smackenzie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
smackenzie) wrote2007-11-23 07:32 pm
smackenzie) wrote2007-11-23 07:32 pm
day 6
Marya did not sleep particularly well, which was annoying but understandable. The bench seat wasn't very comfortable anyway, and because it also wasn't very wide she couldn't roll over. And the sleeping bag kept trying to slide off her. Oscar slept on undisturbed and Marya envied him, although she was glad she didn't have to sleep curled up into a ball on the front seat. Leaving the front row of seats in the van had been as brilliant an idea as taking out the back row. Otherwise she wasn't sure where she'd be able to sleep.
She managed to get a few decent hours of sleep despite the cramped bed equivalent, and when she finally decided to get her ass up for good it was a little past eight. That was a good hour to get started, she figured. Early.
She got out of the van to stretch and pee - this peeing in bushes thing did not really get any easier, and she still expected someone to drive by and honk at her for flashing them - and to let Oscar out to stretch and pee. She didn't really want to walk him down the highway and back, but he wanted to go somewhere, so she locked the van and took him. They weren't gone long - Oscar didn't seem to want to go far once they started going - and when they got back to the van Marya tied his leash to the seatbelt so she wouldn't have to watch him or lock him in while she found cleaner and slightly less smelly clothes to wear. Packing the small travel duffle had also been a brilliant idea.
She scooped some kibble into Oscar's traveling food bowl, poured him some water, and scrounged around in the cooler for something to eat for breakfast. She was actually really tempted by the Ho-Hos she'd taken from the gas station yesterday, and she still had some orange juice left which she should really finish before the frozen corn completely defrosted and there was nothing left to keep the cooler cold. So she drank the rest of the juice and ate a pack of Ho-Hos and dug out a bottle of water to wedge next to the front seat for later. Next she ate some of the cheddar cheese and an apple and considered looking for a knife so she could get out the bread and spread some jam on a couple of slices. She hadn't realized how hungry she was, but now that she'd started eating, she was starving. She rummaged in the paper bag of miscellaneous kitchen stuff until she found a plastic knife, but by then she remembered that there was honey in with the bread too, and she didn't need a knife for that. So she got out two slices of bread and the bottle of honey, squeezed honey all over both slices, and made a sandwich. All she needed now was some milk and some bacon, and it was almost the perfect breakfast.
Sadly she had no bacon and no way of cooking it if she did, and the only milk she had was Parmalat and she wasn't really ready to open it yet. It had to be refrigerated after you opened the carton, didn't it? And she didn't have a fridge any more and wasn't too sure the cooler was going to keep everything already in it cold, much less adequately refrigerate a box of Parmalat. She figured she'd be ok without it for a while. In a perfect world, when she got to California and found her dad, he'd have found a generator and hooked it up to a small fridge or something. Actually, in a really perfect world, the west coast would have power and she wouldn't have to worry about it.
Too bad this wasn't a perfect world.
Marya pushed the apple core inside the empty carton of orange juice, folded the top closed, and put the carton on top of the bag of kitchen stuff. She'd throw it out the next time she stopped for gas or something, the next time she stopped somewhere there was a trash can. She shook out Oscar's food and water bowls before putting them back in the back of the van and then ran him around the van a couple of times for good measure and to make sure he didn't still have to pee or poop. He didn't. She got him back in the van and paused a minute before getting in herself, just to look up and down the highway and wish desperately for someone else to drive by. Nothing happened. She sighed and got in the van and turned the ignition and pulled off the shoulder and onto the road.
Driving today was a lot like driving yesterday, except the landscape of Ohio was a little different from the landscape of Pennsylvania - although not a whole lot - and the rest stops were slightly different and slightly more numerous. Marya still couldn't tell how many people were in the cities and towns off the road, if there were a lot of people or if it looked as if everyone had packed up and gone elsewhere. She wondered how many other folks were doing what she was doing and were on the road to find friends or family who they couldn't reach on the phone.
When she finally pulled off the road for gas, having picked an exit with signs for more than one gas station, she found that the gas stations in Ohio were just as empty and just as creepy as the ones in Pennsylvania. There were three in one direction and one in the other direction when she got off the exit ramp, and just like yesterday, all the pumps at the first station were dead. All the pumps at the second station were dead too, and so were the pumps at station number three.
