DRY - by Neal Shusterman

 

Fights like the one my parents had at dinner have been a regular occurrence at my house for as long as I can remember. It’s one of the reasons why Brady left after he graduated from high school. Plus the fact that he got into Stanford and refused to go. That alone set him up as an Enemy of the People in our father’s eyes. For the few months before his graduation, Dad would not leave him alone about it. Do you realize the opportunity you’re getting? my father would say. You’re throwing your life away for some girl! Because that’s why Brady said he wasn’t going. His girlfriend was going to Saddleback – our local community college – and he wanted to be where she was.

That wasn’t the real reason, though. I know Brady better than my parents do. The real reason he didn’t go to Stanford was because he was scared. I’m not exactly sure what he was scared of. Being on his own? Not measuring up? Living with strangers? Maybe a combination of all those things. Anyway, he moved out, got a job at GameStop, and now he only comes home for holidays. He stopped coming with his girlfriend, which means either she can’t stand our family, or he broke up with her. Brady hasn’t said either way.

My dad might not see eye to eye with him, but I know how much he still loves him – because even though we’re constantly rekeying our doors, Dad always leaves a key hidden in the yard for Brady, just in case he comes home. He’s the one person in the universe allowed to bypass all of our security.

The day of the Tap-Out, I texted Brady and called him, just as my parents had, leaving a message that he needs to come with us to the bug-out, but like I said, he’s not the most responsive person. Our primary form of communication now is online RPG games. He’s a knight, a mercenary, or an assassin, depending on the game. I’m always his sidekick. I’ve been getting online, hoping to catch him playing, but so far nothing.

Today’s parental dispute has left Mom sitting on the couch, blank-faced, hopped up on Xanax and watching the news while defiantly downing a full gallon of water. My dad has retreated into the garage again, welding and sawing with full-tilt intensity, so I take it that they haven’t quite made up yet.

“You okay?” I ask Mom.

“I’m fine, Kelton,” she says. “Just tired.” And I know her definition of “tired” can fill volumes.

I’m guessing that my father is working on one of the booby traps we planned out a couple of Saturdays back – which I’m sure will turn out awesome. My dad always makes the best weapons when he’s angry. Nevertheless, this is my cue to get out of the house. I decide to go check in on Alyssa.

I find Alyssa and Garrett on their back patio. It’s toward the end of twilight now, and they’re wrestling with a black plastic trash bag, a bucket, and their barbecue. Seems as if they’re working on a condensation trap to purify some water, and though I’m thoroughly impressed that they even know what a condensation trap is, they’re going about it all wrong.

“Hey,” I say coolly.

“Hey,” Alyssa responds from behind the trash bag.

“Don’t you think it would be best to do that during the day, seeing as the sun is nearly down? Evaporation and all…”

Alyssa throws the bag in frustration, “We started this during the day,” she snaps. “Day or night, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not working.”

She leans up against the wall of their house and goes to take a sip from a water bottle that’s down to the dregs.

“Save what you’ve got and have some of mine.” I extend my canteen graciously. Alyssa takes it without hesitation and drinks.

“How much are you gonna charge for that sip?” she asks. “Ten bucks? Twenty?”

I just smile. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a thirty-five gallon tank, remember?”

She hands my canteen back to me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m just on edge. Our parents went down to the beach and they’re not back yet.”

“It’s been six and a half hours,” adds Garrett, taking his cue to worry from Alyssa.

I realize it’s my job to be the optimist here – which isn’t a role I’m used to, but in difficult times, you gotta be flexible.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” I tell her. “The lines must be massive, and getting back might take a lot longer than going.”

“They’re not answering their cell phones,” Garrett says.

“I told you, their phones are probably dead,” she tells her brother. “Mom’s phone never holds a charge long, and you know how Dad’s always forgetting to charge his.”

“Also,” I suggest, “it could be a system overload. Cellular frequencies get jammed in densely populated situations.”

“Like at a concert!” Alyssa says, unable to hold back a wave of relief.

