Chapter Eighteen: Open Road — Part 5

The journey out is a haggard ride, and even though Jynx makes the best of the trip, she opts to stop after about 140 miles to rest and top off her tanks in a relatively small town known as Jonesboro, in Arkansas. Jynx is tired, the road is rough, and even though she is certain that Joe and Blake are happy to be away from the Glenn, and despite the fact that she had prepared for the worst, she misses the little things she left behind. Little things like her pipe and her special mix of pot and cloves that she ground in with just a hint of cinnamon and a touch of molasses. Daria stops her when she tries to get out and grab an empty fuel canister.

“No, love. You’ve been driving while we’ve been sleeping. Stay here with the mother and get some rest while we do something for once.” Daria says brightly. “Besides, Heath’s volunteered to go out with us, and Blake’s already looking with a small party for fuel not only for your truck, but for the cargo truck and the vans.”

Jynx lies down in the back, hoping she’ll get enough sleep before she has to take the driver’s seat to keep pushing on through to wherever it is they’re going. Jonesboro is in the same shape as most of the other cities. The search for diesel will be a long one, and it will require much walking, especially with only five people looking. The kids take the time to stretch their legs, and ignore the bones and rags they know must be in the houses and remains of a once thriving town. None of them knows just how close they are to a university whose buildings have survived, but whose occupants stopped living with the coming of the Storm. Nobody bothers to look that hard for survivors.

When Jynx wakes up, it is well into the afternoon, and the sun is burning bright overhead. The cab suddenly feels stuffy, and the smell of boys and babies infused in the sleeping bag is suddenly oppressive. Jynx sits up, shakes off the grogginess, and heads toward the others, who are mostly sitting around a bonfire made from dead wood found along the side of the road. Food rations are being passed around, as is a flask of something harder, as well as what must be large quantities of water or juice. Jynx opens one of the buckets, finds an MRE inside, pulls it out, and reads the ingredients. She doesn’t remember collecting them, so she’s guessing that Joe must have gotten hold of them from somewhere. The one she has grabbed has milk products in it, and maybe meat, so she hands it to one of the kids she passes and takes her own rations from another bucket.

Jynx walks on toward Joe, wondering what is going on. The children chatter among themselves while Jude and George stare at a map with Joe, talking about the route Joe has chosen. Jude is holding the odd tool that helps him map out gravity arches. Its bearing looks dead center to her, but to Jude, it must be saying something, because as he stares at it, he points off to the Northeast, and Joe seems to agree, so each of them mark an arrow on the map. She steps up next to George, smiling at Joe while opening the package food, eating the freeze-dried fruit first.

“So what’s the plan from here, Joe?”

“We’re trying to plan the route out past the supply depot we set up.” Joe says. “We need to find an arch, somewhere, and it needs to be big, as big or bigger than the one at the Glenn.”

“What if the really big ones, like at the Glenn, are uncommon?” Jynx wonders aloud.

Jude shows his lightly traced lines on the map. “I’ve been mapping the gravity patterns as we go, just as I did into the Glenn. It isn’t a proven concept, but there seems to be some kind of a relationship between the various arches, maybe. See how these pulls in direction all seem to cluster in a circle around different points? At the center of what could be one small arch cluster is the Glenn’s arch. I’m not saying every cluster of arches we’ve mapped are part of an edge or circle, but if it is an indicator, it can’t hurt us to use it.”

“So,” Joe says quietly, “While we figure this out, what direction are you taking us?”

Jynx wonders if she is as pale as she suddenly feels. She pauses, thinking. “We’ll head to the Four Corners Region. ChoCho and I have a friend there we should check up on.”

Joe looks suspicious. “And you know him because?”

“We know him because he rode an arch that took him, in two days, on horseback, from the Navajo reservation to Arkansas. As far as we know, he made it back through arch as well.” Jynx says.

“You’re quiet, all of a sudden, George.” Jude says, though in truth George hasn’t done much more than sleep and look exasperated since they left the Glenn.

George shrugs. “We’re covering a lot of ground, aren’t we?”

Jude smiles gently. “Yeah sweetie. It’s a lot of work, isn’t it? Moving across country, making the change.”

George gives Jude an across the shoulder squeeze and heads off toward the fire, where Arpie and Opus are standing, each of them drinking, since neither of them are driving the next shift. Jynx doesn’t try to assess what George is feeling, any more than she tries to understand why Jude and Joe are so impassioned about the arches. She simply needs to find them all a place to settle in and get comfortable. ChoCho and Kevin have each come back twice with fuel, and are each headed out again for more when Jynx gets a glimmer of thought about what Joe might have in mind. She keeps the glimmer to herself, though, because there is no verbal affirmation, just that sort of intuitive nudge that can so easily be driven from the mind by the smallest distraction.

That distraction comes with the sound of plastic canisters banging against the inside of The Girl’s back. ChoCho and Kevin return from the fueling, having filled the green canisters with diesel fuel siphoned from trucks that did not blow up. Daria and Blake have managed to fill the vans back to full as well. By early evening, the trucks and their owners are refreshed a little, and ready for the road, and Jynx has only to wait for everybody to eat before setting out on the course Joe has mapped out for her.

Jynx is momentarily distracted by the raw emotional expression of her new friends. Leaning against the middle van is one of the puds Jynx has not taken a moment to get to know yet. Leaning against this one is Heath. They are kissing with some passion, and it doesn’t look to Jynx like either of them is going to come up for air any time soon. Jynx lets the darker worries edge off. She looks away from the young couple maybe a moment longer than is polite. Something about the kiss, about the intimacy and passion of it, even the odd youthful clumsiness of it, gives her a quiet sense of hope — hope she keeps bottled tightly behind a face as calm and passionless as glass.