"Shit," she said. "This sucks." She headed the other way to try gas station number four and almost drove off the road in surprise when a car pulled out of the station in front of her and turned down the street. Marya hit the gas and laid on the horn and didn't even think how threatening she might look bearing down on this little white two-door. In response, the little white two-door stopped in the middle of the road. Clearly everyone had taken their stupid pills this morning.
Marya stopped the van just behind it and jumped out. Oscar started barking but she left him in the passenger seat. She didn't want to scare off the first actual person she'd seen in twenty-four hours, and even though he wasn't huge for a Dalmatian, he was friendly in the way of dogs who didn't realize human beings had boundaries, and it would be just her luck that this person in this unexpected white car was terrified of dogs.
She jogged up to the white car, which had stopped although the driver hadn't gotten out. Whoever was inside it had rolled down the window, though, and when Marya came up alongside it, a head poked out along with the barrel of a handgun.
"Oh shit," Marya squeaked, putting up her hands and taking a couple of fast steps back. "Don't shoot me, I'm unarmed, Jesus."
"What the hell is wrong with you?" demanded the person inside the car. Marya had moved so whoever it was could see her, which meant now she could see them. The driver was a guy, maybe in his early thirties - it was hard to tell from just his face - with short curly brown hair. He was wearing a polo shirt, it looked like, and there were some boxes and a desktop computer in his back seat. Why was he carrying around a desktop? Did he expect to find a place to plug it in?
Well, she'd brought her laptop, hadn't she. Maybe it just had a lot of information on it that he wanted to keep an eye on. Never mind that no one else could get to it, or even use it once they had it....
"Were you trying to run me down?" the guy continued. "What the fuck is your problem?"
"I'm sorry, I just didn't want you to get away. I haven't seen anyone since yesterday."
"Well, you're not seeing anyone now. Are you a ghost?"
"Do I look like a ghost? What do you mean, I'm not seeing anyone now? I'm looking at you, aren't I?" Was this guy crazy? Had he become unhinged? He looked real and solid to her.
"I'm a ghost, shh. Come here." He beckoned with the barrel is his gun. Marya raised an eyebrow.
"Um... you have a gun. I don't. You're not gonna shoot me, are you?"
The guy sighed, sounding exasperated. "If you're a ghost it won't matter. Just come here. I want to touch you and see if you're real."
Marya took a couple of tentative steps forward and held out her hand. The guy took it, shook it, and dropped the gun below Marya's line of sight. She let out a breath.
"I didn't mean to freak you out," she said. "I wanted to talk to you. And none of the gas pumps that way" - she gestured up the road behind her, where the dead pumps were - "work, and I need gas. And it looked like this station is working. Did you get gas?"
"Lemme give you a hint," the guy said. "Get a gas can and fill it up. Get two. Take 'em with you. Gas is gonna run out and all you'll have is what you can siphon. Be prepared."
"But that station doesn't have a garage. Where am I gonna find gas cans?"
"Improvise. And don't go to Columbus. Go all the way around. They got the roads blocked anyway."
"What, all the roads? You mean like access roads and stuff?" How could a city block all the ways in? Especially a big city. Columbus was on her route, though, and from there she was going to head to either Cincinnati or Indianapolis, depending on which way looked better. She hoped to get across Indiana and Illinois and as much of Missouri as she could before she had to stop for the night.
"All the ways I could see. Crazy fucking people got that city now. Don't go that way, trust me. I came up from Louisville - don't go into Kentucky if you can help it either. I ran from some crazy shit down there. The empty places? Not so empty any more."
Marya remembered what Spike's cousin had said about Las Vegas - that it was empty of people but not actually empty. "What does that mean?" she asked the guy in the car.
"It means you don't want to go there, unarmed girl like yourself. Saw a bird the size of a couch take down a bear big as my car. Just grabbed it and flew off."
"What was a bear doing on the highway?"
"Didn't say I was on the highway. Just listen to me, ok? Don't go into Kentucky. Go around Columbus, if you're heading that way. Other news, I can't give you. And don't go chasing people down on the road. You'll get someone who's willing to shoot you in the face next time." And with that, he rolled up his window and drove away. Marya had to step back out of fear he'd run her over. She watched him disappear down the road and then went back to the van.
