At Least I Had Her

It starts raining on us as we see another sign for I-75 going towards Detroit. Yes, we’re getting closer! Maybe. It might still be about a day walk to the Blue Water Bridge, if we don’t stop. I can tell Lexi is getting tired of all of this. Her chipperness has seemed to die down, shriveled like everything around us. I hear her screech a little and turn to see what’s wrong.

“Hey, you okay?” I ask her, worried as I crouch down to meet her face. She just points at something on the side of the road. It’s a fox. The fur looks like it has been singed off and its skin is blistered and bubbling. I turn away from it and turn her face towards me.

“I wonder if all of the animals are like that now,” she says sadly.

“Hey, don’t think like that. Maybe some of them found shelter like we did,” I say reassuringly.

“Why do you do that?” she says, looking down and I look at her with some confusion.

“What do you mean?” I say questioningly.

“You act like I’m too young to handle the truth. I have eyes and ears, Ty. Everything is dying.”

I just look at her and sigh. “I’m sorry,” I sigh, ”I know you’re not a baby anymore and after everything we’ve been through so far, everything we’ve seen, it’s changed you, made you more mature and I’m sorry I haven’t recognized that. You’re still my baby sister and I remember when I was your age when you were born and how I didn’t want anything to ever hurt you, unless it was by my doing of course.” She rolls her eyes. “I guess...I guess I have just resorted back to that. I don’t want you to be hurt by the truth so...I keep things pg.”

“Thank you. For not leaving me too,” she says and I can hear her shudder, even through an earpiece in our masks.

“I’d never leave you, Lex,” I say back, as I put a hand on the side of her head, caressing the mask since I can’t touch her face. “We gotta keep moving.”

The rain dies down to more of a mist after about 10 minutes of walking. It’s that annoying mist where it feels like it’s raining really hard because there’s just a bunch of water all over the fucking place but it’s small soft droplets, not the hard ones that feel like you’re getting slapped by bees. With these masks on though it makes it really hard to see and we end up having to wipe the water off like every ten seconds. The ground is wet enough though that puddles have formed. Lexi finds one and starts happily jumping in it. I want to tell her to stop because the water will get in her shoes and her pants will get wet and it’ll make her cold but she was laughing. I hadn’t heard that laugh in what feels like a year. It’s that cute generic kid laugh you hear on tv when they’re running through the playground. She had that right now and I didn’t want to make her mood become like this weather, dreary and uneasy.

We get closer to the city so I pull Lexi closer. We’ve heard reports that people who were still loitering around the bigger cities have been robbing people and jumping them. I pull the taser and knife out of my backpack and hand her the taser.

“I don’t know how to use this,” she says.

“Well that’s why I’m about to show you.”

My dad was a great dad who taught me a lot of stuff when I was younger. When I was about 8, he signed me up for self defense classes and taught me how to use knives, tasers, and pepper spray. He always made sure that I knew that if someone came up behind me, to step on their toes and then elbow them in the ribs if I could. He also always made sure I at least had pepper spray on me and that it was always filled with the right stuff. I was never a very rough kid and he knew that, but he never forced me to be who I wasn’t. He just wanted me to learn the basics, wanted me to know how to survive and I am more than grateful that he instilled that into me because now, I am able to protect my sister with the knowledge that he gave me.

“How do you know how to use a taser?” she asks.

“It’s a secret. But take it like this and keep a good grip. See that button? Press it and it’ll light it up! Go ahead and try it.”

She releases the button just as fast as she pressed it, probably shocked by how much power something can have while in her own hand.

I laugh, “Scare ya?”

“Not really,” she says snarkily. “Could this kill someone?” she says kind of mischievously with a smirk on her face.

“Umm...I guess it could if you shock them in the right place for long enough. But for now we’re gonna keep the safety on which is this button here and then when you press again, it’ll release. I just don’t want you shocking yourself.”

“I’m not stupid,” she says with a furrowed brow.

“I know you’re not but still. Just in case.”

I hear commotion a couple blocks away where it looks like two guys are fighting over, something. One guy punches the other, knocking his gas mask off. I can hear him gasping for air and see his skin blister on contact. I put my hands over Lexi’s face and we swivel behind a building.

“Did that man just…” she says.

“Yeah,” I say back. I look back out where the men were and the guy who punched the other guy, left in his truck, leaving the dead man’s car behind. I get this eerie idea.

“We need a car,” I say thinking out loud.

“What happened to, ‘we can’t just steal a car’, like you said when we were back home. And besides, where are we gonna get a car and who the heck is going to drive it?”

“All caution has been thrown to the wind. And I can drive, sort of,” I say kind of offended. “Dad taught me a little bit. ”

“All you’ve really done is go to driving school to learn that the legal alcohol level to where an adult can drive, is .08%”

I look at her quickly with a questioning face. “How the hell do you know that?”

“I read it somewhere,” she says looking around, seemingly to make sure that no one else was around. “Are we gonna get that car or not?”

I nod as an answer. “Come on.”

We head over to the pale looking convenient store and I keep Lexi behind me, keeping my hand on her, so she doesn’t have to see the dead body. I check to see if the door is unlocked and luckily, it is. I pull her from behind me, shielding her eyes as I do, and get her to climb up and over to the passenger seat. Now, all we need is the keys.

“Eww, don’t touch him,” she says, almost like she could hear my thought process.

“We can’t drive without keys. Search for a map or something.”

I close the door, walk over to the blistered corpse, and crouch down next to it. I slowly reach my hand towards the man’s front pocket and check for the keys. No keys in that one but I do feel his phone. It’s an old one, weirdly, so I have to unlock it...with his thumb. But we need a phone, since I dropped mine in a pond a few days ago. Before doing the unbelievable, I look in the other front pocket and thank God the keys were in there, or else I would have had to flip him over. I open the car door back up to start the engine and turn the heat on to keep Lexi warm while I unlock the phone. I pick the phone up and I almost gag at the fact that I have to lift this guys hand. I take the glove off his hand and position his hand to where I only get the thumb and unlock the phone.

“Yes!” I say in a whispered excitement.

I get back in the car and see that luckily the car has a half tank of gas, but his phone is going to die soon but luckily we still have my charger. We can use it to get directions. I hand my backpack over to Lexi and tell her to activate the air filter so I can change the password to his phone and get the directions to Blue Water Bridge. Before she activates the air filter, I roll down the windows so the smoke has somewhere to go, and nod for her to turn it on. “Air filtered within a 6 foot radius” the robot voice says. She takes her mask off and so do I and we both take a deep breath. We’ve been in those masks for a good two hours and I was starting to get light headed like I have been when we’ve had to wear them for longer. I program the phone to change its password and put the GPS on.

“An hour away. Lex, we’re almost there.”

She looks at me with a face of relief and smiles as I put the car in drive.