No Shelter Trilogy (Omnibus, Books 1-3) Page 4

  I wake hours before sunrise shivering and curled up around my book. I can barely make out the outline of Isaac’s face through the darkness. Is that sweat glistening on his brow?

  I crawl quietly to his side and place my hand on his forehead. He’s burning up. I pull the blanket off his torso and pull up his shirt to cool him down.

  “Hey, you didn’t have to wait for me to fall asleep,” he mutters, half-asleep and still able to make me blush.

  He grabs my hand off his chest and pulls me toward him. His lips are dry with dehydration, but his kiss is gentle; first on the top of my cheek then he moves his way down to my jaw.

  Isaac and I have only kissed twice, and the second time we swore it would never happen again.

  His breath is hot as he kisses the corner of my lips. He doesn’t taste like charred meat. This thought makes my stomach swell with nausea and I pull away in time to throw up on the dirt floor next to him.

  I taste the charred rabbit meat mingled with sour bile on my tongue as one more heaving wave of vomit streams from my mouth. Isaac doesn’t even attempt to scoot away. He sits up and pulls my hair back as the puddle of vomit seeps into his blanket.

  I’m shaking and sweaty as I sit back and wipe my mouth. Everybody’s awake now and though I can’t see their faces through the darkness I can feel their eyes on me.

  I grab Isaac’s soiled blanket to mop up the mess then I throw him my clean blanket as I scramble to my feet. “Don’t cover your whole body. You have a fever.”

  I watch the sunrise from the roof of the cave while my stomach gurgles and clenches. I don’t know if it’s nerves, hunger, or food poisoning from the meat, but it’s probably a combination of all three. Mostly nerves.

  Isaac’s head peeks out from the mouth of the cave and I almost blurt another apology, but I stop myself.

  “What are you doing out here?” I say, sounding more annoyed than concerned.

  He turns around and grins at me. “Hey, Mount Vesuvius.”

  “You should be lying down.”

  “That makes two of us,” he says. “Can you please come down? I feel like I’m at a bit of a disadvantage here.”

  That makes two of us.

  I jump down and immediately try to usher him back into the cave. He resists and ends up falling on his butt.

  “What are you doing?” I yell at him.

  He grits his teeth against the pain. “Just help me up.”

  I pull him upright and he hobbles away toward the forest. I follow him because I know there’s nothing I can do to stop him.

  “Where are you going, gimpy?” I shout.

  He chuckles as he takes a seat on a fallen pine tree. “I had to get out of there. It wreaks of dead rabbit, and it’s even worse now.”

  I ignore the jab and take a seat next to him. “Did you take your medicine?”

  “Can we please stop focusing on me for one damn second?” he replies.

  I don’t say anything. My face is expressionless. This is a look I’ve perfected: calm and completely unfazed by the madness surrounding me.

  “Don’t start that, Nada.”

  I had a crush on a boy in seventh grade. Chad Robinson. I overheard him make a joke about my slanted eyes during gym class. I never spoke to him again during art class. A couple of months later, I found out the silent treatment had worked. Chad asked me to the Winter Formal. It never felt so good to reject someone.

  “Fine. Don’t say anything. Just listen,” Isaac continues. “I should be well enough to leave this hell hole in about three days. I want you to come with me.”

  I shake my head. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I say. “We’re going to help Daedric find his sister. We can’t stay here and keep fighting off mountain lions and bears for the rest of our lives.”

  He leans in and whispers in my ear. “You won’t even consider it?”

  “No.”

  He traces the edge of my face with his fingertips and plants a soft kiss on my chin. I turn my head away.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask. “Are you trying to manipulate me?”

  He sits back on the log and gazes out across the small clearing at a squirrel flitting about another log.

  “I don’t have much time left.”

  “Your leg is healing fine.”

  “I’m not talking about my leg.”

  Isaac’s face takes on the same flat expression I’ve mastered.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I did something bad,” he says. “I… I can’t tell you what I did, but you need to believe me when I say we have to get out of this area—soon.”

