I hadn’t thought of that.
“Just ride it down the hill like a giant go-cart,” Chase went on.
Arie and I nodded at each other.
“This logging road connects with a highway,” he said, “way down the mountain. Probably a good eight, ten miles. And I’m not sure, but it’s gotta be downhill most of the way. So, we stick it in neutral and coast.”
Arie and I nodded. “Then what?”
“Then,” Chase continued, “we go west on the highway ‘til we find the cut-off that leads to our old camp.”
“Why go there?” Arie asked.
“Because the way I figure it, ole Steele has a vehicle somewhere around there.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, too,” I offered.
“He had to have some way to haul us off, right?” added Chase.
“Yeah.”
“So, I’d be willing to bet he’s alive. He’s a tough little turkey, but I think he’s like the old grizz—he’s resting somewhere up there in the mountains until he recovers from his beat-down. So, we roll downhill in the jeep, hit the highway, head west, and search the area for Steele’s ride. Considering how he was outfitted, I bet it’s a pretty nice set of wheels.”
“Then we better get going,” I said, “while we still have some daylight.”
CHAPTER 30
The plan wasn’t a terrible one. We coasted down the rocky and bumpy logging road for several miles. Sometimes the road was very steep, and I rode the brake pedal so we wouldn’t careen out of control. Other times the grade was rather gentle and we would almost run out of momentum before reaching the next steep part. But we jostled along, and it was a beautiful day, and we made progress. The guys were doing most of the hard work—I was enjoying myself.
Then, inevitably, we hit a longer level stretch of road and the guys hopped out and pushed the jeep along until the road inclined and we were off again. But as we came down out of the mountains, there were fewer and fewer long downhills, and there were even several slight uphill pitches. Now I was getting out to push, too, staying by the driver’s seat and pushing with one hand on the fender and the other on the steering wheel.
“This isn’t fun anymore,” I complained.
“Yeah, it’s less and less productive,” said Chase as we began rolling to a stop. “We might have to ditch this old bucket soon.”
After a short downhill pitch, the road leveled out again, and the jeep slowed. We jumped out quickly and pushed, trying to keep it going. Arie and Chase were both panting hard by this time, and they looked tired. Sweat darkened their shirts. We leaned into the task and the jeep rolled along.
“How far do you figure we’ve come?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” panted Chase. “Maybe six miles, I guess. At least five.”
“Wrong,” I said. I was breathing hard, too. “You’re not far off, though.”
“How do you know that?” he said.
“She’s been watching the odometer,” said Arie.
“Yep,” I said smugly.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” gasped Chase. “Okay. How far have we come, then?”
I grinned. “Guess.”
“Ten miles,” said Arie.
“Way off.”
“Nine?” guessed Chase.
“Eight.”
“Ah, well, that’s not so bad,” said Chase. “The road can’t be much farther.”
“No,” I said.
“Let’s push to the next downhill, ride it as far as it goes, then leave this old heap behind.”
I was about to agree with him, but we had come to a section of the logging road that passed through a narrow place with hillsides close on either side, and in the gap ahead, four men stood pointing hunting rifles in our direction. The weapons looked old and rusty.
“Ya’ll can stop right there,” one of them shouted.
Arie stopped pushing the jeep, but Chase, at the rear of the jeep, had evidently not heard the man and was still pushing. Arie walked along and watched the men. I jumped into the driver seat and pressed lightly on the brake.
“Chase,” I said in a low voice. “Stop.”
Being at the back of the jeep with the sound of the wheels on the gravelly dirty road, Chase apparently didn’t hear me, either, and when I pressed on the brake, he strained hard to keep the jeep rolling, both hands on the spare tire bolted to the back of the jeep. In fact, he pushed harder as the jeep stopped. He put his whole weight into it, grunting and straining with his head down between his shoulders. The men in front of us were now just fifty feet ahead, and they brought their rifles to their shoulders to aim down the barrels.
