Adaptation (5 page)

“We’ll get stuck in that—whatever it is,” David said tersely, gesturing at the convoy.

“But what about Mr. Chapman? We have to go back and—and identify him.”

A bead of sweat worked its way down David’s right temple. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Keep trying the phones. We have to get through sometime.”

Reese gritted her teeth. It felt wrong to leave Mr. Chapman there. But turning back meant spending more time in Las Vegas with its crazy carjackers and blockaded roads and army tanks. She definitely did not want to be in this city anymore. Every nerve in her body was telling her to
run
as far away and as fast as she could. “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll keep trying, and if I can’t get through, we’ll find a landline the next time we stop.”

The freeway was lined on both sides by tall concrete walls that blocked the city from view. Beyond them Reese could only see flat rooftops and a few scraggly trees. There were a few other cars heading north, but otherwise the multiple lanes of the highway were wide open. On the southbound side, the military convoy continued for at least ten minutes—Reese kept glancing over at the tanks as she tried to call 911—but after the convoy ended the road was deserted, as if it had been blocked off somewhere up north.

And then Reese noticed something else that was unusual. All the exits on the northbound side were closed off, though the on-ramps remained open. It was as if drivers were being purposely directed away from the southern parts of the city.

“We can’t get off the freeway,” David said, echoing her thoughts. “Are you having any luck with the phones?”

She took a shaking breath. “No.”

When the concrete walls ended, Las Vegas emerged as a city of drab industrial buildings interspersed with towering hotels. Billboards popped up on the side of the highway, advertising another Hollywood remake of
Batman
. They passed multistory parking structures, all empty. In the distance, casino lights glittered red and gold.

It wasn’t until they left the city behind, warehouses giving way to brown desert dotted with dark green brush, that the freeway exits opened up. It was after 5:00
PM
now, and Reese had been checking their phones regularly, but reception never went higher than a single bar. As they departed Las Vegas, even that single bar disappeared. When the sun began to descend toward a range of mountains in the west, Reese said, “Maybe we should find a place to stop for the night.” The thought of resting suddenly made her aware of how exhausted she was.

“How much money do you have?” David asked. He sounded as tired as she felt. “I don’t know if I have enough. I don’t have a credit card.”

“I don’t either.” She reached into the backseat to grab her backpack. She pulled out her wallet and counted her bills. “I have thirty-five dollars. That’s not much.”

David slipped out his own wallet from his jeans pocket and handed it to her. “Here. See how much I’ve got.”

She unfolded the soft, brown leather. “You’re rich. You’ve got forty-three bucks.”

He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Seventy-eight dollars. What can we do with that?”

She glanced at the gas tank. It was approaching a quarter full. “We’re going to need more gas.”

“You want to keep going?”

“What else are we going to do? I don’t think we can afford a motel room.” She stared out at the barren landscape. It was like another world: abandoned and desolate, but with the sun sending long shadows across the ground, it was also eerily beautiful. “Maybe we can find a town somewhere with a pay phone.”

“There was a sign for gas coming up. Ash Springs. We could ask for directions there.”

“I don’t know.” Reese frowned out the window at the desert. “What if the people there are freaks with shotguns? This looks like NRA country.”

David choked with laughter, and the unexpected sound of it cracked the tension that had held them tight since they fled the gas station. “It’s definitely not San Francisco,” he said. “No liberal organic hipsters in sight.”

An involuntary smile tugged at Reese’s mouth. “And you’re probably the only Asian person in a hundred-mile radius.”

“Never underestimate the Chinese. We’re everywhere.”

Reese laughed out loud and looked over at David. He gave her a quick grin, and Reese noticed that his mouth was slightly crooked when he smiled, the right side angling up more than the left.

One of the phones in her lap beeped, and she scrambled to pick it up as David asked excitedly, “Are you getting a call?”

Her brief moment of laughter was swallowed by sharp disappointment. “No. My phone battery just died.”

At least she was too tired to be freaked out about it.

As they approached Ash Springs, trees sprang up on
the side of the road, pushing back the desert. When the town came into view, it was nothing more than a trailer park followed by a Shell station and a flimsy-looking two-story building. A couple of cars were parked in front.

David pulled up to one of the four gas pumps and turned off the car. Reese opened her door, and the smell of the desert wafted inside: brush and dirt, soured slightly by the smell of gasoline. She and David got out, their doors slamming shut in two sharp cracks. The sun was setting.

“We have to pay first,” David said, reading the instructions on the pump.

“Maybe we should both go in,” Reese suggested. She didn’t like the idea of splitting up.

“I agree.”

She walked around the car and noticed with a pang that the gas cap was still hanging down from the tank. Mr. Chapman had never had a chance to screw it shut. She did so now, feeling a bit queasy. When she looked up, she saw David wince. “Let’s go,” she said, and headed inside.

Behind the counter, a bored-looking guy in a beat-up Pearl Jam T-shirt was turning the pages of a magazine. He glanced up when they entered but did not seem particularly interested in them. They wandered down the two short aisles, searching for maps. David found a road atlas that cost $16.95.

“It’s too much,” Reese whispered. “We have to buy gas.” Her stomach growled. “And some food.”

He flipped the atlas open to the page on Nevada and scrutinized the tiny lines and letters. “We’re on 93 North, right?”

“Yeah.” Reese peered over his arm at the map. “Look, there’s Ash Springs,” she said.

With his finger, he traced a line that jutted west from 93 North. “We can take this—318 to 375, then to 6 and 95 North.”

“North? Don’t we have to go west?”

“Ninety-five will get us to Reno, and then we can get onto 80 West. That goes straight to Oakland.”

