Adaptation (3 page)

Reese clicked on the link to the
Chicago Tribune
article. She saw a screencap of a story about three plane crashes in the Chicago area, all due to bird strikes. The article was accompanied by a photograph of one of the Chicago crash sites. A plane had plowed a deep furrow through a field of corn, culminating in a smoking black mess. The tail of the plane was still visible; the airline’s logo could be seen through the smoke.

“Hey, the line’s moving,” said a man behind her.

“Oh, sorry.” As she stepped forward she clicked back to the original Bin 42 blog, feeling uneasy. She went to the video roundup page. Most of the links were dead, but one video showed a young female reporter in a mountainous area. Wreckage was strewn behind her. Reese couldn’t hear the audio, but the camera zoomed toward a person in a hazmat suit who was retrieving remains from the crash. Reese could barely see what he was holding in his gloved hands, but it stretched out toward the ground as if it was half liquefied.

Her stomach lurched.
What was that?
And why was the person dressed as if he were dealing with a biohazard? Her hands were clammy and the phone nearly slipped out of her grasp as she thumbed back to the blog post Julian had sent her.

But this time, she got an error message. It was gone.

“Can I take your order?”

Reese glanced up, startled. She had reached the front of the line, and a dead-eyed girl was waiting behind the counter. The overhead lights made her face look washed out and tired, and her ash-blond hair strayed in lanky strands from beneath her Wendy’s cap.

“You wanna order something?” the girl prodded.

Reese swallowed. “No.” She had lost her appetite.

David was sleeping on the floor in front of the plastic seats, his head resting on a rolled-up jacket, his back to the windows. Mr. Chapman was napping nearby, slouched in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs with his arms crossed and his feet stretched toward the glass. Night had fallen, turning the windows into a wall of dark mirrors. Reese saw herself reflected as a girl with flyaway dark hair and shadowed eyes in a pale face. Behind her the concourse was littered with travelers trying to sleep under the bright lights, legs propped up on carry-on bags, heads pillowed on lumpy backpacks.

She stopped beside David and looked down at him. One hand was curled beneath his chin, the other draped loosely over his stomach where his Kennedy Swim T-shirt—
SHARKS OF THE BAY
—had inched up over his toned stomach. He was captain of the swim team and a soccer player in addition to being a debater. An all-around golden boy. A familiar flare of self-consciousness burned through her. Angry at herself, she shoved away her feelings. What had happened between her and David was in the past, and she should just get over it. There was no use in thinking about it anymore; there were more important things to worry about now.

She nudged David’s shoulder with the toe of her beat-up black Chucks. “David.” He grumbled slightly but didn’t wake up. “David,” she said more loudly, and nudged him again.

He rolled over onto his back, shading his eyes from the fluorescent lights as he blinked up at her. “What?” His voice was clogged with sleep. “What’s going on?”

“I have to talk to you.”

“About what?” He pushed himself up, rubbing a hand over his eyes.

“Hang on, let me wake up Mr. Chapman.” She turned to their coach and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Mr. Chapman.”

His eyes snapped open, and he jerked upright. “What? Reese?”

“Mr. C, we have to talk.” She sat down next to Mr. Chapman while David leaned against the glass across from them. In the window, Reese’s Rhapsody of Emily concert T-shirt was reflected in mirror image, and there was something disquieting about reading the words backward.

“What’s on your mind, Reese?” Mr. C asked.

“I’ve been checking the news on the Hub,” she began. She told them about the blog post that Julian had sent her, describing the
Chicago Tribune
article and the videos she had watched. “I think we should get out of here,” she concluded. “I think we should get a rental car and drive back to San Francisco.”

“The airline said they would start rebooking flights tomorrow,” Mr. Chapman said. “We should just wait.”

Before she could argue, David asked, “What’s on TV right now?” He looked past her at the concourse.

“What? I don’t know.” She turned to glance at the nearest TV monitor, expecting to see the news, but instead she saw a line of
men in orange prison uniforms moving across a yard. The scene changed to a close-up on one gray-haired man, his mouth shining wetly as he spoke. Across the bottom of the screen, she read the words:
Barred: Behind the Walls of America’s Most Violent Prisons
. “It’s a prison documentary,” she said. “They’re on practically all the time.”

“It shouldn’t be on now, not when there’s more money to be made on a disaster.” David held his hand out to her. “Let me see your phone.”

Startled, she said, “That post is gone—”

“Just let me see it,” he insisted.

She unlocked her phone and handed it over. He pulled up the Hub, clicking through her history. “Hey, what are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m looking for a mirrored site. From what you said about Bin 42, I don’t think they’d only post it in one location.” She saw him entering something into her phone, swiping his fingers across the screen. A moment later he held the phone in front of her. It displayed a copy of the Bin 42 page. “Is this what you were reading?”

“Yeah, how’d you find that?”

“Magic,” he said with a grin that shot right through to her belly. She tried to cover it up by rolling her eyes.

“Whatever. Just read that
Tribune
article.”

“Hang on,” he said. A second later she heard the tinny sound of a video recording playing back on her phone. When he finished, he handed it to Mr. Chapman, who watched it with a deepening frown on his face.

“We should leave, Mr. C,” she said. “Who knows how long we
could be stranded in Phoenix. I don’t think the news is telling us everything.” She lowered her voice. “And everybody’s going to be trying to rent a car to get out of here when they figure that out. We need to beat the rush.”

