Page 68 of The Shade of Things
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We drovefor hours through the darkness. I slept on and off, woken finally by screams and the van jolting to the left.
“Sorry.” Isla corrected our course, breathing heavily. She rubbed her eyes. “A pebble hit the windshield and I thought we were being shot at.”
“Jeez,” Teresa said. “We’re going to need so much therapy when this is over.”
Our tension was palpable, our nerves strung tight as a bow’s string.
The van sputtered and Isla cursed.
She rolled the vehicle into a rest stop next to a single-story building that managed to evoke both The Jetsons and Communist-era architecture with its futuristic sign reading “Exit” atop a sterile gray workhorse of a building.
“We’re out of gas,” Isla said.
“How timely,” Eli said.
There were no gas pumps.
Laurent had shifted back to human while most of us slept. He rested his cheek against his window, his face too shadowed to read.
“Is this a warehouse?” I said.
Teresa rolled down her window. “I hear music. It’s a club.”
Emmett sat up, cracking his neck, which sounded like walnut shells breaking. “Did someone say booze?”
“We’ve regressed another stage on the life cycle,” Eli said. “Death, old age, adulthood, and now youth.”
Daw’s stomach rumbled and she rubbed it.
“I’d kill for a drink,” Isla said. “Or a bowl of stale peanuts.”
Okeyo didn’t look like he’d moved since I’d last seen him, his head buried in his shaking hands.
I looked out the window. “They terrorize you, then give you a time-out. All the better to terrorize you again. It’s a mind fuck.”
“Mind fuck or not,” Isla said crisply, “I, for one, desperately need a normal moment.”
“Me too,” Teresa said.
“I’d be careful of drinking here,” Laurent said. “They might roofie you.” Good point.
Okeyo finally turned around. “Why?”
“Every stage has had a psychological component,” I said. “You survived death, made it back to the land of the living. How’d you feel when you got to the house and found backpacks with food and supplies?”
“Like I had a shot at getting out of here,” Okeyo said.
“Right, but if Mateo hadn’t figured out the trick to escaping the shifting streets, you’d have wandered there forever. Disoriented.”
“Downtown, you were literally penned in,” Eli said. “Towers to signify adult working life. Wondering if that’s all there is until you die.”
“Once again, there was a way out,” I said. “Provided you survived the attacks. Now we’re at this club. A place of celebration, cutting loose. Also a place, for women at least, of heightened paranoia. Laurent is right. Drugs in the drinks are the perfect way to mess with us.”
“Then there should be another section between here and the playground,” Teresa said. “Adolescence.”
Isla groaned. “Like I want to relive that. A drink is definitely in order. Besides, it’s called Exit. They want us to go this way.”
