The Variables (11 page)

She turned away from both of them and stared out the window and tried to regain control.

Ainsley sniffed. “I know. I’m sorry. You can be mad at me. You can stay mad at me for the rest of your life, I don’t care. I don’t care. Because here’s the difference...we’re going to get Teddy. We’re going to save him. And my mom? My mom stays dead. I don’t say it meanly, Darla. But it’s the truth. Those men killed her. They took the last person I had and tore her from the earth.”
 

They came to a main thoroughfare running parallel to a train track. A mile down the road, a passenger train sat dormant. Several cars littered the street, but they were spaced out, making it easy to navigate, until half a mile down they encountered an empty city bus resting on its side, blocking the road entirely.

To the left and to the right were grassy ditches, full of overgrown weeds and rainwater. Dean swung the car to the right and started to inch forward around the backside of the bus, the truck leaning, unsteady on the mud. The bus flanked them on one side, the ditch and the train on the other. Darla looked out the window and a breath caught in her chest.

“Dean—” she said, unsteadily. “We’re not going to make it. Reverse. Reverse!”

He realized too late she was right. Ainsley shrieked as the tires on the right side sunk into the wetness of the earth and the truck slipped sideways down the embankment, where it threatened to topple over completely. Dean pressed down on the gas, hoping to pull them up, but gravity sucked them down. Inch by inch, the truck slipped, and landed on a tilt, no further up the road than they started. They were embedded at a forty-five degree angle in the embankment; Ainsley’s unbuckled body pushed against Darla’s as they crowded at the window.

Dean pushed down on the pedal. The tires spun and mud flapped against the side.

“Come on, come on,” Dean muttered as he attempted to coax the car out, but it was useless. Their slow motion slip-and-slide had rooted them into the ditch. The truck was not getting out without a tow.

“Abandon ship,” Darla said without a hint of the ire she felt building within her.

“We can get it out,” Dean replied, determined. “You two get out and I’ll see if we can budge the truck downward.”

“We’ll just waste time. Get out. We pack up. We walk from here.” Darla attempted to open the passenger door, but it could only be nudged forward a few inches before it lodged against the side of the embankment. Resigned, Dean opened his own door and scrambled up the grassy hill to the pavement. Ainsley and Darla followed.

Assuming they would have the car to act as transport, they lacked the means to carry supplies. A sturdy hiking backpack could have saved them, but instead Dean had thrown what little food they could salvage from the fire, some flashlights, sleeping bags, and a pup tent loosely into the trunk bed. Darla slipped down next to the truck and hoisted herself over the side; she eyed a tarp, and she yanked it free. Then she climbed back up to the road and unfolded it, laying it on the ground.

“Come on. Food and weapons. Flashlights, candles. Leave the rest.”

Dean stared wordlessly at the drifts of supplies resting in the truck. He sighed and scratched his head. “There’s a way...”

“There’s no way. Not if we want to leave the city today.”

“Maybe some of those houses up there would have packs, right? We’d lose twenty-minutes instead of our things.”

“I don’t care about the things!” Darla yelled, her voice echoed.
Things, things, things.

Ainsley crossed her arms over her chest and bounced up and down on her heels, looking between Dean and Darla out from under her lowered head.

“Can we just make some progress today, please?”

No one answered.

Darla went back a second time into the ditch and pulled herself up to the truck. She rifled through the items and tossed out a few cans of green beans, a dented can of chickpeas, some crackers, candles, and several plastic bottles of water. Ainsley collected the cast-offs from the grass and carried them to the tarp wordlessly while Dean wandered off a few feet, peering at the overturned bus and the abandoned train with interest.

“You have your lighter? And your knife?” Darla asked him and he didn’t answer. She called his name and he turned, withdrawn. “Do you have the lighter and your knife?” This time Dean nodded. He looked like he wanted to say something, but thought better of it, and he turned back to the wreckage, his hands fumbling around his front shirt pocket.

“There’s no point in trying to work our way around the city. On foot, our best bet is to just go straight through. Let’s go.” She hopped down and the truck wobbled under her shifting weight. Gathering the edges of the tarp into her hands, Darla formed a plastic sack, and she pulled it up over her shoulder, like a downtrodden Santa Claus. Her gun holstered against her side, she walked with speed and determination past Ainsley and Dean, and left the duo in her dust.