“Exactly.”

“Then right now we’ll just have to sit tight and hope for the best,” Alyssa affirms for herself. I’m glad I can at least inspire the idea of hope.

Their dog, Kingston, who’s looking sluggish, comes up to Alyssa and nudges her with his nose. His nose is way drier than a dog’s ought to be. I pour some water out on the patio for him to lap up, which he does.

“Hey – I’ve been thinking about it, and I figured out a new way for you to get water.” I say it mysteriously, like a magician presenting his next act.

“How?” Garrett asks.

“I’ll show you!” Then I usher them into their house and stop in the kitchen. “The freezer. Have you scraped the ice from the walls?”

“Tried that the first day,” Alyssa responds, folding her arms. “It’s a frost-free refrigerator. No ice.”

I open the freezer slightly. “It’s only frost-free if you leave it closed. If you leave it ajar, water will eventually condense and freeze against the walls. Then you can scrape it off and melt it.”

“Hey, that’s pretty smart,” Garrett says earnestly.

I lean nonchalantly up against the refrigerator, accidentally closing the freezer all the way again. “I am ranked second in our junior class.”

“Not first?” Garrett teases.

It’s Alyssa who smiles at that. “Don’t tell me,” she says. “Zeik Srinivasar-Smith.”

I sigh at the mention of my nemesis. “Zeik Srinivasar-Smith.” An exchange student from God-knows-where who’s probably a genetic mutation.

It seems as if we might be on the verge of bonding, because she seems ready to tell her own Zeik story – because everyone in school has one Zeik story or another – but her attention is grabbed by something on the living room TV. A news report. There’s footage of raging brushfires, and riot police in downtown Los Angeles. And the news anchor – only one instead of the usual two – says, “As a precaution, residents are instructed to stay in their homes, and remain calm.” But in direct opposition to the anchorman’s attempt to soothe viewers, the crawl below reads, Southland declared official FEMA disaster zone.

Then the TV suddenly goes off. It’s Garrett – he’s turned it off. He keeps the remote out of reach, just in case his sister or I want to turn the TV back on. “I don’t want to watch that – they’re just trying to freak us out!”

“They’re saying we should stay calm,” Alyssa points out.

“Yeah, that’s what they said to people on the Titanic when they already knew it was going down.”

And he’s right. As far as authority is concerned, calm people quietly dying is a lot easier to deal with than angry people fighting for their lives.

We all stand there in uneasy silence until Alyssa gets down on a knee to Garrett. “It’s going to be okay,” she says, not as sure about it as she’s trying to sound. “It’s too dark to do anything now. If Mom and Dad aren’t back by sunrise, I’ll go find them.”

And after hearing those words, seeing the look on her face, something suddenly takes me over – this strange, innate force. Kind of like the feeling I had when I shot Mr. Malecki in the chest to save him – a sense of knowing what to do, and doing it, regardless of the consequences. “We’ll go together,” I tell her. “And I’ll stay here tonight, so you don’t have to worry about this alone.”

Alyssa shakes her head, smirking. “Uh … thanks, but no. I’m sure you need this for some sort of merit badge, but I’m not a damsel in distress.”

I find myself getting angry. Is that what she thinks this is about? Last week, maybe. But today, it’s the furthest thing from my mind.

“Look,” I tell her in complete honesty, “I know I’m not your first choice for a friend, but remember, there’s safety in numbers. There are a lot of thirsty people out there, and things can get sketchy pretty quick. If I stay, we can take turns keeping watch, and you can get some sleep.”

“Do you really think we’re going to sleep tonight?”

“You had better,” I tell her, “if you plan to go after your parents tomorrow.”

She considers that, and is clearly waffling – irritated by the fact that she knows I’m right.

… And just then the lights begin flickering.

We all kind of brace – like you do when you think you might be feeling an earthquake. Then the lights go out.

“Oh crap!” says Garrett. “Oh crap oh crap oh crap!”

“It’s okay,” Alyssa says. “This happened the other day. They’ll come back on. You’ll see.”

