II

Three's a Crowd

Escaping the city is—for lack of a better word—challenging. My district has not descended into the kind of chaos seen up north, but the panic is setting in. Greed is one of the first true natures of humankind that emerges under pressure, visible in the unwieldy suitcases people load to the backseats of their cars. Some of them go as far as strapping their mattresses to the top of the car. A family tries to carry a grand piano with them; even Clark snorts a little at that sight.

I don’t try to get to my car. The streets are jammed and a car is only as good as the fuel inside its tank. Walking may be slower, but we can also ignore traffic and not worry about gas.

Walking, however, also means exposure to desperate muggers.

One of them jumps in front of us not a hundred yards from my apartment. It is honestly quite insulting, the way he brandishes a switchblade with that weak grip of his.

Of course he points it at me, what with me being the woman. I sigh, long and weary. “You don’t want to do that,” I say, cringing a bit when I realize how cheesy the line is coming from me.

The mugger is full of originality, snapping a slightly nervous “shut up!” The switchblade wavers a little.

Rolling my eyes, I push my parka a little bit open to show the gun holstered to my side. “Seriously, kid. Give me that knife and scram.” I make a show of slowly reaching towards my gun.

The knife clatters down to the pavement and the kid sprints the other way. Clark crouches, picking up the knife gingerly. “What should we do with this?” he asks.

I lift an eyebrow. He does not seem rattled, just squeamish. “I’ll keep it,” I say; he hands it to me, handle-first. When I retract the blade, he flinches. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he says, though not so certainly. “I just don’t like weapons.”

But not the mugging? I want to ask, but this is neither the time nor place. We are both unharmed; the question can wait.

So we walk.

We make good time; Clark may not be fast, but he endures without complaint. We stop once the afternoon summer heat becomes too much to take a deep drink from our water bottles and take off some layers. I am down to a tank top, my parka tied around my waist and my shirt stuffed into my backpack. Clark also ties his pink sweatshirt around his waist. We laugh a little about how he looks like an overgrown ballerina, the sweatshirt as his tutu.

When the sun finally goes down—which is around 10 PM—we are already at the outskirts of the city. A neon sign for a motel flickers not far from where we are. Clark looks at me beseechingly.

Okay, so not entirely without complaint.

Still, a dodgy motel is still shelter, which means it is still at least better than sleeping under the stars. The cars don’t seem to stop. If anything, the highway seems to only encourage them to go faster and farther away from the city.

The motel greets us with the barrel of a shotgun.

Clark freezes instead of jumping back, which is a good move when facing trigger-happy motel managers. “We’re not interested in your flesh, if it helps?” he says.

The man with the shotgun—short, potbellied, receding hairline, all the winning genetic markers—throws a plastic stick-like object, which, when I catch it, turns out to be an electronic thermometer. “You want to check our temperature?”

“News says it starts with fever,” he says.

I obediently stick the thermometer in my armpit. When it beeps, I toss it back to him. He takes one look, nods, and throws it back to us.