For the most part, the city was intact. It was dusk as they marched their way into downtown Portland. This was Dean and Ainsley’s home, and it was the first time they had ventured into the heart of the city since the Release. They lamented and expressed shock over its desolate, abandoned, and wrecked landscape.
 

Arriving from the west, they hit the heart of downtown after two hours of steady hiking. Their path took them past the Oregon Zoo, which Ainsley petitioned to go see. The dogs had died, it was true, and other animals suffered from the contaminated water. But they had all seen the feral cats sprouting up along the outskirts of the neighborhoods, and had heard the distant howls of wolves moving closer to the city. It was possible that some animals, even after four weeks, might still be alive.

But Darla vetoed the detour; if all the zoo animals had perished, it would have been too grisly a sight. Worse yet, if they had been left abandoned by humans, and were clinging to life, their suffering would have been far more painful. They were not going to set the captives free, so it was better to leave them alone.

“I grew up not far from this teaching hospital, you know. My mom worked at the hospital and she could walk to work, but our backyard butted up against this grassy field and beyond that...the labs. Mostly monkeys. And sometimes on summer nights we could hear them. Howling. Just screaming like they were right there in our yard. Not far away...right there,” Ainsley told them in a quiet voice.

“In Portland?” Dean asked.

“Right here. Outskirts of the city. Right in my backyard, but you wouldn’t know it...unless you could hear them.”

“That’s awful,” Darla added, shifting the tarp from one shoulder to the other.

“Terrifying,” Ainsley whispered.

“You want me to take a turn with that?” Dean reached out his hands toward the tarp, but Darla shied away. She shook her head.

“I got it.”

“I can take a turn,” he said.

“You can take a turn tomorrow.”

“Come on—” Dean complained, readying up an argument.

Darla spun to him. “I’m not playing some martyr role and I’m not going to give you the tarp so you can feel like you’re being productive. I’m fifteen years younger than you are and I worked out my upper arms and shoulders every day for the past five years. I’m the most equipped person to haul the damn tarp. I’m not doing it to make you feel sorry for me...I’m doing it because I
should
.”

Dean put up his hands in surrender and then went to his pockets for a cigarette.

Still hauling the tarp, Darla marched over and freed one of her hands and grabbed the pack. She tossed it to the ground and put the heel of her boot over the cardboard and smashed it into the cement.

Ainsley watched the incident wide-eyed.

“It’s a stressful time...if he wants to smoke, let him smoke,” she whispered.

Darla turned her head toward Ainsley, and looked at her, blinking. She closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, then blew the air out her mouth, mumbling some version of a serenity prayer under her breath. Ignoring their disdain, she took several steps out into the street. The sun was lower in the sky, and a hazy orange hue filled the hills behind them. “We’re going to have to camp inside somewhere tonight. You two know the area the best, so where should we go?”

Everyone looked up and down the street. There were pockets of flooding, bodies, and abandoned vehicles. Something was on fire on the other side of the river and smoke trickled upward.

Ainsley shuffled her feet and then looked at Darla. “I have a place I
want
to go,” she announced. “The one place in Portland I always wished I could have all to myself.”

Without hesitation, Darla said, “Lead the way.”

“A bookstore?” Darla looked at the black, red and white marquee and then at the darkened lobby. Without light, it was impossible to see much beyond the front windows; the cascading bookshelves disappeared into darkness. Powell’s City of Books was a Portland landmark and a tourist attraction. It took up an entire city block and inside its industrial, no frills interior were more than a million books. Or so it boasted.

“Hotels might be too full of bodies. I wouldn’t be able to handle the smell,” Ainsley said, cupping her eyes and leaning against the glass, her breath forming a circle of fog on the window.

“The smell doesn’t go away,” Dean added. “There’s got to be people in there, too. Employees who couldn’t make it home from work...”

Ainsley shrugged. “It was just a thought.”

“It’s dark.” Darla rattled the front door handle and then walked around the corner, staring at the empty side street.

