Ammon started laughing, shrill and unhinged, then shook the man’s head in rage. “Do you believe that I will kill you!”
“Yes, sir, I know you will.”
“Go, then!” Ammon cried, throwing the man across the ground. “Get out of here before I kill you and bury you underneath these bloody skies!”
Luke also released his grip on the man that he was holding, then kicked him with his knee.
Both men stumbled, glanced toward the boys, their eyes wild with fear, then turned and ran.
* * *
Sara hurried over to Ammon. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice worried, almost pleading.
Ammon stared at the spot where the strangers had disappeared. He didn’t move, but kept on staring. Luke moved slowly to his side. “That was like, you know, way convincing,” he said.
Ammon shook his head. “I was so scared,” he answered slowly.
“You didn’t sound scared, you sounded crazy. Really crazy, man. I didn’t know whether I should laugh or run. You almost had me convinced.”
“I was scared,” Ammon repeated. He seemed to be talking to himself.
Luke chuckled just a little. “You sounded like you were going to rip that poor guy’s heart out and cook it up for dinner. A regular Hannibal thing going there.”
Ammon moved away. “I didn’t think I could sound like that,” he said. He was clearly shaken up.
Luke reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, dude,” he tried to comfort.
Ammon didn’t answer. “I’m not like that,” he muttered as if trying to convince himself.
“It wasn’t real, Ammon. Remember, it was part of the plan. We knew it wasn’t going to be enough to just stop them. We had to scare them.” He stopped and looked at Mary, her bright eyes shining in the moonlight. “She was right,” he nodded to her. “It was a smart thing to do. They would have stuck around. They’d have come back. We had to really scare them so we didn’t have to worry about them again.”
“All I did was scare myself,” Ammon said.
“Yeah, but that’s okay.” Luke watched him a moment, then turned to his mother, walked toward her, and put his arms around her shoulders, pulling her close and not letting go. “Are you okay?” he asked, his voice choking.
“I’m fine, son.” She rested her head on Luke’s shoulder.
He pushed her back, inspecting her face. A trickle of blood illuminated in the moonlight, dark and thin. “Are you okay!” he repeated.
“Really. I’m okay. A little bruise. Nothing major.”
Ammon turned from the darkness and walked toward his mom. Standing in front of her, he looked into her eyes. “That will never happen to you again,” he promised, his voice filled with emotion. “I swear to you, Mom, I’ll never let anything like that ever happen again.” He put his arms around her, the three of them holding onto each other in the night.
* * *
Mary cleared her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice soft, afraid of intruding. “I’m a little worried about my baby girl.” She nodded toward her car.
“Right, right,” Luke said breaking away from the others. Bending, he started picking up their scattered belongings. “Let’s get this mess picked up. Don’t worry about organizing it, we’ll take care of all that in the morning.”
Ammon seemed to think, then ran to the car, yanked open the front door, and knelt beside the seat. Reaching under, he felt it. The gun was still there.
Sad, Sara thought as she watched him. It wasn’t the money or food that he was worried about, it was the gun.
Had it come to that already?
No, she shook her head. It wouldn’t come to that. Not for them. She and her family would never live that way.
Ammon stood and walked toward them.
“Okay, listen,” Luke said, “we’ll get this picked up, but that’s really all we can do tonight. We wait until morning, then see what’s going on. Ammon, you and Mom stay here. Sleep in the car. You keep the sleeping bags. Mrs. Dupree and I will sleep in her car. We’ll take some blankets for us and Shelly Beth—”
“Kelly Beth,” Sara corrected.
“Sorry, Kelly Beth. I’ll stay with her and Mrs. Dupree tonight.”
The group was silent for a moment.
“Okay,” Ammon said.
* * *
Morning came. Low rain clouds had gathered again, hanging in the western sky, and a cold wind blew down from the north, sweeping across Canada and Lake Michigan, picking up a dank, fishy smell.
