Despite my paranoia — Patrice wasn't lying. As we arrived at the boardwalk, I immediately saw my dad's old dented car parked by an overturned garbage bin. Patrice waved at me as she came to a stop by the curb. I saw her put on a pair of violet sunglasses from her purse and then a pair of driving gloves.

"Sure, you want to go back to your friends?" Patrice asked. "With my clearance, I can make good time getting to the evacuation center."

Although that sounded tempting, I shook my head. I still didn't trust her. There was something about the way she smiled knowingly at me, as though she already knew the choice I would make, that made me uneasy.

"Thanks for the talk and for driving me here. I'm okay from here."

Patrice chuckled at me, her lipstick-stained teeth gleamed yellow as she did so. The glimmer reminded me of the last precious rays of sunlight slowly fading as the afternoon wore on. "Don't forget what I told you. Everyone here in Miami now is working for someone. Don't trust anyone, not even your friends."

I rolled my eyes and climbed out of her car. I slammed the van's old door behind me, and she sputtered away from the curb.

"Ailith!" Jack yelled when he caught sight of me. He ran over and caught me in a fierce hug. Holly followed not far behind. She was holding a bloody baseball bat in one hand. I noticed it was stained with black blood. At least my friends weren't out bashing people in the head for their Cheetos yet.

"You guys came across some trouble while I was gone?" I asked with a forced smile as I studied the two of them. Holly had rolled up her sleeves and was swinging the bat around as though she knew how to use it. Her brown hair was in a messy bun, and her unmade-up face was finally the same tanned color as the rest of her body.

"No, we scavenged that baseball bat from a body down on Martin Luther Blvd," Jack explained proudly as though this were a video game, and they were busy leveling up while I was gone. "I got my hands on a knife!"

"I found the knife," Holly interjected. "You Columbused it from me."

"Oh, screw you," Jack said. "It's called sharing. We should get going. It's going to be getting dark in about five hours."

"Y-yeah," I said and rubbed my cold elbows. I wished I had more than just a t-shirt on because even though the sun was still in the sky, I was already feeling the nighttime chill. I got into the car. "Mind if I ride in back this time? I hit my head pretty hard."

"Are you okay?" Holly asked. "Those science jerks by the beach told us they were taking you to see their medical team. We've been waiting here for you since then. I was worried they had kidnapped you to run their experiments on you."

"Yeah, I'm fine."

Holly approached me with a determined look in her eye. I expected her to come to punch me for being so reckless during that whole incident with Grace in her vampire form. Instead, Holly wrapped her arms around me and gave me the tightest hug I have ever had. It was as though she was trying to squeeze all the life out of me.

I immediately felt my cheeks grow red as the hug wore on. It was then that I was finally ashamed of myself for thinking the worst when my dad's car went missing. I breathed in deeply as I heard Holly close. Despite it all, she still smelled beautifully of cherries and Victoria's Secret hand lotion. I never liked the smell of either of those things until now as I stared into the nape of Holly's neck, at the black ends of her dyed hair. I liked it there, in her embrace. I felt as though I was seeing a side of Holly Xu few people ever got to see.

Those small feelings, small moments, small treasures were all we had as the deadly day wore on and on.

"We were so worried. Don't ever do that to us again, you hear?" Holly snapped at me like a scolding mother.

"Yeah," I said with a nod.

Jack cleared his throat. I wondered if he had any idea the two of us were an item. Maybe he thought this was just how girls acted. Isn't that what the textbooks said? Teenager girls are all a little bisexual?

I was pretty sure my feelings for Holly weren't just a manifestation of a rebellious need to experiment. This just felt right, like I had found the other half of my soul.

"Go ahead and lie down in the back seat for as long as you need to," Holly said as she wiped the tears out of her eyes. "Don't worry, Jack and I will take care of things upfront. You rest."

As I opened the back door into the car, I saw they hadn't been sitting there and waiting idly the entire time. No, they have scavenged a bit more than just weapons off of the dead. No, the entire back seat was littered with Snickers, Slim Jim's, and Fig Newton's. It was a junk food paradise back there. Apparently, Jack and Holly had been gorging themselves with high-carb, diabetes-inducing snacks as they waited for the world to end.

"Wow," I said. "You guys did some looting while I was gone. Did you guys sack a 7-11 or something?"

"It's the benefit of being some of the last people left in Miami, we get all the spoils of war," Jack said as he got into the driver's seat. He gave me a thumbs-up as he triumphantly clicked the safety belt on. "Let's get going before we turn into vampire junk food."

