Chapter Thirteen – Sing Song

“One bottle of beer on the wall, one bottle of beer! Take one down, pass it around… No bottles of beer on the wall!” Athena sang alongside Teddy and Trinity. Sometimes Maple muttered the lyrics along with them too, but it was so quiet that it was drowned out by their singing.

There had been a lot of singing so far. The Boss had lowered the radio volume down when all that Grandpa Boss played were ‘oldies’ and ‘awful old man rock’ and so they’d taken to singing to fill the silence.

They had tried ‘I spy’ but that had ended in a scuffle after Teddy’s third turn where she ‘I spy’d’ an ‘idiot’ while giving Athena pointed looks.

“What do we sing next?” Athena asked.

“I don’t know if we really need to sing another song,” Aurora said. “I feel like too much singing might be bad for you.”

“How can singing be bad for you?” Teddy asked. “It’s fun! I can start us on the next one! Baby bear, doo doo doo doo doo doo!”

Emily spun around in her seat and pointed towards the back. “No,” she said. “No more singing. What if instead, uh we do some planning?”

Grandpa Boss took one hand off the wheel to point at the glove compartment. “I keep some maps in there. Could be useful. Old paper maps. Never go anywhere without ’em.”

The Boss opened the glove compartment, pushed some papers and things aside, then pulled out a folded pamphlet-looking thing. When she unfolded it, it turned out to be a big square map of the entire region. “Okay… how did you use these to get around before GPSs were a thing?”

“You’d just stop on the side of the road,” he said.

“Old people are weird,” Teddy said.

“Hey now! One day you’ll wake up and realize that you’re old too, and then you’ll see that making fun of me for being old isn’t that funny after all,” Grandpa Boss said. “Besides, I’m not old, I’m fifty-five!”

“Whoa! I’m like, five weeks,” Trinity said. “That’s so many more.”

Grandpa Boss grumbled in the front. Athena, meanwhile, leaned up so that she could poke her head over the edge of the Boss’ seat and see the map for herself. Emily was refolding it so that all that was left was the area with Eauclair all the way to the place where the End Game was happening. It was a place that was about half the size of Eauclaire on the map, way, way down a long road that cut through the city and kept on going.

“Saint Arie,” Emily said. “I read up on the town, and there was a big news report on it the other day, after the End Game started.”

“Anything special we should know about?” Aurora asked.

“Not really? It’s a small town that’s at the intersection of three big highways. It’s kind of halfway between Eauclair, the next big city to the south, and then another big city to the east,” she said.

Grandpa Boss nodded. “About two hours from Eauclaire, but just half an hour away from the next two big cities. You basically need to drive through Saint Arie to get anywhere.”

Emily nodded. “But otherwise? I think there’s been a big push to make it bigger, but it started off as a gas-station town, with a few farms on the edges. There’s a river that cuts close to the town, and the area is kind of hilly. Not too many big buildings. I think the total population was something like sixty thousand before the End Game, which is pretty big for what’s supposed to be a town.”

“That’s a lot of folk,” Teddy said.

“Most will have evacuated,” Emily said. “From what I remember seeing, there’s a big camp here, and here.”

She pointed to two places on the map, both of them some ways away from Saint Arie, they were in a pair of teeny-tiny towns that looked like little more than a few homes around an intersection. “That’s not a big space for a camp,” Athena pointed out. “Can they fit all the people of Saint Aire there?”

“No,” Emily said. “They can’t. Which is our way in.”

“Oh?” Aurora asked.

“We’re going to go in to ‘help’,” She made big air-quotes. “A family friend. The news encouraged people to house friends and family for a while, and there’s a program to let people stay in your home for a while, at least until the End Game is done. That way fewer people are staying in camps.”

“That’s nice,” Maple said.

“It… is, yeah,” Emily said. “But the point is that since they’re letting people freely leave and others enter the area to pick friends up, it’s not exactly well-guarded, at least relatively close to Saint Arie.”

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“So we can just roll up to the End Game?” Aurora asked.

“Ah, not quite,” Emily said. She shifted so that they could all see the map, then traced a circle around the city with a fingertip. “This area is cut off. But, I don’t think it’s cut off all the way. I was able to read some things online. It looks like they’re still trying to pull in HRF people from other cities and provinces to help. They’re super understaffed.”

“Heh, the enemy is unprepared,” Teddy said. “So we’re gonna just sneak past them?”

“That’s… kind of the plan. There’s a forest here, see? Dad’s gonna drop us off by the edge over here, off the highway, and then we’ll walk.”

“That’s a long walk,” Grandpa Boss said. “It’s almost noon already. You’re gonna be tired long before you get anywhere.”

“And we don’t know where we’re going to stay once we’re in Saint Arie,” the Boss said. “We have Trinity to supply us with food from Sam, but finding a place to stay will be on us.”

Aurora hummed. “We can’t exactly rent a motel or something, can we?”

Emily shook her head. “No way. And if there are places close to the End Game like that, the HRF will be using them. We might, ah, have to borrow someone’s house for the night.”

Athena caught her big sister’s eye for a moment and could feel how uncomfortable the idea made her. So she reached over and patted Emily on the shoulder. “It’s okay. We won’t steal too much.”

“Up ahead,” Grandpa Boss said.

Athena squinted, and could make out a long line of slow-moving traffic, all on their side of the road. There was a small town up ahead, it looked like, and the people moving into it were moving at a crawl.

“Alright everyone, sit down properly and if anyone asks you a question, don’t answer,” Emily said.

They sat down, rebuckled belts, and tried to see what was going on up ahead. As it turned out, there was a checkpoint, some guys in HRF uniforms looking bored and stopping every car that tried to pass them on the road.

There was always one person snooping in the car from the driver’s side while another few officers were hanging out to the side of the road, next to an HRF-marked van and a pair of police cruisers.

Athena sat down and tugged her seatbelt tight, but her eyes never left the line of cars ahead. She could see the HRF guys now, sunglasses, dark uniforms, one of them was holding onto a clipboard, a woman next to him was standing with her hand resting on the grip of a holstered handgun. They didn’t look too mean, just… tired. And twitchy.

The van in front of them was waved ahead, and a sedan rolled up. It would be their turn next.

Emily shifted in her seat. “Just follow the script. We’re here to pick up your cousins. We don’t know anything else. We’re normal.”

“What are our cousin’s names?” Teddy asked.

“Don’t say any names,” Emily suggested.

It was their turn, so they slowly rolled up and came to a gentle stop next to the officer. Grandpa Boss’ window was down, but the officer gestured to the back ones. “Window down, please,” he said, already glancing toward the backseat.

Grandpa Boss looked around and then pressed a button that lowered the back window. “Afternoon, officer.”

“Where you headed?”

“Picking up my niece and her friends. News said folks could come pick people up if they’ve got a place to stay.”

The officer looked past him again, then blinked, just slightly. His gaze skipped over Athena, moved to Teddy, then Maple, then back to Grandpa Boss. He didn’t frown, didn’t smile either. Just looked… unsure.

Athena tilted her head and smiled a little. The officer’s eyes returned to her, and she felt something like a rubber-band snap in her head as she caught his attention. Then her smile only widened as she used one of her abilities.

Owl Seeing Eye was a fun little trick. It didn’t hurt anyone, just made them… less friendly to the people they thought of as friends, and maybe a little more open to people who weren’t.

The officer stepped back with a shudder, then he looked up and glared at the officer on the car’s other side. “Right,” he said. “You’re cleared. Drive safe.”

Athena’s smile turned smug. Now… to tell the Boss and earn headpats at the risk of getting into trouble, or not….

***

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