That wasn’t our only problem. We’d rationed what we had, but still run out of food in the early morning and hadn’t come across a stream to refill the canteens since the previous day. My stomach felt empty.
As we got closer to civilization, the trash littering the ground returned with increasing volume. Chase kicked through the scraps, cans, and faded Horizons-brand refuse for supplies we might use. The prospect of eating garbage didn’t seem as revolting as it had in the past.
It was late in the afternoon before we heard it: tires on asphalt. A single car had driven by, somewhere near.
“Did we pass the state line?” I asked, pushing by him in an effort to see evidence of our progress. As much as I hated to reenter the roaming spotlight of the military, I knew we had no choice.
The woods gave way to a thicket of gray-green brush, which crept wildly onto an empty dirt road. Beyond it stretched an open field, surrounded by barbed wire and edged by trees. A cockeyed red mailbox announced a twisting dirt road a half mile down the way. The car, wherever it had come from, was gone.
Chase hauled me back into the bushes and went out to scout the way. From my hiding place I saw him retrieve the map from his pack and look up the road. Then down. Then up at the sky.
This is what my life has come to, I thought, watching him. Taking cues for survival from a guy who is clearly waiting for some kind of sign from the universe.
Beth would have found this hilarious. Ryan would have found it highly impractical. It helped a little, thinking of what my friends would do. Their presence in my mind made me feel stronger, even if for a split second I imagined them doubting me. Thinking I must have done something really bad, something they didn’t know about, to be in the position I was in now.
No. They would never change.
But Chase had changed.
“We’re running southwest, parallel to the highway by a couple miles,” he said when he returned. “But we’re farther from the checkpoint than I thought. We need to step it up.”
A shimmer of anxiety passed through me. My legs were so stiff they could barely bend, and the blisters on my feet were damp with blood, but still we pushed harder. We could not miss this carrier. We had to get away from the MM and find my mother. Again I felt as if our survival would somehow even validate the sacrifice of that poor murdered man in Harrisonburg.
After a while, Chase took out the last bit of food, half of an FBR-issued granola bar, and handed it to me. I broke off the corner and handed it back to him, appreciating the gesture but knowing he had to be just as hungry.
I had just opened my mouth to ask him about his wounded arm when we heard voices filtering through the trees. Instinctively, we both ducked, but it became apparent after a moment that they weren’t moving toward us, they were blocking our path.
“From the house?” I asked, remembering the mailbox.
“Maybe. Stay behind me.”
We crept forward. Ten yards, and the volume of the voices increased. Men, two at least, shouting at each other. Twenty yards, and the undergrowth thinned.
“Get off my property!” one yelled.
“I’ll shoot you if I have to!” countered another. “I don’t want to! But I will!”
Shoot you? The words injected fear straight into my bloodstream.
I was close enough now to see three people. My eyes went first to a wiry man, thirty feet away in a cattle field, with dark hair that turned silver at his temples. He was wearing jeans and an old green army sweatshirt and had a baseball bat swung over one shoulder. His movements were awkward; I realized after a moment that he only had one arm. To his right were a bearded drifter with a silver handgun and a smaller figure dressed in rags. As my breathing quieted, I could hear her sobbing. On the ground between all of them was a dead cow.
Poachers.
Chase gripped my arm. He nodded for me to back up. In his hand I saw the glint of his own weapon. He kept it ready, thumb over the safety, but aimed at the ground. I could tell that he did not want to make this our fight.
I was torn. It seemed right that we should help the rancher, clearly trying to defend his livelihood with only a baseball bat. But at what risk to ourselves?
Just then a shot rang out, cracking against the trees and reverberating in my eardrums. The drifter had fired over the rancher’s head, but not scared the brave man away. An image of the carrier’s legs on the kitchen floor flashed before my mind. Defensively, Chase raised his weapon, pushing me all the way down to the ground.