She'd heard Oscar barking while she talked to the guy, but she'd successfully ignored him. And since the guy in the car hadn't said anything, she'd assumed he was ignoring her dog too. Now when she opened the driver's-side door and got in the van, Oscar almost knocked her over in an attempt to lick her face and make sure she was ok. She pushed him off, laughing and oddly touched.
"I'm ok, I'm ok," she told him. "The guy was weird, though. And traveling with a gun? The hell?" That freaked her out a little, not just that he thought he had to turn the gun on her, but that he thought he needed to travel with it in the first place. She hadn't thought Louisville was that dangerous a city. Maybe she was wrong.
But it sounded as if the areas around Louisville were dangerous too. The empty places which weren't empty any more, and apparently populated with really large, really strong, really hungry carnivorous birds.
Ok, that was a little scary. But you'd need a shotgun to fend them off, not just a handgun. And all she had were some kitchen knives and Oscar.
"Let's get gas," she went on, "and then figure out where to go. He said all the ways into Columbus were blocked."
She turned the van back on, turned around, and pulled into the gas station that the white car had come out of. The pumps here worked, so she filled up the van, tried to squeegee the back windows - she couldn't really reach all of the windshield - and then went looking for a gas can or two. It was just a gas station with a little convenience store like all the other ones she'd stopped at. There wasn't a garage attached which might have good containers for gasoline. The guy in the car, or someone before him, had apparently broken a window in the convenience store door in order to get in, so Marya nosed around inside the place for a while.
She took another few packs of Ho-Hos and a couple of warm cans of Red Bull and tried the few doors inside the little store. She guessed that one was for an office, one was the restroom, and the third was maybe a closet or something, maybe another office. She had no idea - all the doors were locked. She was tempted to just let them be and get back on the road, but she remembered that yesterday she'd had to try two gas stations before she found a working pump, and just now she'd had to try four, and who could say whether the next place she stopped would have any gas she could get to at all. Better stock up while she could.
She rummaged around behind the counter and managed to get the cash register open by banging on it hard enough, and there with the twenties was a ring with a couple of keys on it. She wondered if one of those keys was the key to the register, because people were sometimes dumb enough to lock the register key inside the register. She'd worked at a record store in college where the assistant manager sometimes pulled those kinds of stupid stunts. The assistant manager was nice enough, if a little passive-aggressive and not very bright, and Marya always thought the woman still had a job because she was cute and had big tits and was very possibly sleeping with the owner.
One of the keys opened the bathroom and one opened the room that Marya thought might be a closet but which turned out to be more of a small storage room. She didn't feel right looking through the boxes and cases to find more supplies. She only wanted a couple of gas cans to fill to take with her for emergencies. She didn't need a case of Hormel chili or a box of Slim Jims or even another ten packages of Ho-Hos or a twelve-pack of Red Bull. And she sure as hell didn't need a mop and bucket on wheels.
"If I'm gonna go to the trouble of breaking into this place, I want to find something useful," she muttered to herself. "They don't have any - oh, wait, this looks good." In the back, next to a couple of cases of bottles of motor oil, was what looked like a large orange gas can. "Thank you, god," Marya said, grabbing it and hauling it out of the little room. She shut the door, put the keys back into the register drawer, closed the drawer, and zipped out of the convenience store.
Oscar had started barking while she was finding the container, but he stopped when she opened the driver's-side door and waved her hand at him. He licked her hand and probably would have jumped out of the van but she closed the door. She needed to be able to fill this thing in peace, and she didn't want Oscar getting underfoot when there was gasoline around. Either he'd try to drink it or he'd just get it all over himself, and she had no idea how to get the smell of gas off a dog. She knew you used tomato juice to get rid of skunk spray, but gasoline? So better he bark his head off inside the van while she did her thing.
She got the cap off the gas can, filled it up with no problems, screwed the cap back on, and wiped off the top of it with some of the paper towels from the dispenser by the squeegee. She didn't particularly want gas smell in the back of the van either. She opened the back doors, pushed stuff around, and made a place for the thing. There. Now she was better prepared. She just had to figure out a route the long way around Columbus. She doubted she could bypass it altogether at this point, and she didn't want to get off the highway. That guy's story about the inconceivably large bird - and the bear as big as his car - being off the highway made her a little apprehensive. Plus you could speed on the highways, and they had good signage, and she just felt safer. More isolated, but safer. What a trade-off.
