Running Out of Time

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Jessie tried to make sense of that. Traveling was so difficult, she couldn’t imagine people doing it to learn about the past. Didn’t they have history books? And traveling just for fun would be crazy. All the adults in Clifton talked about how terrible their journeys out from the East had been. Except—Jessie herself had always wondered if the rest of the world looked like Clifton. It might be fun to find out.

  Ma was still talking. It seemed that in Williamsburg and the other historical “tourist sites,” people just pretended to live there, in that time period. Then they went home at the end of each day to twentieth-century lives. And tourists in shorts and tank tops—“strange twentieth-century clothing,” Ma explained—had packed the streets of the tourist sites, killing all the historical feeling.

  “So Miles Clifton wanted someplace where people lived twenty-four hours a day, year-round, and the tourists were hidden,” Ma said.

  Ma paused. Jessie wrapped and unwrapped one bonnet string around her finger. She was missing something in Ma’s explanation…. Then she understood. She jerked back, hitting her head on the King of the Mountain rock.

  “You mean—people watch us?”

  Looking down, Ma nodded.

  “All the time?”

  “No, but—a lot. Oh, Jessie, I’m sorry. I’m trying to think how this must sound to you. It’s terrible that you’ve been watched all these years and never knew it. And that’s the part of Clifton we all agreed to, before things got worse—”

  Jessie stopped listening. She was thinking about all the things she’d done that she wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to see. Once when she was really little, she’d stolen a piece of barley candy from Mr. Seward’s counter. But she felt so horrible, she took it back when no one was looking. And when Andrew was still too young to talk, she’d slapped him while Ma’s back was turned, because Jessie hated everyone cooing over what a cute baby he was. And then there’d been other times, when she’d been alone or just with Mary, and they’d done dumb things like making faces at trees or doing imitations of all the adults in Clifton—Mr. Smythe as a bear, Mrs. Seward as a peacock. No one else was supposed to see those things. The people called tourists were watching her then, too?

  For the first time in her life, Jessie wanted to scream at Ma. But Ma looked so worried and sad that Jessie couldn’t. Jessie felt her anger ebb.

  “Well, you always did tell us that God saw everything we did,” Jessie said weakly.

  Ma laughed.

  “We tried to emphasize that. Would you have obeyed any better if we’d said, ‘God and lots of people you don’t know’?”

  Jessie shrugged, thinking hard.

  “But how? How do these ‘tourists’ see us?”

  “The mirrors in all the buildings work kind of like, oh, telescopes, I guess. That’s not my area of science.”

  In a confusing way, Ma explained that the mirrors looked ordinary to everyone in Clifton, but they also carried images to people watching in rooms below the village. Some buildings had false backs, too, that people could watch through. And throughout the village, there were hidden things called video cameras and microphones.

  “The tree,” Jessie said suddenly, remembering. “That must have been a camera in the one haunted tree.”

  She recalled the glint of glass, and the spanking she’d received for trying to get a closer look.

  “Yes. You shouldn’t have been spanked for that, but—it was to protect you,” Ma said.

  “From what?”

  Ma took Jessie’s hand, cautioning her to wait for the rest of the story.

  When Miles Clifton announced in the 1980s that he was looking for about twenty-five families willing to live like their great-great-grandparents, there was a lot of speculation about who would be interested, Ma said.

  “People predicted a lot of crazies—and maybe they were right,” Ma said. “Some people volunteered for Clifton because they thought the United States had become very sinful. They thought they could practice their religion better in the 1800s. Some people were running away from something in their twentieth-century lives. Others were environmentalists.”

  “En-vi-ron-mental-ists?” Jessie tried out the long word.

  “People who were concerned about the way men were destroying the earth. Most of them ended up leaving. Some weren’t willing to live so primitively. Others found America in the early 1800s was even more wasteful than in the 1980s.”

  “What about you and Pa?” Jessie asked.

  “Pa, I think, was the only person who just plain wanted to live in the 1800s. And I—I was too much in love with him to tell him no,” Ma finished in a husky voice.

