by J L Bryan
The rockets screamed down at them, toppling more of the rocks, which not only pummeled the truck but also blocked off many of their potential escape routes. Ruppert noticed they all seemed to land very close to the truck. The guards, or perhaps students, weren’t shelling the valley at random, but knew exactly where to find Ruppert and Lucia.
“GPS!” Ruppert shouted at Lucia. She was reaching down and trying to take Nando’s hands, but the boy wanted nothing to do with her. Nando ignored his mother, but he was glowering at Ruppert.
Lucia kicked at the underside of the console, then grabbed underneath it, gritted her teeth and pulled. She ripped free a plastic module the size of a poker chip and flung it out the passenger window.
Ruppert continued to push ahead, and within a minute they were out of range of the falling shells. He looked behind him, but saw only solid black. Smoke and clouds of sand occluded the valley.
He found his way back to the dirt road, and at last he could really make some time.
“Sir?” Nando asked. He was still lying curled on the floor, staring up at Ruppert.
“What is it?” Ruppert asked. “Are you hurt?”
“You’re not really a staff sergeant, are you, sir?” the boy asked.
“Nando,” Lucia said, and the boy cast her a sharp look. “Don’t you know who I am?”
Nando stared at her for a long moment. “Are you in the movies?”
“Nando, I’m you mother.”
The boy’s brow furrowed. “Is this…an interrogation exercise?”
“Please, Nando.” Lucia’s eyes glistened. “Try to remember.”
They climbed up out of the smoke-filled valley, heading northwest. Then, at last, the fires among the ordinance sheds must have touched something serious, because a narrow geyser of flame ejected straight up and out of the smoldering school compound, reminding Ruppert of the pillar of flame in the movie Exodus. He thought of the boys he’d left standing at attention, and hoped they’d had the sense to scatter and lay low when the fighting started.
Nando climbed up to look out the passenger window, and Lucia moved aside to let him sit.
“My parents died in the wars,” Nando said. He stared at the pillar of fire. “Like all the kids at school. My dad in Nigeria, my mom in the Philippines. Commandant Redding told me. He showed me pictures.”
“It isn’t true, Nando.” Lucia reached for his hand, but again he jerked away.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“It is your name. Fernando Luis Santos. And mine is Lucia Santos. Your mother.” She took his hands in hers. "Look at me, Fernando."
Lucia leaned close to his ear and whispered, most of it too low for Ruppert to hear. It was Spanish, too low and fast for Ruppert to understand.
“Stop it,” Nando said. His voice was low and quivering. “I have to think.”
“Nando,” Lucia whispered. “Do you remember-”
“I have to think!” the boy snapped. He looked directly ahead, squinting into the wind that rolled over the bullet-scarred dashboard.
Lucia looked at Ruppert with a pained expression, her lips drawn and thin. He tried to smile, and he drove on.
Ruppert felt himself relax a little as they pulled into the tight canyon where they’d stashed the Bronto. Lucia and Nando left the Goblin Valley truck, while Ruppert lingered inside to change out of the bloodstained school uniform, in the process lifting the cash from the staff sergeant’s wallet. Through the shattered windshield, he overheard them:
“Where are we going?” Nando asked.
“We’re leaving for somewhere safe, up north.”
“When do I go back to school?”
“You don’t ever have to go back there. You’re free now, Nando.”
“I’m always free,” Nando said. “I’m an American.”
“Yes, you are, Nando.”
“If you’re my mother, is that man my father?” Nando whispered.
“No.”
“Is he your commanding officer?”
“No, I am the commanding officer.”
“Excuse me?” Ruppert asked. He’d finished changing, and now closed the door of the Goblin Valley truck behind him.
“I am,” Lucia insisted. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I know we have one more thing to do before we can go.” Ruppert glanced at the rear of the Brontosaur, sheathed in its desert tarp. Lucia nodded.
