CHAPTER 16
A JOURNEY
Tears immediately flood in my eyes, making my sight blur. I stand there still, stiffed. What Janine just told me makes me want to blame myself for following Jamela to their house. I don’t know if I can forgive myself for leaving them.
“Who captured her?” I ask.
“The guards,” Janine says.
“Why did they capture her?”
“We don’t know,” she mutters. “They just took her.”
I glance over her shoulder at Kate and Heather. Their palms are covering their faces while they sob. In a few moments, the door opens behind me. I turn around, and Bryan steps inside the house.
“What’s wrong, Mary?” he asks, closing the door behind him. His eyes go to Kate and Heather who were seated on the floor/bed. “Why are they crying?” he asks after a few moments, gesturing a hand at them.
“Bryan,” I say. He turns to me quickly and pays attention. “Beth has been captured by the guards.”
He frowns at what I said. At first the expression on his face seems like he doesn’t believe. He keeps quiet for a minute. Then he shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “That can’t happen.” His eyebrows meet together. “The guards cannot do that. They have no reason for capturing her.”
Silence. He glances at Kate and Heather over my shoulder, and I follow. They are listening to him, their eyes red and tired of crying. I look back at Bryan. He glances back at me and says:
“What can I do to help?”
“You’re the son of the mayor,” Janine says. “Do you think you can convince your father to free Beth?”
Bryan looks at her and stares at her for a long moment. Janine has a point in what she says. He is the son of the mayor. If he can convince his father to free Beth, Beth can still live with us. I hope that Bryan can do it. If he cannot, we cannot see Beth anymore. They will kill her. I don’t know. But if they do, they just can’t do that. They have no reason to do that.
“I don’t know if I can,” says Bryan, a little melancholic. “If she did not do anything wrong, there is no reason for the guards to capture her.”
“But do you know where they take her?” Janine asks.
He sighs. “I know where they take someone they capture,” he says. “But we can’t go there this time. It’s too dangerous for us.”
Janine nods. “When will we go?”
“We can live in the morning,” he tells her. Then he looks at me after Janine nods once again. “Mary,” he begins, “we’re taking so long. The family is waiting for us. Get your—”
“No, Bryan,” I say, cutting him off. He stops immediately and sighs. “I have to stay here for the night. I have a friend to help. And if you really care about her, you can stay here for the night as well.”
I wake up in the morning with Beth’s name in my mouth. I was the first one who got up. But when I hear someone crying softly beside me, I knew I wasn’t.
“Kate,” I say, her name a whisper as they left my lips. I touch her arm and try to turn her around so that I can see her. “Are you okay?” I begin to pat my hand softly on her arm.
“I missed Beth,” she sobs, turning around now.
Beth’s pillow is pressed tightly against Kate’s chest. Beth used to sleep beside her every night, so maybe Kate is assuming that the pillow was her. Tears are welling down Kate’s temples. Some are streaming down toward her ears.
“I know,” I say. “Me too, Kate. I missed her, too.”
“Do you think she’s going back?” she asks.
My eyes close slowly at what she said. I cannot accept the fact that she might not come back already. No, I think. She will come back.
“She’s going to be okay when she gets back, Kate,” I assure her. “Do you want to come with us to take her back?”
She sniffs, and I hear a disgusting sound from her nose. “I want to, Mary. But I’m scared. I want to stay here.”
I nod. “Alright.”
I smile at her before I turn to Bryan who is sleeping beside me on the other side of Kate. His face is buried between his arms and limbs and hands because he uses them as a pillow. I put a hand on his shoulder, taking a breath. Then I shake him hard and say, “Bryan, wake up.”
He grunts, a waking sound. His body stretches as his eyes struggle to open. His drool on his skin has dried and become white. I chuckle under my breath at the sight of it.
“What’s funny?” he asks, wiping the side of his still-wet lips.
“You drool when you sleep,” I say.
“Do I?” he asks again, his voice louder.
“Yes, you do.”
He searches for every white mark on his skin and wipes them immediately. “Is that embarrassing?”
“Quite,” I say, smiling. “But if the other girls see that then it is really embarrassing.”
A huge grin forms in his mouth. “Thanks for reminding me. That helps a lot.”
“No problem.”
He sits up now, his eyes staring at me. His eyes look tired and at the same time, refreshed. He was tired yesterday because he played soccer. And now he had finally rested and he seems ready for another round. But we are not going to play soccer today. We are going to free Beth.
“You look handsome when you wake up,” I tell him, as if I am still inside the Conference Room where in I am not allowed to tell any lie. His blonde hair is messy. And I think I also have a messy hair like him. They say that when you look at yourself in the mirror after you wake up, that is how you really look like.
“Thank you,” he breathes, and the air travels around my nose. “You too. I mean, beautiful.”
“Some people tell me that when I turn into a boy, I’d be as handsome that every girl would want to have sex with me.”
“But that’s not the case,” he says immediately. “You’re a girl.”
“I am.”
“And you are going to be the one asking me to have sex with you.”
I expel a heavy sigh when he said that. “Not yet, Bryan. Not now.”