“Hey, what’d we run into up there?” croaked Chase, still vigorously pushing against the motionless jeep. “Rock? Log?”
“Chase!” I turned and shouted at him.
His head popped up from behind the spare tire. “Oh,” he said when he saw the armed party. His chest was heaving and his face was smudged with grime. “Hey, fellas,” he said with an arch grin.
“Get away from my truck,” said one of the men. He was tall and gangling, with long hair that hung lank about his bearded face. His voice was rough and baritone.
“What, this hunk ’a junk?” Chase sneered, still breathing hard. “Doesn’t even run.”
“I know that,” the man answered. “I’m planning to fix it up.”
Arie and Chase scoffed in unison.
“It’s a hundred years old,” said Arie.
“Never you mind. Just shut up, put your hands in the air, and tell me who you are.”
“Well,” I asked, “do you want us to shut up or tell you who we are?”
The gangling man opened his mouth, but he said nothing, his mouth working, waiting in vain for the retort to arrive. Instead, another of the men, this one short and squat like a fire hydrant, stepped forward and shouted, “Just shut up and get offa that jeep! And getcher hands up!” This one’s voice was rather high and squeaky.
We held up our hands and moved away from the jeep.
“Who are you guys?” said Chase. “You’re not Agency, and we’re obviously not, either. I’m thinking we’re on the same team, here.”
The short squat fellow held his rifle on us while a third man searched us. They took Chase’s pistol and Buck knife from him. They took Steele’s pistol from Arie, and they piled our packs and other belongings on the ground alongside the trail, arranged like some tiny yard sale.
“If we was on the same side, you wouldn’t be stealing my truck,” said the tall one, poking our things with the muzzle of his decrepit rifle.
Arie rolled his eyes and said, “You know, it’s a jeep. Not a truck.”
“We didn’t know it was yours,” said Chase, bemused. “And, frankly, I’m still not convinced it is. It was sitting up there on the hill ten miles away under two inches of dust. Doesn’t belong to anyone. Might as well say you own that tree over there. Or the ground.”
The tall man stormed over to Chase and poked him with the barrel of his rifle. And again his mouth gaped open to retort, but before he could speak, Chase snatched the rifle by its barrel, wrenched it away from the man, and tossed it easily aside, where it clattered into the dust of the road. Two of the other men hastily pointed their rifles at Chase’s head. Then the lot of them fell into shouting and shoving and threatening.
Arie got into the middle of it, too, and I suppose I could have easily picked up the thrown-aside rifle, but instead I placed my index fingers between my lips and did the loudest horse-whistle I could manage. They paused their shoving and grabbing for a moment to swivel their heads in my direction.
“Listen,” I hollered. “Everything’s cool. We’re with Ruby. You know, Ruby?”
They stared blankly.
“Central camp?” I continued. “It was raided by Agency thugs, in case you haven’t heard. We’ve been on the trail ever since. We really are on the same team. I’m Alison. Okay? That’s Chase. Ever heard of us? Chase has probably even been to your c
amp. Right, Chase?”
Chase nodded. “Yeah, most likely.”
“Well, tell them—aren’t they part of our collective? Haven’t you met these guys?”
“Maybe,” Chase breathed.
My face reddened as I considered that maybe these were Agency soldiers. If that was so, I’d just given them some useful intel and an invitation to ask for more.
But they didn’t look or act like Agency troops. Not at all. No uniforms, no military weapons, and no discipline. And it wasn’t as though every Agency goon or trooper I’d ever met was a super-genius or tactical prodigy, but these guys were just dimwits.
I wondered if we should try to make a run for it. Grab the gun, fire a few warning shots, then high-tail it to the trees. After several camp attacks and fending off wandering raiders, all three of us were good at both fight and flight. We’d catch them off-guard. I glanced at Chase, knowing he was thinking the same thing, or that he would catch my meaning.
He caught my glance, but he shook his head—nearly imperceptibly, but sternly. “Bad idea,” he was saying. Arie sent the same message with only the look on his face.