But they don’t – and the silence now is true silence. The hum of the refrigerator, the breath of the air-conditioner, all gone. And the finality of that silence is so eerie, it’s terrifying. I feel a tight grip on my arm. It’s Garrett. He was closer to me than he was to Alyssa. I’m the closest port in his storm.

Now we begin to hear voices. Neighbors wondering what the hell is going on, and what the hell they should do.

What had seemed to be very surreal now has become vividly, luridly real.

Our eyes begin to adjust to the dim afterglow of twilight lingering in the western windows.

I know what I have to do.

“I need to go…”

But before I can finish, Garrett cuts me off. “No! You said you’d stay!”

And although she doesn’t say anything, I know Alyssa is just as freaked by the blackout as Garrett is. As I am.

“I need to go,” I say again, “but only for a minute. I need to check on my parents, but I’ll be right back.” And then I take a step closer to Alyssa. I can’t quite see her face in the dim room, which is better for what I’m about to say. “I know you can take care of yourself. I know you don’t need me here. But even so, it’ll make the night a little bit easier.”

“Okay,” says Alyssa. “I just want to make sure … I mean, I don’t want you to think…”

I know where she’s going with this, and I save her the trouble. “Alyssa, just because I’m offering to stay overnight in your house, don’t get any ideas about me getting ideas.”

She sighs, relieved. “Thank you, Kelton,” she says, then adds, “If it means anything, you’ve been officially lifted from ‘creepy dude next door’ status.”

“You thought I was creepy?”

Alyssa shrugs. “Kinda.”

I consider that. “Yeah,” I say, “I kind of am.” Then I leave, reminding them to lock the door behind me.

My house is a beacon of light in the darkness. Off-grid, totally self-sustainable. Inside, my mom’s asleep on the couch, and my dad is still welding away in the garage. They have no clue that the power’s down in the rest of the neighborhood. I don’t engage them, because there’s nothing to say. I leave a note in my room that I’m spending the night at Alyssa’s to help her out until her parents come home. My mother will like it, because it’s something social that doesn’t involve video games and guys who believe deodorant is optional. My father won’t like it, but he also won’t embarrass both of us by coming to retrieve me. I’ll get an earful in the morning, but I’ll deal with it then.

I place the note on my comforter, then kneel down, reach an arm under my bed, and fish around until I find what I’m looking for. I slide out a black metal case and crack it open, revealing, in all its glory, my silver forty-five caliber Ruger LCP pistol. I pull it out and load the magazine, trying not to be overwhelmed by its beauty and its power – the way its sleek silver barrel reflects light, contrasted by a black matte grip so dominant, it absorbs any and all light that hits it. It’s perfect in its dualistic nature. Light and dark. Today, I feel like I’m something in between the two. And that’s okay. It’s what I need to be right now, if I’m going to be the first line of defense for Alyssa and Garrett. I tuck the handgun into my belt, and hurry down the stairs and out the front door to head back to Alyssa’s … but what I see as I come out our front door causes almost every joint to lock up —

Although every other house is now blackened by nightfall, I swear I can make out figures in the street, faintly illuminated by a low-hanging moon. Most everyone in the neighborhood has stepped out of their home to marvel at our light – like moths entranced by the lick of a hot campfire flame. By having our own electricity supply, my family has made itself the unexpected envy of the neighborhood. And a target. So I stand, body trapped in the doorway, stuck between the threshold of what my life once was and what it will soon be, staring into the dark, a hundred eyes glowing back in the night.

And I’m scared to the bone, because right now I can’t tell if I’m looking into the eyes of sheep, or wolves.

 

 

DAY FOUR

TUESDAY, JUNE 7TH

8) Alyssa

The next morning I wake up to an obnoxious digitized symphony – the alarm on my phone, which, miraculously, held its charge overnight. It’s 5:45 a.m. Sunrise. At first I couldn’t sleep at all – every sound was my parents coming home, or someone breaking in. But neither of those things happened. Twice I went downstairs to find Kelton doing the Boy Scout thing – reading a book by flashlight, while keeping watch for the nonexistent bad guys he was so sure would be crashing through our windows to suck the moisture out of our veins. It all seems so silly now in the light of day.

