Night of the Purple Moon (23 page)

But Abby must continue! He had no idea how, but she had to try.

“Please, keep going,” he begged.

“Jordan, I’m not leaving you.”

“Start walking. Someone will pick you up. Get the pills and go back to Portland. You know how to sail now.”

Abby moved behind him and he felt her finger poke between his shoulder blades. White light exploded in his brain. Every nerve ending in his body burst into flames. The tsunami of pain shot from his toes to the tip of his tongue, penetrating bone and eardrum, grinding him to dust. Gradually, the pain lessened, and he huffed to catch his breath.

“Say that one more time,” Abby said, “and I’ll poke you harder. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“What I said about you being kind—I take it back!”

“Jordan, we’re going to Boston if I have to carry you.”

From her tone she was serious. He draped an arm over her shoulder and hobbled beside her. After five feet they both knew they had to try something different.

They settled down in the fast lane, Jordan on his side, Abby sitting cross-legged. It was three thirty in the afternoon, the sky clear, a gorgeous spring day on the mainland. Dogwood blossoms shot up like pink fountains in the stand of oak and maple trees growing in the median strip between the north and south lanes of Route 95.

“Go to the river,” Jordan told her, talking in spurts, afraid she’d poke him again. “Get help, come back.”

Abby lowered her eyes. “How long do you think it would take me to walk there? All night?”

“Someone will drive by soon,” he said optimistically.

“If they do, they won’t stop.” Slumping forward, Abby’s posture signaled defeat.

“Now
you’re
the one feeling sorry for yourself!” he said and waited for a reaction.

Abby slumped lower.

“People are good, right?” he said. “That’s what you believe.”

“Not anymore,” she said grimly.

Two hours passed. Once it looked to Jordan like blood was dripping from Abby’s freckled cheeks. He wondered if he was hallucinating. Should he tell her? He reached out, and thankfully the blood disappeared before his hand brushed her cheek. She remained motionless. Abby, he realized, had given up.

At that moment they heard a car approaching, but it was heading north, on the other side of the median strip. Jordan was too weak to stand, and Abby didn’t even try to signal it.

In the powdery gray of dusk, Jordan pointed out a car about a quarter mile away. No doubt it had sat there for a year, since the night of the purple moon, and held one or more corpses. “Abby, maybe you can start it and we can drive to Boston.”

He thought the odds of her starting the engine were slim. No, the odds were zero. “Never give up,” he whispered through gritted teeth.

“Jordan, the space dust killed adults at night. If they were driving, they had their headlights on. The battery is dead.”

He was exhausted and it killed his parched throat to speak, but he drew on his well of stubbornness and kept arguing. “Some batteries last a long time.”

She shook her head. “Not that long. Anyway, kids probably siphoned the gas from the tank.”

“I bet they skipped over that car.”

“They didn’t,” she said and lay on her side.

The sun set and the temperature dropped. Jordan couldn’t stop shaking. He huddled close to Abby and put his arm around her. Searing pain radiated from his rash, but he suffered in silence, feeling less afraid when he was next to her.

“They have plenty of food,” she said.

“Who has food?”

“They can fish from the rocks. Soon the garden will produce vegetables. If they get over their squeamishness, they can eat the rabbits Emily and Tim are raising.”

Jordan had never seen his sister act like this. She was ready to die. Fighting sleep, he tried to think what to do. The car was their only hope. Slowly, an idea slowly took shape.

He pointed toward the dark shape in the distance. “Abby, if that car has a standard transmission, you can pop the clutch to start it.”

“Ninety-nine percent of cars have automatic transmissions,” she replied in a lifeless tone.

“So there’s a one percent chance it’s a standard!”

“How am I supposed to roll it? I can hardly move you.”

“It might be on a hill.”

“The highway is flat,” she said. “You’re hallucinating again.”

“Maybe I am. But I’m not giving up like you are!”

With blank and tired eyes, she said, “I’m just being realistic.”

“Okay, then do it for Toucan!”

He’d hoped that would stir her, light a fire, encourage her to fight on, but she just looked right through him.

“Emily can raise her,” she said. “Sorry, Jordan, I can’t.”