  “Is it Vic?”

  He nods and I realize our little trip to the Salton Sea just got even more dangerous. Suddenly Isaac’s proposal doesn’t sound so rash.

  “Come with me?” he whispers.

  I search his eyes for a trace of untruth. Isaac’s left eyebrow almost always twitches when he’s lying. Almost always. At the moment, it’s as steady as the despair surrounding us.

  “I will,” I say, and his face lights up. “But only if this shelter thing doesn’t work out.”

  He sighs. “Alright. I’ll take that.”

  This time I lean in and kiss him on the cheek. He has patches of hair growth on his cheeks since he hasn’t shaved in a week.

  He takes my hand and places it on his chest. “You feel that?”

  His heart thumps against my fingertips.

  “It’s yours. Be careful with it.”

  I laugh out loud. “You are so corny it’s disgusting.”

  “Are you laughing at me, Mt. Vesuvius?” he says as he pulls me into a playful headlock.

  “Everything okay?” Daedric’s voice calls from across the clearing.

  Isaac lets me go and I smooth my hair as I sit up straight. Mary stands next to Daedric glaring at me. No, it’s not my imagination. If looks could kill, I’d be gutted and skewered by now.

  CHAPTER 8

  Three days later, I wake to find Mary staring me. We didn’t have enough water to wash Isaac’s blanket, so I’ve been sharing mine with him.

  “Good morning,” I say, my voice thick with sleep.

  “Good mornin’, beautiful,” she says, grinning as she sharpens her knife.

  I smile back at her. “You have something you want to say to me?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ve got nothin’… Nada.”

  Mary Southern accent creeps through when she’s upset. She flips the blade closed and tosses it to me.

  “That ones yours,” she says, and I realize she’s been sharpening my blade; the one with the jade handle my mother gave me shortly after we arrived at Whitmore.

  It’s an unspoken rule that we each sharpen our own blades.

  I flip the blade open and sit mesmerized as the light reflects off the tip. Isaac wakes and grabs the blade from my hand. He flips it closed and pulls me tighter to him. I can feel Mary’s eyes burning a hole through Isaac straight into the back of my head.

  Though Mary is the last person in this cave I want to anger, I lay with Isaac a bit longer. I don’t want her to think she’s gotten the better of me with her intimidation tactics.

  When I get up, Eve and Daedric are just getting back from setting more traps. Daedric sees me as I step out of the cave and tosses me a bunch of wild onions.

  “Fry them up with the pigeon eggs,” he orders as he shoves past me.

  Eve looks at me with a twinge of pity in her crystal-blue eyes.

  “Watch where you’re going,” I shout back at him as he enters the cave.

  “You need some help?” Eve asks me.

  “Sure,” I say, though I usually refuse help with menial tasks like cooking and cleaning. I need the company. I need to know that not everyone in this tribe hates me.

  We chop the onions and whip up the eggs in silence. Though Eve’s hands are trembling, as usual, the occasional smile she tosses my way seems genuine.

  “Can I ask you something?” I ask.
<
br />   Eve lowers her head. “Yes?”

  I glance back at the cave to make sure we’re alone. “Have Isaac and Mary ever… been together?”

  Eve’s hands tremble more violently and she nicks her finger with the knife. I grab her hand and wrap the cuff of my sweater around the cut.

  “You okay?”

  She nods though it’s evident her anxiety level is skyrocketing.

  I didn’t know Eve before we found her bloody and beaten next to her mother’s ransacked grave two months ago. I don’t know if she’s always been this anxious. I do know the thing that calms her the most is when I hold her.

  I pull her close. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

  The violent tremble in her bones relaxes to an occasional shudder.

  “Yes,” she whispers.

  We pack our backpacks to head out: water, blankets, rabbit jerky, a blade, lighter fluid, and matches. Mary takes three blades: small, medium, and machete. Eve takes some leather straps, a toolkit, and a bundle of twigs for making traps. Daedric finds the baseball bat he left in the woods. Isaac packs a compass and his wits.

