“Not in a car,” Tuck said distractedly, his gaze constantly moving to the rearview mirror as if he expected to be chased down at any moment. “We probably wouldn’t be able to make it through because of the parked vehicles, but even if we could, it isn’t safe. We’d have to travel way too slow in a car and be vulnerable to attack. It’d be safer to go by foot, but we don’t have enough provisions for that. We’ll need to stock up first, at least on water.”

Not having enough provisions also meant we wouldn’t be able to backtrack to Arizona and attempt to get to the San Fernando Valley from the opposite direction than the one we’d taken. Truthfully, we might not even make it back the way we’d come considering the barriers that seemed to be going up by the hour.

Tuck continued to look extremely unsettled, and it scared me too. “This looks like the only route we can take, but moving north to your parents will mean traveling through Los Angeles,” he said.

Los Angeles.

All this way, we’d avoided cities because they weren’t safe. Tuck had planned to go to Los Angeles alone, but Tuck was strong and street savvy, and his instincts for handling danger were honed. Me, I was none of those things.

That was the old you, Emily. Haven’t you held your own on this journey? Haven’t you proven that you can be an asset too?

“Okay,” I said, giving him a tip of my chin. “Then we’ll check on your uncle together. And then move on to my parents’ from there.”

“We don’t have another choice right now,” Tuck murmured, almost as if to himself. And again, he banged his palms on the steering wheel and cursed under his breath.

We turned onto another road, and then another, finally catching sight of the City of Angels sprawled in the distance.

chapter thirty-seven

Tuck

Day Sixteen

I pulled the car behind a furniture store in a strip mall that had obviously been looted, front windows broken and glass sparkling in the morning sun. I parked behind two dumpsters that looked mostly empty and shut the engine off. “We’ll come back for it if we can,” I told Emily, pocketing the key.

“What if someone hotwires it?”

“They might. But I think it’s safer leaving it here than attempting to drive it into the city.”