“Nando,” she said, “Why don’t you go stand at the front end of this truck, and wait there for a minute, all right?”
“Yes, sir.” Nando turned on his heel and marched to the front of the camouflaged truck, where he stood at attention.
Ruppert and Lucia lifted the tarp from the back of the truck and pushed it forward, unveiling the rear half of the Bronto. They lowered the tailgate and raised the door panel in the back of the truck’s camper top. Ruppert stared at the heap of forest-colored tarp for a moment.
After seeing what the school did to boys in their charge, he felt a bit less sorry for the men they’d hurt or even killed in the course of extracting Nando. He hoped some of the other boys had used the opportunity to escape, though he didn’t know where they might have gone. Perhaps they were too brainwashed to try such a thing, in any case.
He lifted up the tarp. There was nothing underneath but a long smear of partly dried blood.
“Shit,” Ruppert said, just before the impact on the back of his head spun him forward and slammed his head into the side of the camper top. He felt like he was caught in a small tornado as something swept him up, pulled him back, slammed him a few times against the side of the truck, then pitched him forward, Ruppert’s face dragging the desert-colored tarp off the remainder of the truck.
A large pair of rough, calloused hands grabbed Ruppert up and shoved him back against the door of the Bronto. The school official, the staff sergeant Ruppert thought he had murdered, loomed before him, the size of a grizzly bear, his upper torso and his entire head encrusted with sand glued on by dried blood, one eye swollen shut, looking very much like one of the wilderness demons Pastor John preached about. He snarled at Ruppert through broken teeth.
The staff sergeant hissed, his body curling to one side. Lucia had slashed him across the ribs with her obsidian blade, and then scurried back from him. He dropped Ruppert and charged after her.
Ruppert struggled to his feet, pushing himself up along the truck door. He thought he could hear a bass drum thumping somewhere deep inside his brain. The moonlit world around him blinkered in and out.
The staff sergeant snatched Lucia’s knife hand in one of his own, then pinned her thumb back while twisting her wrist. The blade spilled from her fingers and stabbed deep into the sand at her feet.
Ruppert forced his right foot to slide forward, then his left. He focused on the staff sergeant’s twisted, glowering face, pushing himself toward the bigger man. His ribs ached from repeated slamming against the truck, possibly cracked. He didn’t know what he would do when he reached the man-Ruppert doubted he could do much more than lean on him.
Then the staff sergeant rolled backward out of his field of vision. Ruppert’s aching neck turning slowly, and he saw the large man sprawl out on his back onto sand and sharp rocks, a look of shock on his face.
Nando scurried on his hands and knees away from the man’s legs and up to his head. He held Lucia’s blade in one hand, and it was dripping. In one nimble, fluid movement, he knelt beside the fallen man, raised the blade high with the tip of its blade pointed straight at the man’s Adam apple, and then he stabbed it downward in a perfectly straight line.
The man’s hands wrapped around Nando’s upper arms, and his legs kicked from the knees, his feet flopping uselessly. Ruppert saw that the Nando had slashed across the man’s heels, severing both his Achilles tendons.
Nando dragged the blade around the man's neck, with the calm expertise of a butcher, halfway decapitating him. Then Nando let the staff sergeant's head flop back, bleeding out into
the sand. Every muscle in the man twitched, as if he were having a small seizure, and then he died.
Lucia stepped gently toward her son.
“Nando? Nando, are you all right?”
Nando swiped both sides of the knife across the man’s chest, painting a bloody X.
“That’s Staff Sergeant Meyers,” Nando said. “Now I can never go back.” He stood, and he offered the blade to Lucia, handle first. “The Commandant is going to kill me.”
“He won’t find you,” Lucia said. “Come on, we’re behind schedule now.” She began gathering the desert-colored tarp. Nando and Ruppert stared at the dead man.
“Are you all right?” Ruppert asked him. The boy nodded. “Thank you. You saved our lives. I’m sorry you had to do it.”
