Elijah's a girl. :3
Also, I said that Elijah remembers everything. yeah, I'm taking that out when I edit this book, so just forget that Elijah remembers everything, because that little tidbit about her is irritating to write. Thanks, and enjoy the story (:
Oh and yes there's a lot of cursing in this.
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"We are living on the brink of the apocalypse, but the world is asleep." – Joel C. Rosenberg
“Road trip!” Kyle my imbecile of a brother shouted as he tossed his bag into the back of the car and came around the side to hop inside. Once he was seated beside me, he turned to me with a huge grin on his face. “Aren’t you excited, Elijah? A road trip!”
That was the thing about my little brother. At fifteen, he was two years younger than me and those two years couldn’t make more of a difference. Our family had never been on a road trip before—Kyle’s definition of a road trip was an extended car ride to a destination that wasn’t home in which we’d be staying there for over a night—and for some reason my little brother found the idea of a road trip extra exciting.
As for me, I could care less. Packing wasn’t my strong suit, and it definitely wasn’t something I wanted to spent three hours of my life doing. Honestly, I’d wished that our parents would let me stay home. But no. It was a family vacation, which of course required the whole of our family.
“Yeah,” I said in reply to Kyle’s earlier excitement, “road trip. Yay.”
Kyle scoffed. “You don’t seem happy about it, Elijah. Why not? We’ve never been on a road trip before.”
“Because,” I explained, “all a road trip is a long car ride where I get more and more irritated with you.”
That efficiently shut him up, albeit I did feel a bit guilty for shooting down his happiness. He was my brother and I loved him, but his obsession with road trips was more than stupid. He’d been obsessed with the actual road trip itself ever since our parents announced it a little over two weeks ago. We were going to visit our aunt Harriet in California, which was more than a day’s worth of a drive, so this entire experience should be fun, shouldn’t it?
Both Mom and Dad climbed into the car and drove out of the drive way, pulling into the neighborhood street.
We’d been driving for exactly 20 minutes so far. I’d counted. Ever since I was a young girl, I’d had a . . . gift. Not a supernatural gift that allowed me to see the future or anything of that sort. No it was just my brain that tended to remember everything. Every little aspect of my life was commended to memory. Nobody really knew why, but that was just how it was. I’d learned to accept it by now.
But that was how I knew that it was exactly 20 minutes since we left our house. Some might call me a freak or a weirdo for being able to remember everything, but it came to my benefit at times. For examples, tests were the easiest thing in the world for me. The answers came so easily due to the fact that they were permanently etched into my brain for all eternity.
“Elijah? Kyle?” Mom’s voice carried from the front of the car to the back. Her head turned, she was looking back at Kyle and I. “Are you guys hungry?”
“No thanks,” Kyle said, but Mom didn’t listen to him, and she handed me the bag of Pringles chips either way.
I gave her a nod of thanks, and she seemed to understand, because she smiled at me.
I had always been closer to my mom than I was my dad. Not because I didn’t love my dad equally, it was just because I hung around my mom more. Dad was a scientist, so he wasn’t home often. Kyle was closer to our mom than our dad also and for the same reason as mine.
We were driving through a bridge, and on instinct, my eyes flickered toward the clock, tracking our time by each minute. Ever since I fully began to understand my memory, I started paying more attention to the details, deliberately memorizing each one. Because what if there came a day when I needed to remember something, but I had simply forgot to look at it and shove it into the gigantic brain that I called my own? That would really suck, and I would feel bad about myself.
Therefore, I tried my best to take in my surroundings every chance that I got.
“Right, kids, so up ahead—“ Dad started to say, but he was cut off as our car jumped. It wasn’t one of those tiny road bumps that occur all the time on the roads. No, it was one of those bumps where you wonder if you’ve killed somebody or not.
Let’s hope not.
Instantly, my eyes flew open and they looked out the front window, trying to see what had happened. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make anything out other than the empty road. It was strange, really, that there was no other car on the road with us, but I didn’t question it. What I did question though was the fact that I didn’t notice it earlier that we were alone on the road.
