by Tosca Lee
A few seconds later, I’m gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
* * *
All that day I waited. For him to appear at the children’s barrow or summon me to meet him at his car. Or his office itself. After all, it was abandoned. We’d be alone.
But no summons came. I went with Magnolia to the warehouse to check on the latest yields. When we returned, Magnus and his blue Prius were gone.
I must have looked out that office window fifty times throughout the afternoon—dreading its arrival even as I waited anxiously for the white van that would return my sister from Ames. I had to try to talk to her again.
But when it pulled in past the gate shortly after five, Jackie wasn’t among those who got out.
I hurried out after one of the women—a girl named Mallory two years older than me.
“Where’s Jaclyn?” I asked.
Her brows, so fair they barely existed, lifted in confusion. “Magnus picked her up in town.”
Magnus?
“What for?” I asked.
“He didn’t say,” she said, clearly perplexed by my question. Of course she was; Magnus didn’t need to explain himself to anyone, and no one would have asked.
Anxiety gnawed at my gut. Where had he taken her? Had my willingness to reengage him somehow tipped him off about my plan for her and . . .
Suddenly I was running for the children’s ward and tearing up the steps of the barrow.
“Truly!” I shouted, barging through the front door into the open front room . . . where all the children were sitting in a circle reciting lines from the Testament with Arabella. I searched their faces, the floor tilting beneath me.
“Winnie!” Truly said, waving from across the room where she sat between two other girls.
“Are you going to marry Magnus?” a girl to Arabella’s right asked. Another child tittered, covering her mouth with her hand.
“Well, you’ll just have to wait and find out, won’t you?” I said, before saying something about needing Truly to play with the daughter of a visiting family later this week, tugging on my earlobe, and leaving as she reached for her own.
Neither Magnus nor Jackie came to supper that night. And Enzo was nowhere to be seen.
I finally mustered the courage to seek out a Guardian.
“She’s with Magnus,” he said, barely looking at me. “Out of town.”
And though I pressed, he either didn’t know—or wouldn’t say—more.
I’d never known Jaclyn to accompany Magnus anywhere before. Why now? Had he seen us talking and taken her as insurance against the possibility of my escape?
Would she tell him?
I thought back to that call, to his demand for privacy. Who’d been on the other end of that conversation?
That night as I lay in bed, I heard the gate grind open from my cot in the Factory through the window cracked open near my bed. Slipping out from beneath my quilt, I moved toward the window. I could see the twin beams of the Prius swing through the yard as the car rounded the drive toward the barrow Jaclyn and Magnus shared.
They were back. She was back.
Tomorrow I’d learn where they’d gone and what, if anything, she’d said. I could convince her. I thought back to her warning. Clung to the hesitation in her eyes.
My arms had just started twitching with sleep when something startled me: a whisper near my ear. I started, scared—until I saw the features of the woman standing over me. Jaclyn.
I hurried out of bed, instantly alert. “What is it?” I said, noting the gas lantern in her hands, the coat over her shoulders as I pulled my skirt over my nightgown and threw my shawl around my shoulders. Slipped into my shoes. But she said nothing as she took me by the hand and led me out, down the path toward the storehouse.
“Where’ve you been?” I said. “Where’d you go?”
“Quiet,” she said. She sounded nervous as she pushed the door to the Quonset hut open, pulling me inside.
She set the lantern on a shelf near the entrance, illuminating the area where I’d found her two days ago, and pulled me toward her, her fingers cold in the late-night chill.
“You wanted to know where I was,” she said.
“I was worried!” I said. “When the van came back without you—”
She cut me off with a sharp gesture, her face pale in the lantern light, ghastly shadows beneath her eyes. “I’m going to talk,” she said. “And I want you to listen.”
“Okay,” I said slowly.
“I was with my husband in Des Moines, where he had meetings. What you don’t realize is that he has to work very hard to find new seeds for our vault, a thing that requires a great deal of time, not to mention investors.”
“But why take you?” I said, not understanding why we were even talking about this. We had plans to make.
“Because he wanted us to have some time together. To talk about you.”
“About me.” I gave a short, harsh laugh.
“And for me to have time away from my responsibilities to think. About the future. All of ours.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You mean yours, mine, and—”
“Yours, mine, and the Enclave’s,” she says.
“Jackie! There isn’t any—”
“Not another word!” she said, fingers digging into my arm. And then, more quietly: “There’s far more at stake than your concerns for yourself. It’s true that I’ve had questions. I’ve been proud . . . even jealous. But now I see that this is for the best.”
“This . . . being . . . ?” There was a slow sinking in my gut.
“Your marriage to Magnus.”
“How can you say that?”
“He needs sons to carry on his work in the coming age. To lead new nations. I haven’t been able to give him another child since Truly was born.”
“You’re only twenty-seven!” But what I wanted to say was that Magnus could get them with someone else—after we were gone. It wouldn’t be our problem anymore.
I took in the set of her jaw. The tight line of her mouth. And then I realized: he didn’t take her with him just to give her time to think but to convince her he was right.
Because that’s what Magnus did.
“Jackie,” I said, taking her by the arms, something desperate in my voice.