A cry pierced the air. The closeness of it startled me: I almost thought that I was the one who’d made the noise. I turned my head to the side, straining to hear over my raking breaths. It couldn’t have been the woman—she was too far away—and the sound was much too high for a man.
I could hear whimpering now. Nearby. My fingernails scraped the earth, ready to run. I sprang up to my haunches and saw him.
A child. No older than seven.
He had parted brown hair and a sniveling nose that matched his tomato-red sweatshirt. I knew immediately he must be with the rancher; he was too well dressed to belong to the couple. He was hiding, terrified, watching as the thief aimed a gun at his father.
My breath froze its rapid assault to my lungs, and without thinking I jerked out from under Chase’s grasp to crawl toward the boy’s hiding spot, ten feet to our right.
“Ember!” Chase hissed.
The gunman’s voice hitched before us. “Yeah, sure, I had a house once, too. A house and a job and a car. Two cars! And now I can’t even feed my family!” I could hear the thief crying now. His desperation was ramping up. Both Chase and I tensed in response.
The boy sobbed loudly. The thief spun in our direction.
“What’s that? You got someone else out there? Who’s there?”
“No one!” the rancher said forcefully. “It’s just us.”
“I heard someone!” He began stomping toward us.
I froze. My knuckles sank into a damp patch of leaves. The boy was still five feet away, but he’d seen me now. He was covering his mouth with both hands. His face sparkled with tears.
I moved one trembling finger to my lips, desperately trying to shush him. Why hadn’t we backed up like Chase had wanted to?
The deliberate crackling of undergrowth snapped me out of my trance. For a brief second I caught Chase’s eyes and recognized the soldier’s hardened stare. Then, to my shock, he dropped the pack and stood to his full height. He had never looked more formidable.
“Who the hell are you?” yelled the thief, aiming the gun right at Chase’s chest.
My head reeled. What is he doing? I tried to grab Chase’s ankle so that I might still pull him back and make him see reason, but it was too late. He was covering for the child, I realized. Showing himself before the gunman started shooting at random into the forest. The prospect of Chase being harmed crushed me with powerlessness.
“Hey, easy. Put the gun down,” I heard Chase order calmly. The thief hesitated and backed up several steps.
“Who are you?”
“A traveler, just like you. Damn cold, isn’t it? That’s the worst part, I think. The cold. Listen, I know you’re hungry. I’ve got some extra food I’ll share with you tonight, and we’ll think of a plan, all right?”
“Back off!”
The rancher’s eyes were darting between the two armed men, then toward the woods, where his son was hiding. The evening air bristled with static.
“Please Eddie!” bawled the thief’s wife. “Please, let’s go!”
The man brought both of his hands to his head. The barrel of the gun pressed lengthwise against his temple.
He’s going to shoot himself, I thought, horrified.
“Look, I’m putting my gun down, okay?” said Chase. “You put yours down, too, and we’ll get you some food.” I watched in shock as Chase bent to lower his gun. Negotiations had been part of his training, but was this right? He was about to be defenseless!
A crack in the
bushes a few feet away refocused my attention.
The boy was leaving his hiding place.
“Hey kid!” I whispered. “Get down!”
He didn’t listen. He seemed to think that Chase had defused the situation.
“Dad!” The boy began running toward the rancher, whose surprised expression lapsed into terror. He dropped the bat.
The thief swore, startled, and jerked the silver handgun toward the boy charging out of the bushes.
“Ember, STOP!” roared Chase.
I hadn’t until that moment realized that I’d stood as well, and that my feet were running, too. Toward the boy. I was closer than the father. I could stop him first. Those were my only thoughts.
Crack! The shot was fired the moment the kid and I collided. We tumbled into the grass in a heave of expelled breath and tangled limbs.