Mr. Chapman’s face was troubled as he handed her phone back to her. “I don’t know whether I buy it, Reese. That site—who runs it? Do you really think the government would go to the trouble of covering all that up? Besides, it’s doing an awful job of it if that’s the plan.”

Normally, Reese didn’t believe half the stuff Julian tried to convince her about, but tonight, Mr. Chapman’s skepticism frustrated her. “I don’t know who runs it. But who would be able to fabricate those videos so quickly? I think we should get out of here. If we rent a car and start driving tonight, we can be back in San Francisco by tomorrow.” The scene on the TV monitor changed again; now it showed a man in handcuffs being led out of a courtroom. She glanced at her watch. It wasn’t even 10:00
PM
yet. “You know, David’s right about the TV,” she said uneasily. “The news should be on. Anytime there’s a disaster, they cover it twenty-four/seven.”

They all turned to watch the prison documentary. The news network’s logo was plainly visible in the corner. An inmate with bizarrely red eyes spoke to the camera, his face bearing a creepy, self-satisfied smile, and Reese shuddered.

Mr. Chapman said, “I suppose… it wouldn’t hurt to check at the rental-car counter to see how much it would cost.”

“Great,” Reese said, surging to her feet. “The rental-car center is open twenty-four hours; I checked. Let’s go.”

The rental-car center was packed with people who
had exactly the same idea.

“So much for getting a jump on things,” Reese said as they made their way to the back of the very long line. They passed a snack counter along the way, and the refrigerator case was empty except for a few crooked signs that read
TUNA SALAD
or
HAM AND TURKEY
. Reese’s stomach growled, and she wished she had bought that Wendy’s burger.

By the time they made it out of the airport, driving one of the last available rentals—a Suzuki sedan with a long dent in the driver’s side door—it was nearly morning, and Reese’s hunger had settled into a gnawing hollowness that made her both tired and cranky.

Mr. Chapman eased the sedan into the line of cars waiting to
get onto the I-10 as the horizon turned gray, then pink. David, sitting in the front passenger seat, scanned through the radio stations one by one, but none of them was reporting any news—not even traffic, which was moving at a crawl.

It took an hour to go seven miles. As they inched their way onto the I-10, Mr. Chapman said, “David, look at that map they gave us and find me another way to San Francisco. If it’s this bad around Phoenix, I don’t want to take this all the way to LA. It’s just going to be worse there.”

Reese slouched in the backseat, checking her phone every few minutes for reception. She hadn’t been able to get a call through to her mom, and the stress that had been tightening her neck all night was starting to make her head pound. Outside on the freeway, it was practically a parking lot. A Toyota nearby contained a man and a woman and what appeared to be mounds of supplies: canned goods, toilet paper, blankets. A white VW that kept trying to cut them off was packed with five passengers, and the trunk was tied down over piles of suitcases. There were way too many people on the freeway for it to only be rush-hour traffic, and Reese couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something. What was driving these people out of their houses at the crack of dawn?

“Hey, we can take the next exit to 17 North,” David said, breaking into the silence. “It’ll take us to 93 North, and at Kingman we can switch to I-40, which goes west to 58, then meets up with 5 North to San Francisco. It even skips Las Vegas.”

“Great,” Mr. Chapman said. “I can’t wait to get out of this and get some coffee.”

The sound of honking erupted, and a battered blue pickup
barreled down the shoulder of the road, causing more than one driver to scream out their windows at the truck. As the truck passed, Reese saw a man standing in the truck bed holding a giant sign. It read
NEWS—AM 1438
.

“Hey, try that,” Reese said, leaning between the two front seats. “AM 1438.”

David switched to AM and cranked the dial until they found a scratchy signal that faded in and out. A man’s voice was speaking: “… secure compounds inland. Reports of military convoys heading toward the heartland… President Randall… wait for confirmation. However, classified documents leaked onto the Hub show that the government is prepared to crack down on dissenters.”

Mr. Chapman frowned. “Who is this?” He moved his hand toward the radio.

“Wait a sec,” Reese cried, trying to make sense of the jumbled phrases.

The man’s voice continued: “Citizens are urged to prepare for disruptions in food supplies due to interstate lockdowns and the air traffic ban… terrorism but speculation is rampant about causes. So-called rogue states would not have the coord… too much for one little nation—”

The static roared, and Mr. Chapman turned the volume down. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s just get home.”

Arizona, Reese soon discovered, was one giant sprawl of desert, at least on either side of the highway. In the distance, mountains lent a jagged edge to the horizon, but they were so far away that
they seemed like a mirage. The reality, here, was flat dirt: a light brown broken by occasional bushes that clung obstinately to their patches of ground and were permanently bent by the dry wind.

On the road, as far as the eye could see, was traffic. As the day wore on, Reese saw more and more cars packed full of gear: tents strapped to the roof, blankets and pillows piled high in backseats. She increasingly felt as if they had joined a tide of refugees—only she didn’t know what they were fleeing from. At a Texaco just outside Phoenix, a man in a rumpled suit eyed her as she grabbed the last box of Hostess doughnuts, as if he wanted to take it from her. She hurried to meet up with Mr. Chapman and David at the cash register, hunching her shoulders defensively. It was hard not to be affected by the sense of paranoia that seemed to infect their fellow travelers. Even the gas station attendants who took their money had developed a kind of squinty-eyed anxiety. If she could only get some real information, Reese thought, she wouldn’t be so on edge.