“It’s for the best,” she said. “I wanted you to hear me say it before you talk to him.”
I opened my mouth to say I didn’t want to talk to him. I wouldn’t. That I would do whatever it took to prove to her he wasn’t what she believed.
Just then something moved in the shadows and I instinctively pushed Jackie back as a figure stepped into the light of the lantern.
Magnus.
I stared at him as Jackie moved past me to stand at his side. He laid a hand on her shoulder. “You see,” he said. “Your fears about your sister are unfounded. In a few days, we’ll all be family.”
She gave me a last embrace before they returned to their barrow. And I felt her hand slip into my pocket.
Alone in a stall of the Factory bathroom ten minutes later, I withdrew the folded slip of paper. The message was only two words, penned in Jackie’s hand:
Trust me.
My engagement was announced at next morning’s service.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
* * *
I dream of Jackie. Chased by an unmarked car. Getting run off the road. Careening from a bridge. Holing up in some shack and freezing to death only to be found days, weeks, or months from now, ravaged and twisted with decay and the telltale signs of her mad last hours.
I dream I die, but when I get to that Other Place, Jackie and Mom aren’t there.
I sit up with a start, heart racing. Feel as though I’m suffocating in the mask.
Chase glances over at me, his own mask gone. “When you said you have water and food, you failed to mention that you snore,” he says pointedly.
“What? I do not!”
He grins. He’s got dimples. “I’m just te
asing.”
I look away.
The sky, stark blue this morning, has turned sullen gray. I search out the clock on the dash. One twenty-nine. Vivaldi’s gone, the news back in its stead, turned low. Then I notice we’re off the interstate on some two-lane county highway.
“Where are you going? Where are we?” I demand, pushing up straighter, glancing behind us.
“Relax,” he says. “We’re south of Omaha. Had to avoid the city. Sounds like it’s a mess.” He rubs his hand over his face with a faint scratch of whiskers. “I would not want to be an ambulance driver in any city right now, I can tell you that.”
“Has that car been back there for a while?” I say, gesturing.
He frowns. “I think I turned in front of it. Why?”
“Paranoid, I guess.”
“That isn’t all bad. Do you trust her neighbors?”
“Whose?”
“Your mom’s.”
“Oh. They’re nice. Though I guess you never really know what people are like. Why?”
“Anyone not already crazy from the disease is going to get mental really fast when they run out of food and water. Especially if they think you have some. And a lot of idiots are going to burn their own houses down trying to stay warm. Which means they’ll be looking for a new place to stay.”
“What are you, some kind of survival guy or something?”
“Or something.”
“I forgot to ask where you’re from.”
“Cleveland, this time.”
“ ‘This time’?”
“I move around.”
“What do you do?”
“Whatever I want,” he says with a slight smile.
“Maybe you shouldn’t say that to women riding with you.”
“Sorry. I fought for a while after I left the service.”
“Fought.” Service.
“You know. Mixed martial arts?”
“Oh, yeah.” No, I don’t know.
“Traveled for a while,” he says, sighing. “Switched to training for a while.”
“Do you actually live anywhere?”
He looks over at me. “Do you?”
“Naperville. I told you. Where I’m in school at—”
“Where you loaded a single bag full of clothes into a two-year-old SUV your aunt loaned you not knowing when you’d be back. By the way, North Central’s on a trimester system. Buddy of mine went there.”
“What?”
“You’re not missing out on the rest of the semester because they don’t have semesters.” He glances sidelong at me. “Just a tip for next time.”
“It’s really none of your business.”
“At least that part’s true,” he says.
We ride past country homes and a small gas station. The lights are off, the place deserted. Meanwhile, the first snowflakes of winter have begun to fall, fat and sloppy against the windshield.
• • •
“THIS LOOKS LIKE it could get ugly,” he says, glancing through the windshield up at the sky. The snow’s been coming down progressively harder for the last half hour. And though I know what Chase means, there’s nothing ugly about it. It looks like a starfield from the old Star Wars movies Jackie used to love. Which makes it both more beautiful and more devastating at once.
“Can you pull up any weather info?” he asks, unlocking his phone where it’s plugged into the dash.
I take it from him and for a minute I wonder what kind of music and photos he has on it. The places he’s been.
After a long pause, the weather app loads.
“Snow through the night,” I say. I turn and dig around in the back, offer Chase a protein bar.
“Thanks,” he says, but sets it on the console, opening the water instead.
“When did you leave Cleveland?” I ask.
“Couple hours before the electricity went out,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “Figured it was coming.”
“Want me to drive so you can sleep awhile?”
I say this having never driven in snow. But also because it’s unnerving not being in control. I’m angry at myself for having fallen asleep earlier, his comment that he could be a serial killer still ringing in my head.
“I’m fine.”
Chase pulls off the highway.
“What are we doing?” I say.
“Steering clear of Lincoln, crazy people, and idiots who can’t drive in snow, hopefully,” he says grimly.
All I know is we’re losing time and could’ve been halfway across the state on a normal day by now.
But on a normal day, I’d have no reason to hightail it to Colorado, either. At least the car behind us is gone.
