After the End

24 MILES

WHEN I WAKE UP, SHE IS TALKING TO A BIRD.

That shouldn’t faze me, but I’m not quite awake yet, and a wave of alarm rocks me before I remember that hanging with a crazy person is a means to an end. The end being the look on my father’s face when I finally do something right.

I take my time crawling out of the tent, hoping that the reality fairy will wave her wand and things will suddenly be normal when I look back up. But no, when I stand, Juneau is staring at me, waiting, as if she’s waiting for me to say something ground shattering.

“What?” I ask.

“We have to go,” Juneau says. “Now.”

“No flame-broiled roadkill for breakfast?” I joke. She acts like she doesn’t hear and starts stuffing her pack with the cooking gear.

“Someone’s coming after us. We’ll eat on the road,” she says in that I’m-the-boss-of-you way that’s really starting to get under my skin.

“Ah,” I say, raising an eyebrow purely for my own sake, since she isn’t looking at me anymore. “Would these pursuers happen to be government agents? Or maybe aliens? No, wait. Angry rangers who keep tabs on the park’s bunny population.”

“You can take the tent down if you want to help,” she states simply. And although I really couldn’t be bothered to join in as a willing partner of her paranoia, the way that she says it—like it’s a challenge she doesn’t think I’m up to—makes me turn around and start yanking tent pins out of the ground.

“You might want to take the bedding out first,” she says.

“Yeah, I was about to do that,” I mutter, and pull out the blowup camping pillows and paper-thin thermal blankets. By the time I’ve figured out how to take the folding rods apart, she has everything packed and in the car and comes around to help me. “Have you ever camped before?” she asks, but not in the mean way I was expecting.

“No,” I admit as I shove the final rod into its bag. “Does it show?”

She looks up and gives me this quirky little lips-pressed-together smile, and I can’t help but smile back, which makes her laugh through her nose.

And for one second I am actually enjoying myself, even though my back is paralyzed from sleeping on the hard ground and I am standing in the middle of an illegal campsite, grinning at a paranoid schizophrenic. She actually seems halfway normal. Nice, even. The thought rockets through my mind and ricochets around once or twice before I catch it and twist the life out of it. This girl is a means to an end, I tell myself. All that should matter to you is getting her to California. And forcing the smile off my face, I start the car.

Juneau throws the tent bag in the back and jumps in beside me. With a squawk, the bird flies in too and settles on the backseat and stares at me, daring me to react.

“What’s that?” I ask, gesturing at the bird as Juneau pulls her door shut.

“The raven’s coming with us,” she says.

My eyes widen in disbelief, and I try to control my voice, reminding myself that she’s the crazy one, not me. “And why, may I ask, is the raven coming with us?”

“Because if the guy who sent him to spy on us calls him back, it won’t be very hard for them to find us.”

My brain starts hurting again. I stare at the bird incredulously. It just eyes me for a second and then casually begins picking something out of its wing. I look back at Juneau, and the star-decorated contact lens makes me shudder from its weirdness. I don’t think she even took it out last night.

I can’t believe I thought she was normal for even a second—I must have Stockholm syndrome or something. I put the car into gear, turn it around, and head back down the dirt road we drove in on.

“So where to?” I ask in what I hope is a calm tone as we pull up to the paved road. She has me trained now. I watch her check the position of the sun and glance up and down the road in both directions.

“This road runs north-south,” she says. “Do you think there’s a way for us to get onto something heading southeast?”

“Well, if you can jump-start my iPhone, I could use the GPS to find the way,” I say. She stares at me like I’m speaking Chinese. I remember the L.A. mix-up and ask, “What part of what I just said did you not understand?”

“Jump-start. iPhone. GPS,” she responds.

I pick one. “Global Positioning System,” I explain. She shakes her head. I can tell by this tiny muscle that clenches in her jaw that it’s costing her to admit she doesn’t know what something is. “Where are you from that doesn’t have GPS?” I ask, hoping she’ll say something about Alaska, or tell me more about who she is.

“No time to talk,” she says. “Take that road. I’ll explain on the way.”

Joy. I pull the car out onto the pavement and begin driving south. “I guess that means you can’t jump-start my iPhone,” I prod after a few minutes.

She doesn’t look at me but stares straight out the window and then down at the speedometer, looking anxious. I step on the gas and she relaxes slightly. “Alaska,” she replies.