Come on, Elijah, I silently scolded myself. You need to be paying attention more often. You never know when—
My inner monologue was cut short when Dad’s car door opened. At first, I thought that somebody was trying to get in, but I soon realized that Dad was getting out. He was slowly stepping out of the car and walking toward whatever we had ran into.
“No, Steve, stop,” Mom called after her husband, but he was out of range, and he couldn’t hear what she was saying to him. “Steve!” she shouted, but Dad seemed hell-bent on walking toward whatever was laying on the road. “Get back in the car!”
When Dad still failed to turn around and acknowledge Mom, she let out a few words that she would never allow Kyle and I to say and got out of the car as well, the door slamming behind her. But before she left, she said, “’Kay, I have no idea what’s going on, but you kids need to stay in the car, alright? Unless I ask you to come outside, I need you to stay in the car. Do not get out whatsoever. For anybody . . . or anything.” She had said the last part so quietly that I wasn’t sure if she even said it.
“Elijah,” Kyle said, looking at me with worry in his eyes, “I have a really bad idea about this.”
I sighed. “I know, Ky. I know.” And that was why I unbuckled my seat belt and began to sit up.
“You know what Mom said,” Kyle hissed at me, grabbing my arm and holding on tight. “Don’t get out of the car. You heard her, Elijah. You even nodded and said ‘okay, Mom’.”
“I know, Ky,” I snapped at him, yanking my arm away. “I wasn’t getting out of the car.” I leaned forward a bit over the plastic compartment between the driver and passenger seat, trying to get a better view of the road and our parents. “I was just . . . trying to see . . . what was . . . going . . . on.”
“Whatever,” Kyle huffed, crossing his arms and falling back against the seat. “Don’t get mad at me when Mom and Dad get—“
“Oh my god,” I breathed out, not believing my eyes. There was a man on the road. Dad had run over a man. But that wasn’t even the creepiest part of what I was seeing. The creepiest part was Dad was pulling something out of his jacket, and once it was fully unsheathed, I saw that it was a pistol.
Okay, what the hell? First, Dad ran over a man. Second, he got out of the car—to what? Shoot him? Wasn’t he aware that running over a man and then shooting him was illegal? I mean—
“Oh my god,” I screamed louder than I thought, but since the windows were closed, neither of my parents heard my scream. But Kyle sure did. He jumped forward and tried to pull me back down to my seat, but I refused and restrained against him.
The man—the very one that my dad had just run over and was about to shoot—suddenly jumped up from the ground and attacked Dad. He attacked him. He actually sprang to life—is that even possible?—and pounced (for the lack of a better word) on my dad. What I was seeing was unreal, and yet it was still very real.
Mom started screaming at the man who was not even a few seconds ago lying flat on the ground, supposedly dead, and was yelling at Dad also. If seeing my dad pull a gun out of his jacket wasn’t weird enough, seeing my mom pull a gun out of her jacket too was even weirder.
But sure enough, she shoved her hand into his jacket and when she removed her hand, there was a small handgun nestled into her small hand. She aimed for the man who attacked dad and shot.
It was then that I realized that this man had no blood on him until the bullet pierced through his back, creating a hole with blood seeping out of it.
Usually, after being shot, a normal man would fall to the ground in agony. But I supposed that this man wasn’t normal, because he didn’t stop attacking Dad. Mom had to shoot him three—three—more times before he finally fell to the ground. I wasn’t sure if I could say that he was dead or not.
“What the hell was that?” Kyle demanded, trying to stand up in the car as well but I quickly yelled at him and shoved him back down into his seat.
“Stay down,” I growled at him. “I’ll explain later. Or better yet, Mom and Dad will explain later.”
“What the he—“
But I blocked out his voice and turned my attention back toward my parents. My mom was leaning over my dad, cradling his arm. Simultaneously, they both looked back at me, their eyes meeting mine. Dad’s eyes held this sort of distressed look in them while Mom’s eyes looked murderous.
