by Erin Lorence
I nodded, looped my message back around my wrist, and tied the ends.
The uneasiness inside me grew, a noxious weed with thorns that pricked.
I undid the knot, unraveled the plastic, and squinted at the illegible word after Black. Black what? The scribbled word seemed to begin with a B, and it would be the name of a place, somewhere government people would go.
Black Boulder? No. The looped-and-lined scrawl was too short for boulder. Black...Bat? Was there a town somewhere named Black Bat?
Trinity hunched forward to read the message for the third time. Again, I tapped the unknown word. Her arm moved against mine in a shrug. No clue.
Even if I could decipher the word and figure out where the ransoming event would take place, what could I do to prevent it? I’d be busy in California—Trinidad—discovering the facility or camp where captured Christians were held. And after I succeeded and accompanied my family back to Ochoco, I’d return to Sisters to carry out my job of being Sent and begin my serious hunt for Wolfe. Because I would find him. Even if Lobo interrupted with a brief trip to a Louisiana swamp.
Right. I’d stop obsessing about a stranger’s unrealistic scheme to pick a fight that would lead to the Reclaim.
And I also wouldn’t worry about details of how I’d accomplish the upcoming rescue in California. God had been faithful so far in my journey. In all my journeys. Why doubt Him now? He’d show me my way.
I retied my message and mashed my eyes shut. No doubt, my uneasiness wasn’t from the message at all. It came from riding on a pile of shifting gravel in a jolting train car. I’d eaten a stomachful of nuts from Chaff’s pack and shared his water bottle with Trinity while he hibernated, but when had I last slept? Two days ago? More?
I slid down deeper into the dusty gravel that still held some of the sun’s warmth. I’d sleep until we reached California. If Trinidad was an early stop in that state, I might not even freeze to death.
Trinidad.
My eyes flew open. Odd. Odd that the stuttering Christian at Rahab’s Roof had been so quick and sure with his answer that the missing Christians were being held in Trinidad. If he knew and shared his information so quickly, then other Christians must know the location, too.
Had any rescue attempts been made? Or had knowledgeable believers given up hope because attempts would be too dangerous? Were my cousin and I flying down these rails into a situation that we wouldn’t be able to escape?
Had I—we—made a mistake?
I nudged Trinity awake and gestured to the train car. “Mistake?”
“What?”
“Forget it.” I leaned back and covered my face with my pack. It was too late for a conversation of whether or not we should be going to California—of whether Trinity had paused to ask God when I hadn’t. We’d both decided to go along with Chaff’s suggestion we travel this route to Trinidad. No turning back.
Even though Chaff had lied. Was it a coincidence that Chaff lived in the same town where our family was being held? No way.
I yawned. No doubt he had missing family members, too. He’d gone up to Rahab’s Roof, learned that Christians were being held in Trinidad, and decided to head there for the same reason we did—to scout around and figure out a way to help. He was just too chicken to tell us the truth.
Then how had he known about this train?
I shifted.
God, I’m exhausted. I’m going to sleep now. I’ll wait for You to tell me what to do—
Turn back north.
Hooonk. Honk, hooonk.
I lay rigid. My exhaled air, trapped under my pack, created a warmth on my cheeks. Had I heard right? Or had the train’s simultaneous blast of horn screwed up my listening?
Turn back and go north? How? Why didn’t God want me to continue on to where my family was trapped?
Did He expect me to leap up this instant, grab Trinity’s hand, and jump off this moving train into unknown territory? Then what? Walk the thousand miles back?
I strained my ears. There was the metallic roar of wheels against track. The jostling clang of train cars bumping along. Nothing else.
With clenched fists and burning cheeks, I stayed put...and let the train carry me farther south.
21
When I shifted the pack from my damp face, a cloudless morning stretched motionless above. An unmoving sky? No roaring or jostling below me? The train had stopped.
As a bird twittered, I began to sit up, but Trinity rolled and pinned me against the gravel. She smashed a finger to her lips.
Yard bull, she mouthed.
