The First Hours Read online

  “Deena! What are you doing? Aren’t you coming with me?”

  Deena had her face close to the side mirror, applying lipstick. She stood up, rubbing her lips together. She fluffed her hair and grinned, “Sure. I had to make myself presentable. You never can tell the boys might catch up and offer us a ride.”

  Teagan pointed at Deena’s feet, “Please tell me you have better shoes than those.”

  Deena lifted one foot and twisted it so she could see all sides of it, “What’s wrong with these? Do you have any idea how much I paid for them?” Seeing the frown on Teagan’s face she obviously decided to gloat, “I didn’t think so. Probably more than those combat boots on your feet.”

  Teagan looked down at her feet, and then at Deena’s. Teagan wasn’t going to argue the cost of their shoes, but was happy with her choice over Deena’s.

  How much could they cost? Paper-thin soles and two encrusted rhinestone straps. No matter what Deena paid for them, they wouldn’t hold together if they had to walk very far.

  “Don’t you have anything a little more durable? Tennis shoes or something?”

  Deena wrinkled her nose and sneered, “Oh ick, why would I have those? I wasn’t planning on taking a gym class. We’re going to party.”

  Teagan’s earlier thoughts were right. This wasn’t going well at all. She and Deena were not a match made in heaven, but Teagan didn’t want to go knock on a stranger’s door alone. She had to have other options.

  “Does that mean you have nothing else to put on your feet?” Teagan tried hard to keep the impatience out of her voice and thought she’d succeeded when Deena smiled.

  “Oh, I have shoes. I have a whole suitcase full. A well-dressed woman has shoes for every occasion.” She hurried to the trunk and pulled on one of her smaller cases. She balanced it on the lip and zipped it open.

  As soon as Teagan saw the multiple pairs of footwear, she shook her head and shuffled through them. She considered a pair of rubber-soled beach shoes and tossed them back with a sigh.

  “You’re going to have to borrow a pair from me. You have nothing you can walk very far in.”

  Teagan opened her bag, which still lay in the dirt and pulled out her old pair of Nikes. There was no way she’d let the girl wear her new ones because the way it looked now, she was going to have to return her New Balance and get her money back just as soon as she got home. She was going to have to repay her father for the room deposit because it didn’t look like they were going to make it after all, and the hotel would run the bill long before she and Deena made it there. They’d told her when she’d called that it was non-refundable if she couldn’t make it, but returning the shoes would refund the cost back to his credit card.

  “Ewww…” Deena said, drawing the short word out longer than necessary, “You have to be crazy. I’m not putting those old things on my feet.”

  “You will if you’re going with me. But, if you want to stay here in the dark, alone until I get back, that’s fine with me.” She had noticed the sun was getting awfully close to the western horizon and knew if she had to walk a mile, each way, by the time she made her call and got back, it would be long after night had settled. The trees, while beautiful and majestic in the daylight would look ominous and threatening at night. She could hear them creaking as they moved with the breeze. Teagan shivered.

  “Why can’t I wear those?” Deena whined, pointing at Teagan’s new pair.

  “Because I might have to return them when I get home.”

  “Return them? Why?”

  “To pay my Dad back for the deposit money, if you really need to know.”

  Deena frowned as if she didn’t understand the concept of returning items to the store, “I’ll buy them from you. I bet you didn’t pay more than a hundred for them.”

  Deena was right, she hadn’t, but she didn’t want Deena to buy them either, and she had no idea why. She felt like Deena was trying to make a pity buy. Deena obviously knew Teagan didn’t live on the same side of town that she did and was only offering her money for them because she felt sorry for her.

  “Oh, come on. I’ll give you a hundred and fifty for them, but only if you throw in some socks.” She waved her hand over her suitcase, “as you can see, my shoes don’t require socks,” Deena said in her smug voice.