“We ain’t never heard of you,” said the tall one, trudging over and lifting his rifle from the dust.
The others stepped back and trained their rifles on us again.
“Okay, well, do you know Mac?” said Chase. “He still runs your camp, I assume.”
Their faces darkened, and there was a jittery nervousness in the way they glanced at each other.
“Mac’s dead,” said the short one after a quiet interval.
Chase shot me a look. He said nothing, but I knew what he meant: “Not now. Not good.”
CHAPTER 31
They herded us with their absurd hunting rifles into their camp, a hike of two or three hours. As we stopped to drink from the stream, Arie and Chase and I tried to coordinate a whispered plan, but the dimwits shushed us, and we were quiet until we reached their camp. If it bore any resemblance to the camps we established with Ruby, it was only in the strictest sense. It was a camp. It had tents and firepits and a few crappy chairs, but it was untidy, squalid. The tents leaned and drooped, unkempt and ragged, and there were piles of debris and food leavings here and there, over which swarms of flies and ants held sway. And instead of manicured trails running efficiently from place to place, the vegetation of this camp had been generally trampled flat, and in the bare soil there were puddles of brackish, standing water.
The people we saw wore a sullen, miserable aspect, and they regarded us with a suspicion that bordered on open hatred. Most of them were armed, too. This was unusual—in Ruby’s camp only those assigned to guard duty or patrols carried weapons in the camp. It was a safety thing. Here everyone seemed to have a gun, though most were in poor condition. One had a rusty pistol jammed into the waistband of her pants. Another had a battered .22 rifle slung across his back with a length of frayed twine.
Our armed escort stopped us outside a sort of shack-tent pieced together with lengths of cord and frowzy tarps and tent parts. The tall man ducked inside and there was a testy exchange of words. Soon the tall man came back out, accompanied by another man, plump and pale with heavy-lidded eyes and large, wet lips.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
Chase spoke up. “Is Mac around? He can vouch for us.”
“Mac?” the man said disdainfully.
“Yeah,” said Chase. “Mac.”
The plumpish man stepped over to Chase and struck him across the face. For a moment I felt bad for what Chase would do to him in retaliation, but Chase absorbed the blow as if a child had playfully slapped him.
“I’ll let that one go,” said Chase. “But don’t do it again.”
The man lifted his chin haughtily, but reading his body language I knew he’d take Chase’s advice to heart.
The guy with the lips and the other camp men moved a short distance away and quarreled with each other, occasionally looking in our direction and gesturing. After a few minutes, the tall man who’d captured us left the group and approached us.
“Come over here,” he said tersely, motioning with his rifle. “Sit down.”
Lips and the rest of them walked off toward a cluster of tents. We found a place on the ground that wasn’t too muddy and leaned against an old fallen tree. The tall guy sat on a log nearby, ostensibly to keep watch over us, but he was soon pre-occupied, using a twig to absently scrape the mud from the treads of his boots.
“Chase, I don’t understand,” I said, my voice low. “What’s going on?”
“Yeah, aren’t these guys aligned with us?” asked Arie. “Aligned with Ruby and the other camps? I thought we were all on friendly terms.”
“Hey,” said our guard. “No talking. Shut up.”
“Or what?” said Chase. “You’ll shoot us?”
The man waved a dismissive hand and went back to scraping the mud from the creases of his boots.
“I don’t know these guys,” said Chase quietly. “I mean I think I recognize a few of them, but I haven’t been here since spring. Back then a fellow named Mac was running things, and—” he paused, sighed, scratched his beard.
“And what?”
“And I guess my opinion was Mac wasn’t exactly what you’d call executive material,” said Chase. “I got the feeling he didn’t have a firm grip on the reins, if you take my meaning.”
“Think these clowns got rid of him?” asked Arie.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think,” replied Chase. “And whoever took over apparently doesn’t seem to know or care about Ruby or anything else. I mean look at this place. No organization, no discipline.”
