Abram tips his head back and laughs. “You want to know why I’m done with you people?” He turns around. “Because people who talk like that are the ones who get you killed in a world like this. Che Guevara talked like that. Lenin and Mao talked like that. All those doe-eyed idealists watching the future through a telescope while they trampled over the present. There’s no bigger threat to the world than people who think they can improve it.”
He lifts Sprout onto the back of the bike. She looks back at Julie with sadness and fear, but Julie looks right past her, boring into the back of Abram’s head.
“How about this, then?” she says. “How about you fly the plane or I shoot you.”
Abram turns around, chuckling, and finds himself looking into a gun barrel.
“How about I don’t give a shit about the world,” Julie says, gripping the pistol in both hands. “How about I want you to fly us to Iceland so I can get help for my mom, because she’s my family and fuck everyone else.”
Abram’s smile is amused but weary. “Cute,” he says, and turns to mount his bike.
“I will shoot you, Abram.”
He shakes his head as he climbs on. “No, you’ll stand there saying you’ll shoot me, because you love to talk about things you know will never hap—”
Julie shoots him.
He falls off the bike and lands on his knees, clutching his arm. Sprout screams.
“Shit, Jules,” Nora murmurs.
Abram pulls himself up, pale with pain and surprise. His hand drifts toward a pouch on the side of his duffel; I open my mouth to warn Julie but she’s watching him with no apparent concern. His hand comes out empty.
“You stole my Ruger,” he says with muted amazement.
“Fly the plane,” Julie says.
He stares at her for a moment, then makes a grab for the rifle on his back.
Julie shoots him in the shoulder.
“Julie!” Sprout sobs, gaping at her in disbelief.
Julie’s eyes dart toward Sprout and her face flickers; I glimpse shame and horror as full awareness hits her. But she hardens again.
“Fly the plane.”
Abram examines his wounds—a deep graze across his left tricep and a clean shot through the trapezoid—and as blood soaks the sleeve of his beige jacket, the shock on his face slowly becomes something else. A faint smile, not patronizing this time, not mocking, not even angry. He looks at Julie like he’s meeting her for the first time.
“Well all right then,” he says.
He marches up the ramp with Julie’s gun at his back.
Julie doesn’t look at any of us. We don’t look at each other. We board the plane in frightened silence, like hostages, and I haul the ghost of Julie’s mother by the neck, seeing nothing in her eyes but death.
WE
“LET’S PLAY a game,” Gael says.
“Which one?” Gebre says.
“Let’s play Road Name.”
“What’s that?”
“You take the name of the first wrecked car you see, then a cartoon character from the first roadkill you see, combine them however you like, and that’s your road name.”
The boy sits on a plastic bucket between the van’s driver and passenger seats, staring at the highway ahead. The morning sun is streaming through the trees and bathing everything in an ethereal glow, but by the time it reaches him through the dirty windshield and his scratched sunglasses, it is cloudy and dim.
“I’m playing for our little mate here,” Gael says, smiling at the boy. “Because we need something to call him other than ‘mate.’ Right, mate?”
We watch the boy’s thoughts as he weighs these two men. Their intentions, their motivations. A brain is built to learn from experience—if fire burns, don’t touch fire—and if his does its job, he will never trust people again. And yet the brain is not a simple machine. It is a concentric infinity of wheels within wheels, and it fights against its own functions toward goals it barely comprehends.
“Honda Fit!” Gebre blurts as they approach a car with its nose buried in the ditch. It’s Gael’s turn to drive, so Gebre has the scouting advantage. “And roadkill! A pigeon, I think. They must have swerved to miss it . . .” He cranes his neck to watch the bird’s dried remains disappear. “I guess that’s the reward for kindness these days.”
“Geb,” Gael says.
“Anyway. Honda Fit plus a bird, so . . . I guess I’m Tweety Fit?”
“You can mix it however you want. Doesn’t have to be whole words.”
Gebre thinks a moment. “Fonda Titty.”
“Sure you are,” Gael chuckles. “But that’s good. Okay, mate, our turn.”
They have been driving for three days. The boy records the patterns around him deep in the back of his mind. Bright then dark. Warm then cold. The opening then closing of dandelions. The desperate scramble then sated stillness of insects. And the ebb and flow of conversation in the van, from idle chatter to heavy debates to long, unreadable silences. They have offered him food and he has refused. They have seen him sitting alert on his bucket while they fall asleep in the pop-top bed, and they have woken to find him unmoved, staring up at them from his bucket, waiting. He wonders why they pretend not to know what he is.
“There!” Gael says, pointing to an SUV stalled in the middle of the road with cut tires and broken windows. “Land Rover. Okay, mate, keep your eyes peeled for some roadkill and we’ll make you a lovely new—”