  Who had enough money to throw away on a pair of tennis shoes they’d probably never wear again? Apparently, Deena did, when she dug through her wallet and pulled out three fifty-dollar bills. Not waiting for an answer, she thrust them at Teagan and reached down into Teagan’s bag, fingers clutching for the shoes.

  Teagan’s natural reaction was to grab the bills out of the air before they fell to the ground. A breeze had begun, and she didn’t want to chase the money down the road. The cash would cover the deposit against her father’s card and then some, but first, she had to figure out how to get home without the use of her phone. Her father had no idea where she was, and so he wouldn’t be looking in the right place if he did come looking. When she didn’t show up this evening, he would probably assume she was spending the night with Nancy. Their homes had been interchangeable for both girls growing up and it was a practice he had grown used to over the years.

  If he was as involved with his new girlfriend as Teagan thought he was, he might not start looking for her until after the weekend. He didn’t know she knew about the woman, she didn’t know who it was, but to Teagan, the distraction couldn’t have come at a better time. Wistfully she wished his affections had been directed at Carrie. Many times, she thought about telling him to look closer to home, but Nancy had told her to butt out.

  She’d been subtly urging him to get a life of his own for years and knew that having him fully occupied was the only way she was ever going to have a life of her own without him breathing down her neck every moment they shared the same roof.

  While Teagan had been lost in thought, Deena had rifled through Teagan’s bag and put on Teagan’s favorite socks. The same socks, Nancy had brought back from Disney World three years before. The socks she only wore when she needed cheering up. The same socks she had planned on wearing with her new tennis shoes. Something about the circle of Mickey Mouse heads around the cuff never failed to make her feel happy. Deena, sporting them with Teagan’s new shoes and Deena’s little black capris and red tank top, didn’t make Teagan feel happy at all.

  Teagan had to admit that Deena did look cute, with her short, bobbed hair cut longer on one side than the other, the long side hanging down seductively over one eye which accented her periwinkle blue eyes.

  With her own thick curls, it wasn’t a look that Teagan could have carried well and she’d never bothered with makeup or lipstick.

  When Teagan looked down at herself, she saw practical. Practical jeans, plain white tee shirt, and her new Ariats. With her flaming red curls, Teagan didn’t think anyone, but her father would ever call her cute. She had learned long ago that she couldn’t wear red or purple, both of which were her favorite colors. Her one blessing, if she could call it that, was the olive complexion she’d gotten courtesy of her father’s good genes. She never burned like most redheads, and she wasn’t covered in freckles, and if she had to be honest, she didn’t have flaming red hair anymore. The older she got, the darker it had become. If she were going to give it a name, she would say the color was dark auburn, which went well with her hazel eyes. It was her corkscrew curls that drove her crazy.

  “Are we going, or are you going to stand there and stare at me the rest of the day?”

  Teagan shook herself back to the present. “Sorry, I was thinking.”

  “About how cute these shoes look on me because you were staring at my feet?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I was trying to figure out why our phones don’t work and why the car quit. Bad gas maybe, but I don’t think that’s it.”

  As they walked, Teagan thought about what she knew to be fact. One, their phones and she suspected the car quit at the same time. They hadn’t seen another
moving vehicle in the hours they’d spent on the side of the road. If Deena’s friends were indeed behind them, they should have caught up or passed by them long ago.

  “Did you take the special physics class that Mr. Henderson gave last year?”

  “Are you kidding? I can’t spell it, let alone be interested in it. Why?”

  Teagan shook her head, “It’s nothing really. Just something I was thinking about.”

  Chapter Two

  “Teagan don’t walk so fast. My feet are tired. We must have walked for miles already.”

  Teagan shook her head and laughed, she turned and walked backward, waiting for Deena to catch up to her. “We haven’t even walked a mile yet.”

  “Oh geez, give me a break. I know how tired I am, and I say we’ve gone well over a mile. We should have broken into either of the last two houses and used their phone. I bet once they knew our story, nobody would have cared, and my Dad would have paid for the damages.”