I froze. When we’d been under the steel bridge in Portland, Chaff had warned us about trainyard bulls—railroad cops. Pacing back and forth, he’d flailed his hands in the air to emphasize his words. “Anytime the train halts, a yard bull hunts. When the train doesn’t move, you don’t either. Don’t even breathe. Stay hidden until the train gets going again at full speed. And if a bull catches you...” He’d gulped. “Enjoy Heaven.”
Yard bulls were “the most violent cops in the world.” They were “cops who’d maim or mangle any human they discovered hitching a ride on a train.” And they didn’t attack only Christians but godless stowaways, too.
Kids...elderly strays. Any trespassing human could become a victim. Yard bulls lived to spill blood and torture. It was their own form of twisted religion.
I craned up to see the other side of the gravel mound where Chaff slept. If a yard bull prowled below, would the guy spaz out like he had underneath Rahab’s Roof and get himself caught? If he did, Trinity and I’d need to create some space between ourselves and him.
His area—the place where I’d spent yesterday tossing rocks at his head—was an empty hollow. Chaff was gone.
With a lurch, the train began to creep along its track. After an endless minute of staying still, I crawled, careful not to sink too far in the loose debris, over to the body-sized, shallow crater where he’d slept. New divots made by his long feet in the gravel led from the hollow to the top of the ladder.
Trinity crouched beside me and mimed chattering teeth. She pointed at the ladder then at the neighboring boxcar. Chaff had gotten cold and found a more protected hiding spot inside that car? We were all cold. But would hunkering inside a gloomy boxcar make so much difference? Probably not. More likely the antisocial guy relocated to avoid us.
I curled up in his abandoned hollow, jostling along with the train while unfamiliar scenes, such as stretches of roads in dying grass, flew by. A glint of water at the western horizon. Mammoth evergreens that touched the sky. Clusters of low, sad buildings—one with a picture of an unrealistic bear eating a sandwich that claimed to be a California eatery. Then more stunted pines.
I twisted the yellow strip in a circle around my wrist. I was unable to obey God. Unable to believe anything I did would help my family. I wasn’t supposed to be here...but I was here anyway.
After a long while my skin began to sting and turn pink. I repositioned so that my own shadow could offer protection from the sun and wind. Then my jaw fell open.
Trinity poised upright on the top of the gravel mound with her arms out, as if in flight. She shook back her blonde head with its long braid and turned her sun-stained face up to the blue sky. She laughed, a joyful sound I couldn’t hear, and then opened her eyes.
“C’mon up,” she mouthed at me. And laughed again.
I refaced the evergreens. A few hundred more bushes flashed by. Then with stiff, slow movements, I uncurled and pushed myself to my feet. With a sigh, I slogged up the gravel pile. Now what?
My cousin grabbed my hand, jerking my arm out straight like hers. She let go and continued to pretend to fly.
Dumb. This is so dumb. But I copied my cousin—feet apart, arms raised, and chin tilted to the clear sky.
Upright like this, the strong wind hit me full force. It tugged my hair at it roots. It pierced through my clothes and rushed to numb my skin, erasing my aches.
My feet sank into the mountain of pe
bbles, so I shifted and raised onto my toes.
Incredible. Now I was flying. Flying over the earth, my fears blown away. No failures. No heartache. Just speed and wind and sunshine.
Freedom.
A gunshot rang out, and I toppled over.
22
No pain ripped through me. So, I hadn’t been shot, only startled into extreme clumsiness. I skittered low to the train’s open side.
A thick-faced man in a black uniform darted around a metal container in the tall grass below. Weapon in hand, he charged at our train car. It had entered a manmade clearing and slowed, arriving where other boxcars sat in short, unmoving lines. Chaff had described this as a trainyard.
I ducked low to keep out of another bullet’s path. My breath came in gasps.
Trinity. Be OK.
Her body reappeared over the hump of gravel, crawling closer to the opposite side of the car. Apparently uninjured since her movements were quick and strong.
Danger.
