Fire in the Woods

by Jennifer M. Eaton

  “We need to go. Now.”

  I grabbed his hand and we ran. Where would Maggie meet us? Adams and what street?

  Dangit. I ran for Adams and prayed for the best.

  A siren’s howl pierced the morning sky. Boy, were we in trouble. Could that be for us already? What a stupid idea, going to Maggie’s house. But where else would we have gone? We were trapped in an enclosed base with the Army looking for David. It was a lose-lose situation no matter what we’d done.

  I don’t think I breathed or had another thought until Maggie pulled up alongside us.

  She jumped out of the car, leaving it running. She waved me to the driver’s side. “Go. Just go. You have your GPS, right?”

  “You’re giving me your car? Are you sure?” I slipped into the driver’s seat.

  Maggie opened the passenger side door for David, and closed him in. “I’ll stay here and provide recon. I’ll let you know if they’re on your tail of not.” She leaned through the window. “Just bring my car back in one piece, okay?”

  I wished I could hug her. “Thanks Maggs. You’re the best.”

  She saluted. “Now get out of here before anyone sees you.”

  Too late. Mr. Hutchinson was probably on the phone already. I hit the gas petal and turned on my phone. One missed call from unavailable flashed across the screen. I dismissed it and called up the GPS app.

  “What’re the coordinates again?”

  “Latitude 39-46.505192 north by longitude 074-57.071403 west.”

  I pulled up to a stop sign. “Okay, can you slow down a minute there? I can’t type fast and I don’t want to end up in Maine somewhere.”

  David repeated the directions at a more type-able speed.

  “Calculating route,” my GPS said. David lifted an eyebrow.

  “That’s Michelle, my navigator’s voice. She gets me everywhere…or at least she did, when I had a car.”

  “What happened to your car?”

  I flinched, a vision of sirens and ambulances flashing through my mind. “You don’t want to know.”

  David itched a jagged rip on the left arm of his sweat jacket. I hoped he didn’t get cut on the barbs. He wasn’t complaining, so I figured I’d take a look when we were farther away. Much farther away. The top of my knee poked out from a hole in my jeans as well. I wasn’t hurt though, so until I knew we were safe, I’d keep driving and we’d take stock of the damage later.

  I pulled out onto the road, passing the entry to the woods and leaving the residential section.

  “Turn right on route sixty-eight north,” Michelle said.

  I glanced at the screen. “It says here, we are about 50 minutes away from your coordinates. We’ll be there in no time.” As long as the Army doesn’t catch us, or the police, or the Air Force. I peeked through the windshield, checking the sky.

  “Your father is going to be upset with you, isn’t he?”

  I thought about the call that I’d dismissed, and swallowed the lump forming in my throat. Upset didn’t cover the gamut of emotions that would explode through Major Martinez’s psyche when he found out I was missing. He’d set the entire Army loose looking for me. I glanced down at my phone. Last week Dad had called me from work and it came up unavailable. If that missed call was him, he was probably rallying the troops already. Dad wasn’t one for procrastination.

  I bit my lower lip and glanced at David. The panic had finally left his face. There was no use in worrying him with the possibility of pursuit when I didn’t even know who had tried to call.

  “He’ll be fine. I’ll explain everything to him once we get you home.”

  I shuddered, and pushed the thought of Dad scrambling a couple hundred soldiers out of my mind. With all those high tech gadgets at their disposal, how long would it take the army to track us down when they did start looking? Once we were close enough to the pickup point, we’d definitely need somewhere to hide.

  After changing lanes, I took a deep breath and tried to keep my voice steady. “I guess since we will be there so early we should scope out the place and maybe find somewhere to stay for the night.”

  “That sounds good,” David said, rubbing his arms. “It gets a little too cold here when the sun goes down.”

  “Sorry. Are you still chilly?” I flipped on the heat and resisted the urge to open the window and let in the fresh air.