He turns onto a county road. Out here the farmland looks a lot—too much—like that near the Enclave. Silent. Remote. For a minute I entertain the idea that Chase is indeed a serial killer—or even just a one-off killer. And I remember Julie’s pepper spray is buried in my bag.
Earlier today, blazing through Iowa, I had briefly entertained the idea that maybe God had meant for us to be at the Enclave. Not because Magnus was right or even for the sake of my soul but to get these samples to Ashley today.
In which case I wonder why God couldn’t keep the electricity on. Or the weather warmer.
Or, barring that, a grill inside a pickup.
A few minutes later, I realize we’ve slowed, are coming to a stop. “What are you doing?” I say, heart thumping against my ribs. But Chase is squinting through the snow at something on the road.
“Hold on,” he says, grabbing the protein bar and getting out.
I watch as he walks about twenty feet down the road and stops. A second later, he crouches down. Just as I’m eyeing the driver’s seat, the key fob dangling from the ignition, caught between sliding over and throwing the Jeep into gear and getting out to see what’s going on, he stands up and comes back carrying something beneath his jacket.
He gets back into the Jeep, snow on his hair and lashes. And there, peeking out from his jacket and shivering against him, is a little white-and-brown-splotched dog.
The puppy whines as Chase lifts him up in the warm air.
“He’s a boy.” He glances at me. “Hope you aren’t allergic.”
“To boys?”
He sets the puppy on the console, but it climbs back to Chase’s lap on unsteady feet and peers out the window. “I think this one was waiting for someone who isn’t coming back. Came right toward the car to see if he recognized us. See how he keeps looking?”
But at that moment I can’t. I can’t look. The mere thought threatens to break something thin and raw inside me.
“Probably going to be a lot of this in days to come, hate to say. Poor little hungry guy ate my lunch,” he says, rubbing the dog’s floppy ears. “Hey, buddy.”
Chase buckles up and puts the car in gear, left arm curled around the dog that drops, in the space of a mile, into an exhausted sleep curled in his lap.
We go a few more miles before the snow is so thick we can barely see the section stretching in front of us. I glance at the speedometer: thirty-five miles an hour. Try to quell the panic rising up inside me. Every mile feels like torture; I’d hoped to be halfway across the state by now.
Thirty miles an hour. Twenty-five.
“You look on that side, I’ll look on this one,” Chase says.
“What are we looking for?”
“Somewhere to wait this out.”
A few minutes later, he turns off into a field toward an open weathered wooden corncrib and drives in.
The second he turns the car off, I can hear the wind howling through the boards, feel it shudder in gusts against the Jeep.
He gets out, dog in one arm, and opens the back.
I get out, stretch stiff legs with each step as I move to the opening to gaze out at the landscape. Visibility’s getting worse. The puppy runs out into the snow just far enough to do its thing and retreats back at a whistle from Chase. I didn’t want to stop but if we have to, it�
��s better that we’re hidden.
I wonder where my sister is, where she went after she left Julie’s house. If it’s true that she was followed. If she’s somewhere safe . . . or knows where she is at all.
Chase has the back of the Jeep open, is rummaging around in the front, the puppy lapping at a Thermos lid of water near his feet. I’m just coming back to get my sleeping bag when he steps back from the driver’s side, a gun in his hand.
I go very still, breath frozen in my throat.
Before today, I’d seen exactly one gun in my life, and it was wielded by a man threatening to kill my mother.
The memories flash through my mind all at once: Dad, drunk. Mom, arms out, telling us to go to our room and lock the door. Mom, crying in the living room. Jackie and I hiding in the closet, our breath too loud. Magnus preached on family curses once. Is it ours—Mom’s, Jackie’s, mine—to fall victim to the men around us?
“Hey,” Chase says. “Wynter, it’s okay.”
I back up a step and he lifts his hands.
“It’s all right. This is for protection,” he says, glancing up at it.
That’s why Dad claimed he had a gun, too.
I spin toward the open end of the barn, stare wildly out at the storm. Back at the samples in the Jeep.
“Look, I’m putting it away.” He reaches on top of the Jeep for a black case. Opens it and sets the gun inside. He latches the dark plastic box. “See?”
“It stays in back,” I say, voice unsteady.
“It’s not a lot of help back there . . .”
“We’re in the middle of a snowstorm. Who’s going to find us?”
“I’ll make you a deal. It stays up front. On your side. Okay? Trouble comes, you hand it to me. Fast.”
Magnus always taught that a gun sends two people to Hell—the one getting shot and the one doing the shooting.
Finally I nod.
I retrieve my sleeping bag and get back in front. Climb backward onto the seat to fumble through the emergency kit for a couple mylar blankets.
A few minutes later, I’m cocooned in my sleeping bag beneath a mylar sheet, my stupid hat on.
Chase turns the engine on long enough to warm up the inside as we eat pumpkin bread and string cheese from Julie’s house, half of which he feeds to the dog curled in his lap before turning the engine off. Within seconds, I can feel the cold seeping in from the edges of the windshield, the window beside me. He pulls his sleeping bag over his shoulder and, a few minutes later, reaches back for the blanket from Julie’s house, settling it over all three of us.