I floundered through gravel to join my cousin. My knees and hands sank down in my hurried flight. The pebbles slowed me as I fought against their quicksand-like shifting.
At last I reached the car’s opposite orange edge and threw my legs over the top—no ladder on this side. Trinity balanced beside me, impatient. Her braid flicked back and forth as she watched for a yard bull.
The pieces of scattered trash and weeds below continued to slide by. No time to wait and find out if the train would stop. Side by side, we eased off our perch, dangled by our hands from the lip...then let go.
“Uhh!” I landed facedown, my stomach smacking the rocks so hard I couldn’t breathe. The train’s wheels screeched by within spitting distance.
“Dove! Get up!”
Another shot exploded nearby.
Hoooonk. Honk.
I dragged in a wheezy half-breath and crawled away from the shooter and the train’s noise. Everything ached—my ribs, my stomach, the heels of my hands, my cheekbone...
Trinity reeled before me. She reached for my waist. Oozing scratches trailed down her palm. “Get up, Dove. You can do it. You’re strong.”
“Freeze, trespassers!” Someone bellowed. “You’re mine. Do you hear me? You’re mine.”
With Trinity’s help, I gained my feet and limped for a wooden fence ahead.
“Through there.” She pointed at a ragged break in the boards where a rusted-out container pressed.
I chanced a look back. The yard bull hadn’t climbed the train. He was still trapped on the other side of the tracks while the cars inched by. His red face flickered in the brief spaces between cars. No doubt as soon as the train stopped, he’d dart through one of those spaces, and after that, he would be on us faster than a coyote on a pair of wounded jackrabbits.
My lungs moved air in and out now with less effort. I quit clinging to Trinity. Together we tugged at the broken, rotten board until it gave way.
Dried weeds and bushes stretched on the fence’s other side—no pieces of train or lines of track. I sucked in, wriggled behind the rusted container, and slipped through. Trinity copied, and we began to run.
The sound of wood splintered, as if someone had ripped the fence board clear off its post.
“Not good...not good.”
Trinity, three strides ahead, glanced back and stumble-stopped. “The spineless...I can’t believe it. He made it out, too!”
Chaff loped past us and headed for the scraggly bushes. His sob drifted back. “You girls—conspicuous—blew it.”
~*~
I straightened up from the lonely water spigot sticking upright in the baked ground and swiped my dripping face with my shirt. The small clearing—no doubt, once a green wilderness—now existed as a dried-up wasteland. It was empty except for a lone tree cluster, scattered trash, and a rough wooden structure to sit.
“You think the yard bull is hunting for us?”
Chaff sighed. “Does a watchdog leave its post?”
Trinity raised her brow and shook her head. “No clue, Chaff.”
“No. It does not. So, no thanks to you two, we are for the moment...safe. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my trail mix disappeared from my pack. And I’m hungry.” He drifted toward a waist-high metallic can where flies circled.
I flopped down onto the weathered bench that supported an uneven tabletop. A cluster of drooping alders provided shade.
My cousin reclined in the shade on the table’s other side. “I can hear it.”
I raised my head. “The angry bull guy?”
“No. The ocean. Just like I always dreamed it would sound. But better. I can smell the...seaweed maybe? Or is it brine?”
My nose wrinkled. That’s not what I smelled.
An armful of spoiled food thudded onto the tabletop. Chaff rubbed his hands together. “Score. I claim the apple aaand...the bagel.” He plucked those two items up and shoved the fruit into his ragged pack.
I turned my face away while he continued to rummage. “Chaff, how do we find a train going north?”
His bustling broke off. “What? Why? We’re a couple miles away from Trinidad, which is south.”
“I made a mistake. Trinity and I coming here was a mistake.”
“But Dove—”
“No, Trinity, listen. God told me. And now He’s provided us with water and food—OK, water—so we can begin our return trip north. And I feel it. Where we are...it’s not right.”
I braced myself for hundreds of questions. Questions my traveling partners in the past—Melody and Jessica—would have asked.
