Poison Princess by Kresley Cole

Author:Kresley Cole [Cole, Kresley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857079183
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

22

DAY 230 A.F.

DEEP IN MISSISSIPPI

I sat in the parked car, surrounded by old corpses, watching Jackson fight through a windstorm. He had his bow at the ready, the shotgun slung over his shoulder, and a plastic gas tank tethered to his belt.

Empty, of course.

We hadn’t made it out of Louisiana before we’d started running on fumes. That’d been nine days ago. Since then, he’d been scrounging a gallon here or there and sourcing for car parts. Already we’d burned through three pairs of windshield-wiper blades and two air filters.

With the constant stops—and the unrelenting windstorms—we averaged less than twenty miles a day.

Today, he was sourcing fuel at a lawn mower repair shop. He thought the militia might’ve overlooked it.

Surely they’d gotten everything else. Just as Jackson predicted, food was scarce. We were running out of cans. Luckily, we were holding steady on water, sometimes finding leftovers inside water heaters.

Kneeling up on my seat with my forehead to the glass, I squinted, keeping Jackson in sight. Visibility was poor. The car rocked, ash swirling over the corpses splayed all around, like sand over windswept dunes.

When he encountered a body in his way, he didn’t veer his direction, just stepped right over it. He drove over corpses too.

At first I’d asked him to avoid them. After a couple of days, I’d realized how silly my request was. Without much moisture or insects, and few birds, the bodies had a lot of staying power, collecting over time.

He’d told me they were worse in the cities. I’d never imagined how many there could be.

Still, I was relieved to be out here on the road with Jackson, felt like some of the pressure of the last several months had been lifted.

Though my grief for my mom remained raw, it wasn’t as debilitating as it’d been in the beginning. At least now I could stem my tears. They seemed to really bother Jackson, like he took them as a personal insult.

But then, he spent most hours of the day irritated with me anyway. I had little clue why, barely able to keep up with his moods. . . .

The winds increased. A plastic Christmas tree tumbled by; a blackened clothes dryer inched down the road. Debris battered the car.

Jackson was out in that wasteland, exposed to danger. The militia had indeed cleared the roads, bulldozing wrecks. They’d piled them up along the sides, until the streets were like corrals. Like deadly wind chutes.

When he bent down beside a riding lawnmower parked on the small lot, I fretted my bottom lip. But Jackson seemed to possess no sense of fear, working steadily at his task.

I watched as he jammed a clear siphoning hose into the mower’s tank, swishing the tube around. He gave me a thumbs-up sign.

Clever, Jackson.

He’d turned out to be markedly different from how I’d remembered him at school. He was more hardened, and so possessed of himself that I sometimes forgot he was only a couple of years older than me.

Yet on very rare occasions, I caught a glimpse of an eighteen-year-old boy.

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