by Trevor Shane
“Max,” Max answered without saying any more. Max knew that it wasn’t worth telling Christopher anything until Christopher finished reading the journals. So Max gave Christopher the journals and then sat quietly in the room with him for two days as Christopher read every page.
Once, when Christopher was alone and Max was out getting them something to eat, Christopher dared to call his mother. Even as he dialed, he wasn’t sure what he was going to say to her. He didn’t want her to be worried or to think that he’d run away from them. He loved them. He loved them even more after reading about his birth parents, after having it confirmed once and for all that his parents didn’t bring him into this world. If they had brought him into this world, he’d have that to hold against them. But no, all they did was love him and try to protect him. Love they could do. Expecting them to be able to protect him from what he was up against wouldn’t be fair.
“Mom,” Christopher said when she picked up the phone before it had finished even its first ring.
“Christopher, where are you?” His mother’s voice was trembling. He could tell by the sound of her voice that she’d been on the verge of panic for days. “Are you in trouble?”
“I’m okay, Mom,” Christopher said. He began to stammer, almost unable to get the words out. “I can’t tell you where I am.”
“There were bodies here,” Christopher’s mother said. “They found three dead bodies and you disappeared. Have you been kidnapped?” Christopher could hear the sound of his father’s voice saying something to his mother in the background, like they’d been doing nothing since he’d left but sitting in that room together waiting for him to call.
He thought about lying for a second. It would be a useful lie. He could tell them that he’d been kidnapped. It wasn’t too far from the truth. “No, Mom,” he said instead. “There’s just some stuff going on. Some stuff I need to take care of.”
A moment of silence passed between them while Christopher’s mother decided whether or not she should say what she eventually said next. “Did you have anything to do with those men who were killed?” she asked him. “You can tell me if you did, Christopher. We’ll love you no matter what.”
A lump developed in Christopher’s throat. He wanted to lie to her now even more than before, but he didn’t know how to lie to his mother. “It’s not what it looks like, Mom. Please trust me.”
His mother cut him off before he could say anything else. “Come home, Christopher,” she ordered with a force that Christopher hadn’t heard since he was a little boy. “We can help you. Whatever it is, we can help you. We love you.”
“I love you too, Mom. I’ll come home as soon as I can. Don’t worry about me. I’ll call. I promise.”
Muffled voices came through the line for a few seconds. “Your father wants to talk to you,” Christopher’s mother said.
“Okay,” Christopher answered and then waited for the phone to be passed.
“Chris”—his father’s voice was hoarse—“whatever problems you’re having, we can help.” No you can’t, Christopher thought. Not this time. “Whatever it is, we’ll stand by you.”
“Dad,” Christopher said, letting the tears flow now but doing everything in his power to keep his voice steady. “I need to handle this on my own. I promise I’ll come back. I promise everything will be okay.”
“You’re still a kid, Chris. I know that you don’t think you are. I know how smart you are and how independent you are, but you’re still only a kid. Come home, please.” It had been years since Christopher felt like a kid, but he felt like a child again now, talking to his father on the phone.
“I’m sorry, Dad. Not yet. Soon, but not yet. I love you both so much. I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.” He could hear his mother’s muffled voice in the background now, saying something to his father. “Please don’t say anything else. I have to go.” Christopher waited for a moment and then hung up.
Later that same day, when Christopher finished reading the journals, he had a million questions, too many to organize in his own head. So he asked Max only one. “So what now?”
“We need to leave the city. I need to get you out of here. We’ve been here too long already. It’s too dangerous to stay any longer.”
“If I go with you, where would we go?”
“Florida,” Max answered. “There’s someone there who knew your mother, someone who wants to help you.”
“And then what?” Christopher asked.
“We think we can clean you. We think that we can keep you safe.”
“What does that mean?”
“We think we can keep you hidden from all the people chasing you.”
“For how long?”
Max didn’t have to answer. Christopher knew what Max’s silence meant. He’d read the journals. “So I run and hide for the rest of my life?” he asked.
Max put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder. It was a brotherly gesture. “That’s true whether you come with me or not,” Max replied. “That’s true for all of us. You don’t get to pick between running and not running. Your only choice is between running with us and running alone.”
Christopher slipped his phone out of his pocket and looked down at it. He was up to fourteen unanswered texts from Evan. The last one read, “i talked to your parents. now I’m worried too.”
“Okay,” Christopher said to Max. “Let’s go to Florida.”
The rain splattered on their windshield. Their headlights reflected off the wet asphalt on the highway. The drive from Montreal to Florida would take more than twenty-four hours, but Max didn’t plan on stopping. Somewhere in upstate New York, Christopher woke up for a second. “Do you know what happened to Maria?” he asked, almost certain that he already knew the answer.
“You mean your mother?” Max asked.
“You know who I mean,” Christopher said.
“She went to prison in Ohio for killing some kid. I heard that she turned herself in after giving you away.” Max squinted, peering through the rain pelting the front windshield.