  “Turn right on route two-oh-six north,” the voice sounded from my phone.

  David inched forward and looked through the windshield. Stopping at a light, I scanned the sky to see what had his interest, hoping dearly it wasn’t a few dozen military helicopters. Thankfully, nothing but fluffy clouds mottled the happy blue backdrop.

  “Your sky is such a pretty color,” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess. What color is the sky where you’re from?” I checked for traffic, and continued driving.

  He laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen my planet.”

  “Oh. That’s right. I forgot. It must be a lot like being an Army brat, huh? Move from place to place with your parents, never getting a chance to settle down and grow some roots?”

  “Yes, I suppose.” He craned his neck, gazing through the windshield as a flock of geese flew overhead.

  “Turn left on route two-ninety-five south for nineteen point three miles.”

  I turned onto the ramp, signaling as I merged into traffic. “Okay, so it looks like we will be on this road for twenty minutes or so, and then we take route seventy-three south for ten miles to somewhere called Cross Keys Road…take a left on Watsontown Road, and we’re there. Easy breezy.”

  David stared out the window to his side, and out the windshield once again. It reminded me of a kid seeing Disney World for the first time. But what was he looking at?

  Endless lines of trees flanked the highway for as far as the eye could see. Totally boring. Whenever Dad drove on this road, I usually played games on my phone to pass the time. What could he possibly be looking at?

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Me? Yes.” He turned back to the window. “I like all the trees and plants. They’re pretty.”

  “Aren’t there trees and plants where you come from?”

  “No. Born on a ship, remember?”

  “So, you’ve never seen a tree?”

  “Not like these. Is it true they make the air you breathe?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “You think so? Don’t you know?”

  “Yeah, I mean, they do. I don’t really know how it works, but yeah, they take all the bad stuff from the air and make more oxygen out of it.”

  His left eyebrow inched up. “Interesting. I’d think you’d want to know a lot about the vegetation if it’s the reason you’re alive.”

  “I know they’re important. We celebrate Arbor Day and all. I think it’s bad that they cut down the trees, but there’s really not much I can do about it.”

  “You cut down trees? Aren’t you worried about running out of air? Why aren’t you protecting them?”

  I glanced in his direction, surprised by his agitated tone. “I guess we’re not all so good about that…protecting the environment, I mean. I hear we’re doing a pretty good job of screwing things up.”

  “That’s a shame,” David said. “This is a beautiful planet. You should have taken care of it.”

  My phone rang. Maggie.

  “Hey you.”

  “Jess, where are you?”

  I glanced down at my navigator. “We’re on 295 heading toward Route 73. What’s up?”

  “You need to ditch the car—like, now.”

  12

  “Ditch the car? Why?”

  “Your grandmother had a conniption when you weren’t here. She and my mom called our dads and everyone compared notes. The cat’s out of the bag.”

  “Oh, no.” The blood whirled out of my head like someone yanked the drain plug. My hands trembled on the wheel. In one flaring
instant, the reality of what I’d done—of what I was still doing, sunk into my bones with the weight of a steamship.

  “Yeah, you’re not kidding. They noticed my car is gone. You guys are in a heap of trouble.”

  “Crap. What do I do?”

  “Like I said, you gotta get rid of the car, but be careful. I want it back.”

  “Huh? Oh, of course.” I checked the road markers. “I’m almost in Marlton. I think I have an idea.”

  “Don’t you dare leave my car in a ditch somewhere.”

  “I have something better than a ditch. I’ll call you back later.”

  I tapped end call and made my way onto route 70.

  “Recalculating route. Make the next legal u-turn.”

  “I know, Michelle.”

  The phone rang once again. Unavailable. Sorry, Dad.

  Cringing, I shut the phone off.

  “Don’t we need that?” David asked.

  “Not right now, I don’t. I know where I’m going and I want to save the battery.”

  I saw my target on the other side of the highway, and eased into the right lane to make the U-turn.

