“That’s because you try to spell things out,” she chided. “You can’t just see a car and claim the letter C, you have to see the C written somewhere.”
“But you never let me write it.”
“Obviously you can’t just write yourself, that’s cheating.”
I shrugged and looked at a passing restaurant. “I don’t think I get the allure of this game.” The restaurant was a greasy dive, some Dairy Queen knockoff called Dairy Keen. Probably out of our price range, unless there was literally nothing else in town. I saw a couple of teenagers in front of it, just hanging around, leaning on the front wall, and it reminded me of the old Friendly Burger back in Clayton. A tiny little place where nobody ate but the locals, and then only until a McDonald’s opened up. Brooke and I had gone on a date there. And Marci and I, too. There weren’t a lot of options in a town like Clayton. Or Baker, by the look of it.
I missed Marci. I tried not to think of her, but she was always with me, like a ghost in the back of the truck. Invisible and intangible yet relentlessly, inescapably present.
“No Q on the Dairy Keen,” said Brooke. “Come on, guys, think about the alphabet game when you name your restaurants. Doesn’t anybody plan ahead?”
I thought about our next moves. Our first stop would be a bus station, if we saw one, or a bank if we didn’t—not because we had any use for a bank, but because it was a good place to ask about a bus station. We couldn’t just ask anywhere in a little town like this; we looked so obviously homeless that if we walked into a store, word of the teenage beggars would spread too fast and we’d get locked out of any real assistance. Small-town shop owners looked out for each other. Bank tellers, on the other hand, tended to move in different circles, and we could talk to them without any real fear that they’d call the local grocery store to warn them. Our end goal, of course, was that bus station, where we could find either cheap showers or some fellow drifters who could tell us where the nearest shower might be. Drifters looked out for each other just as much as shop owners. Once we were clean and changed into some better clothes, we’d look like regular tourists passing through on the way somewhere else and we could walk around the town without setting off any mental alarms. We’d get some food and then look for the church—not Baker Community, but the other one. The commune. The reason we’d come here in the first place. I figured most of Baker’s regular residents wouldn’t want to talk about it, but they’d all know about it, and if we got lucky they’d point out one of the members.
“Quality Feed and Fertilizer,” said Brooke. “Q and R. And over there’s an S, T, U … V. Video Rental. They still rent videos in this town? Did we hitchhike into the past?”
“Looks closed,” I said. We’d had a place like that in Clayton—it rode the home DVD boom, then crumbled when the Internet made their business obsolete. They’d closed a few years ago, and nothing had moved into the building. Looked like the same story here.
“At least they left the sign up,” said Brooke. “I’m glad somebody in this town was thinking about my needs.” She grimaced, and looked at me. “What’s it called again?”
“The town?” I asked. She might have just switched personalities again; a lot of ideas transferred from one to the next, but some didn’t, and she tried to hide the transitions by faking a poor memory. “Baker,” I told her. “We’re here to look for The Spirit of Light Collective.”
“Yashodh,” said Brooke, nodding. “We’re going to kill him.”
I felt the old, familiar pull of death. “Or he’ll kill us.”
“You say that every time.”
“One of these days it’ll be true.”
The truck was slowing, probably looking for a good place to drop us off. I grabbed the strap of my backpack, getting ready to jump out, but saw that Brooke was ignoring hers, staring instead at the buildings we were driving past: tall brick storefronts with ornate, peaked facades on the second story. Some of them were painted, some were covered with wooden or vinyl siding, others were bare brick or bore the residue of old-timey signs too weathered to read. A barber shop. An antique store. A pizza place that looked way more modern than the rest of the street. I wondered if we could beg any food from the back door.
The truck pulled to the side of the road, by a bright green lawn in some kind of town plaza—city hall probably—and I was already over the side and reaching back for Brooke’s bag when the driver rolled down his window. “This good? I could take you a few more blocks if you want.”