  “We’re not going to break into someone’s house just to make a phone call. If we find someone home, we’ll ask to use their phone otherwise our next course of action is to keep walking until we get back to the service station where we gassed up.”

  Teagan was tired too, but she wasn’t about to let on to Deena how far they had walked, or she’d want to stop and rest, and she’d never get her up and moving again. The last two places had been dark inside with no cars in the drive to indicate someone was home. She hadn’t mentioned that the previous house had been unlocked. Teagan had tried the door and they could have very well gone in and used their telephone, but Teagan didn’t feel it was the right thing to do. She wouldn’t have liked for just anyone to come off the street, walk into her house, and use the phone if she wasn’t home. She would find the idea invasive. A person’s home should be a sacred place. The one place you were supposed to feel safe, and she wasn’t about to violate her own beliefs.

  “How far now?” Deena whined. “I’m getting cold, and I’m hungry.”

  “If you’d move faster, you’d warm-up, and I can’t do anything about you being hungry. I’m hungry too, but the thought doesn’t do me any good to think about it. Try thinking about something else.”

  The longer she walked and the darker it became, the more she felt herself losing her patience with Deena. Deena was almost a year older than she was, and the girl was acting years younger, and just the whiny tone of her voice, made Teagan cringe. How had she thought she could have shared a room with Deena in the first place?

  Teagan didn’t know how far they’d walked, but she suspected it had been well over six or seven miles. From experience, she thought she averaged 2.5 to 3 miles an hour, but with Deena sitting down every 15 or 20 minutes, it was hard to keep track of the miles going by their time alone. Without a working phone or a watch, they had no way to tell how much time had elapsed. They hadn’t passed one house with lights on, nor a moving vehicle. A mile or so back they had passed by two cars. One was stopped almost in the middle of the road, and the car Trevor had been riding in had been sandwiched between it and the guardrail.

  At first sighting of the wrecked cars, Deena had found it in herself to fluff her hair and go running ahead until she realized both vehicles were empty.

  Deena had collapsed into the open car door on the driver side. As Teagan walked up, she could hear Deena sobbing. In another time, the sound would have made her feel sorry for the girl. But it wasn’t another time and if what Teagan suspected was right, the other time would never come around again. In the short space of a few moments, their whole world had changed, but until she was sure, she couldn’t say anything. The story would reveal itself once they reached the service station. They’d either find out her thoughts were wrong or prove her correct.

  “We have to go.”

  Deena hung over the steering wheel as if it had the power to hold her erect. Both hands gripped the wheel, her forehead resting on them, and she sobbed. Teagan wasn’t sure if Deena heard her or not. “Deena, we need to go. Sitting and feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to cover the miles we still have to go.”

  Deena looked up, and even in the dim light, Teagan could see Deena’s makeup smeared down her cheeks. The moonglow made her face look shiny. “Why? Why can’t we wait here?”

  For just a second, Teagan felt like slapping Deena silly. She’d heard the expression somewhere and understood why someone would use it, and she’d heard somewhere that slapping someone would shake them out of the state of shock and she suspected that was what held Deena captive. While Teagan thought that no one could put on an act like Deena, she also felt the girl was truly somewhere she had probably never been before.

  “It’s the only way we are going to find someone to help us.”

  “I can’t walk another step. You go. I’ll wait here for you to come back. Okay?” Deena sniffed loudly and finally realized the futility of snuffing the fluid back in. She looked around the front seat for something to wipe her nose on, sniffing all the while. She leaned over and rifled through the glove box, dropping papers and candy wrappers as she did so. Something hit the floorboard with a thunk.

  “What was that?”

  “I have no idea,” Deena told her in a watery voice, as she dragged out a cloth made with the specific purpose of cleaning eyeglasses with. She held the material under her nose with one hand and reached down with the other. Her hand came up holding a small pistol together with a cellophane wrapped package of Kleenex, both of which she almost dropped back to the floorboard when she realized what she was holding.

