Raging Sea (Undertow, #2)

“It was so real,” I explain as I turn it off. “I can still hear them.”

Bex points to my driver’s-side window. I crane my neck in that direction and spot a gang of burly guys sitting on motorcycles in the parking space beside our car. They laugh and shout at one another, gunning their motors so that a loud thrum rattles our windows, my teeth, the air, and probably God in heaven. One of them spots me and howls with laughter. He’s amused that he scared the crap out of me. I give him the finger and he laughs even harder.

“Where’s Arcade?”

“She’s praying,” she says, the words riding on a wave of irritation. “Were you two out training last night?”

I nod. There’s a big purple bruise on my shoulder and on the right side of my rib cage. Bex gives them a quick once-over and shakes her head.

“Do the two of you have a plan when we get there?”

“Sort of,” I say, but suddenly realize we don’t at all, unless you consider “Attack the camp, free everyone, make people regret doing evil crap” a plan.

“Sort of?” she says. “And do you have a plan for me?”

“You’re going to drive the getaway car.”

“No, for when you die.”

It’s not like I haven’t considered the possibility, but I also know I have actively avoided giving it a lot of thought. I don’t know what is going to happen or how it’s going to end. I also haven’t thought about what Bex will do if I’m killed. Who the heck plans that kind of thing? This is a unique situation. I don’t have a plan B, and she knows it.

“What do you want me to say? There isn’t an instruction book for what we’re going to do. I’m doing the best I can here.”

“For just one second, can you stop fighting me and hear what I’m saying to you?” she says. “What should I do if you die?”

I fumble with words I don’t have. I’ve been so caught up in preparing for this fight that I have forgotten about the consequences if it fails.

“Find somewhere to be happy,” I whisper.

I watch a tear tumble out of her left eye and down her cheek; then she nods as if I just answered a question for her.

“Typical,” she says.

Arcade opens the car door and crawls into the back seat.

“You have had enough rest,” Arcade says. “Make this machine go.”

I give Bex my best reassuring smile, but it misses by a mile. She turns her head away to the window again.

I start the car and pull out onto the freeway.



I’ve seen movies set in the desert, so I thought I knew what to expect: endless miles of golden sand, vultures, and some poor fool raving from thirst and hallucinations. The West Texas desert is nothing like the movies. Amazing colors are baked into everything: reds and rusts, mustards, browns and grays, and deep maroons, speckled by shocking blues and purples. It’s a glorious painting, and the artist used every hue. It’s also overflowing with life. Unfortunately, said life is freaking me out. I grew up in a place where the wildest beasts were the seven cats owned by the crazy lady on the tenth floor of my apartment building. Here, there are lizards as big as those cats. They sit in trees and lurk in the scraggly brush, spitting their lavender tongues at everything. Snakes whip their bodies into the road in defiance of my two-ton machine. Furry creatures with long tails skitter in the tall grasses that line the highway. I feel like I’m driving through a zoo.

When we hit a town called Goldthwaite, we lose the sixteen-lane superhighways that run through Texas, along with the eighty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. This is where the poor carve out their lives. Gone are the monstrous SUVs and pickup-truck mutations designed to speed up climate change. These roads belong to the beekeepers and the day workers and the fruit pickers, to the Mexicans who work the oil wells, and to the people who live on “the res.” The folks I pass have faces baked by hard work and years in the sun. They send me friendly waves when we pass one another. At least, I think they’re waving at me. It might be the Ford they’re waving at. It fits in nicely in this part of the country.

Unfortunately it’s running on fumes, and when the engine finally ceases, we barely have enough to make it off the freeway and into a dusty gas station in the middle of nowhere. When we come to a stop, the motor pings and pops, then wheezes its final, dying breath.

The three of us are stuck. There is nothing out here for miles. Even this gas station is abandoned. By the look of the pumps, it filled its last car long before I was born.

“What now?” Bex asks.

“We walk,” Arcade says.

“It’s hundreds of miles!” I cry.