With the Enemy by Eva Gray Read Free Book Online

shelter,” Rosie answers, sounding like her old self, and I get a warm feeling in my chest. “It’s about to pour.”
    The sky opens up when we’re near an abandoned strip mall by the side of the road. It’s raining so hard that we’re all soaked by the time we’re beneath the overhang. Water is sluicing down my back in rivers.
    The doors and windows of the stores have been boarded over. On the third door we try, a piece of plywood gives with a little pulling. Our entrance stirs up dust and our flashlight beams crisscross as we step inside.
    It takes a moment to understand that we’re surrounded.
    “Leprechauns?” Louisa says. She bends close to one of the cardboard cutouts of a smiling man in a matching green top hat and suit.
    Ryan shines his light on the ground. “And four-leaf clovers. Must be our lucky day.”
    Rosie crouches to pick up a rectangle of paper.” ‘Frankly Parties,’ “ she reads from the card. “‘Making life more fun for Greater Chicago for fifty years.’” She lets the card flutter back to the floor. “I guess the market for fun isn’t what it once was.”
    “I’m not sure I would ever have thought this was fun.” Drew holds up an object that appears to be a moldy hamster in a Santa outfit.
    I’d love to take off my sodden boots but the floor is thick with the leftovers of “fun.” There’s a torn H APPY 3 RD BIRTH — banner and another banner that proclaims, VELCOME TO SPOOKSYLVANIA. A pirate glares out from a tattered paper plate and part of a shiny blue balloon offers me — GRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEW BA —. There are two rows of what had been shelves running the length of the store, but they’ve been dismantled. One wall has a peeling paint mural of Santa in his sleigh flying over a landscape across which the Easter Bunny is making tracks with a basket of brightly colored eggs pursued by a ghost, a witch, and a mummy.
    My foot brushes something and there’s a weird bleating noise that I think is supposed to be music and a voice saying, “Show me the money, show me the money.” I bend down and see that the noise is coming from inside a card that reads
For my beloved Grampa
on the front.
    “A classic,” Alonso says, squelching up beside me. “Bet it works every time.”
    “Check it out,” Ryan calls from the far corner of the store. Five flashlight beams converge on him. He’s standing under a thatched roof with the sign TIKI TIME! dangling from it. The remnants of a poster showing aturquoise ocean lapping at white sand under a cloudless sky are still plastered to the wall, flanked by two dust-covered plastic palm trees.
    “Welcome to my surf shack,” Ryan says. “I invite you all to camp out with me on the beach.”
    “I call ocean view,” Alonso says and plops his stuff down opposite the poster.
    We all pull off our packs. Fortunately, even though we’re soaked, we discover that our sleeping bags managed to stay relatively dry. Of course, since we’re sleeping in wet clothes, that matters less, but hopefully our body heat will dry them by the morning.
    “It’s weird to think people felt like they had to buy all this stuff just to have a good time,” Louisa says, sitting down on her sleeping bag and toweling her hair with her spare T-shirt. “From what I remember before the War and the way my parents describe things, life was pretty great.”
    “Look at this,” Rosie says, holding up a satin ribbon that has SWEET SIXTEEN PRINCESS written on it in glitter. She fingers the lettering. “Can you imagine?”
    We all shake our heads. That sash certainly wouldn’tgo with the military uniform we’ll all be wearing on our sixteenth birthdays.
    Ryan’s eyes get big. “This store must have been out of business for a
long
time. The mandatory enlistment age was lowered to fifteen, what, four years ago?”
    “Five,” Alonso corrects him.
    Sometimes when I think about what it must have been like before the War, I can’t understand why it happened. I mean,