Alive

Chapter 5: Bury County

"So, we have to go to Bury county," Ann said.

She was pretty unemotional about the news that her twin brother was still, possibly, alive and heading there.

"That's about four hours from here driving," I said. She folded the note and pocketed it in the tight space in her skinny jeans. I lifted my brows. "He must have gone through a lot of trouble to write those wherever he could put them," I said.

"It sounds almost too good to be true," Ann said.

My thoughts exactly, and so that explained her reservation.

I nodded.

"Maybe, but it could be a safe point," I said.

She snorted.

"You play too many games," she said.

For a moment everything was silent in the kitchen as we both mulled over our options. Bury wasn't very populated, and it made sense that it could be safer considering this. But...it took a different direction off of the highway. If we were to go down that road, and it turned out to be for the worse, there was a chance that we wouldn't make it through the longer route through the city.

Then there was the possibility that Doug was still alive.

"We have to go don't we?" I said.

She nodded, almost hesitantly.

"If this is a trap, we're the biggest idiots ever," she said.

"It did look like his handwriting," I said.

She gave me a brief sidelong stare.

A lot of things weren't how they appeared lately.

"Okay, tomorrow morning," she said decidedly.

We hung out on the couch, watching the news fuzz in and out on a very low volume, and eating a bag of marshmallows from the kitchen's pantry. They hadn't been opened yet. I thought about how all of our holiday plans were more than likely ruined. That was such a trivial thing to get caught on at the moment, or if ever again. The uncertainty for the future still hadn't sunk in, and I began to wonder when it would.

I looked over my shoulder every now and then, but after a while, I got up finally to close the blinds in the entrance room. I hated the thought that someone was spying on us from the window.

"This all feels like, when am I going to wake up, you know?" a lady on TV said.

We had heard this three times now. The station had been playing on a loop for who-knows-how-long. I settled back down onto the couch and nudged Ann.

"Do you think they're still recording?" I whispered.

She pursed her lips, looking at the TV, as the reporter threw his hoodie over his head against that windy day for the third time. Ann switched the channel where a paid advertisement played for cookware.

"I think we've seen all we're going to," she said.

"I think that's all we need for now," I amended.

Neither of us really slept that night, despite having run ourselves into exhaustion. I mindlessly watched the salesperson scrape a pan with a spatula uselessly, the crust stuck onto the pan between a gray filter and backdrop. The next scene was bright and happy, an orange countertop in the background as the new pan gave up every bit of what had been stuck onto the last pan with one magic flip.

Eventually, I dozed a little while, Doug's letter in the back of my mind. What would be the outcome of our journey? If we found the county to be unsafe, whether because it had since been taken over or Doug was flat out wrong what would be the outcome of that? Ann was the coder, but I was the one who thought in numbers. We were either going to have to circle back fifty miles or keep going thirty through the potential danger at that point.