Yeah, this was definitely new. The parents that I knew were kind and loving. They wouldn’t own guns. Especially my mom. She was a soccer mom for god’s sakes! Since when did soccer moms own handguns? They didn’t, and that was the problem.
Normal moms didn’t own handguns.
Before I could freak out anymore, Mom stood up and began walking back over to the car, gun still in hand. It chilled me right down to the bones to see my mom with that deadly weapon, to say the least. But now that Mom wasn’t hovering over Dad anymore, I could properly see the damage that the man—now dead man—had done. I gasped when I saw that he had a gigantic gash on his arm.
Okay, gash was an extreme under exaggeration if those even existed. The injury on my dad’s arm was more of a hole with red, bloody flesh surrounding it. It looked like the man had taken a huge chunk out of my dad’s arm with his teeth and then proceeded to chew on his arm, ripping away more and more flesh.
I would’ve stared at it longer if it weren’t for my mom who opened the door of the car and stuck her head in.
Her hair, which was previously in a tight ponytail, was wild and everywhere. Her ponytail was almost all the way out. And her eyes—by god, her eyes—were swollen, and tears were welling up in them. The fierce woman whom I had saw merely moment ago bravely pull out a gun and shoot a man three times to save her husband was gone. She was replaced with a fragile woman who had just seen her husband possibly get eaten.
“Listen . . . “ she trailed off, looking away from me momentarily to look at Kyle. When I looked back at my little brother, his eyes were wide and a look of disbelief was written all over his face. She returned her gaze back to me. She sobered up, and she looked like the woman from minutes ago. She took a deep breath. “Listen to me carefully, Elijah.” She waited.
I nodded my head, not talking so that she could go on.
A cold look passed her face and ice entered her eyes. “You’re going to get into that driver’s seat,” she said, pointing to the spot Dad had previously occupied, “and you’re going to drive an address. You—“
“What address?” I interrupted her in panic. What the hell was going on? Like, shit, why was Mom telling me that I needed to drive? “Why do I have to drive? Why can’t you?”
Mom glared at me with such malice that I didn’t know if she was even my mother anymore. She definitely wasn’t the woman who had offered me Pringles earlier. “Shut up, Elijah. Just shut up and listen for once in your goddamn life.” She took another deep breath, calming herself. “Listen, your gift . . . use it to your advantage. I can’t even begin to explain things to you right now—“
“Oh my god!” I shouted at her. “Just what the he—“
“Shut up, Elijah!” Kyle’s voice yelled from behind me, grabbing the back of my jacket, tugging hard but not hard enough to knock me back. “Let her speak, goddammit!”
“Now that you’re listening,” Mom snapped at me, “what you need is in the glove compartment and the middle compartment. There is money in there—enough to sustain both of you for a while until you get to your destination. Once you get there, introduce yourselves with your last names as well as your middle names. That way the people there will know who you are.”
“Mom, I’m scared,” I told her honestly in a quiet voice.
Surprisingly, her gaze softened for the briefest of moment but then hardened once again. “I’m sorry, but you’re on your own from here. You’re going to need to listen to my instructions carefully, and you’re going to need to do exactly as I say.”
She looked at book of us for agreement, and Kyle and I both nodded.
“Okay, things are going to get real tough, alright?” I whimpered in the back of my throat. Tough wasn’t a word I liked very much. “You’re going to need to be strong. Trust no one unless you’re positive that they’re . . . safe.”
“How will we know they’re safe?” Kyle asked, and I nearly wanted to slap him because Mom answered his questions and not mine.
She looked at her son. “You won’t.”
“This is great.” Kyle cursed a string of profanities, and Mom didn’t even flinch. “This is real freaking great!”
“You don’t even know half of it, Ky,” Mom said gravely, beginning to back out of the car.
No, she couldn’t leave yet. I still had so many questions! “What about Dad?” I asked her before she could slam the door shut, leaving her kids behind. “Will he be alright?”