Ammon awoke. The night before, he had unzipped one of the sleeping bags and pulled it around him, then slept in the front seat. Sara had slept in the backseat but was already up. When Ammon didn’t see her, he climbed out of the car. Even the gray, misty morning was welcome after such a dark night. He glanced behind him, up toward the freeway, then down the off-ramp toward Mary Dupree’s car, which was closer than
it had seemed the night before. Funny, he thought, how distances seemed so much greater in the dark. Sara and Mary were standing close together outside the black woman’s car. To his left was a thick cluster of trees; to his right, the four-lane freeway was crammed with stalled cars. He could see a couple of dozen people huddled around several cars and, half a mile east of the off-ramp, he could make out the parking lot and buildings of the service stations they had been aiming for last night. Beyond the trees were fields, brown and ready for fall digging. He was surprised at how rural the scenery around him was, being so close to Chicago.
He considered, then stretched. Walking around the Honda, he checked the two broken windows, grabbed a bottled water from the backseat and walked toward his mom.
“Good morning, all,” he said.
Sara turned toward him. Ammon looked at her face, seeing the bruise and narrow cut across her lip. His anger started boiling and he had to look away. “You sleep okay, Mom?” he asked.
“Pretty well, Ammon. It was colder than I thought it would be.”
Ammon nodded at the sky. “The temperature has dropped quite a lot.” He turned to Mary. “How are you, Mrs. Dupree?”
“I’m fine, honey, fine.”
He glanced to her car. His brother wasn’t there. “Where’s Lukester?”
Sara nodded toward a cluster of trees to her right, a hundred feet or so beyond the road. “There was a man back there, in the trees. He was on an old four-wheeler. Luke thought he was a local. He went to talk to him.”
Ammon moved his eyes to where she was pointing. Luke was just emerging from behind the trees. They waited, watching him walk toward them.
“Anything?” Ammon asked.
Luke shook his head. “There was a guy back there on a four-wheeler. He rode away before I could talk to him.”
“A four-wheeler. It was running? Are you sure?” Ammon asked skeptically.
“Yeah. It was old and pretty beat-up, but it was working. Now, why is that?”
Ammon thought. “Anything built before electronic ignition and all the gee-whiz computers that control everything now, I think will work. You might have to replace some spark plugs or ignition wiring, but that’s pretty easy to do.”
Sara moved back and leaned against the vehicle. “We tried Mary’s car again,” she said, as if offering something important. “It isn’t working still.”
Ammon nodded, not surprised.
Mary walked over and stared through the back window at her little girl, then turned toward them. “Sir,” she said to Ammon. “Please, I’ve got to get my little girl home. She needs her medicines—if nothing else, her pain medications.”
Ammon walked toward her and leaned down, looking through the back window of the car. The little girl was still asleep. Small and thin, she looked to be eight or nine years old, but it was hard to tell, she was so slender. Her face was thin and dainty . . . no, that wasn’t right . . . her face was thin and fragile. He watched her sleep and thought what a beautiful little girl she was.
“Did she wake up last night?” he
asked Mary.
“A couple times. She sleeps all the time now, but never for more than three or four hours at a time.”
“Did you—you know—tell her anything?”
Mary shook her head. “I told her we were having car trouble.”
Luke came forward and stood next to them, stealing a glance toward Kelly Beth.
“It worried her,” Mary concluded. “She worries way too much for a little girl. She’s got a new sister back in Chicago that she’s worried about now. She is terribly concerned about leaving her alone.”
A gust of wind blew and the trees off in the distance began to sway, creating a muted whisper, a smooth and lonely sound.
“This other daughter, why is it that she is a newcomer to Chicago?” Sara wondered.
Mary hesitated. How much should she explain? How would these people feel about it? She just didn’t know. “She’s not really my daughter,” she started.
They waited patiently.