Except for the fact that my parents still aren’t home. No amount of happy sunshine is going to change that.

Garrett, who had insisted he was okay sleeping in his room, had, at some point, surrendered all macho pretense and crawled in with me. Now he sleeps and is in that blissful place where his only care in the world is what to feed Spider-Man and the various Pokémon who just came over for dinner – or whatever it is that ten-year-olds dream about. I don’t wake him as I slip out of bed and head downstairs.

I half hope that my parents came in while I was asleep and didn’t want to wake us, but no such luck. In the living room is Kelton, snoring away on the sofa. So much for keeping watch. He was supposed to get me a few hours ago to relieve him, but he tried to soldier through the night on his own.

That’s when I see the gun. It’s resting on the end table beside him, like it’s part of the décor: lamp, family picture, pistol. He must have hidden it from me when he came back from his house, knowing I wouldn’t approve – and I don’t. It makes me consider demoting him back to “creepy dude,” but worse, because now it’s “creepy dude with a gun.”

I pick it up and right away find that it’s much heavier than I had anticipated – and then I get a little freaked out realizing that I’ve never actually held a gun before. This thing ends lives. I put the pistol down, but slide it out of Kelton’s immediate reach, and shake him awake.

The moment he’s conscious, he bolts up.

“What? What happened? Is everything okay? Did I fall asleep?”

“It is, and you did,” I tell him. “And now you’re going to take the bullets out of that goddamn gun.”

He looks at me, then looks away.

“It has no bullets,” he says. “The magazine is in my pocket – I’m not an idiot.”

“The jury’s still out on that one,” I tell him, then hold out my hand. “Give.”

Reluctantly, he hands me the magazine of bullets – and although I don’t want it in my pocket, I’d rather it be there than in his. Then I look at the gun again, furious that it’s even here.

“I marched against these!” I inform him. “How could you bring one into my house?”

“You marched against assault weapons,” he says, far calmer about this than I am. “I can respect that. But this is not that. This is a defensive weapon. We may need it to protect ourselves.”

He doesn’t reach for it and override my objections with bravado. Instead he waits for me to give him permission. The fact that he’s deferring to me makes me feel better about it. But only a little. I reach out and push the pistol a few inches in his direction.

“You want to keep this for show, fine. But you’re not shooting anybody today.”

“Understood. But a gun is worthless if you’re not prepared to use it,” he says – probably something his father drilled into his head.

I look out the window. The street’s empty, but it’s not even six a.m. I’m not expecting anyone to be out there. All I can think about now is my parents, and all of the worst-case scenarios that probably didn’t happen but still haunt me all the same. I try their phones again. Mom’s goes straight to voicemail, but Dad’s rings a few times first, which lets me know that at least it’s on.

Kelton makes a quick trip home to get tire sealant so we can take all three bikes, and when he returns, he’s suited up in what looks like a duck hunting outfit, fully loaded with survival rope, and a million pockets. I don’t have the energy to make fun of him now, and I’ve come to trust that there’s a reason for everything he does. We actually might need the rope, and whatever other stuff he has hidden away in those pockets.

Truth is, we need him – plus when it comes to water, he’s the person to know; without him, I’m not sure we’d have the rations to safely make the journey down to Laguna Beach and back.

I had packed a backpack last night for the road. Beef jerky. The rest of our water, a kitchen knife, although I’m sure Kelton has something much nastier than that hidden in his outfit. I don’t ask. Anyway, I might as well have my own way to protect myself, so I don’t feel I have to rely on Kelton’s Krav Maga, or whatever other lethal martial art he knows. I pet Kingston, and give him a ration of water that I know is not enough but is all I can spare. Then, just before heading out of the house, I flip on a light switch to check the power again. No luck. I wonder how many other neighborhoods are without electricity right now.