“And then?”
Max looked over at Christopher, trying to make a judgment call about how much the boy could take. “They killed her the day she was released. They couldn’t let her live,” Max said. “She meant too much to too many people. She was too big a liability.”
“How so?”
“It’s what she represented. To a lot of people out there, your mother was more than merely the girlfriend of a martyr and the friend of a traitor. She’s a legend in her own right and the mother of a hero.”
“I’m no hero,” Christopher said to Max.
“I know. That’s why I’m taking you to Florida.”
Max believed that he was telling Christopher the truth when he told Christopher that his mother was dead. He had no reason to think that Reggie would have lied to him. Christopher had no reason to believe he was being told lies either. He put his head back against the passenger-side window and slowly went back to sleep.
Max kept driving through the rain.
Five
Addy felt the buzz in the compound before she had any idea what was going on. All she knew was that something was happening. As usual, she felt out of the loop. Everyone else seemed to be talking to each other in quick glances and secret whispers. Even though Addy couldn’t make out the words being whispered, she could hear the excitement in the voices of the whisperers. She thought that maybe the excitement had something to do with Max’s return. Before he left, Max had told Addy that he was going on an important job, but she thought that he was teasing her. That was what Max did. Addy never minded being teased by Max. It reminded her of her older brother before her older brother was killed.
Addy walked down the hall toward her desk. She eyed the others as they spoke under their breath. About thirty people total worked at the compound. S
he counted more than twenty of them there today. She’d never seen the compound so crowded before. Addy looked for someone, anyone, that she might have the courage to ask what was going on. If Max had been there, she would have asked him. She thought about asking Reggie but didn’t have the courage. Whenever she thought about going to Reggie recently, she worried that he would somehow sense that she’d been reading about the Uprising. Addy wondered if Reggie would make her leave if he found out she’d been reading Dutty’s postings. Since she couldn’t find anyone to ask, Addy simply decided to wait. Whatever everyone was whispering about was going to happen whether Addy was in on the secret or not.
Six
Evan stood in the hallway in front of his open locker. He’d told his English teacher that he had to go to the bathroom. She knew he was lying. He knew that she knew that he was lying. Even so, she sighed and told him to be quick. The issue was that the school had a no-leniency policy on the use of cell phones in classrooms. Students making phone calls wasn’t the problem. The problem was the texting and the cheating and the porn. The school officials might even have looked the other way if it was just the texting and cheating, but when the third teacher caught one of her students watching porn on his phone during class, the ban was instituted. Students could keep their phones in their lockers, but bringing them into the classroom was an automatic suspension. Evan considered risking it. It was absolutely killing him, sitting in class, not knowing if Christopher had texted him or e-mailed him back yet. He needed to check his phone.
So instead of going to the bathroom, Evan snuck to his locker and pulled out his phone. He looked down at it. He was up to sixteen unanswered texts and four unanswered e-mails. Christopher was beginning to piss him off. Evan wasn’t getting mad at Christopher for not getting back to him. He was getting mad at Christopher for making him look like a bitch. Evan almost felt like he was stalking his best friend. How could he still not have a message? Evan took his phone and banged it against the wall, trying to see if he could force it into action. He turned the phone off and back on again. He half hoped that it was broken, but the damn thing worked fine. He’d been getting messages from his other friends. Only Christopher was absent.
Evan knew about the phone call that Christopher made to his parents. They’d called Evan right after they got off the phone with him. They tried to use the fact that Christopher called them to get more information out of Evan. They assumed that Evan knew something. They didn’t believe Evan when he told them that he knew even less than they did. Evan could barely believe it himself. That pissed him off even more, the fact that Christopher took the time to call his parents but didn’t make time to call his best friend—correction, his only friend.
Evan looked up at the clock hanging above the lockers. Only five more minutes before the bell rang. He thought about sending another text to Christopher, blistering him, trying to guilt him into a response, but he controlled himself. He had to keep a little pride. He knew that Christopher would get back to him eventually. He also knew that whenever Christopher did, whatever Christopher was going to tell him was going to be huge. Evan knew that Christopher kept some secrets from him, but Evan always figured that he’d learn everything in due time. Evan wasn’t even sure if Christopher knew his own secrets. That was what made all of this so painful. Evan hadn’t been waiting for answers for three days. He’d been waiting for years.
Evan also knew about the bodies in the woods. They had to be connected to Christopher’s disappearance somehow. Stuff like that didn’t happen every day—not in their little shit pan of a town anyway. Despite everything, Evan couldn’t imagine Christopher doing something like that, at least not unless he had to, but Evan had no idea what Christopher was capable of if he were ever cornered. The thought of it scared Evan a little.
So Evan stood in front of his locker, lost in thought. He heard the droning sound of the bell in the clock over his head—the hum that preceded the actual bell. He’d been staring at his phone for five minutes, waiting for a message. “How long is this going to fucking take, Chris?” he muttered to himself. The bell rang. The other students began to flow into the hall. He watched them stream out of their classrooms, grinning and giggling. “Fuck it,” Evan said to himself and slipped the phone into his pocket. “It’s not like I’m going to be watching porn during history class.”