  We stop to let Isaac rest his leg every one or two miles, depending on the terrain. He tries to hold my hand twice, but I keep rejecting him.

  “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” he says, as we approach a dry bed of rocks, which used to be a stream.

  I reach my hand out to help him across, but he doesn’t take it. A tinkling chuckle assaults my ears. Isaac glances back at Mary behind us. I can’t tell if he’s annoyed or embarrassed. He grabs my hand so I can help him out of the bed of rocks.

  After six hours of rough forest terrain, we stop to rest for the night in the umbrage of an ancient oak tree.

  “So, what’s the plan if we run into the Guardians?” Mary says as she tucks in under her blanket.

  Isaac flashes me a look before he answers. “What we always do: we let Nada fight them off.”

  “Yeah, I’m actually being serious,” Mary replies and I can hear the sneer in her voice.

  She may be lethal with a knife, but I’ve got her beat in hand-to-hand combat.

  Eve lays her blanket down next to Isaac and me. “I brought a slingshot,” she says.

  “That will do a lot of good against their assault rifles,” Daedric says.

  I smile at Eve. She hardly contributes to our conversations. She’s always afraid she’s going to say the wrong thing.

  “A sling shot is still better than a bat,” I say, as I slither in under the blanket next to Isaac.

  He slips his icy hand underneath my shirt and I jump. “What are you doing?”

  “Just trying to warm up my hand.”

  “Oh,” I say and I lay back down.

  He traces the outline of my bellybutton with his fingertip and I try not to laugh. His fingers slide over my ribs and I grab his hand to stop him.

  “Good night,” I whisper, my signal I’ve had enough.

  “Good night, beautiful.”

  CHAPTER 9

  When I wake, Isaac and Mary are gone.

  “Isaac needed to stretch his leg,” Eve whispers next to me. “She offered to go with him.”

  Eve’s still tucked under her blanket as if she’s been waiting in this exact position for me to open my eyes so she can blurt these words.

  “Thanks,” I whisper.

  Isaac and Mary arrive minutes later, her face flushed with either exhaustion or exhilaration. Isaac offers me a hand to help me up from where I’m sitting under the tree, but I push myself up on my own.

  I hand him his piece of rabbit jerky and his backpack. “Let’s go.”

  I walk a few paces ahead of Isaac, closer to Daedric and Eve, for over an hour. When we stop to rest at the foot of the valley, Isaac glares at me from where he sits atop a small boulder. Everybody notices the tension between us.

  I throw down my backpack and curl up against the trunk of a pine tree. Eve sits cross-legged a few feet away from me.

  “Remember when you caught that possum in your trap and it nearly bit your finger off,” I say to her.

  She smiles and nods. “I thought I was going to die. My mom told me possums carry diseases.”

  “My mom told me the same thing,” I say.

  For a moment, Eve and I sit in silence thinking about our moms. Then I think of Mary. Her mother didn’t die in the storm. She died when Mary was a baby. Her father abandoned her during the storm. The only reason I know this about Mary is because she confided in Isaac and Isaac told me. At the time he was using it to explain her intolerable attitude. I still don’t find this a convincing excuse. I’m the only one of us who can relate to the feeling of rejection from being abandoned by a father. Eve’s father died during the flooding while attempting to save Eve’s little brother. I know this because Eve told me herself. I guess my tragedy résumé just wasn’t impressive enough for Mary to confide in me.

  I glance at Isaac and he’s still glaring at me while Mary sits at his feet combing her fingers through her hair. I look around and find Daedric sitting alone on the other side of the pine tree.

  “Daedric, how did you get all the way here from the Salton Sea?” I ask. “Weren’t you ever attacked by thugs or Guardians?”

  Daedric scoots around the pine tree so he can see me better. “I got mugged by scavengers twice,” he says. “I didn’t have much for them to take, so they let me off easy. How about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You ever been attacked?”