  Jessie looked away, out into the dark woods. Ma and Pa didn’t talk about love much.

  Pa had worked in a historical village in Massachusetts, learning how to be a blacksmith, Ma explained. He got really good at it, but there wasn’t much call for blacksmithing in the 1980s.

  Jessie couldn’t understand that—blacksmiths did everything—but she let Ma go on.

  Ma had been a nurse, which was kind of like a doctor, but there weren’t any nurses in the early 1800s. So she gave that up.

  “But you still take care of sick people,” Jessie said.

  “Not the way they should be taken care of. Medicine’s much better in the future.” She laughed bitterly. “Did I say ‘future’? It’s finally gotten to me!”

  Jessie couldn’t get used to Ma sounding like that. She reached out and touched Ma’s face. It was wet. Jessie had never seen her mother cry.

  Ma looked up, and Jessie could see her tears glistening in the lamplight. It scared her. She wondered if Ma had gone mad. What if this were all some story Ma had made up? It seemed like a lot to make up.

  Ma saw Jessie looking at her, and pulled her into a hug.

  “Oh, Jessie, I’m sorry. I don’t like seeing you so terrified. Pa and I never knew what a nightmare this would turn into.”

  Although the tourists saw things as they were in the early 1800s, the people of Clifton at first had life much easier. Miles Clifton promised they would get modern medical care when they needed it. And in drought years, food was shipped in, so no one would starve. People were allowed to leave when they wanted to, and they were supposed to be able to tell their children the truth about Clifton when they turned twelve.

  “We wanted you all to have a choice, to make your own decision about what century you wanted to live in.”

  “But—I’m thirteen,” Jessie said. “You never told me … and I’m sure Hannah and Mary and Chester and Richard don’t know either—”

  “Things changed,” Ma said. Again, her voice was bitter.

  Gradually Miles Clifton took away everything that wasn’t “authentic,” as he called it. The modern medicine had stopped only six months earlier. But years before that, people were forbidden to leave or to mention the outside world as it really was. Adults weren’t supposed to talk about the twentieth century with one another, let alone with their children. All the entrances to and exits from Clifton were sealed or guarded. The cameras—which were originally limited to only designated spots—appeared everywhere, to watch everything the Clifton residents did or said. And people were punished for anything that didn’t fit Miles Clifton’s idea of the early 1800s.

  “That’s what’s wrong with ‘okay’ and ‘shut up,’” Ma said. “People said those words all the time in the 1980s, and it was hard to break the habit. So you children picked it up, and you didn’t understand—”

  “I always asked about it,” Jessie said, remembering what a pest she’d been. “And you got in trouble?”

  “They beat Pa.”

  Jessie remembered a time Pa had come home with a black eye and bruises all over. He said he’d been kicked by a horse, but there was too much blood on his back.

  “Oh, Ma—”

  “It wasn’t your fault. But that should let you know the danger you face.”

  FIVE

  “So I will have to do something dangerous
,” Jessie said. ‘After hearing about Clifton’s real past and the United States’ future (for Jessie couldn’t help thinking of it that way), she had almost forgotten the “something dangerous.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” Ma said grimly. “I think it’s time to tell you about that.”

  “Wait, Ma, what about—”

  Jessie wanted to ask so many questions, she couldn’t think where to begin. She wanted to know about the “something dangerous,” but she wanted to understand everything else Ma had told her first. She would have liked to take a day or two just to think. She wanted to go back to their cabin and look closely at the mirror on their back wall, to see how it was attached and how it divided her life and that other world of—what had Ma called them?—“tourists.” She wanted to climb the haunted tree and finally examine the glass Ma said was a camera. She wanted to watch Pa and Mr. Smythe and the Ruddles and all the other adults in Clifton to see what they were hiding.

  “Jessie, I know you’re curious, but there’s not much time,” Ma said. “Can you just listen?”

  Jessie nodded, dazed.