*

The three of us drove away from the boardwalk, but no sooner had we hit the backstreets when our car was approached during a red light. (Frankly, I didn't know why Jack even bothered to stop at a red light, but we were all exhausted from the day's events.) I guess at this point; we were all acting out of habit. At the red light, a group of angry men blocked our car and started banging on our windows with their fists. One of them spat on our windshield and stuck out his middle finger at us. I heard him call us "Yagerin dogs."

"What do they want?" I asked.

"What else? To steal our car," Holly muttered. "Also, I think they think we work for Yagerin because we're Asian."

"Hey, asshole!" Jack yelled and cracked open his window. "I have Lumins here for you, get closer."

As the man leaned in and jammed his stubby fingers into the cracks of the car window, Jack leaned close to the dirty man and spat a mouthful of chewed-up Oreos into his unshaven, mud-stained face. The man started screaming obscenities at us, but Jack and Holly both erupted in gut-wrenching laughter.

Then — to both mine and Holly's surprise — Jack floored the gas and plowed the car into the men blocking us. The jerks were shocked, too, and jumped out of the way. Looking into the back window, I saw them hobbling away while waving their fists at us. As much as I agreed they were jerks, I was thought Jack was crazy to go Rambo on them.

At least they weren't dead. Jack didn't give them a backward glance.

"They got what they deserve," Jack muttered through clenched teeth and wiped his mouth on his denim jacket sleeve.

"Well good for you, Jackie boy. It looks like you finally grew a pair," Holly said as she found a pack of Bubble Yum in her jean pocket. She offered me one before she popped one in her mouth.

Holly's snapping of the gum between her perky lips was the only sound that disturbed the silence as we left Miami behind us. The sky was already growing dim.

As the sun completely faded behind the horizon, Jack and Holly polished off the remainder of the junk food. They piled the empty plastic wraps between them. Houses were burning everywhere; bodies were strewn on the sides of the roads. I supposed vampires killed the people as they were hitchhiking. Or worse yet, other people killed them for their cars.

Abandoned vehicles littered the road as well. The Blight Rain was hard on the car engines. My dad's car sputtered and creaked along; it was running down its last breaths as well, but it didn't give in.

As we made it down the I-195, the traffic piled up. There was no way we were going to make it to the evacuation site by nightfall. Eventually, the national guard blockaded the streets. An armored vehicle with a loudspeaker attached to it drove up and down the shoulder and told everyone to seek shelter before it got dark. They said a curfew was instated now after nightfall.

We had no choice but to exit the highway. Holly said we should try to find a back street to bypass the police blockade, but Jack disagreed. Unfortunately, his opinion had the most weight because he was driving.

As Jack drove us away from the highway, he pointed out that we needed to get gas first, and the last thing we needed was to get lost in suburbia in pitch darkness.

Yeah, gas, I almost forgot about that. There were broken down cars all along the street which had been destroyed in the Blight Rain. I wondered if we could make a siphon out of all the plastic wrappings we had to steal some gas. In the darkness, that was probably not the wisest experiment to try. I lamented my lack of survival skills. If only my parents had signed me up for the girl scouts.

Jack drove us to the gas station. Naturally, there was no one there, and all the pumps were off. Jack cursed under his breath and slammed the steering wheel with both hands.

"No shit, Sherlock. Of course, it's closed," Holly mumbled with her arms firmly crossed over her chest. "What do you think we were going to find here? Vampire gas station workers? We can just tip them by giving them a little nibble?"

"Shut up!" Jack snapped, finally wholly losing his cool. He was turning red now as he realized the gas was more precious in this Brave New World we were inhabiting than gold. "Do you have any bright ideas? Or are you just here to take up space and complain?"

"Okay, cool it guys," I said and pointed at the nearby convenience store. "If we can break in there, we can take some canisters of gas. Let's find some rocks to throw through the windows."

"Yeah, bright idea, Sleeping Beauty. The noise will attract every vampire in a five-mile radius," Jack retorted.

"We need to find shelter for the night," Holly finally stated. She twirled a strand of her caramel-colored hair as she glanced between the dessert gas station and the nearby strip mall, ruminating deeply. "If we don't find someplace to hide soon, we'll be dead meat."

"I have an idea," Jack said and drove us straight through a fence. We ended up in the empty parking lot of a looted Walmart. "Are you guys thinking what I'm thinking?"

"No, we're not going to have a threesome with you, Fayer."

"You might when we hear my bright idea! We can hole up inside the Walmart. It's pre-broken into! We can barricade ourselves in here for the night."