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“Not really,” I admitted. “When I came here with my friends, we were more interested in partying than hiking. And of course you can’t Yelp something after the apocalypse.”
His mouth seemed to twitch, but when he turned slightly to look at me, his expression was grim enough. “Is that what you think this is? The apocalypse?”
“Well, close enough as makes no difference.” We’d slowed to maybe twenty miles an hour at the most, partly because Jace was weaving in and out of the abandoned cars on the streets, but also because I had a feeling he didn’t have any idea where he was supposed to go. “I mean, most of the world is dead, and the life we had back then is gone. No, I suppose there weren’t any four horsemen and blood-red moons and flaming swords and all that, but….”
He didn’t reply, but I could almost feel him turning over the idea in his head. My knowledge of Native American mythology was scanty at best, and so I didn’t know if his people had their own vision of the end of the world. The terminology I’d used was purely Revelations sort of stuff, but that was my only frame of reference. At least, those were the kinds of things you’d always hear quoted in movies dealing with the end times.
“I have an idea,” he said, in a very different tone. “Let’s stop and go into that hotel. They had to have phone books and local directories at the concierge desk, right?”
He had a point. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used a phone book, since I either used Yelp or Google Maps to find things with my cell phone, but maybe not everyone was as firmly rooted in the digital age as I had been before the world collapsed. Checking at the hotel sounded like a good idea.
So he pulled up onto the sidewalk in front of the La Fonda Hotel, in a spot where once bellhops had probably assisted people with their luggage but was now free of cars. And actually, as I got out of the Jeep and looked around quickly, it somehow seemed as if the street wasn’t quite as choked with vehicles as I remembered it.
“What’s the matter?” Jace asked, seeming to notice the way I was scanning the street. “Do you see something?” His hand went to his belt, and for the first time I realized he was wearing his long knife in its sheath. I hadn’t even thought to bring one of the guns with me. Maybe Jace made me feel a little too safe. I was getting sloppy.
“No,” I replied, quickly so he wouldn’t get too nervous. “That is…I could have sworn there were more cars here the last time I drove through. It’s as if some of them are just…gone.”
His eyebrows went up, and I could see him look past me to the street the hotel faced. What good that would do, I wasn’t sure, because I didn’t think he’d even come this way when he passed through town. There were obvious gaps in the lines of cars parked at the sidewalk, but that didn’t have to mean anything, except that no one had been parked there in the first place.
“You’re sure?” he asked, and now I thought I detected a note of patience in his voice, as if he was trying to humor me.
“No, I’m not sure, because I wasn’t memorizing everything I saw when I drove through here. It just feels…off.”
“Well, all the more reason for us to see if we can find a phone book and a map, and then get out of here.”
I decided I couldn’t argue with that logic, and followed him into the lobby of the hotel.
* * *
Luckily for us, the concierge’s desk did have an area phone book, as well as a detailed map of downtown and a larger one for the greater Santa Fe area. I took a quick glance around, remembering how Tori and Elena and I had gone up to the rooftop bar for drinks. Back then the place had been packed. Now the tiled floors echoed under our footsteps, and I had to work hard not to look at the flurries of gray ash that stray drafts must have blown against the floorboards and into the corners.
It felt good to be out in the sun again, despite the brisk wind, although we got into the Jeep quickly enough. I paged through the phone book and discovered that there was an REI probably less than five minutes from our current location. Jace seemed cheered by that, and we headed there in silence, although I kept looking at the streets as they passed by, trying to determine if they felt less impacted by abandoned vehicles than I’d previously thought. It was hard to say for sure, as I’d never gone down this particular road. It did seem less crowded than it should be, although I was basing that observation on pure gut feeling and not much more.
The store was located almost on the railroad tracks, just off Market Street. While there were a few vehicles parked nearby, the place still felt far more deserted than some of the other shops I’d visited. Again, people probably weren’t thinking of outdoor supplies as they were succumbing one by one to the Heat.
Jace and I got out of the Jeep and headed to the store entrance. The glass wasn’t smashed, but the doors seemed to have gotten stuck halfway open. Convenient, since we wouldn’t have to worry about breaking in.
When we entered the store, though, I still got the feeling that it had been carefully ransacked, although it wasn’t a mess. No, it was more that the stock seemed far leaner than it should have been. The glass case with the GPS devices had been emptied of its contents, and it looked as if a bunch of the mountain bikes were gone, too.
But at least the low-dollar stuff like the thermal underwear and the gloves hadn’t been totally depleted. I got a shopping cart and started adding anything in my size, while Jace went to the men’s section and basically did the same thing. He dumped in all his items, then went back for a thigh-length down-filled jacket. Before he put it in the cart, he looked at the price tag and shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
“That coat cost more than I paid for my motorcycle.”
Ouch. Well, retail prices were definitely a thing of the past, so it wasn’t as if we had to worry about whether we could afford any of this stuff. “Yes,” I said, “but a motorcycle won’t keep you warm at night.”
A corner of his mouth quirked, even as a warm gleam came and went in his eyes. “Oh, I’ve got something way better than a jacket for keeping me warm at night.”
I could feel heat as well, running through my core, but I knew we needed to stay focused on the task at hand. “Anything else?”
“That about does it for me. I like my boots, so I’m not going to bother replacing them. You?”
“Same.” Maybe there were some fancy outdoor shoes that would have suited me better, but my hiking boots were sturdy and comfortable. They’d cost me a good chunk back in the day as well, come to think of it. Money well spent, as far as I was concerned, considering everything they’d gotten me through during the past few weeks.
So we pushed our haul out to the Cherokee and stowed everything in the back. “Who do you think took that other stuff?” I asked Jace, just as he was closing the hatch to the cargo area.
He shrugged. “Other survivors, I suppose.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that we still haven’t seen anyone?” Something felt strange. I couldn’t put my finger on it, since I really didn’t have any frame of reference for what things were supposed to feel like after the apocalypse. Still, you’d think that any survivors in Santa Fe would have seen Jace and me coming and going, would have realized we didn’t pose any kind of threat. At least, I didn’t think we looked terribly intimidating.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He turned the key over in his hand, fiddling with it. “I’ll bet if you crunched the numbers, you’d realize the odds of us running across any of the few hundred survivors in the area on any given day really aren’t that great. We’d have to keep coming down here day after day, looking for them. Are you ready to do that?”
Part of me was. Oh, I didn’t really need anyone other than Jace, and we’d done just fine — more than fine — on our own, but still….
I wanted to know.
However, I could tell from the expression Jace currently wore that he didn’t share this particular thirst for knowledge, and I decided I’d better not push it. After all, before I’d met him, my run-ins with survivors of the Dying hadn’t exactly been all that pleasant.
“No,” I said, and gave him what I hoped was a convincing smile. “I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
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