  Ma pulled up the bag she always took on her midwife visits, and Jessie saw that it bulged more than usual.

  “I wasn’t supposed to save these, but I always thought there might come a time … I wish I hadn’t been right,” Ma said as she opened the bag.

  Ma reached inside and pulled out a pair of trousers made of fabric Jessie had never seen before.

  “Blue jeans,” Ma said.

  “Are these Pa’s?”

  “No, they were mine. In the 1980s, everyone wore blue jeans—men and women and children…. I just hope they’re still ‘in’ in 1996.”

  Jessie and Ma both stared at the pants. They had pockets with shiny brass rivets that reflected the light from Ma’s lamp. At the front, two rows of metal teeth peeked out from behind a cloth flap. Jessie reached out and felt the bottom where the pant leg flared out slightly. The material was softer than it looked, maybe because the blue jeans were made for a woman. Jessie had never heard of women wearing pants. But these trousers were so odd that Jessie began to believe the world outside Clifton was truly very different. She trembled, afraid. Before, she could half believe that Ma was making up the whole story. But these pants were proof, alien compared with everything Jessie was used to in Clifton.

  “They look so strange, now!” Ma said, with a laugh that caught a little and sounded sad. “In the 1970s, everyone wore something called bell-bottoms, where the legs really opened out, but by the time we came into Clifton, legs were narrower again. Oh, I hadn’t thought of bell-bottoms in years! It seems like another world….”

  She was crying again, but brushed away her tears.

  “You’ll need to wear the jeans and this T-shirt”—Ma pulled out a strange-looking shirt—“to go outside Clifton for help.”

  Somehow, in some part of Jessie’s mind, she had known Ma was leading up to that. But Jessie still felt dizzy. She would have been a little scared of leaving Clifton even if she still thought it was 1840. But now … even Ma couldn’t tell her what 1996 was like.

  “Ma—” Jessie was ashamed that the word came out as a whimper.

  “I know. If you’re too scared—”

  “I’m not!” Jessie said.

  Ma smiled sadly. “I’m scared enough for both of us, then. Jessie—sending you out of Clifton is our last resort. We’ve tried everything else. We thought the quarantine signs would force Clifton’s men to get us medicine before the tourists could see the signs. But they just ordered us to take the signs down, and threatened us.”

  “Clifton’s men?”

  “The ones who are on his side. Seward, the doctor, a few others.”

  Jessie considered that.

  “Well, if they don’t want these tourists finding out, and the tourists are watching us all the time anyway, why don’t people just start talking about the sickness and needing medicine, and—”

  Jessie was wound up, but Ma shook her head.

  “We never know when the tourists are here and when they’re not. We can’t run the risk of being so bold, because—Jessie, I believe they might kill, rather than have their secrets out.”

  A chill crawled down Jessie’s back.

  “What if they catch me?” she asked in a small voice. It was hard dark in the woods now. Jessie stayed a little outside the lamp’s glow so Ma wouldn’t see how terrified she was.

  Ma shook her head.

  “Don’t get caught.” Ma looked down, then back at Jessie, her eyes burning. “I hate doing this to you. I’ve been turning this over in my mind all day, trying to think of another way. I wanted to go myself, but I can’t fit in my old clothes anymore, not after having Andrew and Nathan and Bartholomew and Katie. I squeezed and squeezed trying to pull them on. So did Mrs. Ruddle and Mrs. Webster. We’re all too fat—any of us who might go. And we’d be spotted in an instant in our Clifton clothes outside. So—that leaves you.”

  In spite of the danger, Jessie felt a rush of pride, that her mother trusted her instead of Hannah or anyone else.

  “Won’t everyone know I’m missing?” Jessie asked. “If I’m not at school tomorrow—”

  “I thought of that. I’ll just tell people you and Katie are both sick. I won’t even tell Pa the truth. Pa”—Ma’s voice cracked—“I love him very much, but I think he’s forgotten this isn’t 1840. At first I thought he was protecting me, not letting me speak of, of anything else. Now … it’s different.”