“OK, Dove. Fine. We’ll head back north.”
I sat up and waited. Still, my cousin didn’t accuse me of wasting time when I led us hundreds or thousands of miles too far south. She continued to lay as if sleeping or listening to a distant roar with her arm covering her eyes.
Chaff rotated the stale bagel around and around in his palm. “You’re going away?”
I shouldered my pack. “You say this is your home territory, right? And you’ve ridden north in the past to get to Oregon’s Council? If that’s true, where do we catch a northbound train?” I eyed him. Confession time.
He opened his sack and swept the remaining items on the tabletop inside. “Fine. I’ll show you. But sound carries, so keep your mouths tight shut. And follow me.”
~*~
The Pacific Ocean rolled and frothed onto the rocky shore with a noise like I’d never heard—not bees or cars or anything. It was the sound of a billion rocks being mauled by a huge, forever-writhing body of water. The water’s vastness flowed out to the horizon where a couple of white, winged specks—seagulls?—wheeled.
I crossed my arms, which were goose bumped despite the warm breeze. “I don’t see any train tracks. Where’s the train?”
Chaff bobbed his neck in Trinity’s direction and raised his voice for the first time in hours above a whisper. “Figured she’d want to see the ocean first. Talked about it enough.”
He cupped his hands to his mouth and uttered a shrill seagull cry. A far-off bird echoed.
I scanned our leafy surroundings, a lush wilderness of ferns and chaparral that was clueless as to the rest of the nation’s drought. Somewhere beyond the bluff I balanced upon—but close by—had to be the place my mom, aunt, uncle, and grandpa were being held.
But where? No buildings big enough to contain hundreds of Christians existed between me and any horizon. There were no buildings or shelters anywhere, for that manner. Where was the town? Trinidad?
Not that it mattered since I wasn’t supposed to search.
I bit my lip to keep from shouting for my mom. Because what if she was down there? Waiting for someone—for me—to help her?
A sudden wall of pressure nudged me back the way I’d come...away from the edge of the bluff. I tugged Trinity’s pack. “Let’s go. This isn’t right.”
But she was scrambling down through the tangled shrubs after Chaff. Both headed to the dark rocks below that made up the beach.
&nb
sp; “I’ve got to touch the waves, Dove. Just once. I know you don’t understand but...”
I hesitated. Then my feet shuffled down the trail that wound between rocks. The green fell away until only quarry-gray surrounded me.
I stopped. I didn’t need the whisper from Heaven to know. I shouldn’t be here.
“Trinity, stop. Now. We have to turn—”
My lips froze and my hand rose to shield my eyes before dropping to clutch my chest.
A familiar figure waded where the breakers crashed against the lumpy beach. With my eyes glued to it, I rammed against Chaff, regained my balance, then barreled past Trinity.
“Wait, Dove—”
I lost the path and took a more direct route down to where he waited. His back was to me. The waves buffeted around his bright shoes and pantlegs.
I grabbed Wolfe’s bare elbow, yanking him around. Tape covered his mouth. My fingers flew up and ripped the gray adhesive square off.
“Wolfe. Why—”
“Because I’m bait. Go!”
23
Wolfe shoved me away with bound hands. Then he slumped and held his palms out. Defeated. “Never mind.”
The empty strip of beach became crowded with movement. Yet I couldn’t unstick my gaze from Wolfe’s to discover who else was here.
Reed Bender’s voice cut through the rush and roll of the surf. “Well done. Stone? Take control of your Heathen prisoner.”
The ashen-haired giant, whose image I pushed from my mind whenever it surfaced, loomed before me. Stone’s light irises flickered over me, avoiding my face, and lit on Wolfe. He gestured with the sharp stick he held like a spear. Come away.
His prisoner stepped closer to me. Below the tape-shackled wrists, both hands hunted for mine.
I grasped one and glared up at the Bender brother. “You still have your arm, Stone. Is it all healed? No doubt you thanked Wolfe for saving it by hauling you across the country last spring so you could get your mom’s medicine?”