“Why?” He smirks.
“Because right now,” I tell him, “Beth is in trouble and we need to save her. When we succeed”—I smile first before I tell the next sentence—“I’d give you whatever you want me to do.”
Kate and Heather decided to stay at home instead of coming with us. Before we left the house, we called their boyfriends to come stay with them. I think it might be a good idea. Dave and Baron can help to cheer them up.
Bryan drives. I sit beside him at the passenger’s side, Janine sitting ignorantly at the back seat looking around the inside of the car.
“I never knew that this is the feeling of being inside the car,” she says. “It’s making me dizzy.”
I laugh a little, smiling. I glance quickly at Bryan and see him doing the same.
“Where is this place we’re heading at?” she asks. “Bryan, are you sure you know where they took Beth?”
Bryan sighs heavily. “I told you I know where they took her,” he says. “It’s quite far. But not too far.”
“Okay,” Janine says, contented with Bryan’s answer. I can feel her nodding her head at the back even though I cannot see.
In a few minutes, I hear Bryan speak.
“We are about to leave the town,” he says. “When we enter Town Crest, I’ll drop by into a store so that you can buy some food to eat.”
“We don’t have money, Bryan,” I tell him.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says, shaking his head at me. “I’ll just pay whatever it is you buy.”
I don’t know how to feel about that. I awe him a lot now. I awe him for helping us free Beth and I awe him for giving us a ride to do that. Now I’m going to awe him once again for that “food” matter. I feel so shy about it already, but what can I do? What will happen if I don’t accept his offer?
We have passed a lot of towns now. But no Town Crest yet. I ask Bryan where the town is located, and he tells me that it is the town where there are stores everywhere. No houses. No buildings. Just a bunch of market and malls.
“And where are we going exactly? Where is Beth taken?” My voice sounds desperate for an answer. I look at Bryan with anticipation.
He sighs. “We’re going to the main city,” he says. “The Depton City. It would take us ten hours to get there. After we pass Town Crest, there would be no markets. So buy as many as you need. You’ll get hungry, I’m sure.”
“How long before Town Crest?” Janine asks.
“We should be there in thirty minutes,” Bryan replies. “Take a nap. I’ll wake you soon when we get there.”
Janine does what Bryan says: to take a nap. But I stay awake because I’m not that much sleepy.
Minutes have passed now. Maybe twenty. The sun is already high in the sky, making the surroundings so bright it makes my eyes feel heavy. Glad the windshield of the car if tinted. It makes the sunlight turn darker.
“You should wake Janine up,” Bryan says, without looking at me.
I nod in reply, turning to look at the back seat where Janine sleeps. Her head is leaning on the window, cheeks pressed against it.
“Janine,” I say.
She moves, and her eyes open after a few seconds. “Are we there yet?” she asks, leaning away from the window now.
“Not yet,” I say. “But I guess we will be there in a few moments.”
Janine nods at my answer. She looks away from my eyes and watches the trees instead outside as we pass. I glance back in front of me, and stare at the road as minutes pass.
We begin to slow down when the arch of Town Crest zooms into view. I can already see the markets, stores, malls and shops inside. On either side of the arch are walls. The boundary of the town.
“Finally,” Bryan mutters. “We’re here, guys.”
A smile stretches across my cheeks. And out of the corner of my eye I can see Bryan smiling as well. We’re here, I think. I can’t believe we’re here.
When we pass the arch, I look out of the window and stare at the buildings outside. They are colorful. All of them have great architecture and design. It is also clean. Every white wall on the buildings has no dirt. The stores are twice as big as our small house. Malls are built on either side of the road. It looks like a city. A city of markets and malls and stores.
“Where are we going to stop?” It was Janine, her voice excited.
Bryan heaves a sigh and laughs. “I don’t know,” he says. “Actually, there are more than two hundred stores here. Five malls. And seven markets.”
I wonder how big the town is. I wonder if there is still a mayor here. Is it administered by the government? Well, I have no idea.
“We have to go into a grocery store,” I suggest.
And I see Bryan nod in agreement. “Sure,” he says.
We park at a parking lot near the grocery store we chose to go in. When the car engine stops, I click the car door open and hop outside. When I push it close, something surfaces in my head about the temperature.
Hot.
I raise my hand and make a fanning motion in front of my face. But the air that touches my skin however is also hot. I search for a shadow—a large shadow to hide from the sun. But then I realize that I should just run to the door of the grocery store. I bet there is an air condition there that would make me cool and dry my sweat that is starting to form at the top of my head.
As Bryan opens the door at the back seat so that Janine can finally go out, I decide to head to the grocery store. At first I am just walking, but when I start to feel the sun burning my skin, I begin to jog to the door. I look over my shoulder at Bryan and Janine when I step under a shadow. Bryan carries an umbrella over their heads. Why didn’t he tell me that he has one? I could just have taken it.
“I’m going inside,” I tell them. “It’s extremely hot out here.”
Bryan nods. “Alright,” he says. “We’ll just follow you.”