“Ronnie!” The rancher flung me to the side as he desperately clutched his young son’s body, searching for injury. My eyes ran over him as well. The jeans and sweatshirt were mud stained, and his innocent face was white with shock. Still, he had not been shot, and I felt no pain apart from getting the wind knocked out of me, which only left…
“Chase!” I was on my feet at once, sprinting over the patches of damp grass and puddles toward the two men on the ground. It took me a full second to see that they were both struggling. Neither, at least so far, had been fatally injured.
As I rounded the dead cow it became clear to me that Chase was winning. He outweighed his opponent by fifty pounds and had youth and training to his advantage. The woman had attacked him too, though, and was flung to the side, sobbing miserably. Somehow, both guns were lying on the ground.
My eyes found Chase’s first, as it was closest. I scooped it up quickly, forgetting about safeties and chambers, and pointed it at the jumbled mass of blood-stained clothing that rolled frantically over the earth.
My hands trembled. I couldn’t shoot one without risk of hitting both.
“Stop!” I shouted.
Chase elbowed the thief savagely in the face. The man clawed at Chase’s wounded arm, and Chase hissed in pain.
Something changed inside me then. A bolt, straight down my spine. The blood ran hot and fast through my veins. My vision narrowed into compressed slits, and over it descended a red veil. Suddenly, I didn’t care how pitiful this stranger was or how hungry.
This had to stop. Now.
I raised the gun upward, toward the sky, and pulled the trigger. A loud pop slammed through my eardrums. The metal recoiled, sending a vicious kick through my wrist, down my forearm. I yelped, and the gun fell from my numb hand to the ground. My mind went absurdly but peacefully silent.
Chase lunged to a stand, shoulders heaving. All the calm negotiating had been stripped from his face to reveal the ferocity beneath. His eyes searched wildly for the source of the shot and came to rest on me.
The woman helped her husband to a stand. His mouth and nose were a mess of blood and dirt. They fled into the woods without another word.
I stared after them, feeling suddenly displaced, like a hammer with no nail. What do I do now? Everything had happened so fast and had ended just as abruptly.
When I turned around, Chase was coming toward me. His gait told me that he was furious before he ever opened his mouth.
I couldn’t think clearly. My ears were ringing from the shot, and my mind buzzed with the fleeting remnants of rage. Tears blurred my vision. The fear, momentarily paused, returned with full force, and in this frantic, baffled state I ran to him, and leapt into his arms.
He seemed surprised at first but soon was squeezing back.
“It’s all right,” he soothed. “No one’s hurt. You’re okay.”
His words sliced through me, and for the first time since he’d taken me from school, I knew the truth about us: I could not be okay if he was not okay. Pain, nightmares, fighting—all of it aside—he was a part of me.
“Don’t do that again! Not ever again!” I told him.
“I should say the same to you,” he said. I could feel his breath, warm on my neck.
“Promise me!” I demanded.
“I… I promise.”
“I can’t lose you.”
In that moment, I didn’t care about getting to South Carolina. I meant that I needed him. The way he had been. The way he still could be if he never let go. I don’t know what made me say it, but in that moment I had no regrets.
He hesitated, then pulled me even closer, so that I could barely breathe. My feet no longer touched the ground. I could feel his hands grasping my coat.
“I know.”
My heart rate slowed but pounded harder than ever before. He did know. He remembered now what it was like when we were together. I could feel it in the way he let himself go, in the shimmer that connected us when he stopped thinking. Here, returned at last, was my Chase.
Someone cleared his throat.
We detached like the wrong ends of two magnets, and what had felt so solid between us shattered like brittle glass. Having forgotten anyone else was present, we now faced the rancher. The baseball bat was tucked under his amputated arm, and his opposite hand rested on his son’s head. The boy was now smiling foolishly. My face heated, despite the falling temperature that came with the evening.
“Sorry to interrupt. My name’s Patrick Lofton. And this is my son, Ronnie.”