She got back in the van, had some water from the bottle wedged next to her seat, and rubbed the top of Oscar's head.
"We got spare gas now," she told him. "Just in case. Now we just gotta go around Columbus. Let's make tracks." And with that she pulled out of the gas station and headed back to the highway.
words: 3066
total words: 38,537
She managed to get a few decent hours of sleep despite the cramped bed equivalent, and when she finally decided to get her ass up for good it was a little past eight. That was a good hour to get started, she figured. Early.
She got out of the van to stretch and pee - this peeing in bushes thing did not really get any easier, and she still expected someone to drive by and honk at her for flashing them - and to let Oscar out to stretch and pee. She didn't really want to walk him down the highway and back, but he wanted to go somewhere, so she locked the van and took him. They weren't gone long - Oscar didn't seem to want to go far once they started going - and when they got back to the van Marya tied his leash to the seatbelt so she wouldn't have to watch him or lock him in while she found cleaner and slightly less smelly clothes to wear. Packing the small travel duffle had also been a brilliant idea.
She scooped some kibble into Oscar's traveling food bowl, poured him some water, and scrounged around in the cooler for something to eat for breakfast. She was actually really tempted by the Ho-Hos she'd taken from the gas station yesterday, and she still had some orange juice left which she should really finish before the frozen corn completely defrosted and there was nothing left to keep the cooler cold. So she drank the rest of the juice and ate a pack of Ho-Hos and dug out a bottle of water to wedge next to the front seat for later. Next she ate some of the cheddar cheese and an apple and considered looking for a knife so she could get out the bread and spread some jam on a couple of slices. She hadn't realized how hungry she was, but now that she'd started eating, she was starving. She rummaged in the paper bag of miscellaneous kitchen stuff until she found a plastic knife, but by then she remembered that there was honey in with the bread too, and she didn't need a knife for that. So she got out two slices of bread and the bottle of honey, squeezed honey all over both slices, and made a sandwich. All she needed now was some milk and some bacon, and it was almost the perfect breakfast.
Sadly she had no bacon and no way of cooking it if she did, and the only milk she had was Parmalat and she wasn't really ready to open it yet. It had to be refrigerated after you opened the carton, didn't it? And she didn't have a fridge any more and wasn't too sure the cooler was going to keep everything already in it cold, much less adequately refrigerate a box of Parmalat. She figured she'd be ok without it for a while. In a perfect world, when she got to California and found her dad, he'd have found a generator and hooked it up to a small fridge or something. Actually, in a really perfect world, the west coast would have power and she wouldn't have to worry about it.
Too bad this wasn't a perfect world.
Marya pushed the apple core inside the empty carton of orange juice, folded the top closed, and put the carton on top of the bag of kitchen stuff. She'd throw it out the next time she stopped for gas or something, the next time she stopped somewhere there was a trash can. She shook out Oscar's food and water bowls before putting them back in the back of the van and then ran him around the van a couple of times for good measure and to make sure he didn't still have to pee or poop. He didn't. She got him back in the van and paused a minute before getting in herself, just to look up and down the highway and wish desperately for someone else to drive by. Nothing happened. She sighed and got in the van and turned the ignition and pulled off the shoulder and onto the road.
Driving today was a lot like driving yesterday, except the landscape of Ohio was a little different from the landscape of Pennsylvania - although not a whole lot - and the rest stops were slightly different and slightly more numerous. Marya still couldn't tell how many people were in the cities and towns off the road, if there were a lot of people or if it looked as if everyone had packed up and gone elsewhere. She wondered how many other folks were doing what she was doing and were on the road to find friends or family who they couldn't reach on the phone.
When she finally pulled off the road for gas, having picked an exit with signs for more than one gas station, she found that the gas stations in Ohio were just as empty and just as creepy as the ones in Pennsylvania. There were three in one direction and one in the other direction when she got off the exit ramp, and just like yesterday, all the pumps at the first station were dead. All the pumps at the second station were dead too, and so were the pumps at station number three.
"Shit," she said. "This sucks." She headed the other way to try gas station number four and almost drove off the road in surprise when a car pulled out of the station in front of her and turned down the street. Marya hit the gas and laid on the horn and didn't even think how threatening she might look bearing down on this little white two-door. In response, the little white two-door stopped in the middle of the road. Clearly everyone had taken their stupid pills this morning.