With the bikes now fully operational, we wheel them outside, manually pull down the garage door, and take to the streets. Looking around my neighborhood, I half expect it to be in ruins, but everything appears just as it always was, and I realize the wreckage is more internal.

We push forward down our street, keeping the dawn to our backs.

“There’s a path that runs down Aliso Creek Canyon that goes all the way to the beach,” I tell Kelton. “Although I’ve never taken it all the way down, so I don’t know how smooth it is.”

“Bad idea,” Kelton says. “It’s all wilderness, and we’ll be isolated. Targets for anyone who might jump us for our water.”

I want to tell him that he’s being paranoid, but I know he might be right, and it pisses me off.

“The more we keep to civilization, the more likely that people will be civilized,” he says. Then adds, “At least for now.”

I turn to Garrett as we leave our neighborhood and take to the bike lane of a major avenue. “How are you doing?” I ask him.

“Better than you,” he brags. “I ride my bike all the time, and you don’t, so try to keep up.” The fact that he’s being a brat answers my question – he’s in good spirits.

It isn’t long before we come to an overpass for the 5 freeway. As I look down, I can see a typical snarl of cars, but somehow this is different. This is bumper-to-bumper traffic like I’ve never seen before. Morning rush hour is usually all about heading north toward LA – but today the traffic is at a horn-blaring standstill in both directions, as far as the eye can see – which eventually disappears into a thick crimson haze, swallowed whole by the sun cresting over Saddleback Mountain.

Not our problem, I say to myself, a little creeped out. I try to focus straight ahead as we pedal across the overpass, but I can’t pull myself away from the reality all around me.

“Where is everyone going?” Garrett asks.

“Anywhere but here,” Kelton answers.

“Yeah,” says Garrett. “Well, it looks like they’re not gonna get there.”

I don’t think he realizes how deeply that truth resonates – and on every level. But Kelton does.

“When it’s time to bail, there are nontraditional routes that most people don’t know. They won’t be gridlocked like the freeways.”

The fact that he said “when” rather than “if” stays with me far longer than I want it to.

About five minutes later, Garrett pulls his favorite and most frustrating travel maneuver. “I gotta go to the bathroom,” he says. I tell him to pee in the bushes somewhere, but of course, it’s not that kind of bathroom he’s talking about. I imagine, considering the horrific state of our toilet, even with Kelton’s waterless fix, Garrett has been holding it in rather than dealing with it. But there comes a point at which nature takes over. And always at the worst time.

There’s a familiar gas station with a convenience store up ahead. And although I’m sure its bathroom will be even worse than ours, I don’t tell Garrett that. We pedal toward it.

The three of us roll up to the store and step inside, taking in our surroundings. Like the rest of the world, the store is a slight aberration of normal. Bleak and dusty, the air is so thick it coats your throat. The AC’s off, which we already knew, since we hadn’t hit a single functioning streetlight between home and here. Refrigerators that usually contain soda, energy drinks, and water are empty, as expected. But what I don’t expect is how barren this place is, devoid of not just products, but even the hope of them. Only one in ten items still remain on the shelves – one type of chips, one brand of gum. It reminds me of pictures I once saw in class of a destitute market in a war-torn country, where your only options were between canned beans or bread, and if you hesitated, you didn’t get either. All the while, the grimness is mocked by fifties doo-wop music that echoes from an old battery-operated radio somewhere.

At the far end of the store, the clerk sits behind the register. Someone I don’t know. The thing is, I know this store. Mom and I would always stop here on the way home from soccer practice to get a Powerade and corn nuts. Kind of a little ritual of ours. I thought I knew all the clerks who worked here – but not this one. He looks like the guy your parents warned you about. The one with a white windowless van rolling slowly past the park. He looks like Santa Claus after two tours in Vietnam. His shifty eyes are fixed on us, with one hand hidden below the counter.

Garrett heads toward the bathroom, and the clerk shouts, “Gotta buy something to use the crapper.” And so, as Garrett closes the bathroom door behind him, Kelton and I move down an aisle to get something, and to get out of the guy’s line of sight.