* * *
TWENTY minutes later we were following Patrick and Ronnie down to the main house. Much to the rancher’s chagrin, we had to leave the cow where it had fallen until morning, when he could bury it properly. They couldn’t butcher it; they didn’t have a cold room large enough to store the meat, and their buyer, a man named Billings, wasn’t due for another week. At the mention of the slaughterhouse, I shuddered; it made me think of the dead dog hanging in the woman’s trailer.
Patrick had insisted that we stop in so his wife could thank us properly with a meal. When we told him we had to move on, that we had family waiting in Lewisburg, he offered to drive us there, and we agreed: The unknown tenants of the ranch house had to be safer than the desperate, starving people in the woods.
Besides, we weren’t going to be a whole lot better off than the drifters if we didn’t eat soon.
Chase had introduced us as Jacob and Elizabeth, and Patrick seemed to accept the pseudonyms, despite the fact that we’d used each others’ real names earlier. I didn’t like them; I looked nothing like an Elizabeth. The only one I’d known was Beth from home, and she was five inches taller than me with bright red hair. But at least it wasn’t Alice.
Chase had then created a flawless story about our displacement to Richmond after the Chicago bombings, which encouraged Patrick to share that he too had borne witness to such atrocities. He’d been a soldier in the U.S. Army, stationed in San Francisco, when it had fallen. It was there that he had lost his arm.
We approached a rickety red barn with white trim and a green tractor outside its oversized doors. A pasture lined the land opposite it, where thirty or so black cows were just barely visible through the failing light.
“Mind dropping your firearm here, Jacob?” Patrick asked, pausing in front of the barn. “Just until we leave. We don’t bring guns in the house, what with Ronnie so young.”
I nearly said something about the child not being too young to be shot at, but held back, knowing the request had more to do with Patrick’s concerns about us than with his son’s youth. I felt Chase straighten, then nod in agreement. He still had his baton and knife, after all.
“Sure. No problem.”
Patrick forced open the creaking door of the barn. We were blasted by the musty scent from the hay bales that lined the splintering wooden walls. In an open space before us, a motorcycle with wide silver handlebars leaned on its kickstand. I felt a trickle of nostalgia looking at it.
“Whoa. They stopped making Sportsters before the War,” said Chase in awe.
Patrick laughed. “Not bad. You know bikes, huh?”
“Dad, come on. We’ve gotta get Mom!” Ronnie interrupted.
Patrick’s smile from the compliment faded, and he opened a cabinet in the back corner with a key from his pocket. On the top shelf was a hunting rifle. He added the thief’s handgun to it. Chase left his there as well, with only a moment of hesitation.
The Loftons’ house was warm and spacious. The living room, just past the laundry room, was littered with toy cars and action figures. A fireplace was embedded into the wall, and on its mantle were a dozen family pictures. All smiling faces.
Chase and I scraped off our boots as he removed the backpack. I looked at him, brows raised, and he returned the sentiment.
The Loftons had money.
They weren’t rich. In fact, they probably had less than we’d had when my mother still had a job. There wasn’t even a television in the living room. But there was a glass vase and a decorative lamp on the end table, toys and books lying around, and extra clothes cluttering the floor that the boy—Ronnie—had shed at some earlier time. These were all things I would have sold when we’d been in a tight spot. The fact that they hadn’t needed to meant that they were doing significantly better than most of the country.
The kitchen had a skylight centered above an island. The walls were painted burgundy, and the towels and utensils on the counter were all fashionably black. A delicious salty scent emanated from an oversized slow cooker atop the marble counter. It had been a long time since I’d had meat; the soup kitchens never carried it, and with standardized power we couldn’t maintain a fridge. It took everything I had not to stuff my face in the cooker. The familiar hum of a generator outside distracted me.
I couldn’t tell if my stomach gripped from hunger or the sudden onslaught of nerves. A generator? They were commonplace in businesses, but not in private homes. Who were these people, friends of the president? They obviously made a good living; the price of beef was sky-high.
“Honey!” called Patrick. “Mary Jane! It’s all right, come on out!” He placed his keys in a ceramic bowl beside the fridge.
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