“Damn,” Tuck said. “There are cars up there, but they’re all stopped, just like the other ones we saw.

“What the fuck is that about?” Charlie asked as we followed Tuck up the on-ramp to get a closer look. We’d see more from up there. Maybe a hotel… I didn’t need power. Just a bed. A pillow. Oh my God, carpet beneath my feet.

Vehicles littered the highway, dark and abandoned like the few we’d passed at the gas station. We stood there, looking in both directions. “Whatever happened disabled all these cars and trucks,” Tuck said.

“I saw this movie once where a comet vaporized most of the people on earth,” I said. That explanation seemed ludicrous, but then again, this whole situation felt bizarre and inexplicable. What if? At this point, I might even be willing to consider aliens.

“This isn’t a movie, Emily,” Charlie said, gripping the front of his hair and screwing up his face, clearly at risk of having a breakdown too now that we’d arrived at another disappointing location.

“Yes, I’m aware, Charlie,” I retorted. There wasn’t space for both of us to fall apart, but of course, Charlie couldn’t abide by that simple, unspoken rule.

“Kids,” Tuck warned. “No one got vaporized.”

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“Because we’d see their empty clothes where their bodies used to be. I saw that movie too.”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense though, right?” I said as he moved around a big rig blocking our way and I shuffled behind him. “I mean, if a comet vaporized human hair, wouldn’t it vaporize cotton too?”

He shot me a look and then pointed. I followed his finger to a sign up ahead that told us Springfield was eleven miles away. “Oh,” I breathed, even if in that moment, eleven miles felt the same as eleven feet—I could walk neither. Also, which Springfield? I looked from one license plate to another. If these cars were all local, then we were in Illinois. Tuck hesitated for a moment and then climbed up onto the side of the truck, making it to the roof in mere moments. He stood up and peered off into the distance, in the direction where there was apparently a metropolitan area.

It was then that I noticed the logo on the side of the truck we were standing next to. “Charlie,” I said, grabbing for his arm and gripping it.

“Ow. What?”

“This truck.” I pointed to the large red logo that I’d seen on every box of breakfast cereal I’d eaten growing up. We locked eyes for only a moment before we both headed for the back.

chapter eighteen

Tuck