“Abby, I’m going to start that car.” Preparing to stand, he assumed a crawling position. But his elbows gave out and the ground came up quickly. No, the other way around—his face plowed into pebbles and grit. His head started spinning. Too dizzy to walk and too weak to crawl, he’d move on his belly like a worm. He pushed his arms forward, dug his fingertips into the dirt, and pulled.

“Jordan, what are you doing?”

“Get out of my way, Abby.”

Each torturous effort gained him mere centimeters. He had made it about six inches when she crouched beside him.

“Jordan, tell me how to pop a clutch.”

It took Abby more than two hours to reach the car, now past midnight. She thought of the car as ‘Jordan’s fantasy.’ But her brother had been right about one thing. She had given up. Had he not made an effort to crawl here, she might have closed her eyes for a final time.

Moonlight glinted on the door handle. She opened the door and reached tentatively into the pitch blackness until her fingers came in contact with a wool sweater. She felt the driver’s bony shoulder beneath it. She couldn’t tell if it were a man or woman. She fumbled her hand down the driver’s side and to the leg, continuing until her fingers tangled in a pant cuff. It was a man. Then she found the gas and brake pedals. Sadly, there was no clutch. This car was an automatic. She turned the key in the ignition just in case the battery was still good. As she had expected, the battery was dead.

Abby clambered up and began walking toward the exit ramp, away from Jordan, with one goal: take a step forward. She stepped forward. That goal accomplished, she set her next goal. Take another step.

She was searching for an improbable set of circumstances: A car with a standard transmission on an incline. Oh yeah, and with a full tank of gas, too, or otherwise she wouldn’t get very far.

Deathly ill, she was on a wild goose chase that offered their last and only hope…
step, step, step.

Before she had left Jordan, she made him promise that if a car stopped for him, he was to go with them. Secretly, Abby hoped that Mandy would return. Kenny, Jerry, and Sam had definitely forgotten about her and Jordan. She still carried the hope that Mandy was different.

About an hour later, now off the highway, the sweet perfume of grass pulled her to an overgrown lawn. Standing in grass up to her knees, stars above, a tingly sensation moved from her fingertips to forearms, toes to calves, forearms to shoulders, calves to thighs. Warmth filled her to the core and poured into her extremities. An incredible sense of peace radiated out from her heart. Abby curled up in a nest of tall grass and felt her body melting into the earth.

Abby pounded the ground with her fists and made an ugly, primitive sound deep in her throat. She raked her fingers across her face and pictured Toucan. She fought to get to her knees and finally made it to her feet.

She moved on.
Step. Step. Step. Never give up.

Her swollen tongue crowded her mouth like a sock. Abby desperately needed water. Remembering Kevin’s crazy idea, she entered a house and found the bathroom, but over the winter expanding ice must have cracked the porcelain. She stared at the shattered toilet. It was bone dry.

On the move again, the woods seemed to come alive with the buzz of spring peeper frogs. Perhaps her fever was making her ears ring.

The temperature was dropping fast, and she hoped Jordan had covered himself with the ferns she had picked for him. Abby forced her brother from her mind. An empty mind was best.

Abby passed four more cars, all automatics, before the miracle appeared. As her heart thumped wildly, her fingertips grazed the smooth, sleek shape of the sports car. The windows were up, and opening the driver’s side door was like cracking a coffin lid. She clamped her mouth shut against the immediate gagging. Praying silently, Abby sought out a stick shift.

Yes!
This car had a standard transmission! A clutch!

But one huge, devastating problem remained: gravity. The car was on level ground. Unable to budge the vehicle, Abby moved on.

The sky lightened. Ahead, halfway up a steep hill, Abby spotted a shape she recognized well—a Volkswagen Beetle. Her small steps shrank to tiny shuffles up the never-ending incline. She struggled to keep her eyes open. Dawn revealed so many inviting places to rest.

To stop, she thought, is to die.

The sun was up when she reached the yellow VW Beetle. She peered through the window and sighed in joy at the sight of the stick shift, this time keeping her emotions more in check. Something—no, ten million things—could still go wrong.

Abby opened the door and took a step back to let fresh air inside. The driver wore a blazer with a tag pinned to the lapel. HELLO, MY NAME IS… He had printed WILSON in primary blue magic marker.