  Jessie put her hand on Ma’s shoulder and it struck her that that was something Ma would have done to comfort Jessie.

  “Ma, that’s all right. I can go. I’m good at being brave. Remember?” Jessie’s voice sounded scared to her, but Ma smiled.

  “Yes. I can count on you.”

  Ma gave her a package of things to carry and told her what she had planned. Ma thought a man named Isaac Neeley could help. He had opposed the founding of Clifton, saying it was unethical. He lived in Indianapolis.

  “I have to walk to Indianapolis?” Jessie asked. She knew Indiana’s capital was about thirty or forty miles away.

  “No,” Ma said. “If we’re lucky, you won’t have to walk very far at all. You need to get out of Clifton and find a pay phone to call Mr. Neeley. I’ve written his number on a piece of paper in this package.”

  Ma explained a little more—what a phone looked like, how a phone worked, where to put the money. Jessie listened, but it seemed too incredible. How could she stand by a box just outside Clifton and talk to someone in Indianapolis, forty miles away? It was crazy.

  “Do you understand?” Ma asked.

  Jessie nodded. But she thought that if she had to talk to this Mr. Neeley, she’d have to walk to Indianapolis first.

  “What do I tell him?” Jessie asked.

  “Tell him there’s a diphtheria epidemic in Clifton and the authorities are refusing to treat the patients with anything but 1840s medicine,” Ma said. “Tell him—tell him children are going to die if they don’t get help.”

  The words stunned Jessie.

  “Katie? Betsy?” She almost wailed.

  “I don’t know. I hope I’m wrong and they all get well. But Jefferson Webster and Abby Harlow are very, very ill, and some of the others may be as bad soon. I’m only telling you this so you know how serious it is—many people died of diphtheria before there was medicine to treat it. And this appears to be a particularly virulent strain. You were all supposed to be vaccinated against diphtheria, but Dr. Fister must have lied to us about that.”

  “But why?” Jessie asked. “Why would anyone want children to die?”

  Ma shook her head.

  “That’s one of the things I don’t understand either. At first, everything was done to be authentic—but this is too much. I wondered if the world outside Clifton had changed, and there isn’t medicine available anymore. But I’m almost certain Susan Seward is getting treatment.”

  “Because Mr. Seward is on Miles Clifton’s side?�
��

  Ma nodded grimly.

  “Jessie, I’m sending you into a puzzle. It’s been twelve years since I’ve been outside Clifton myself, and Mr. Clifton’s men act so strangely…. I’ve tried to figure everything out, but I can’t. Maybe Mr. Neeley will be able to explain. I just know we can’t let Abby or Jefferson or—or Katie—or anyone die when there is medicine out there.”

  The lamp flickered, and Jessie heard an owl far away. She tried to think of the words to reassure Ma, but they wouldn’t come. All Jessie could think of was more questions.

  “How will Mr. Neeley get the medicine to Clifton?” Jessie asked. “If Mr. Clifton and his men won’t let him in—”

  “Oh, he won’t bring it himself. He’ll call the board of health and cause a big fuss.” Ma sounded more confident, as though she was sure she could trust Mr. Neeley. She even chuckled a little. “And, if I had him figured right, he’ll probably call a news conference, too.”

  Jessie wanted to ask what a news conference was, but she had begun to feel impatient to begin her journey. It was like the time she’d walked the log across Crooked Creek—she knew if she waited too long she might chicken out. So she asked a more important question.

  “How do I get out of Clifton?”

  Ma smiled.

  “When you children began playing on this rock, Miles Clifton’s men got so upset that a couple of us decided we’d better look at it. At first we thought they were mad because it seemed to be the only place in Clifton out of range of the cameras and microphones. Then we discovered—it’s a way out that isn’t sealed.”

  Ma showed Jessie a thin crack under the rock.

  “But—there are guards?” Jessie asked.

  “Yes. You have to be careful and avoid them.”

  “But—”