“She’s an orphan from a refugee camp in southern Iraq. She’s Iranian, not Iraqi, though. She had no family, no one, really. She’d been bought . . .” Mary hesitated. “There are people who buy and sell young women, I’m sure you know what I mean. There’s an organization in London that works to intercept and save them. My daughter, her name is Azadeh, had been bought and paid for and taken out of the refugee camp. I don’t know if she knows or understands this, but she was on her way to a very bad situation, a very bad place. I don’t know the entire story, but someone, apparently a couple of U.S. soldiers, stepped in and saved her.”
“No kidding,” Luke answered. “Some U.S. soldiers found her and saved her?”
Mary shrugged. “I don’t know the whole story, but yes, apparently.”
“What studs,” Luke smiled. “Good ol’ U.S. soldiers. Gotta love ’em, man.”
Sara watched, then interjected. “We have a son in the army,” she explained. “My husband is in . . . used to be in the air force.”
Mary listened, pulling her shirt collar up around her neck. “I like the army,” she said. “Lots of my people, most of my neighbors, think it’s a terrible thing to do. I never felt that way. I know what it’s about. Good people. Unselfish people. If you’ve got a son in the army, you should be proud.”
“Thank you,” Sara said.
“Anyway,” Mary continued, “the London organization worked to place Azadeh somewhere in the West. I agreed to take her. It took months and lots of money to get her here to the States. She got here just a few days ago.
“But that’s not the main reason I need to get home. The biggest reason is Kelly Beth. All of her medicines, her painkillers, her vitamins, everything is back there.”
The other three were quiet. “How far is it to your house?” Luke asked.
Mary nodded to the north. “It’s surprisingly close. Straight up Interstate 65. That takes you almost to the lake. A couple miles before that, you come to Gary and take 90 west. It’s only about four miles from there.”
“So, how far, do you think?” Ammon asked.
“I don’t know—when you’re driving you don’t pay that much attention, you know what I mean. I could drive it in half an hour, twenty minutes if I don’t hit traffic.”
Luke reached down, picked a piece of grass from beside the road, and stuck it in his mouth. “Maybe twenty miles?” he asked.
“That sounds about right,” Mary answered.
“How far is that?” Sara asked. “I mean, could we walk it? How long would it take us? A few hours? A week? A couple of days?”
Ammon smiled at his mom. When it came to such things, she was totally clueless. “I don’t know, Mom, maybe a couple of days,” he said.
“It’s really not that far,” Mary interjected hopefully.
“So what do we do, then?” Luke asked.
Ammon stared at his mother, then turned to the others. “We walk,” he said to Luke.
“That’s a long way, don’t you think?”
“I guess we could stay here and spend the winter.”
Luke looked away, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean that, not the way it sounded.”
Mary put a hand on Luke’s arm. “What about my baby?” she asked, a terrified strain on her face. “We can’t leave
her . . .”
“We’ll carry her,” Luke answered.
“You’ll carry her?”
“Yeah, we’ll carry her, of course.”
“You will do that? You would do that?”
“Of course,” Luke answered, smiling at Mary. “What did you think we’d do?”
Mary hesitated. “Truthfully?” she said. “I thought you’d leave me.”
Sara shook her head. “Did you hear what I said last night?”
Mary kept her head down.
“We meant it, Mary. You’ve got to start trusting us. We’re simply not going to leave you out here by yourself.”
“Isn’t there a wheelchair in the back of the car?” Ammon said.
“Yes,” Mary nodded.
“No problem, then,” he said.
Luke glanced toward their car. “I don’t know how we’re going to carry everything,” he wondered. “All the food and water, our clothes, the sleeping bags and camping gear?” He shot a secretive look toward Sara, thinking of the gold and other valuables hidden throughout the car.
Ammon turned and rubbed his hands through his hair. “I was wondering the same thing,” he said with worry.
“I’m strong,” Mary shot back. “Much stronger than I look. I can carry a lot. You can pack me down like a mule. I’ll carry anything you tell me to. I’ll make three or four trips if I have to. I’ll steal a wagon and drag it, if you’ll please just take my little girl.”
