Chapter 17

Mariah Nowak and Marcos Walker sat on the curb and passed sticky notes, filling both sides of each colorful square. When asked if he had bigger paper, for real conversations, Marcos responded that he had never had any real conversations, except with his mom. As he wrote this last part, his face closed itself off and became dimmer, as if a curtain had been drawn somewhere behind his eyes.

“Where is your mom?” Mariah asked.

Marcos shrugged and looked the other way.

Mariah decided not to pull on that thread anymore. After she finished outlining her situation (leaving John out of the story for simplicity’s sake), Marcos snapped to again. He got up and motioned for her to follow. They went back the way she had come, away from the intersection and its piles of haunted electronics. It was the first time she’d thought of that word in connection with the world’s goings-on. Her skin prickled from her scalp to her toes.

Haunted.

When they reached the main thoroughfare, Marcos turned the opposite direction of school. Above the road hung a green sign labeled Silver Way. They walked beneath telephone wires on which no crows gathered, between homes in which no lights shone. Some places had been broken into; screens laid at the foot of open windows, deadbolts chopped off doors that had been left to creak in the wind. So. That explained where the televisions had come from, along with the rest of the stuff.

Marcos had cleaned out the entire town. He flashed Mariah a discreet, almost embarrassed smile and passed her a note: “I wanted to make it safe.”

Mariah nodded. It was all she could manage to do. How long had it taken him to visit every house? she wondered as they continued down the street. And where were the people? They couldn’t all be . . . could they?

Marcos stopped in front of a discreet bungalow. An empty bird feeder swung over the porch. A sparrow chirped uncertainly on the roof. It sounded small and out of place in the night. “There used to be a lot more birds here,” he told her. “But they all left, or they’re hiding. Do you think birds are afraid of the dark?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think so,” he wrote. “Some birds anyway.”

Mariah waited for him to tell her more. When he didn’t, she tapped his shoulder and motioned for him to pass her the pencil. “Who lives here?”

“Mr. Vandegrift.”

She looked at the name. It was written in big letters, as if it belonged to a big person.

“I saw his car keys on the counter earlier,” Marcos jotted on a fresh note, his handwriting back to its normal size. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind us borrowing it for a while since it’s an emergency. He’s cool.”

Marcos was talking about Mr. Vandegrift in the present tense, she observed.

“Wait out here,” he told her. “I think I got everything dangerous. But sometimes people stick old phones and stuff in their drawers.”

He lifted the latch on the gate and jogged up the path. The house must have been unlocked when he’d visited earlier, because the front door still had a deadbolt and the windows still had screens; it seemed this Mr. Vandegrift person, besides being cool, was also trusting.

As Marcos let himself in, Mariah half expected to glimpse someone slouched in an armchair, staring blankly into the corner where a TV had once been. She saw a couch instead, at the end of a hall. There was no one sitting in it. She didn’t know whether to feel reassured or unsettled. Maybe the TV was in Mr. Vandegrift’s bedroom, she thought, and he’s back there right now, tucked in and dreaming in the dark, a smile on his face.

Marcos left the house, taking special care to turn off the lights. He looked worried. “Do you drive stick?” he asked.

She laughed.

He frowned.

“Yes,” she answered him. “Yes, I do.”

They walked to the curb where Mr. Vandegrift’s car was parked. It might have been the company, or it might have simply been the fact that she was somewhere again after having been lost for so long, but Mariah discovered an unexpected lightness to her step. Even her shoes seemed to fit right. She stuck the key into the door and started to turn it, but then her hand began to shake. She backed away from the Camry until she was on the other side of the street. So close. She’d come so close. Fear had her by the throat, its nails long, its fingers tight. But the most frightening thought wasn’t that she’d almost hopped into the driver’s seat. It was that she’d forgotten why she shouldn’t. How easy it was to get comfortable. To let down your guard, just for a moment.

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Marcos approached her. He didn’t need to ask. The question was plain on his face: What’s wrong?

“Did you take it out?” she said. “The radio? Did you take it out of the car?”

He shook his head, and not until later would she realize he’d understood her despite the fact she’d spoken out loud. He started to write. Stopped. His Adam’s apple tugged down in a jerking swallow, then he looked over his shoulder at Mr. Vandegrift’s Camry before slowly turning back to her. When he set his pencil to the paper again, she noticed that his hand had caught a tremble of its own.

“The boy. He’s on the radio too. Isn’t he?”

She nodded.

“Maybe we should walk.”

✽✽✽

They did just that.