“Wilson,” she said, an exhausted smile breaking over her face, “I need to borrow your car.”

Jordan stood in the fast lane, fearing that if he sat down he would never regain his feet again. A car might pass by and the driver wouldn’t see him.

His heart pounded when he heard a car in the distance, and once more he rehearsed what he would say. First he’d inform the driver about the antibiotic distribution. Then he’d ask him or her for a ride, as well as to search for Abby before they drove to Boston. If the driver wouldn’t help look for his sister, he would stay put. Despite the pact he had made with Abby, he could never abandon her.

The car was heading north, the wrong way. He tried to shout, but the only sound he made was a pathetic croak. He watched the flash through the trees. Dejected, Jordan collapsed on the ground.

This time gravity was Abby’s friend—Wilson’s car was on a steep hill. But she had another problem. To pop the clutch, the car needed to be rolling forward. Yet the nose of the Beetle was facing uphill. For her to turn the car around, she would have to spin the wheel hard left, roll back until perpendicular to the hill, and then get out and push the vehicle. If she could inch it forward, gravity would do the rest. If she failed, she would keep Wilson company forever.

She dragged Wilson’s body to the side of the road.

Abby discovered a six-pack of beer on the passenger seat, a special brew of purple beer made to commemorate the comet. She cracked open a can and took a sip, letting it coat her swollen tongue. With morbid humor she realized that this was her first beer ever, and she was about to drive.

Abby took a deep breath and reviewed the steps required to make a reverse three-point turn. “Step on brake,” she said out loud. “Depress clutch with left foot. Release emergency brake.” She couldn’t remember what to do next, as if her fever had fried the brain cells holding this crucial information. “Think Abby!” The words tumbled out. “Shift into neutral. Spin wheel hard to the left. Ease back on the brake.”

It was now or never.

She followed the sequence of steps, and the car swung around. She stomped on the brake. Abby couldn’t recall the last time something had worked so well. She had been smart and lucky to stop where she did, too, a deep drainage ditch was mere inches from the back wheels.

Poised by the open door, ready to push the car and hop in, Abby recalled Jordan’s instructions. Pump the gas once. Turn the ignition key on. Depress the clutch. Shift into second. Wait until the car is rolling fast. Pop the clutch. Then quickly step on the gas and depress the clutch.

With one hand on the wheel, feet planted firmly, Abby pushed for all she was worth.

Jordan was lying on his side when an engine whined in the distance. He might be hearing things again, or the car might again be traveling north. “Never give up,” he told the chirping birds and once more began the exhausting journey to his feet.

He rolled onto his belly, dragged his right knee forward, then his left, and placed both palms flat on the ground. He pushed, raising himself higher, and held this position like a crooked praying mantis. He gazed up the highway. The sound grew louder, but no car appeared heading his way, which probably meant it was across the median strip driving north, or maybe it was just a hallucination.

He clenched his teeth, fighting the urge to give in, to give up, to quit and die. He arched higher, screaming in pain as a sensation of boiling oil gushed down his back. He huffed until his mind was clear. Then he concentrated on his next sequence of moves: left knee forward, plant foot, and stand. With every muscle spent, he realized he had only one attempt to stand left in him. Jordan leaped for the sky. His legs wobbled and millimeter by millimeter he struggled in slow motion to his feet. He teetered, straightened, and finally stood tall, rejoicing in one of the greatest accomplishments of his life.

Despair nearly toppled him as he heard the shifting gears climb the musical scale, but he still saw no car coming his way.

Suddenly, from the other direction, a cheerful-looking yellow Volkswagen pulled up beside him. The car had been driving north in the southbound lanes.

Abby beeped twice.

Heading down Route 95 at fifteen miles per hour to conserve gas, Abby maneuvered through an endless obstacle course of cars, trucks, and pot holes. She hit a small bump and Jordan grunted in the back seat. In the rear-view mirror, she saw that his eyes were closed.

The gas needle pointed at empty. From her experience driving on the island, she knew that when the needle first pointed to empty, a tank usually had two gallons of gas left. If the Beetle got twenty-five miles to the gallon, they could make it to the airport, just barely. Their lives depended on ‘usually’ and ‘if’.