The tall guy flicked the muddy twig away, stood up, and stormed over to us. He pointed the rifle at us.
“I said no talking,” he barked.
“Go sit down,” said Chase, glaring up at the man. “I took that piece of junk away from you once. So unless you mean to pull the trigger, you better put it away or I’ll take it again and club you over the head with it.”
The man took what looked like an involuntary half-step backward.
“Because that’s all it really is, right? A club? It’s not loaded, is it?” scoffed Chase. “Remington .207? Where would you even get any? The gun’s empty, isn’t it?”
The man’s eyes widened with sudden horror. He didn’t have to say more.
Chase rolled his eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. “Listen, pal,” he said to the tall guy, “what is going on around here? Who’s in charge?”
The man’s eyes blazed for a moment with anger, and his jaw muscles pulsed. But then he blinked a few times, looked around as if to check for eavesdroppers, and his face went slack. He looked around again and came closer.
“Everything’s gone to hell,” he whispered, crouching beside us. “Mac’s gone. There was a fight. Big one. ‘Bout a month ago.”
“So who’s in charge now? The pudgy little squirt?”
“You mean Hickman. No, he ain’t in charge. I mean he was at first. But now I guess we got a new leader. They’re off talking to him now about what to do about you.”
“In other words,” said Chase, “the camp’s falling apart.”
The man nodded reluctantly, his expression forlorn. “There’s never any food. No one will work. People keep fighting. People keep leavin’.”
Chase sighed and shook his head.
I smiled and extended my hand. “I’m Alison. This is Arie. Chase you’ve already met.”
The man looked at my hand for a moment as if he might have forgotten what the gesture meant. Then he reached out tentatively, took my hand in his, and shook it.
“I’m Chester,” he said with a faint smile.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, “such as it is.”
Chester nodded wearily.
“I’ve met you,” said Chase, his tone conciliatory now. “Right? When I was here in the spring?”
Chester again hesitated but then said, “Yeah. I ‘member you. I me
t Ruby once, too.”
“Then what’s the problem? Why are we being treated this way?”
“I couldn’t vouch for you. Too dangerous. Hickman thinks you want to take over.”
“Well, I don’t, but you’d think he’d want me to,” said Chase with a chuckle. He looked around the camp. “Hell, a ten-year-old could do a better job.”
“Like I said, we got some new guy running things. He seems more, what’s the word? Competent?”
Chase shrugged. “I don’t see how things can get much worse.”
Just then something caught Chester’s eye, and he sprang to his feet. “They’re coming back,” he said.
We turned to see. Hickman was tromping in our direction, flanked by a few men with rifles. They came within a few steps of us and then stopped.
“So,” said Hickman. “You’re with the Agency.”
“Yessir,” quipped Arie before either Chase or I could answer. He threw up his hands in a cartoonish surrender. “Ya got us. Fair and square. I’m the Agency president. He’s my vice-president, and that lady there is commander of the Agency submarine fleet.”
“We’re not with the Agency,” Chase sighed.
“No?” said Hickman. “Prove it.”
“How do you suggest we do that?” I said. “You want to see our IDs?”
Hickman’s moist lips parted in a sneer. “Come with me,” he said.
His men pointed their rifles at us. I wondered how many rounds of ammo they had between them—if any at all.
“Chester,” barked Hickman. “You can go.”
Chester’s gaze wandered from Hickman to us and back again.
“I said you can go,” growled Hickman.
Chester wandered off, looking back at us a few times as he went.
“Get up, Agency goons,” Hickman shouted at us.
We got slowly to our feet and followed the pudgy little figure. His armed men stayed behind us, their rifles leveled at our backs. When we came to the edge of the camp, Hickman looked back as if to confirm we hadn’t been followed. Then he waved us on and we continued into the woods.
“Hey, uh, Hick?” said one of the men behind us. “I thought we were s’posed to bring them back to—”
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 16