Nando stayed quiet for several seconds, and then he shrugged. “It’s okay. Everyone wants to kill Staff Sergeant Meyers.” And the boy turned and marched toward the Bronto’s cab.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Lucia drove them north, into the Rocky Mountains and Wyoming, following a course of high, twisting roads through one of the least populated regions in America. They’d siphoned the gas from the Goblin Valley truck before leaving, and now the Bronto could travel for several hours before stopping again. Ruppert sat on the passenger side, still aching from his fight in the desert.
Nando sat in the back seat of the Bronto, alternating between long periods of silence and long barrages of questions.
“If you’re really my mom, how come it took you so long to come get me?” he asked at one point.
“I tried, Nando. The officials keep your location secret. They don’t want your parents to find you.”
“I don’t believe that. Who was my father, then?”
“I have not seen him in a long time, Nando. He was taken to prison.”
“For why?”
“For helping the wrong war victims. Practicing medicine.”
Nando frowned. “The Commandant told me my father was in Special Forces, and he commanded a regiment of the Nigerian army against the Islamofascists. He died defending America.”
“He commanded a…small regiment of volunteers. Like me. He was a very, very good man. You would have loved him, and he would have loved you."
Nando took that in for a moment, then pointed at Ruppert. "If he’s not my father, and he’s not your commander, who is he?”
“My name is Daniel,” Ruppert said. “I’m just helping your mother.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s helped me, and now it’s my turn.”
“Oh.” Nando sat back and stared out the window again. Then he asked, “Where is your base?”
“We don’t have a base, Nando,” Lucia said. “We aren’t part of an army.”
“So you’re irregulars.”
“We aren’t soldiers,” Lucia said.
“Intelligence?”
“No.”
“You aren’t civilians, I saw everything you did back there. You’re terrorists, aren’t you?”
“We’re just people, Nando,” she told him. “Just trying to survive.”
“You bombed our base,” Nando said. “You took me prisoner. Who was that on the P.A.?”
“That was me,” Ruppert said.
“You don’t speak Arabic too good.”
“I don’t speak it at all,” Ruppert said. “Just what you hear on the news.”
Nando recited a long, fluid Arabic verse, then smiled and translated, “‘In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds.’ That’s the opener for the Koran.”
“They teach you about Islam?” Lucia asked.
“It’s just for controlling foreigners,” Nando said. “In church we study the New Dominion Bible.”
“That’s what we used at my church, too,” Ruppert said.
After a long pause, Nando asked, “Am I going to Hell for going AWOL?”
“No, Fernando,” Lucia said. “You’re going to be fine.”
Lucia shifted gears to climb a steep, narrow dirt road. They were far from any highway, once again relying on the maps stored in Archer’s dashboard computer. Ruppert hoped there weren’t any surprise washouts ahead, or fallen rocks blocking their path.
The driving was rough, steep, and much slower than they would have liked, but the Rockies provided far more cover than the flat, open lands to the east or west. Lucia said that mountains were the best setting for guerrilla war, the kind of terrain that yielded least to control by central governments, which were more interested in ruling cities and masses of people than rocks and goats.
Nando launched into an enthusiastic monologue on the subject, describing in detail tactics employed by mujahideen against Soviet and American soldiers in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. He seemed to be adjusting to the sudden events fairly well, enjoying the sight of moonlit mountain pinnacles outlined against the stars.
They drove through the night, northward along the roughest mountain roads, Ruppert fading in and out of consciousness. They shared a jug of juice, a bag of nuts and dried berries, a few squares of chocolate. Eventually Nando fell asleep as well.
Ruppert woke to Lucia shaking his arm. He blinked as his eyes adjusted to the soft early morning light.
She’d parked by the side of an overgrown dirt track winding through a valley encircled by sheer, dark bluffs. Within the bluffs, blooming meadows and veins of rock sloped down to a clear alpine lake, reflecting the gold and red of the sunrise over the snowy peaks to the east. A white mist emanated from the lake itself, obscuring the far side of the valley.