I settle on a bag of peanuts. As I approach the checkout, I get a closer look at the clerk – he looks worn, the skin around his eyes thick and heavy.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” I say, as he tallies up my items.

He studies me coolly. “I’m new.”

“How long have the cars been like that on the freeway?” I ask, changing the subject.

He scratches his neck. “Middle of the night, I imagine. Brought a lot of customers here. Some were cool, others thought they could just take whatever they wanted.”

“Why didn’t you just call the cops?” I ask.

The man chuckles, but it comes out as a hiss. “Haven’t you heard? You can’t get through. 9-1-1 lines have been jammed since yesterday.” He grins, like it’s funny. “That’ll be forty dollars,” he says.

At first I think he’s joking. But then I realize that, no, he’s dead serious.

“Free-market economy,” he says. “Supply and demand. And right now there’s a whole lot more demand than supply.” He leans closer. “So like I said, that’ll be forty dollars.”

Kelton comes up beside me with a Clif Bar, having not heard any of my exchange with the clerk. That’s when I notice the cash register. It’s been smashed open. And I realize this guy isn’t wearing the ugly blue and yellow shirt that the clerks here always wear. The more I try to comprehend what happened here, the more I don’t want to know.

Garrett comes out of the bathroom, and I grab the Clif Bar from Kelton’s hand, throw it down on the counter, and before he has a chance to object, I grab Garrett’s hand, knowing that it will startle him into submission, and I hurry all three of us out.

“Gotta pay for the goddamn bathroom!” the man inside yells, but we are already gone.

I hop on my bike and we race off, but I keep in the lead, setting the pace, and the pace is fast. A few blocks away I slow down enough for Garrett and Kelton to catch up with me. I stop and look back, to make sure that the guy from the convenience store isn’t chasing us.

“What was that all about?” Kelton asks.

I don’t tell him. Not because I don’t want to, but because the particulars don’t matter anymore. “That gun of yours – it’s in your backpack, right?”

“Yeah…”

“And you know how to use it?”

“Hell, yeah.”

I reach into a side pocket of my own backpack and pull out the compact cartridge of bullets. The magazine, Kelton had called it. I look at it. Think hard about it. It represents everything that I hate about the world. But this isn’t the same world it was yesterday. Finally I hand him the magazine, then I start pedaling again, because I don’t want to see him snapping it into the pistol.

 

 

SNAPSHOT: INTERSTATE, NORTHBOUND 6:30 A.M.

When Charity first learned to drive back in the sixties, she was taught to leave one car length between you and the car ahead of you for every ten miles per hour you’re traveling. That way, you’ll give yourself ample time to brake.

But when no one’s going anywhere, your bumpers all might as well be touching.

Gridlock.

Or maybe something worse, if that’s even possible.

At first it’s the typical rush hour stop and go, but on this particular Tuesday things start to feel different right away. There’s a thickness in the air that reads like claustrophobia; it’s evident in the positioning of the cars, more tightly squeezed than ordinary traffic, and soon there’s even a sixth lane that was once a shoulder that cars have started funneling into. And stopping.

Charity left her apartment just before five a.m., hoping to beat traffic on the way to Henderson, Nevada – where she planned to spend the worst of this crisis with her daughter and grandchildren – but it looks like she wasn’t the only one with plans to get away.

She looks to the other side of the highway, noticing that drivers going in the opposite direction seem to be in the same predicament, perhaps even worse, since there are a few cars stuck facing in the wrong way – something she’s never seen before. Clearly the traffic got so bad, people turned around on the road and tried to go the other way, hoping that backtracking would actually cut their losses. Then again, this is probably the kind of elliptical logic that jammed up the highway in the first place.

Charity takes in her surroundings. An impatient man on a Harley trying to work his way between traffic, like threading a needle. A family in a minivan. A cable repair truck. She passes the time by thinking about who these people might be and what their stories are. Where they’re coming from and where they’re going. Sure, the water crisis is bad, but not every one of these people could possibly believe it’s so bad that they’d need to leave for greener pastures.