Seven
The buzz in the compound didn’t die. It only grew, like a balloon inflating to the verge of exploding. Then Max and Christopher arrived. Addy was sitting behind her desk when the two of them walked in. She was working with mapping programs, evaluating new locations to pick up people running from the War. She had options—Palm Beach, Miami, Orlando, even Tampa. She had heard that the close proximity to so many cities was one of the reasons that Reggie had decided to put the compound outside of Port St. Lucie. Still, she was having trouble concentrating. She was trying to ignore the excited, secretive whispers around her, but she was failing miserably.
When Max walked into the building with the stranger, the whispers stopped. The talking stopped. Everything stopped. The room became completely still and silent. Everything but Max and the stranger was put on Pause. Everyone stared at the stranger. Addy, still confused, stared at Max. Max caught her glance for a moment and smiled. Then he wordlessly escorted the stranger through the building towards Reggie’s office.
Addy had had enough. She needed to know what was happening. She got up from her desk and walked over to a woman who had named herself Angelina after some obscure Bob Dylan song. She was sweet, and though Addy wouldn’t say they were friends, Addy liked her well enough. “What’s going on?” Addy whispered to Angelina once Max and the stranger had walked past them. “Who is that?” she asked.
“That’s the Child,” Angelina said. Not even her whisper could cover up the excitement in her voice.
“The child?” Addy asked, confused. “He doesn’t look like a child to me,” she said, following the stranger with her eyes. He was young and not very tall, but she wouldn’t have called him a child. He looked like a man. He looked strong and fierce and his eyes glowed.
“Christopher,” Angelina said. “The Child with the parents.” Angelina’s words were little more than nonsense, but Addy finally understood. She could barely believe it. He was here. Max hadn’t been teasing her when he had told her that he was going on an important job. She wished she had known what was going on before they walked through the door. She would have watched Christopher more closely. She would have joined the others and stared at him unabashedly. Christopher. The Child with the parents. Addy would have killed ten men at that moment for the chance to talk to Max. Not only was Christopher real and alive but he was actually there. Addy had no idea what it all meant or what it all would mean. All she knew was that her life now felt larger and more important than it had felt only moments ago.
Maybe it was a good thing that Addy hadn’t known that the stranger that Max brought into the compound was the Child. If Addy had watched Christopher closely when he walked through the door, she wouldn’t have seen the person she had heard stories about since she herself was a child. Instead, she would have seen a confused and scared eighteen-year-old boy. She didn’t get a close look, though, so she didn’t see reality. She only saw the legend.
Eight
Christopher felt uncomfortable being marched through a room full of strangers. Hell, he would have been uncomfortable being marched through a room full of people he knew. He hated being looked at. He hated being watched. He’d spent his life trying to avoid being watched by people he couldn’t even see. Now Max was marching him past people who were standing right in front of him, staring at him. He had to believe that another route existed. He was sure that the building had a back door. He and Max could have come at a different time. He wondered if Max was doing this on purpose, if Max was trying to prove some sort of point. But what point could it be and who was he trying to prove it to? Christopher didn’t know and could
n’t figure it out. Max barely seemed to notice the oglers. Or at least, he didn’t seem to care about them. He made eye contact with only one person, the confused-looking woman in the corner with the light brown hair. Christopher had an urge to run from all of this, to cut back out the door they’d just walked through and never look back. He didn’t run, though. In the few days he’d known Max, he’d begun to trust him. He figured he had to trust somebody.
Christopher had slept for almost the entire twenty-six-hour drive from Montreal to this strange building hidden in the Florida swamps. He’d tried to catch up on the sleep that he’d lost over the two days after he killed the men in the woods. To Christopher, those moments in the darkness in those woods already seemed like an eternity ago. His memory of that night was dim and impersonal, like the memory of a movie he’d seen when he was a kid. This two-day emotional roller-coaster ride had him all off-kilter. He wasn’t ready when Max pulled the car up to the building, put it in park, and told Christopher that they were “here.” Christopher didn’t even know what he wasn’t ready for. And where the fuck was “here” anyway? Max sensed Christopher’s unease. In a lot of ways, Christopher was the same as all the other people Max had found and brought to this building to be cleaned and sent back out into the world. Max knew that the ways that Christopher was the same weren’t important. All that mattered was how Christopher was different. “It’s okay, Christopher,” Max assured him. “You’re safe here. The guy I’m going to introduce you to, he’s someone you’re going to want to meet.”
So Christopher followed Max into the compound and felt the eyes of all those people staring at him. Instead of meeting their gazes, Christopher put his head down and walked. No one made a sound. When they were a few steps into the hallway on the other side of the crowded room, Christopher asked Max in a whisper, “Is it always this quiet?”