Ghost Ride by Hope Zane

Author:Hope Zane [Zane, Hope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hope Zane

Moriah misses the days of canned food.

It’s harder to come by since the money ran low—you can stuff a candy bar in your pockets in a way you can’t do with a can of corn. She misses vegetables and fruit, the soft bite of something real under her teeth. They haven’t had a decent meal in weeks.

They make do the best they can, heating water with a camp stove when they can spare the propane, crunching on bricks of ramen raw when they can’t. They add whatever they’ve got into the pot, sticks of jerky carefully cut with a pair of kids’ safety scissors they picked up from who even remembers, seasoning packets and a glug of sesame oil Moriah picked up from a grocery store a long ways back, the bottle tiny and easy to conceal. They’ve got two forks and one pot and take turns sharing it around, passing it back and forth and using their smelly bath towels to cushion skinny legs from the heat.

It’s what passes for life these days. It’s not perfect—it’s not even good—but it’s what they have, and somehow, that means it has to be enough.

There’s a list of things Moriah won’t let herself think about—what happened in Chapel Hill, for one. What happens when the car finally breaks down in a way they can’t fix. What happens when the money runs out, when the slowed production of goods around the world hikes prices higher and higher. It’s already happening all around them.

The fact that Alexis kissed her—it’s just another thing she can’t let herself think about. It’s not like she hasn’t had plenty of practice.

She’s been driving them hard, pushing the car and their bodies to the limit because she can’t stand the feeling of staying in one place. She hears Sarah’s voice in the back of her mind, wry and warm, saying you’re still trying to outrun your problems.

Wherever you go, there you are, but she knows she’ll lose her shit if she stays in one place.

They’re driving west, chasing the sun, and Moriah doesn’t know what happens when they hit the coast.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks only once.

They make their own day and night these days. They’d tried to stick to a schedule at first, figuring it’d make things a little normal, but it just felt more insane to be clinging to a relic of a world that no longer exists. Moriah no longer thinks the sun will come back one day, that this is just a temporary aberration. The console dash reads 3:08 before Moriah kills the engine; she isn’t sure if it’s a.m. or p.m., and it doesn’t matter, so she doesn’t care.

The dark doesn’t feel like a safe place to have conversations you don’t want to see the light of day anymore. The dark before sleep feels just like all the rest of it, so there’s no way to feel safe when she asks.

“Fuck you,” Alexis says, shifting over in her seat.

She waits for the day when she’ll hear the clicking of a car door opening, the slam of it shutting for good.

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