She took the atlas from him and followed the white lines he pointed out. “Okay,” she agreed, memorizing the road numbers. “You want me to drive for a while? You could get some sleep.” David had the dazed expression of someone who had been trying to stay alert for too long.

“Aren’t you tired?” he asked.

“Not as tired as you are. You’ve been driving all day.” He
looked skeptical, and she said, “If I get too tired I’ll pull over and go to sleep. But I think we should keep going as long as we can.”

“All right,” David relented. “Let’s go pay.”

At the counter, Reese set down two granola bars, a large bag of Doritos, a Diet Coke, and a bottle of water. “Is there a pay phone around here?” she asked the attendant.

“Yeah, but it’s broken.”

“Do you know where the nearest pay phone is?” David asked.

“You might find one in Rachel. Don’t you have a cell phone?”

“No reception,” David said.

The boy shrugged. “It’s spotty out here. You know, military presence and all.”

“What military presence?” Reese asked.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” the boy said flatly.

“We drove up from Vegas,” Reese said. “Haven’t you heard about what’s going on?”

He shrugged. “Some crazy shit with birds, right? Whatever. I still gotta work.”

David’s eyebrows rose. “Well, we’re heading to 318 West,” he said. “Do you know how to get there?”

“Sure. Everybody who comes through here wants to go there.”

“Why?” David asked.

“It’s the Extraterrestrial Highway. You know,
aliens
. Area 51.” The boy whistled the
X-Files
theme song.

“Oh. Right,” David said. “So is it far from here?”

“You can’t miss the turnoff for 318. That’ll take you to Rachel too. Just keep an eye out for the Alien Fresh Jerky sign.”

“Alien jerky,” Reese repeated in disbelief.

“Alien
fresh
jerky,” he corrected her. “Can’t miss it.”

“Thanks,” David said. He turned to head back out to the gas pump, and Reese hurried to keep up with him.

“This place is crazy,” she whispered.

“No doubt,” David agreed, and pulled the gas nozzle out of the pump. He hesitated for a moment before unscrewing the cap to the tank, and Reese knew he was thinking about Mr. Chapman. She shivered, crossing her arms, and glanced nervously around the gas station. But there was nobody else there. Ash Springs was deserted except for them.

The sign advertising
ALIEN FRESH JERKY
appeared just as the sun dipped below the horizon. A green alien head—a pointed oval with black, almond-shaped eyes—peered out from the billboard. Near the sign was a brown shack that during the day might open into a farm stand but was now boarded shut.

Reese turned left onto 318, taking a sip of her Diet Coke. David had fallen asleep almost as soon as they had left the gas station, but the stop in Ash Springs—and the junk food—had refreshed Reese. Plus driving the well-lit streets of San Francisco was completely different from this lonely two-lane road in the middle of nowhere. The empty highway at twilight had an eerie feel, and her hands were sweaty from clinging to the wheel.

After the sun set, darkness descended quickly, and she turned on the car’s high beams. The center yellow dashes in the black road flashed past like Morse code. She heard David breathing in the passenger seat, and it felt as though the two of them were the only humans left alive in the world. She missed, fiercely, streetlights and skyscrapers and neon. There were dangers in the city,
of course, but those were dangers she understood. She had no idea what was out in the middle of the desert. The blackness could be a beast that wanted only to swallow them whole.

When the road forked, she barely remembered to stay left in order to turn onto 375. She sped past a green sign that read
EXTRATERRESTRIAL HIGHWAY
and wondered what Julian would think about her driving down this road. He would probably be jealous. A couple of months ago he had tried to convince her to help him start a conspiracy news site called Black Mailbox, named after the object that was located off the side of the road near Area 51.

“That’s super geeky, Jules,” she said. They were in the journalism room after a deadline, drinking Diet Cokes and playing basketball with crumpled-up sheets of page proofs.

“Geeky is awesome,” he said, and emphasized his point by expertly tossing a paper ball into the trash can, which they had hooked onto the back of the door.

“The mailbox isn’t even black—you said it’s white now. If it’s going to be the name of a
news
site, shouldn’t it at least be accurate?” Reese crumpled up the proofs of her most recent story, “GSA Launches Anti-Bullying Awareness Week.” It banged off the edge of the trash can and fell to the floor. She groaned.

“It doesn’t matter what color it really is. It’s known as the black mailbox. And it’s not an
alien
mailbox—it’s just a regular mailbox where you go if you want to see UFOs over Area 51.”

“But the UFOs are
alien
spacecraft, aren’t they?”

“Maybe, maybe not. They could just be top-secret military fighter planes or something. Like the B-2 bomber. It was tested at Area 51. Black Mailbox is an awesome name.”

She had agreed to help him—they even discussed how she would play skeptic to Julian’s believer on their site—but shortly afterward she and David had qualified for nationals, and all her time was taken up with debate practice.

And then she had gone and messed up during the semifinal round. All that work for nothing.

Reese glanced over at David. The dashboard lights didn’t illuminate much; he was mostly a shadow in the seat beside her, his head lolling against the passenger side window. In the dark bubble of the car, her thoughts drifted back to the night before semifinals. She had tried to stop herself from thinking about it too much—it wouldn’t do her any good to obsess over it—but she was all alone with David in the middle of nowhere. She couldn’t help herself.

They had won the quarterfinal round decisively. Mr. Chapman took them to dinner at a Southwestern restaurant to celebrate, and Reese remembered the blue corn enchiladas and garlicky guacamole with an audible hunger pang. After dinner they returned to the Holiday Inn, where most of the debaters were staying, and Mr. Chapman went to bed, telling them to get some sleep before the big day. But she and David were too excited to sleep. They bought sodas from the vending machine by the pool and staked out two deck chairs, spreading out their notes to quiz each other.