“We can go somewhere else,” Ainsley breathed, defeated. “I just thought...I don’t know...I’ve always wanted to be in there alone. “

“Wait,” Darla replied. She motioned for them to follow her. Along the edge of the street was an employee entrance, guarded by a keypad, rendered useless without power. Darla took off her sweatshirt and wrapped her hand up tight, then without explanation or warning, she punched the glass above the door. The sound of breaking glass echoed up the street. Shaking the shards free, Darla reached over and inside and pushed the metal bar on the door. It opened easily, welcoming them into the children’s section of the store.
 

Dean cleared his throat and mumbled a sincere thank you.

“From watching movies,” she explained with a half-smile.

Racks of Maurice Sendak and Curious George hardbacks beckoned them. Darla ran her hand over a copy of
Goodnight Moon
, which had been Teddy’s favorite when he was a toddler. She went to grab it, flip through the pages, but under the watchful eyes of Dean and Ainsley, she stopped herself. Nostalgia would have to wait.

Once inside, Ainsley had a plan.

Their flashlights lit the way around the darkened store. Occasionally, they would encounter a toppled shelf, scattered books, signs of panic, but for the most part Powell’s was quiet and void of life. Ainsley led them through a hallway lined with journals, pens, and bookmarks and up into a general fiction section. They traveled up another staircase and into science fiction. Collapsed next to a fantasy display, they confronted their first body; it was a liquefied mess, a puddle of yellow spread out from under its plaid shirt and seeped on to the concrete below. A leathery hand still clutched a hardcover book about dragons.

The trio stepped around it and shined the flashlight away.

In the next room, they found a café. The display case was empty.

“It was worth a shot,” Ainsley said as they slid the light over the shelves looking for anything of value.

“We aren’t the first ones to get inside here. Before day six the Raiders would have picked it clean.”

“Most of the food would have been perishable anyway,” Dean lamented. He took a step behind the counter and ran his finger along the Formica laminate. Dust had started to collect on the tables and chairs. Outside, it was raining. There was a gentle pit-pat of droplets on the sidewalk.

“Come on.” Ainsley motioned. “This way.”

The Rare Book Room was cozy: antique furniture and faux Persian rugs, wood paneling, and non-working lamps. Behind display cases were first or rare editions of classic literature. Darla shined her flashlight over the spines and read the titles. The area was cordoned off from the rest of the bookstore, like its own little private store-within-a-store, and whether by design or by accident, the air was cool, but not cold. To guarantee comfort, Dean had nabbed three oversized Powell’s sweatshirts on their way from behind a help desk on the second level. As they settled down on to the rug, they each shimmied into the fleece, and pulled the hoods down over their faces.

“Okay, this is going to sound stupid, but my dream was to buy a book from the Rare Book Room when I got my first job. A treat for myself, you know?” Ainsley told them, while perusing the titles from the comfort of the floor.
 

“That’s not stupid,” Darla told her.
 

Ainsley smiled and her face lit up. “Thanks.”

“You can have anything you want, you know. They’re doomed here...left to rot. You should take one,” Dean added, rummaging through the tarp and examining the green beans and the chickpeas with mild interest before leaving the cans unopened. He ripped open the bag of tea lights and set them out one by one around the room, lighting them with his lighter.

“It’s not the same,” Ainsley grieved. “I wouldn’t have earned it.”

The room glowed from the candles, and their shadows flickered across the walls. Scanning the shelves, Dean leaned over and peered into a glass case; it was tilted so that the onlooker could scan the pages of the book inside. The case was padlocked with a tiny lock and Dean took a step back and smiled. He took the flat bottom of one of the lamps and knocked the lock free. Then he lifted out the green cloth-bound book, stamped with gilded vines.

“Here,” Dean said, handing the book to Ainsley. “We’ve most
definitely
earned it.”

Ainsley put her hand on top of the cover and gasped. Then she tenderly turned the pages, and ran a finger along the words. It was the first edition of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
. A yellow bookmark fell out between the pages, and written in a flowery script was the price: $170,000. She let out a small shriek as she held the stated value in her hand.