirt.

The crowd in front of the barrier was screaming now, as were the men behind it. The people parted, and a man lay on the ground, and even from a distance I could see the blood spreading from his body. “They shot him,” I said. “Tuck, they shot him.”

Tuck dropped the map, backed up and then turned around just as one of the women spotted us,raising her hand and yelling, “Hey! Hey! Help!” and began running toward our car. I watched her through the rearview mirror, the others turning too and beginning to pursue our car, but then stopping as we sped away.

The desperation was palpable. Those people were likely out of food, had no transportation, and were on the wrong side of an already-established line.Parents. Children. Young women my age, alone.I swallowed gulps of air, tamping down my anguish.

Tuck was looking at the map as he drove back around the big rig we’d driven past a few minutes before. “Goddammit,” Tuck swore. “Both roads I was going to take to your parents’ are blocked. We’re going to have to go another way.” He pulled over to the side of the road and I was quiet, trying to process what I’d seen at the barricade as Tuck studied the map. After a few minutes, he set it down and pulled back onto the road. I didn’t ask what new route we’d take, trusting him as I’d trusted him to get me this far.

We drove toward the coast now, the only direction available. “Should we try the highway?” I asked. Maybe back roads had been safest once, and mostly empty in many locations, but perhaps the opposite was true now. I couldn’t imagine what anyone would be trying to protect on a highway, especially one where the cars had been raided.

“Not in a car,” Tuck said distractedly, his gaze constantly moving to the rearview mirror as if he expected to be chased down at any moment. “We probably wouldn’t be able to make it through because of the parked vehicles, but even if we could, it isn’t safe. We’d have to travel way too slow in a car and be vulnerable to attack. It’d be safer to go by foot, but we don’t have enough provisions for that. We’ll need to stock up first, at least on water.”

Not having enough provisions also meant we wouldn’t be able to backtrack to Arizona and attempt to get to the San Fernando Valley from the opposite direction than the one we’d taken. Truthfully, we might not even make it back the way we’d come considering the barriers that seemed to be going up by the hour.

Tuck continued to look extremely unsettled, and it scared me too. “This looks like the only route we can take, but moving north to your parents will mean traveling through Los Angeles,” he said.

Los Angeles.

All this way, we’d avoided cities because they weren’t safe. Tuck had planned to go to Los Angeles alone, but Tuck was strong and street savvy, and his instincts for handling danger were honed. Me, I was none of those things.

That was the old you, Emily. Haven’t you held your own on this journey? Haven’t you proven that you can be an asset too?

“Okay,” I said, giving him a tip of my chin. “Then we’ll check on your uncle together. And then move on to my parents’ from there.”

“We don’t have another choice right now,” Tuck murmured, almost as if to himself. And again, he banged his palms on the steering wheel and cursed under his breath.

We turned onto another road, and then another, finally catching sight of the City of Angels sprawled in the distance.

chapterthirty-seven

Tuck

Day Sixteen

I pulled the car behind a furniture store in a strip mall that had obviously been looted, front windows broken and glass sparkling in the morning sun. I parked behind two dumpsters that looked mostly empty and shut the engine off. “We’ll come back for it if we can,” I told Emily, pocketing the key.

“What if someone hotwires it?”

---