  I glance at Isaac and think of the day he saved me when Vic nearly choked the life out of me. “Yeah… but I’m still here.”

  We finally reach the residential streets where the charred, looted remains of sprawling estates litter the hillsides. Squatting in empty houses was dangerous a year ago when there were still a few things left to steal, but everything’s gone or burned to a crisp now. We find a large home that’s only half-burned to the ground and camp out for the night.

  We lay our blankets down in what used to be a dining room. A gaping hole in the vaulted ceiling marks the place where looters ripped out the chandelier and the electrical wiring. I sit next to Isaac and we stare at each other for a moment before we lie down.

  He doesn’t wrap his arms around me. He just lies on his back and stares at the ceiling.

  I’m the first to wake so I start divvying out the rations of jerky. A soft whimpering behind me draws my attention. Daedric must be having a nightmare.

  “Please don’t take her,” he mutters in his sleep. “Please… please…”

  He wakes with a start and we lock eyes. He ruffles his golden hair and rubs his face to wake himself up.

  “Bad dream,” he says, as he grabs a piece of jerky.

  “My sister used to have nightmares,” I whisper, and I realize I’m talking about my sister for the second time in four years. I’ve only ever spoken to Isaac about her once.

  Lara was shot during one of the many burglaries on our home the year before the storm. After the first burglary, she began having nightmares about drowning, which I dismissed as a side-effect of reading her favorite undersea adventure one too many times. She was just ten years old and she understood what was coming better than I did.

  “Elysia’s never been alone and now… who knows what they’re doing to her,” he says.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to feel anger for something so utterly hopeless and unchangeable, but I can’t help it now. The world may never be the way it once was, and the thought of it fills me with rage.

  Isaac’s eyes flutter open and I hand him his jerky. He tosses it aside and pulls me close to him. “I’m sorry,” he whispers in my ear.

  The rage subsides and my eyes well up. A tear falls onto Isaac’s arm and he sits up to get a better view of my face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I want to tell him about Lara. I want to thank him for saving my life two years ago. But most of all, I want to thank him for bringing me ba
ck to life when I had nothing to live for.

  Instead, I pull him toward me and kiss him hard. He seems surprised at first, but he quickly gives in, his tongue moving slowly inside my mouth.

  He pulls away and stares at me as if my face is covered in green spots.

  “What?” I ask.

  He plants a kiss on my forehead. “Nothing.”

  We make it to what used to be Burbank Airport. All the planes were evacuated long before the storm, so all that remains are the gutted terminals and runways overgrown with weeds. We strut down the runway like rustic supermodels, though Daedric is probably the only one pretty enough to pass for one. We’ve been lucky not to run into anyone so far, but I have a feeling our luck is about to run out.

  A plume of smoke rises behind an empty hangar and I stop in the middle of the runway. Everyone else stops behind me.

  “It could be Guardians,” Mary says. “We should go back.”

  “She’s right,” I say, trying not to look at Isaac. “We can’t risk it.”

  Daedric continues toward the hangar. “We don’t got time. We already wasted enough time at that damn cave.”

  “We don’t have time,” Mary corrects him.

  Isaac’s pride kicks in and he walks on. “He’s right. We’re running out of time. They’ve had her for over a week. That’s a long time to figure out how to leverage her.”

  Mary shakes her head. “Idiots,” she mutters.

  We approach the hangar slowly.

  “Nada, you stay with me,” Isaac whispers. “You three go around that way and we’ll check out this side. We’ll all meet here to report back on what we see.”

  “Why do you get Nada?” Mary asks.

  “Because she’s the best,” Isaac replies, and I want to either disappear or slug him in the face.

  Mary skulks off with Daedric and Eve. As soon as they round the corner of the building, I punch Isaac in the arm.

  “Ow! What the hell!”

  “Stop being a jerk.”

  We tiptoe to the corner of the building and peek around. I can glimpse the glow of the fire near the rear of the building, but I can’t see anyone.

  “How’s your leg?” I whisper, in case we need to run.