Marya stopped the van just behind it and jumped out. Oscar started barking but she left him in the passenger seat. She didn't want to scare off the first actual person she'd seen in twenty-four hours, and even though he wasn't huge for a Dalmatian, he was friendly in the way of dogs who didn't realize human beings had boundaries, and it would be just her luck that this person in this unexpected white car was terrified of dogs.
She jogged up to the white car, which had stopped although the driver hadn't gotten out. Whoever was inside it had rolled down the window, though, and when Marya came up alongside it, a head poked out along with the barrel of a handgun.
"Oh shit," Marya squeaked, putting up her hands and taking a couple of fast steps back. "Don't shoot me, I'm unarmed, Jesus."
"What the hell is wrong with you?" demanded the person inside the car. Marya had moved so whoever it was could see her, which meant now she could see them. The driver was a guy, maybe in his early thirties - it was hard to tell from just his face - with short curly brown hair. He was wearing a polo shirt, it looked like, and there were some boxes and a desktop computer in his back seat. Why was he carrying around a desktop? Did he expect to find a place to plug it in?
Well, she'd brought her laptop, hadn't she. Maybe it just had a lot of information on it that he wanted to keep an eye on. Never mind that no one else could get to it, or even use it once they had it....
"Were you trying to run me down?" the guy continued. "What the fuck is your problem?"
"I'm sorry, I just didn't want you to get away. I haven't seen anyone since yesterday."
"Well, you're not seeing anyone now. Are you a ghost?"
"Do I look like a ghost? What do you mean, I'm not seeing anyone now? I'm looking at you, aren't I?" Was this guy crazy? Had he become unhinged? He looked real and solid to her.
"I'm a ghost, shh. Come here." He beckoned with the barrel is his gun. Marya raised an eyebrow.
"Um... you have a gun. I don't. You're not gonna shoot me, are you?"
The guy sighed, sounding exasperated. "If you're a ghost it won't matter. Just come here. I want to touch you and see if you're real."
Marya took a couple of tentative steps forward and held out her hand. The guy took it, shook it, and dropped the gun below Marya's line of sight. She let out a breath.
"I didn't mean to freak you out," she said. "I wanted to talk to you. And none of the gas pumps that way" - she gestured up the road behind her, where the dead pumps were - "work, and I need gas. And it looked like this station is working. Did you get gas?"
"Lemme give you a hint," the guy said. "Get a gas can and fill it up. Get two. Take 'em with you. Gas is gonna run out and all you'll have is what you can siphon. Be prepared."
"But that station doesn't have a garage. Where am I gonna find gas cans?"
"Improvise. And don't go to Columbus. Go all the way around. They got the roads blocked anyway."
"What, all the roads? You mean like access roads and stuff?" How could a city block all the ways in? Especially a big city. Columbus was on her route, though, and from there she was going to head to either Cincinnati or Indianapolis, depending on which way looked better. She hoped to get across Indiana and Illinois and as much of Missouri as she could before she had to stop for the night.
"All the ways I could see. Crazy fucking people got that city now. Don't go that way, trust me. I came up from Louisville - don't go into Kentucky if you can help it either. I ran from some crazy shit down there. The empty places? Not so empty any more."
Marya remembered what Spike's cousin had said about Las Vegas - that it was empty of people but not actually empty. "What does that mean?" she asked the guy in the car.
"It means you don't want to go there, unarmed girl like yourself. Saw a bird the size of a couch take down a bear big as my car. Just grabbed it and flew off."
"What was a bear doing on the highway?"
"Didn't say I was on the highway. Just listen to me, ok? Don't go into Kentucky. Go around Columbus, if you're heading that way. Other news, I can't give you. And don't go chasing people down on the road. You'll get someone who's willing to shoot you in the face next time." And with that, he rolled up his window and drove away. Marya had to step back out of fear he'd run her over. She watched him disappear down the road and then went back to the van.
She'd heard Oscar barking while she talked to the guy, but she'd successfully ignored him. And since the guy in the car hadn't said anything, she'd assumed he was ignoring her dog too. Now when she opened the driver's-side door and got in the van, Oscar almost knocked her over in an attempt to lick her face and make sure she was ok. She pushed him off, laughing and oddly touched.