Charity looks to an old black and white image of her and her late husband wedged into the dashboard. If he were still alive, she thinks to herself, he’d probably be kicking and screaming by now. For decades the two of them owned a pawn shop, where Charity would handle the customers – she was always the cool-tempered one. Her parents had named her Charity, one of the seven virtues, and she had always tried to live up to that name, giving her full heart to whoever she encountered – rare in the pawn business, but it was what it was. She added a ray of light in miserable circumstances. However, now, staring into the endless snarl of automobiles, she’s starting to wish they had named her Patience.

Another half hour and still no movement. Not an inch. People start to get restless, standing on the roof like packs of meerkats, all trying to get a better view of the highway ahead. A man and his young son walk down the row past Charity. She rolls down her window.

“Getting out for a stretch?” she asks.

The father smiles weakly. “Gonna check things out up ahead – see if anyone knows what the hold-up is.” The fact that people are doing something active to help the situation makes her feel a little bit better. And things could be worse. In between lanes, kids now play tag, weaving in and out of the landlocked cars, while their parents play cards on the hoods. It makes her think of her own daughter. How she always worries when Charity makes the long drive to Nevada. At this rate, she might not get there till dark.

Another forty-five minutes. The sun beams down now – any impatient honking has stopped. Most of the cars’ engines are off. There are people in cars around her who seem to have given up hope altogether, but are hanging tough in their vehicles. Some even huddle together by the side of the road, or lie down in the shade between cars, as if going to sleep and then waking would magically make this situation disappear. Charity taps her hand on the dash, anxiety growing. The man and his son never returned to their car. It will have to be towed and will add that much more pain to the process. Charity locks her doors and leans back, resting her eyes for a brief moment…

Thirty minutes later her eyes snap open as she’s awakened by the sound of screams ricocheting between cars, originating from God knows where – and then someone sprints past her window. And then someone else, and before she knows it, the scene is total chaos. Everyone abandons their cars and runs south, the complete opposite direction of traffic. What would compel every one of them to run in the opposite direction of where they were headed?

Charity steps out of her car to get a better view, walking north, against the stampede … and finally sees what everyone is running from.

A fire.

Black smoke billows and swirls in the morning sky, and below it, maybe fifty yards ahead, is a single car that has caught on fire. It’s a valid reason to flee, because if that car explodes, and if the explosion is large enough, it could set off a chain reaction of exploding cars up and down the freeway. But if Charity has learned anything in all her years, it’s to keep a calm head – especially in the face of utter chaos. She is a child of the sixties; following the pack blindly has never been her ethos. Instead, Charity decides to ask herself the contrarian questions of the world, because unique questions will always yield unique answers.

She marches forward, against the current, even as the mob grows, cascading in an avalanche of panic that picks up everyone else in its path – including those who don’t even know why they’re running. Charity moves toward the fire, the hysteria heightening. People are trampled. Bruised. Bloodied.

But where everyone else sees disaster, Charity finds opportunity. Back when she and her husband had the pawn shop, Charity learned a thing or two about junk. It was always about looking closer. Finding the treasure in the trash. Identifying the true diamonds that were worth more than the fake gold ring that held them.

She searches the dozens of cars for anything that could help her put the fire out. What kind of car would have a fire extinguisher? she thinks to herself. She goes to the TV cable truck and opens up the back double doors – but with no luck. Just boxes of wires and junk. And then the situation escalates even further with the sound of a blast. The car that’s on fire up ahead has exploded, blowing off the hood and setting fire to a couch in the bed of a nearby pickup truck. This is rapidly going from bad to worse.

Charity scans the rows of cars one final time and sees an electrician’s van, with the electrician long gone. She quickly pops the back doors open – and bingo! A fire extinguisher, right there strapped to the door. So Charity marches toward the blaze, extinguisher in hand, a fire in her eyes hotter than any earthly inferno.