It takes me a second to realize that she’s one conversation back, but I catch up and say, “They’ve got to have GPS in Alaska. With all that wide-open wilderness and… tundra, or whatever they have there.”

She considers that for a second. “I’ve been living in a tiny community outside the major cities. When you described me as ‘back to nature’ before, you pretty much hit it on the head. It was just nature and us.”

“But I bet you’ve seen on TV—” I begin to say.

“We didn’t have TV,” she cuts in. “Or electricity, for that matter.”

“And you lived there for…”

“My whole life,” she replies.

While I try to wrap my brain around this, it occurs to me that, in this light, she suddenly doesn’t seem quite as crazy. If she was raised in some kind of hippie commune out in the middle of nowhere, no wonder she was freaking out in Seattle. I see her fiddle with the window, trying to fit her fingernails through the top of the glass as if she thinks she can push it down with sheer force.

“It’s the button next to the door handle,” I say, and she wiggles the control back and forth for a second until her window goes down and she leans her head to the side so the cold morning air hits her in the face.

“What? You don’t have cars either?” I ask, remembering the way that she leaped out while the car was still moving yesterday and forgot to close the door after she got back in.

She shakes her head.

I look at her incredulously. “How did you get around?”

“Dogsled,” she replies matter-of-factly. “Of course, our sleds were fitted with wheels when there wasn’t snow on the ground.”

“Of course,” I respond, one eyebrow cocked. She looks at me to see if I’m making fun of her, but I grin my goodwill and she does her lips-closed smile back.

She actually doesn’t look half-bad when she’s not scowling. I mean, that haircut still makes her look like a deranged pixie. But that’s definitely an improvement from evil elf girl, shoving skewers through dead animals’ body cavities.

“So why did you leave?” I ask tentatively. “I mean, now that we’ve established that it wasn’t an insatiable craving for Big Macs,” I add to lighten the mood.

Juneau leans her head back against the headrest, as if speaking more than a few words at a time is exhausting. She talks less than any girl I know. Uncomfortable silences don’t faze her. In fact, I’m not even sure she knows what uncomfortable is. She’s like a robot. Or an old person.

She sighs deeply. “When I said I was looking for my father, it’s because he went missing. Actually, not just him, but it seems my whole clan was abducted.”

“What? Why?” I ask, although as I say it I think, Wait a minute, Miles. It’s just more paranoia-speak. But she looks so sincere that I decide to swallow my doubt for just a few minutes. Even if she is spouting a load of crap, it’s obvious that she believes what she’s saying.

“I honestly have no idea,” she responds. “If I hadn’t been out hunting, I would have been taken too.” Her eyes flit to the backseat, and I see that she has placed the loaded crossbow within arm’s reach. I decide to ignore the fact that I am driving with an oversize crow and a dangerous weapon behind me and take advantage of the fact that she’s actually talking to press her further.

“And so you think the guys who took your father are the same ones who are following you? And they”—I can’t believe I’m about to say this—“sent the bird to spy on you?” I peer into the rearview mirror and see that the bird is treating my balled-up T-shirt from yesterday like a nest.

“Them… and my old mentor,” she says in almost a whisper.

“Your mentor?” I say, genuinely surprised, because I have no idea who she’s talking about.

Her face scrunches up like, if she were the kind of girl who cried, she would be blubbering about now. But she’s not the kind of girl who cries, thank God, so she just grinds her teeth and looks back out the window, focusing on a tiny shack with an enormous American flag in its garden, whipping and snapping in the wind. Cows lie sprawled out underneath, fast asleep like they had been whooping it up all night at some crazy bovine Fourth of July party.

Juneau’s eyes take in the landscape. Her mind is somewhere else. And all of a sudden it dawns on me. There could actually be people after her. Hell, I was after her. So were Dad’s goons before she shook them. If Dad’s trying to track her down so urgently, his competitors must be after the prize too.

That realization shakes me. I mean, it’s not like we’re in a Hollywood film where people will do anything for the chance to get their hands on a new drug. We’re not talking international espionage.

Or are we? Dad said that calling her an industrial spy was close enough to the truth. She’s obviously got valuable information.

This is getting complicated. When I thought she was a total nut, it was easy—I didn’t believe a word she said. But now that what she’s saying is starting to make sense, I have no clue what to believe.