“That’s right!” I reeled on him. “You never think! I have no idea how you ever survived this long!”

“Look, I’m sorry!” Lazlo looked hurt, but I didn’t care. “I haven’t driven a car in like a year, and the little red gas gauge light never went off.”

“Seriously?” I gaped at him. “God, Lazlo! I don’t care if you’d never driven a car ever! You should be able to tell when we’re running out of gas!”

“I’m an idiot! I screwed up!” Lazlo yelled back. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I want you to-” I didn’t know what I wanted but I was so pissed, I couldn’t stand it. I pushed him, hard. He’d been standing close to the SUV, and he slammed back into it.

“Remy!” Blue took a step towards us.

I wanted to punch Lazlo, or punch anything really, but I just shook my head and took a step back.

“Maybe we should all calm down,” Lia said, sliding out of the car, but she really just meant me, since everyone else was irritatingly calm. “We can all eat and stretch our legs.”

“Stretch our legs?” I scoffed. “We’re gonna be walking for the next thousand miles!”

“Remy, we’ll find another town.” Blue looked at me, as if he could stare me into being reasonable. “We’ll figure something out. It’s not that bad.”

“I am really sorry,” Lazlo repeated, rubbing his shoulder. I had pushed him back into the car pretty hard, but he deserved it.

I nodded but didn’t say anything. I was too deflated to argue anymore, and it wouldn’t make the situation any better. Nothing I did seemed to make anything better.

Lia went around to the back of the SUV to see if she could find something to make for breakfast, and Lazlo went to help her. Ripley jumped out and stood in the middle of the road, sniffing the air and looking confused.

For breakfast we had SPAM and olives because they were heavier to carry, and we needed to lighten our loads. Things like beef jerky traveled easier. I didn’t eat much of anything, settling for warm water and pacing. Lia made everyone say grace before they ate, but I mumbled through it

Afterwards, I climbed in the back of the SUV and went through our stuff. Harlow helped sift through her clothes, and I picked out the bare essentials everyone could carry. This meant I’d have to leave behind the shotgun I’d stolen from Korech.

I hated leaving behind weapons, but we didn’t have any bullets for it, and we might never find any. We only had two guns, so I gave the handgun to Blue and kept the semi-automatic for myself.

With our bags packed as concisely as possible, I grudgingly said goodbye to the vehicle. We started down the road, going north. I downsized back to my overflowing messenger bag with the gun hooked to it, and everyone else had done roughly the same.

Harlow’s mood had strangely lightened since we started the long trek down the highway, and she and Lia had a banter that I found mildly irritating. They talked cheerfully about everything they saw on the side of the road and plunged into an intense game of “I Spy.”

“I spy with my little eye….” Lia chewed her lip, thinking of something good, which would inevitably be a tree or a stone or some other piece of vegetation, since there had been nothing of interest to look at for miles. “Something… green.”

“Um...” Harlow looked around, and I’m not sure if she was pretending to debate to build suspense, or she was actually that clueless.

“It’s a bush.” Lazlo broke his silence. He’d shut up since I pushed him earlier, but the game had gotten to be too much for him. “It’s always a bush.”

I suspected Blue had tolerated their game because he had more patience than the rest of us, and I didn’t say anything because it would be more of a headache arguing with them.

“But there’s different bushes,” Harlow said indignantly, glaring at Lazlo, but Lia lowered her head. “She was talking about a specific one.”

“Ooh, the intensity of it all!” Lazlo waved his hands in mock excitement. “We may never know the exact bush Lia saw on our 300 mile walk!”

“Well, what else are we supposed to do?” Harlow snapped. “And it’s your fault we’re all out here walking anyway!”

“Why don’t you try playing another game?” Blue suggested before Harlow and Lazlo got into it more.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” Vega said. She looked straight ahead, talking to no one in particular.

All of Harlow and Lia’s musings had been interspliced with random declarations from Vega. She spoke rarely, but when she did, it was almost entirely in Bible verse. The verses she said had little connection with the conversation at hand, but none of us chose to address that.

While back at Korech’s ranch, I had felt some kind of kindred spirit with Vega, but the more time I spent with her, the more I found her kind of off-putting.

Lia could be annoying in her own right, since she was older than me but behaved more like Harlow, but Vega was just… weird. She held her head high, always looking ahead, reminding me of the old films I’d seen of Nazi’s marching.

“So… was that your suggestion for a game?” Lazlo asked Vega, giving her a sidelong glance.

“It means that we have a task at hand, and we need to work to achieve it before we can play,” Vega replied, her voice emotionless.

Lazlo exchanged a look with me, but I just shrugged. What did you say to that?

“We don’t have a task at hand,” Harlow scowled. “We’re just walking. We can walk and talk at the same time.”

Vega didn’t respond to her, so nobody said anything. Harlow tried to introduce another game, but Vega had shamed Lia, and she wouldn’t play.

After a while, Harlow started to slow down. She lagged the entire time, with her and Lia following more to the back, but she was falling farther and farther behind.

“I’m tired!” Harlow had to shout to be heard since Vega and I were so far ahead of her. “Can’t we like take a break or something?”

“Just a little bit longer,” I said.

The sun was right above us, so it had to be close to noon, but if I were on my own, I’d walk without stopping at all. It was incredibly frustrating never knowing what time it was, and I wanted to make it somewhere “safe” by sundown.