She took a moment to answer, sighed, then, “No.”
Without another word, she slammed the door and stalked back toward Dad, gun still in hand. She grabbed both Dad and the man that Dad ran over and dragged them to the side of the bridge. With one last look at me, she nodded her head, and I knew that I needed to get into the driver’s seat and drive off this bridge and leave my parents here alone with whatever that man was.
“Elijah—“ Kyle started to say but broke off, his voice cracking. “What just happened?”
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly, maneuvering myself so that I comfortably sat in the driver’s seat. I gripped the steering wheel and closed my eyes for just a minute. When I opened them again, Kyle was sitting in the passenger seat, his head leaning against the window, looking out at the outside world. From the corner of my eyes, I saw my Mom waving her hands in my direction. I heard her shouting at me, and I could barely make out her words.
“Get out of here!” she screamed. “Put that car in drive and get the hell out of here!”
Without further instruction, I drove.
It had been exactly 96 minutes since we left the house, prepared to go on a family road trip, except it turned out to be so much more than a road trip.
The memory of what happened roughly 72 minutes ago still burned in the back of my head, and I wanted so badly to rip it out and forget it, but I knew that wasn’t how my gift worked, if I could really even consider it a gift. I couldn’t forget. No matter how hard I tried to forget, I just couldn’t. A blessing and a curse, really. More of a curse though when it came down to it in the end.
“Elijah,” Kyle said. I looked at him. “Where are we going?”
I sighed. “I have no idea, Ky. I really don’t.” I remembered what Mom said about their being everything that we needed in the glove compartment. “The glove compartment,” I told Kyle. “Look in the glove compartment.”
When he did, I watched what he did from my peripheral. Inside the glove compartment was a wallet full of cash—we didn’t bother checking how much—our identification cards, cans of Spam (that must’ve been Dad’s doing. He had always said that one would always need Spam in their car if they were going to survive), and a folded piece of paper.
Kyle unfolded the paper. “14982 Spring Land, California.” He looked toward my direction. “Isn’t that where our ‘relatives’ are living?”
“The ones we were going on the road trip to see?”
“Yeah.”
“Then yeah.” I laughed. That was just too ironic. We were going on a road trip to a house in the first place and even after everything that happened, we were still going on a road trip. “Looks like you’re getting your road trip after all, Ky.”
Kyle groaned. “This is so not how I wanted it to happen.”
I chuckled. “Me either, Ky. Me either. Hey, is there a map in there?”
Kyle started rustling around in the glove compartment again and pulled out a map of the U.S. From the looks of it, it was a pretty advanced map. There were over 100 pages, and there were maps of each state with the roads and highways. It was exactly what I needed.
“Cool,” I said. “Do you know how to read maps?”
“Uh,” he said unsurely. “My geography teacher taught us a little bit . . . “
“Good,” I said, not caring if he was an expert or not. “You’re the designated map reader. If we get lost, you’re asking for directions.”
Kyle didn’t reply, and I didn’t expect him to. We fell into a comfortable silence, and I wondered if things we were going to be like this all the way to California—awkward and tense. Things were just so screwed up by then. Hell, we left our parents behind on a bridge in Washington. That was so screwed up all on its own.
We left them there with the extremely vague instructions of ‘drive to that address’ and ‘trust no one unless you’re positive they’re safe’. Then Mom even had the decency to tell us that there was no possible way to ensure that someone was safe.
What great advice, Mom.
I shook my head, grumbling. There was no way this was going to work. Too many questions were left unanswered. Too many damn questions. My head was already spinning from all the questions that I was reeling with.
I had been so distracted overthinking things that I didn’t realize a great deal of things along the way until we were reaching Portland, Oregon (according to Kyle the Map Reader). I hadn’t realized that the roads on the way were pretty much deserted save for a few straggler cars. I hadn’t realized that everything was eerily quiet. I hadn’t realized that we were running out of gas.
And when I realized those things, I said, “Oh shit.”