The next day followed the same pattern. We got up early in the morning and unbundled the fabric of the envelope, fiddling with the pulleys to be sure everything was untangled and ready to move into place. Then Byron and John inflated the envelope and sent us floating skyward. We headed southeast until the pair of us got tired, then looked for a place to stop.
We stopped for the evening near a small town surrounded by vast numbers of wind turbines. John had spotted a Shop on the outskirts and we needed to replenish our water supply.
Although we landed the airship about a mile away from the town itself - partly through inexpert maneuvering, partly for safety’s sake - a group of people arrived to investigate our arrival even before we finished setting up our anchor lines.
“What do you want in Sweetwater?” one of them called. “If you’re here to start trouble, you ought to know that-”
“We’re not!” Kurt hastened to yell. “We’re just passing through. Heading east. We’d like to buy some food and water from the Shop and maybe find a building to rest in for tonight. That’s all.”
There was a pause, then the man shouted back. “That’s fine, but don’t come into town. There’s a tractor supply store just over the hill you can rest in. Just tell us how much rations and water you want. We’ll deliver it to you.”
Their wariness wasn’t exactly a welcome with open arms, but anything that didn’t involve us getting into a fight was a win. None were interested in becoming my “followers” or even talking with us overlong. They wouldn’t even come close enough to take Money in exchange for the rations and water they delivered. The message was clear: they didn’t want any trouble, and we looked like trouble to them.
Disappointing, but fair enough, especially since they were generous - or smart - enough to ensure we weren’t hungry or thirsty.
Unfortunately, we awoke the next morning to storms and high winds that made taking off again far too risky. The storms continued intermittently for two days, so we finally took to the skies again on the final day of the twelveday.
After Byron recognized the Fort Worth city skyline, he refused to descend, trying to push onward to his grandparents’ place. We made it another hour or so, just barely past the into the countryside on the other side of the Dallas metro.
“Damnit,” Byron said. “If only I could have kept going another thirty minutes. Now we’re gonna have to waste a whole day going up and down.
“We should just take off in the morning anyway,” Davi said. “We’ll want to be on the ground before the week rolls over, but if we wake with the sun, we’ll still have a few hours. We can find the right area and land there, and keep Byron’s Specialty refreshing at sunrise. If we have enough time we’ll look for his family before the Challenge. If not, we’ll do it after.”
“I guess that’s fine,” Byron said. He was looking eastward. If he hadn’t been so obviously exhausted, I would have expected him to just start running the moment we touched down. “Not much else we can do.”
We tied Frankenair to a few trees, cleared the monsters from our landing area, and approached the nearby farmhouse. It clearly hadn’t been used in weeks. The windows were unbarricaded but intact, which would only happen if it was empty. The monsters seemed to ignore buildings if there was no one inside. Had the owners been away when the apocalypse started? Were they dead?
At least there were no signs of struggle. If I ignored the mess and clutter of everyday life, I could almost pretend we were staying at an AirBnB or a Vrbo.
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Miracle of miracles, the cupboards were full. There wasn’t any edible meat or fresh produce - even the bag of potatoes we’d found was growing roots - but there was a whole shelf of canned food, a jar and a half of peanut butter, several boxes of crackers, and a flat of bottled water.
Byron rubbed his hands together. “Oh, man. We can actually make something worth eating! Let me see what we’ve got and bring the heat. You guys figure out our sleeping arrangements.
“You sure you’re not too tired?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “A pot of soup is much easier than a massive hot-air balloon. Get going! I’ll call you when the feast is ready.”
His words were upbeat, but they seemed brittle to me, almost frantic, a thin veneer of positivity stretched over concern for his relatives. None of us talked much about family or friends, day-to-day. We didn’t strictly avoid the topic, but it was undeniable that we focused more on the problems right in front of us, doing our best not to dwell on things that were out of reach. When Byron had started recognizing landmarks, he’d gotten fired up. With answers so close, I think he had started focusing on the questions we tried to keep packed away. He wouldn’t be getting answers tonight after all. I knew that had to be rough on him, but I didn’t think talking about it would help.
The rest of us wandered through the upstairs bedrooms.
“It’ll be nice to sleep on an actual mattress again,” Davi said. “There’s a lot of extra space in the master bedroom. We can drag some of the twin mattresses in there. Two should do it? We won’t have more than three of us sleeping at the same time anyway.”
“Makes sense,” said John. “I’ll give you a hand.”
I suddenly realized that Byron wasn’t the only one acting strangely. John hadn’t complained about our use of someone else’s property once, not when Kurt used his Animate Machinery ability to unlock the front door, not as Byron and I started raiding the cupboards. He calmly helped Davi drag the mattresses across the hall and didn’t bat an eyelash when he saw me raiding the linen closet.
I carried in a stack of sheets, handing him one end to stretch over the mattress. “You doing okay?”
“Huh? Oh. Oh, yeah. I just…” The older man hesitated. “Seen a lot of ground the past few days.”
“Yeah. We’ve made it over 600 miles! More than halfway home!” I grinned at him.
He didn’t return my smile. “Lot of burned-out areas. Lots of burned homes. Smashed homes. Too many. Stopped counting after the second hundred. Got harder and harder to believe that we were gonna bounce back from this malarkey any time soon.”
“I can’t really see too well from where I’m pedaling. Mostly clouds.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t steer us if I don’t watch. Just… nothing I want to see. Used Clairvoryance to get a closer look at a little town earlier, one of those ‘one gas station’ kinda places. There were still rams on the street, and they weren’t attacking the buildings. Everyone was dead.”
John tucked the last corner of the sheet under the mattress and straightened, looking me in the eye. “And there’s more. Kurt was right: there is something weird about the burned patches. Took me a while to be sure of what. I kept seeing areas where the fire had stopped, and Analyze couldn’t tell me why. Oh, sometimes it could, if the flames ran up against a road or a creek or such, but a lot of the time, it couldn’t. Something about it just gave me the heebie-jeebies, so I kept lookin’. Eventually I realized that the flames stop if they ain’t near people or stuff people built. Just… stop.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t know if I woulda been if I hadn’t seen it so often, or from such a good vantage, but… yeah. They’re here to burn us, destroy us. Not our planet, I guess. Maybe that’s worth keepin’ around.” He sighed. “It kinda… clarified a few things for me. I’ve been a bit of a fool. We gotta beat the bastards, not worry about the wrong stuff.” His eyes flicked to my crown.
“Take down the aliens first, overthrow monarchies later?” I asked.
He snorted. “Something like that. Stealing… well, it ain’t good, but it’s better than leaving it to get burnt up or liquified or teleported to the asteroid belt, or whatever hogwash they come up with. It’ll be something. They got it out for us.”
“Dinner’s ready!” Byron called.
I tugged John’s arm. “Come on. Can’t stand up to the alien oppressors on empty stomachs. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
He let me pull him down to the kitchen.