But first they borrowed the jack from Mr. Vandegrift’s Camry, along with the juice from its tank. The jack was smaller than the one she’d lost, and shaped differently, like a tiny collapsible coffee table. She didn’t know if it had the stuff to heft John’s truck, but it was worth a try. Extracting the gasoline, however, proved more work than it was worth. There wasn’t much left to begin with (Mr. Vandegrift hadn’t filled up recently, it seemed), and what remained didn’t want to come out, no matter how hard Mariah sucked on the fuel jug’s plastic tube. She had to stop more than once to catch her breath, and by the time the first bitter splash hit her lips she felt as if she could topple right over. The whole ordeal reminded her vaguely of blowing up balloons for a birthday party. Except, of course, blowing up balloons didn’t end with you gagging in the road.

They retraced their steps down Silver Way, pausing occasionally to siphon from one of the vehicles parked at the curb (as long as the vehicle’s windows were shut tightly, that was). After the second stop, her jug far from full, Mariah asked Marcos how it was possible for a town not to have a single gas station. “Holden doesn’t have a lot of things,” he told her. “You have to go to South Point for most stuff.” She inquired about South Point. He shrugged and looked off, just as he had when asked about his mother. But he didn’t stop at a look—he stared, his eyes aiming through someone’s sideyard into the lightless valley that bordered the town, and it dawned on Mariah that he wasn’t just staring in any direction.

He was staring south.

And he was scared.

The third attempt at siphoning started off better. She managed to coax the fuel out with two sharp inhales, and only got a little on her lips in the process. As she listened to it stream into the jug, she heard a soft crackly rustle, like the sound of a popcorn machine. It wasn’t until the noise got louder that she realized it was coming from inside the car, spilling out into the air despite the sealed windows. Static. Rising static. Mariah grabbed the jug and hurried off.

She’d gotten enough gas for a while.

They passed the school, the only bright thing in Holden that wasn’t a streetlamp. Once again she couldn’t help glancing at the chained set of doors in the hallway. Chains like that were generally used to keep people out . . . only what people? She’d seen nobody in town but Marcos, who was walking too far ahead for her to stop him and ask. He’d been different since South Point had come up in their conversation. Distant. It didn’t help that his hands, normally ready with his sticky notes and pencil, were now busy lugging the jack. He stopped to glance back at her, as if to make sure she was still there, and soon Silver Way spit them out into the desert. The change happened fast. One moment they were in Holden, houses all around, and the next they were out in the open where the wind blew unchecked and the night looked down on emptiness and dirt. She caught up to Marcos as they approached the turnoff, and from there she led him to the truck.

When they got close enough to make out the dark shape behind the wheel, Marcos set down the jack so he could write.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s John. Come and help me get this poor old thing back on its feet.”

✽✽✽

You could learn a lot about a person by the way they worked.

Mariah learned that Marcos was protective of his hands, gentle with them, like someone who played the piano for a living. He put his big rubber gloves on before getting busy, and he never stuck his fingers anywhere without careful consideration. That made sense to Mariah. As far as Marcos was concerned, hands weren’t just for touching and gripping. They were language. Without them, he would have no voice.

The task itself was simple enough, once Mariah thought to turn the truck on and open its passenger door for some light. The jack held up its end of the bargain, despite a cranky grumble or two as she wound its handle, and the spare slipped on as neat as Cinderella’s slipper, though Mariah did have doubts about the tire’s overall integrity. Strong doubts. The rim had acquired a few scars on the road, and in one place its lip had bent enough for even her untrained eye to see. But she was proud of herself. She had done it. With a little assistance.

“That was fun,” Marcos wrote.

“Really?”

“No.”

Mariah flicked him on the ear—she couldn’t say why, it just seemed like the right thing to do—and he shot her a surprised look that she answered with a shrug. While she filled the tank, he stood at the rear of the truck and stared west down the road.

“This goes all the way to Death Valley,” he told her when she finished.

You don’t say. Mariah motioned for a sticky note, then took a moment to gather her thoughts. “Thank you for all your help. And I’m sorry. Because now I have to ask you for more. My friend is sick and he won’t wake up. He needs medicine for the first thing, plus somewhere to lay down. He’s been sitting a long time. As for the second thing, the sleeping thing, I was hoping you might have an idea what to do.”

Marcos read what she’d written. He put his finger on the last line and shook his head.

“You don’t know how to wake him up?” she asked.

Another shake of the head. He took the pencil from her. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do once they’ve started dreaming. He’s not dreaming though. Not like them.”

Mariah looked up at Marcos, and he looked right back at her, no trace of doubt in his eyes. How could he possibly know if John was like the others or not? Perhaps he caught a glimpse of John’s face through the windshield, and noticed John wasn’t smiling. But the truck had been dark when the two of them arrived. John had been a shadow in the driver’s seat, nothing more. If Marcos had seen his face, then his night vision was far better than hers, and she didn’t think that was the case. No. She thought Marcos’s certainty came from somewhere else.

“What makes you say that?”

“I can’t feel . . .” Marcos stopped, crumpled the note, and started a fresh one. “There’s something I should probably show you.”