  David looked up into the sky, down at the pavement, and over the back of the seat as we passed someone walking a dog. It must have been strange for him, being on a world where everything was new and different from anything he’d experienced before.

  I edged to the right, pulling off the road. David leaned back, gaping as we passed the towering Wal-Mart sign. I drove in and out of the rows of parked cars until someone left a spot three spaces away from the front door. “Perfect.” I maneuvered the Maggie-mobile between a white van and an old blue sedan and yanked the keys out of the ignition.

  “I thought you wanted to hide the car?” David asked.

  “Believe me, this is better than hiding it in the woods.” I got out and stood by the rear bumper. Shoppers pushing carts filled with bags exited the store, passing me by without so much as a look as they made their way to their vehicles.

  A breeze tickled my knee, and I groaned. My jeans were sliced through from the top of my kneecap to mid-calf. Thank you demon-dog for scaring the crap out of me. I knew I heard something rip when we jumped down. I bent my knee and most of my leg came through. What may have been stylin’ in the eighties was so not going to fly today, and the chances of finding my size jeans in a Wal-Mart two weeks before school started? Like, nil.

  I’d have to use Dad’s old duct-tape standby. I didn’t have time to try anything on, anyway.

  David hadn’t left the car, so I rounded the trunk and peered through his window. He still sat in the passenger seat, running his fingers along the rim of the glass. Muddling around, he felt different parts of the door, and finally found the handle. A smile crossed his lips as he lifted the latch and the door opened.

  I did my best to hold back a smirk as he stepped out. “You can fly a space ship, but you can’t get out of a car?”

  His eyebrow arched. “Do you know how to trigger a stagnant preemptory reaction in an overhead visualization module?”

  I folded my arms. “How would I know how to do that?”

  “Any six-year-old can do that where I come from.”

  “Well I wasn’t born on a space ship.”

  “And I’ve never had a reason to get out of a car before.”

  I smiled. “Touché.”

  He watched the shoppers unloading their purchases into their cars. “How is this hiding? Everyone will see the car here.”

  “There are always tons of cars here. No one will notice an extra one.” I grasped his elbow, tugging him toward the store.

  “Why are we going in there?”

  “We need to get a few things.”

  I led him to the Sporting Goods department, passing displays of camping lights and sleeping bags before stopping at a peg wall of accessories. I lifted a compass off a hook.

  “What is that?” David asked.

  I held the clamshell package up and showed him. “This is a compass. The needle always points north. This will help save the battery on my phone.” I moved further down the aisle.

  “Shouldn’t we get one that points south?”

  I stifled a laugh. “We’ll just go the opposite way.”

  I chose an army-green backpack from the display and slid the armband over my shoulder before leading David toward the grocery section. His eyes lit up as we rounded the corner of the produce aisle.

  “This is incredible. Have you ever seen so much food?”

  I picked up a few apples, threw them into a plastic bag, and placed them into the backpack. “Yeah, it’s a store. Where do you get your food from?”

  “Rations are given to us daily—just enough for my father and I to eat until the next day.” He ran his fingers across a display of oranges, his eyes wide. “I’ve never seen anything like this. How many people will this feed?”

  “I have no idea. Whoever buys it, I guess.”

  “Buys it?”

  He placed a hand of bananas to his nose and smiled. I ripped two off the bunch and tossed them into the backpack.

  “Yeah, like, pays for it.”

  “Pays?” He handed me a pack of strawberries.

  “No, not those. They bruise too easily.” I set the package back on the counter. “Pays, you know, like, money.”

  “Money?”

  I eased closer. “I thought you stole English out of my head,” I whispered. “Don’t you know what money is?”

  David shook his head. “Maybe there’s no translation in my culture.”

  I snatched a handful of green beans and nestled them into a vegetable bag. “But don’t you get paid for being a pilot?”

  “Paid?”