Ammon smiled sadly, realizing the mother’s desperation over her child. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “We’re going to figure something out.”
Luke hunched his shoulders. “Can I talk to you?” he said, pulling Ammon aside. “We’re going to figure this out,” he assured Mary as he guided his brother away.
Twenty feet from the car, he lowered his voice. “There’s no way we can carry all our gear. One of us to push the wheelchair. Three of us to carry. The water alone would take fully one of us. And think about the money and all that other stuff we’ve got hidden in the car. Are we really going to try to take that with us? That can’t be too smart, walking around with a bunch of cash and gold right now.”
“What’s the option?” Ammon whispered back. “Leave it here? If we do that, we abandon it; I guarantee you none of it will be here by the time we come back.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Ammon reached down and grabbed his own blade of grass. “What do you think about that little girl?”
Luke shook his head sadly. “I don’t know. I’m sure no doctor, but I’m telling you, she looks terrible to me. Thin as a rail. Sleeping all the time. I mean, can you imagine! Can you even begin to fathom what that poor woman and little girl have been going through? What they’re going to go through still? I’m as unfeeling and stupid as the next guy, but man, it tears my heart out just to look at her.”
They were silent another moment. “I think she’s dying,” Ammon said.
Luke bit his lip and didn’t say anything.
“I think poor ol’ Mrs. Dupree was taking her daughter home to die. I think she knows. I think she’s given up any hope. Did you hear what she said about the clinic? She went down for some kind of special treatment but the doctors wouldn’t do it. They said there was no reason. That can’t be any good.”
“So what do we do?” Luke asked, his voice beginning to choke.
Ammon stared at his brother, the broad-shouldered high school fullback, the guy who could pound through any hole in the offensive line no matter the cost to his body. The harder the hit, the more it hurt, the more a man it meant he was and the more he loved the game. Under the sweatshirts and the sandals and the hang-by-the-edge-of-the-cliff-without-any-rope, hard-guy exterior, Luke was at least
as soft as any guy he knew. “I don’t know,” he finally answered. “All I know is we can’t leave them here.”
“Of course not. I know that.” Luke considered the darkening sky. “I was thinking maybe we should bury some of the gear, some of the more . . . you know . . . precious but dangerous stuff—the gold, maybe some of the cash and canned food. Let’s cram everything we can into our packs. We could jury-rig some pouches around our stomachs, improvise a little in order to take as much as we can, then,” he nodded toward the tree line, “bury the rest. We’ll be careful, wipe out our tracks and conceal the hiding place. We’ll wrap the little girl—what’s her name, Kelly Beth—in a couple blankets and push her home.”
“Okay,” Ammon answered. “But one thing we haven’t thought of. Once we get to her place in Chicago, what are we going to do then? What’s our long-term plan?”
Luke shook his head. “I’ve got absolutely no idea.”
“What about Mom? Have you talked to her?”
“We talked a little bit this morning. She has no idea either. Still, it’s kind of funny, she seems in a pretty good mood.”
Ammon glanced back toward his mother. “Okay,” he said, “let’s do it. Let’s gather and organize our gear. Take everything we can, conceal or bury the rest. We’ll make Kelly Beth as comfortable as possible and start out walking. The freeway, if you haven’t noticed, is full of people. We won’t be the only ones walking toward the city.”
Luke considered. “Twenty, maybe twenty-five miles. We can do that in a day.”
“I don’t think so,” Ammon countered. “Two days, maybe, with our gear. If we keep going and don’t have any problems, we can be there by tomorrow night.”
Luke looked at him and shuddered. “Listen, dude, I don’t mean to sound pessimistic or overly morbid, but I don’t know if that little girl is going to make it that long.”
“I’ve wondered that,” Ammon said sadly. “But if she doesn’t, then let’s do this. Let’s make certain she is being held by someone who cares about her when she passes from this world. Let’s make certain she can say good-bye to her mother. Let’s keep her safe and warm. That might be all we can do, but let’s make sure we at least do that.”
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