"I'm ok, I'm ok," she told him. "The guy was weird, though. And traveling with a gun? The hell?" That freaked her out a little, not just that he thought he had to turn the gun on her, but that he thought he needed to travel with it in the first place. She hadn't thought Louisville was that dangerous a city. Maybe she was wrong.
But it sounded as if the areas around Louisville were dangerous too. The empty places which weren't empty any more, and apparently populated with really large, really strong, really hungry carnivorous birds.
Ok, that was a little scary. But you'd need a shotgun to fend them off, not just a handgun. And all she had were some kitchen knives and Oscar.
"Let's get gas," she went on, "and then figure out where to go. He said all the ways into Columbus were blocked."
She turned the van back on, turned around, and pulled into the gas station that the white car had come out of. The pumps here worked, so she filled up the van, tried to squeegee the back windows - she couldn't really reach all of the windshield - and then went looking for a gas can or two. It was just a gas station with a little convenience store like all the other ones she'd stopped at. There wasn't a garage attached which might have good containers for gasoline. The guy in the car, or someone before him, had apparently broken a window in the convenience store door in order to get in, so Marya nosed around inside the place for a while.
She took another few packs of Ho-Hos and a couple of warm cans of Red Bull and tried the few doors inside the little store. She guessed that one was for an office, one was the restroom, and the third was maybe a closet or something, maybe another office. She had no idea - all the doors were locked. She was tempted to just let them be and get back on the road, but she remembered that yesterday she'd had to try two gas stations before she found a working pump, and just now she'd had to try four, and who could say whether the next place she stopped would have any gas she could get to at all. Better stock up while she could.
She rummaged around behind the counter and managed to get the cash register open by banging on it hard enough, and there with the twenties was a ring with a couple of keys on it. She wondered if one of those keys was the key to the register, because people were sometimes dumb enough to lock the register key inside the register. She'd worked at a record store in college where the assistant manager sometimes pulled those kinds of stupid stunts. The assistant manager was nice enough, if a little passive-aggressive and not very bright, and Marya always thought the woman still had a job because she was cute and had big tits and was very possibly sleeping with the owner.
One of the keys opened the bathroom and one opened the room that Marya thought might be a closet but which turned out to be more of a small storage room. She didn't feel right looking through the boxes and cases to find more supplies. She only wanted a couple of gas cans to fill to take with her for emergencies. She didn't need a case of Hormel chili or a box of Slim Jims or even another ten packages of Ho-Hos or a twelve-pack of Red Bull. And she sure as hell didn't need a mop and bucket on wheels.
"If I'm gonna go to the trouble of breaking into this place, I want to find something useful," she muttered to herself. "They don't have any - oh, wait, this looks good." In the back, next to a couple of cases of bottles of motor oil, was what looked like a large orange gas can. "Thank you, god," Marya said, grabbing it and hauling it out of the little room. She shut the door, put the keys back into the register drawer, closed the drawer, and zipped out of the convenience store.
Oscar had started barking while she was finding the container, but he stopped when she opened the driver's-side door and waved her hand at him. He licked her hand and probably would have jumped out of the van but she closed the door. She needed to be able to fill this thing in peace, and she didn't want Oscar getting underfoot when there was gasoline around. Either he'd try to drink it or he'd just get it all over himself, and she had no idea how to get the smell of gas off a dog. She knew you used tomato juice to get rid of skunk spray, but gasoline? So better he bark his head off inside the van while she did her thing.
She got the cap off the gas can, filled it up with no problems, screwed the cap back on, and wiped off the top of it with some of the paper towels from the dispenser by the squeegee. She didn't particularly want gas smell in the back of the van either. She opened the back doors, pushed stuff around, and made a place for the thing. There. Now she was better prepared. She just had to figure out a route the long way around Columbus. She doubted she could bypass it altogether at this point, and she didn't want to get off the highway. That guy's story about the inconceivably large bird - and the bear as big as his car - being off the highway made her a little apprehensive. Plus you could speed on the highways, and they had good signage, and she just felt safer. More isolated, but safer. What a trade-off.
She got back in the van, had some water from the bottle wedged next to her seat, and rubbed the top of Oscar's head.
"We got spare gas now," she told him. "Just in case. Now we just gotta go around Columbus. Let's make tracks." And with that she pulled out of the gas station and headed back to the highway.
words: 3066
total words: 38,537