  I slipped the beans into the backpack. “Wow. You don’t know what money is, and you don’t get paid?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Huh. I don’t know if that’s bizarre, or incredibly cool.”

  I snatched a few bottles of cold water out of the deli refrigerator and grabbed a bag of potato chips so we had some real food for me. I tucked it all into the backpack and checked to make sure it zipped shut.

  “Okay. I think that’s all we need.” We headed to the front of the store, and I eased David away from the exit. “No, not yet. We need to pay for this stuff first.”

  We jumped into a twenty items or less lane. Thank goodness there was a roll of duct tape on the buy me ‘cause you’re bored hooks before the register. I snatched a roll and emptied the backpack onto the counter.

  “But we just packed that.” The innocence in David’s eyes warmed my heart.

  I greeted the cashier. “I don’t need a bag. We’ll just put it all back into the pack, thanks.”

  David watched with discerned interest as the girl perused each bag and typed codes into the cash register. “Seventy-seven eighty-six,” she announced.

  Geeze Louise. Three hundred dollars wasn’t going far when groceries were involved. Maybe I should have reconsidered that forty-dollar backpack. I fingered the credit card in my pocket. By the time they traced it, we’d be long gone. Right? Sweat dampened my pits. No. It wasn’t worth the risk. I handed her two fifties and shoved the change back into my jeans. Crisis averted. I still had a little over two-hundred dollars to play with.

  As we walked toward the door, the big yellow Subway sign called to me. “Let’s get a few subs to bring with us.”

  David’s brow furrowed. “What’s a…”

  “Come on.” I drew him toward the line.

  The turkey hollered ‘eat me’ through the glass case. Who was I to argue? The attendant waved me up.

  “Give me a foot-long turkey on whole wheat, lettuce and tomato, dry.” I perused the choices lined up on the other side of the glass. “I guess you can make another one on whole wheat, and just throw every vegetable you’ve got on it. No meat.”

  “You want a Vege Delight?” the attendant asked.

  I checked th
e menu-board and raised a brow. Vegetarian options…Vege Delight. Had that always been there? “Yeah, okay, whatever.” I waved my hand. “As long as there’s no meat or cheese.” I added a few luscious-looking chocolate chip cookies to my order, and handed her the money.

  One hundred dollars, gone like that. No wonder Dad is always complaining about how much stuff costs.

  David touched the back of my shirt. “Is there any other way out of here?” he asked.

  I unzipped the backpack and stuffed the subs inside. “Just the door by the garden center. Why?” I did my best to zip the backpack closed. The white Subway bag stuck out of the top, unable to fit. David squeezed my arm, stopping my trot toward the exit. My stomach sank when I raised my gaze, and I nearly dropped the backpack.

  Near the Wal-Mart entrance, an MP pointed to a photograph, discussing the picture with the door greeter.

  Not. Good.

  But I didn’t even use the credit card. What was Dad, a super sleuth? How did he know to look in a Wal-mart in Marlton of all places?

  I backed up so I could see out the front the windows. A group of uniformed men gathered around Maggie’s car. One tried to force a flat piece of metal through the passenger-side window.

  “This is not good at all,” I said.

  “Where’s the other exit?” David asked.

  “We’ll have to get past that MP.” I gritted my teeth. The door greeter’s stand stood right in front of the entrance to Subway, blocking our escape. The MP turned and marched through the front doors, leaving the greeter with the picture. “No way.” How did we get so lucky?

  “There are still too many outside,” David said.

  “But we can still get to the Garden Center.” We sneaked out of the Subway and back into Wal-Mart, moving as quickly as we could past the checkouts…being careful not to look like we were moving as quickly as we could. We came to another entrance, complete with a cheery, pink-cheeked older woman greeting customers as they arrived. A photograph of me in my junior-prom dress was glued to her metal podium. Each time a young girl passed, she looked down at it.

  Heart racing, I pointed back into the store. “The garden center door is that way.”