The door is meters away from me when I turn around. I pace quickly toward it then push it as I touch the handle. Cold air welcomes me. It indeed dries my sweat at the top of my head and also the sweat around my body. There is a guard standing a few feet when I enter the door. He approaches me and immediately checks me up for weapons. He runs a metal thingy around my body. Then I hear a beep when it reaches my feet.
“You can go,” he says, gesturing a hand toward the groceries. I follow the direction of his hand, and I see a bunch of supplies just meters ahead of me.
I walk toward the nearest shelf of supplies. Before I even reach it, the door opens and Bryan and Janine come inside. The guard checks them, one by one. The metal thingy he’s carrying beeps after it checks both of them.
“You can go now,” the guard tells them.
There is only one guard inside the store. So that means the whole place has surveillance cameras. At first I feel nervous that I might be caught and die. But that’s not going to happen unless we do suspicious things. We aren’t going to steal.
We buy a lot of food, Bryan insisted. So Janine grabs anything from the shelves without even knowing what product it is. I walk to her once, carrying a few packs of biscuits. I look at the things she has in her basket and see canned goods, bottled milks and juice powder which aren’t necessary.
“Janine,” I tell her, going to her and taking the basket from her hand. “Could you at least buy the things we really need? What are we going to do with juice powders and canned sardines?”
Janine bits her lower lip and smiles at her own stupidity. “I’m sorry, Mary,” she says.
“Get those out of the basket,” I order. “What we need is bread, biscuits, water and crackers. Buy a lot of crackers because they’re not so expensive here.”
“Sure.” Janine nods then. She begins to take the unnecessary out of the basket and place them in the supply shelf in front of us.
When we get all the things we need, we already go to the cashier and pay for them. It only takes a few minutes to be done, then Bryan fishes his wallet in his pocket and takes a card and hands it to the cashier. The girl slides Bryan’s card against the card reader. I hear a beep, and the girl smiles at him and says:
“Thank you, Sir. Hope you enjoyed having your grocery at Woodholes.”
Bryan responds to her with a small smile.
The girl hands him the first paper bag. After Bryan takes it, he turns toward me and gives it to me. It doesn’t weigh that much. I peer inside the bag and see that it’s only the crackers and biscuits inside. He gives the second bag to Janine, and I think it weighs heavier than mine. Bryan gets the last one, holding it with his right arm against the right side of his chest. His left hand carries the gallon of water. When he finally manages to carry them all, we start to walk back to the car.
That afternoon, the foods we bought are all eaten. But there are some bread and biscuits left. Janine decided to sleep after we ate lunch at one of the restaurants in Town Crest. She woke up three hours later, and searched for something to eat. She grabbed the bread, then the biscuits, and then some of the crackers. She was the only one who ate the bread. She didn’t even ask us if we wanted some of it. As for the biscuits, she ate the half of it, then she started with the crackers. She took three, and we only have seven so there is four left.
“You dirty little pig!” I tell her when I look at the back seat. She has just finished eating.
“What?” she inquires, as if she doesn’t know what I meant. ‘I’m just eating.”
“Well, you are eating too much. Can you at least leave some for us? We don’t have bread for dinner already. The biscuits are already few. There are only four crackers left.”
“Why don’t we drop by in a restaurant to take our dinner?”
“There are no restaurants anymore after Town Crest,” I inform her, my eyes wide open.
“No restaurant?” she says as if she didn’t hear.
“Yes, Janine. No restaurant.”
She frowns at the car floor, staring at the food that was left. I study the look on her face. There is regret, regret that she ate almost half of our supplies.
“I bet you’re already full,” I tell her. “With all the food that you ate, well, you must be. You won’t be eating anymore until we get to Depton City.”
We’re driving at the side of a mountain. It is already 8:00 pm when the lights on our side begin to show up.
Depton City, I think.
The city has a lot of tall buildings, each is brightly lit up it is almost blinding to the eye when you look at it for long. I let my eyes travel around the place. I look at the road we are about to take, and I realize we are not that far anymore. We might be less than a three miles now. Three miles to go and we’re already near where Beth is.
I never look away from the city until we get there.
But before we go in, there is something, a very big and tall thing, blocking us from entering. They are walls, walls to guard the city from anything that tries to attack it. We approach the entrance in the wall and we are checked by guards not smaller than six feet. They open the car doors each, and check the inside of the car if there is anything that will cause an explosion or something inside the city. The guard that opens the door on my side lights a flashlight and checks the bottom of my foot.
“Get outside the car for a moment,” he orders us after he finishes examining the floor.
We do what we were told.
The guard puts a small thing at the headrest of my seat. He presses something on it, and it beeps. Beams of light come out a few seconds later. It starts to move clockwise from the floor at the back seat to the ceiling, to the front seats, then back to the floor again where it started.
Meanwhile, we are checked by other guards, running their hands around our waists and sliding a long detector two inches away from our body. We all receive a green light. That means we pass.
When the lights come off from the detector inside the car, it immediately shows a green light. That means we also pass.
“You may now go,” the guard now says.
I throw myself back in the car. Bryan is quickly starting the engine. In a few moments, we are already on our way through the tunnel to the inside of the city.
Beth, I think. We’ve come here to save you.