“What is it?” Ruppert asked.
“Look at this place,” Lucia said. “Have you ever been anywhere like this?”
Ruppert thought of his closest experience, looking at an uninhabited island over a railing as he and Madeline rode the Pirate’s Booty tour boat through the Virgin Islands. The ride had been narrated by Captain Steve, who wore a plastic hook hand, an eyepatch, and an automatronic parrot who squawked one-liners. He shook his head.
“Nando,” Lucia said. “Nando, wake up. We’re stopping for a while.”
The boy stirred, rubbed at his eyes, then gasped at he took in the landscape.
“Can I go outside?” he asked.
They poured out of the truck into the meadow, fragrant and richly colored with late summer blooms. Ruppert stood and stretched, breathing in the pristine air.
“Where are we?” he asked Lucia.
“Wyoming,” she said. “There is nothing out here, no towns. We are as safe as we could be.”
Nando saluted his mother. “Permission to scout the area, sir?”
“Stay where I can see you,” Lucia said. “And you say ma’am when you talk to a woman, not sir.”
“Yes, sir. Ma’am.” Nando clomped through the high grasses and flowers, still dressed in gray pajamas, wearing Ruppert’s extra pair of shoes.
“Do you think that’s safe?” Ruppert passed a hand through the tall grass beside him, nearly as high as his waist.
“He seems disciplined enough.”
Ruppert couldn’t argue with that. They ambled downward along the meadow, toward the glowing lake painted the colors of sunrise. Nando ran far ahead of them, zigging and zagging through the meadow, head low as if avoiding imaginary gunfire.
“Do you think he’ll ever be normal?” she asked.
“I think he’s very prepared for the world he’ll have to live in,” Ruppert said.
They reached the pebbled shore of the lake. The water lay clear and still before them, and Ruppert could see all the way to the stony, sandy bottom. He looked off to their right, where Nando had taken an interest in one of the crooked veins of stone that ran down from the cliffs and divided the meadow into sections. The boy inspected the rocks closely, probably looking for a place to climb.
“How cold do you bet the water is?” Lucia asked.
“Freezing,” Ruppert told her. “Don’t even think about it.�
��
She kicked off her shoe, dipped a toe in the edge of the lake. “It’s not so bad. I haven’t had a real bath since California. Neither have you.” She pinched her nose, keeping her face solemn.
“This isn’t a real bath, either. Besides, Nando-”
“We can watch him from here.” The boy was walking up along a flat vein of rock toward the dark bluffs, arms wide as if he were navigating a tightrope, though the ridge was wide and low. The gorgeous colors of the morning sky glowed around him.
Lucia peeled off her skirt and tossed it into the grass, then weighed it down with rocks against the cool morning breeze. She waded out into the lake wearing the black panties and the short top she'd purchased to seduce the staff sergeant. She turned back to face Ruppert, smiling and waving, and then dived into the deeper water toward the center of the lake.
Ruppert glanced back towards Nando, who now lay on his back on the stone ridge, looking up at a stream of low, fluffy red and yellow clouds streaming across the sky just above them, nearly close enough to touch.
Ruppert took off his own shoes and jeans, then followed her into the water. It was so cold that it seemed to grab both his legs.
“Better if you just dive in,” Lucia told him. She treaded water several yards from the shore.
“I know that.” Ruppert plunged into the clear depths, dunking his head under the frigid surface to soak his hair. The water was painfully cold, until his skin grew numb.
“That feels so good, doesn’t it?” Lucia said.
“Sure. Ready to get out?”
Lucia swam up to him, her head submerged up to the eyes like an alligator. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pushed her body up against him.
“Thank you for all of this,” she said. “I could not have rescued him without you.”
She gave him a long kiss. For some reason, he could only think of how easily she’d tricked the man from Goblin Valley.