  “Oh my God, I think it’s real.” Deena let it fall into her lap. Her eyes wide with fright she wiped at her nose with one hand and the other raised the gun by the trigger guard as if it would bite her.

  “Get it off me! Take it!”

  Teagan, careful to stay out from in front of the wavering barrel, took it, and by the weight, she was sure it wasn’t a toy. “I think it is real and I think it’s loaded. Why would your friends leave behind a loaded gun?”

  “This isn’t their car,” Deena snuffled from the depths of the eyeglass cloth. One hand finally pointed at the sandwiched car, “that’s theirs.”

  She wasn’t sure why but knowing the boys hadn’t been riding around with a loaded gun made Teagan feel better. Whoever had owned this one had to have forgotten the gun was in the glove box and then there was the packet of Kleenex, no boy would be caught dead pulling a tissue from the cellophane wrapper. Teagan wished the dome light worked so she could see what was in the back seat and with Deena ensconced in the front seat, she couldn’t fold the seat forward to look.

  Teagan knew to take the gun was probably committing a federal crime, but right then she hadn’t cared. Having the gun made her feel safe. She slid it into her back pocket. She would look at it later until then it would remain in her pocket. Teagan felt sure it belonged to a woman and the grip as she’d slid it in her pocket, fit her hand nicely.

  “You can sit here if you want, but I have no intention of coming back. So, you either go with me or stay. Your choice.”

  They had rifled through the things in the back seat once Deena realized Teagan wasn’t going to stay with her and found a sweatshirt and a leather jacket. Deena claimed the leather and shoved the sweatshirt at Teagan. The girls walked off, Teagan pulling the hoody over her head. It was big, but Teagan was grateful for the covering.

  That had been over an hour ago, and once again Deena was draped over the hood of another stalled car moaning about her sore feet and her growling stomach. “I’m starving Teagan. Are you sure you don’t have anything? A piece of gum or anything? My feet hurt so damn bad. It must be these shoes.”

  She pulled one off without undoing the laces and massaged her foot and then made Teagan cringe, when Deena worked the shoe back on her foot, without untying the laces.

  Teagan was beginning to wish she had encouraged Deena to stay behind, but her conscience, knowing she wouldn’t return got the better of her, but she still wished it. If t
hings were going to be as bad as she thought they would, Deena would have been sitting on the side of the road for a very long time.

  “We should almost be at the service station. I’m sure we can get something to eat and drink there.”

  “Ew…I need food, not junk from a gas station. Can’t we call your parents from there and have them pick us up? I really just want to go home.”

  Teagan stared at Deena while biting the inside of her lip to remind herself to stay calm and not say something she might regret later. For hours she had been curbing her tongue, and the pressure was beginning to wear on her control. “Just a little bit longer,” Teagan told herself. There was no way in heck that she was going to be able to call her father, and no way was she going to be responsible for getting Deena home unless, Deena stopped her whining and complaining, because the way Teagan understood things, somehow, someone had set off an Electromagnetic Pulse, (EMP) in the atmosphere. If she understood her physics class at all, it would have taken out most computerized electrical devices. The professor had been unclear as to the extent of the outage because he’d never been through an actual EMP event, but it would explain the cars and their cellphones.

  Teagan drew in a calming breath before she attempted to talk to Deena and hoped she could keep her cool. Alienating Deena right now would mean Teagan would be covering the last few miles alone. The stretch of road in front of them grew trees almost to the shoulder of the pavement. With the cloud cover moving in, she wouldn’t have the light of the moon to see and the one issue Teagan had with that, was anything could be hiding in the dark.

  “Deena, I think something terrible has happened, and I don’t think we’ll be able to call anyone. I think our phones are broke, just like all of the cars.” She didn’t want to sound all gloom and doom, but what she could see by the expression on Deena’s face made her wish she had given her the full unmuffled version of her thoughts.