Banished

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Hold on,” Prairie said. “Now.”

  I did. I couldn’t see past the blinding light into the other car, but I grabbed the back of the front seat with my right hand, hard, to brace myself. Prairie jammed her foot down on the gas and we shot forward. I heard the whine of the Volvo’s engine straining under the pressure, but the lights of the other car got steadily brighter.

  Prairie swung the wheel to the left, into the passing lane, and then she hit the brakes so hard the tires squealed and I could feel the rubber screeching across the pavement, trying to keep hold of the road. There was a terrible jolt as the car behind us hit our back fender.

  I was thrown against the passenger seat and my forehead slammed into the headrest, connecting with the hard plastic. Then I was thrown a second time, into the door, and my seat belt pulled up hard across my collarbone as Prairie hit the gas again and steered into the spin, flooring it and coming out of the turn in the direction we had come from.

  How? was going through my mind, and I even moved my lips to say it, but nothing came out. My face hurt and I could feel warm blood trickling out of my nose, and realized I had smacked it against the headrest, but I was too scared to care.

  “Hang on again,” Prairie ordered, and I braced myself and checked on Chub. He was awake, and he looked surprised, his big eyes blinking slowly, one fist rubbing his mouth, but the seat belt held him in place, and he was unhurt. Behind us I could see more of the other car as it backed up into a turn, one wheel going off onto the shoulder. It lurched, then leapt forward and shot off the other side, onto the shoulder, before correcting and starting toward us.

  My teeth clacked together hard as Prairie yanked the wheel again, and we headed off the road, into a field, the low-growing crop—alfalfa, maybe, or strawberries—thudding against the undercarriage. Prairie urged the car through the furrows, the wheels finding purchase between the planted rows and biting into the earth. The other car fought against the rows. I could tell the mistake they were making—trying to cut across at an angle, coming after us the shortest way. But the foliage was too tall and it smacked against the car as it was mowed under.

  We had a chance. Prairie increased the distance between us and the other car as they struggled for control, plants and clumps of dirt spinning up into the car’s wheel wells and axles. I leaned forward to say something, I don’t know what exactly, and the words died on my lips as I saw that Prairie was steering us straight toward a leaning structure silhouetted against the inky night, a big, old barn with a sloped roof.

  “Prairie—” I managed to get out, terrified. I reached for her—to do what, I’m not sure, push the wheel away maybe, out of the path of the collision that would kill us—but Prairie spoke first, just as a cloud scudded in front of the weak moon and everything went even darker, leaving only our headlights cutting into the field ahead:

  “Trust me, Hailey.”

  CHAPTER 13

  I GUESS I DIDN’T TRUST HER. I squeezed my eyes shut and groped for Chub’s hand. If we were going to die, I wanted to be holding on to him when it happened.

  I pitched forward again as Prairie slammed on the brakes before we reached the barn.

  And then we hit. The Volvo took the impact in its solid metal frame, and even though the jolt slammed me hard against the seat belt, I knew right away that the barn hadn’t stopped the car. We’d hit it going about thirty, I guessed, and the big flat-sided wood doors splintered and went flying inward. Prairie pumped the brakes a couple more times, and I had the impression of a dark tunnel, the insides of the barn full of crazy angles and hanging rafters and spinning bits of hay in the headlights’ beams. I could make out empty stalls on either side, and then we drove through the other side of the barn and it was like the first time, a thudding crash and wood flying everywhere—

  I had time to scream “Prairie what are you—”

  —before she yanked the steering wheel one last time, sharp to the left. The wheels bounced over ruts and rocks and spun, engine screaming, for a second, another, a third before they caught and the car jerked ahead. Suddenly everything went dark as Prairie cut the lights and ignition and the car shuddered to a stop next to the ruined barn.

  “What are you—” I tried again, but Prairie clapped a hand over my mouth and twisted around in her seat to look out the back. As I did the same, I heard the roar of the black car and it came bursting through the hole we had made in the barn, faster than we had, hurtling past us, and then suddenly tilting up, its front wheels lifting off the ground. For a moment it looked as though it was going to go airborne, and then it made a sickening lurch and the back of the car rose up in the air.

  It seemed to go in slow motion, the back end flipping over the front in a crazy somersault before it disappeared down, down and there was a horrible crash and a bright flash, sparks orange in the night, and then a series of smaller echoes.

  “Where’d it go?” I asked, forgetting to keep my voice down. I think I might have screamed it. Chub started to wail.

  But Prairie was already undoing her seat belt.

  “Out of the car,” she said. “Now. Get Chub.”

  I didn’t have to be told twice. But when I turned to him, I saw that he’d somehow been thrown clear of the seat belt onto the floor of the car next to Rascal. He was making short choked sounds, as though he was trying to cry but couldn’t. I grabbed for him, but when I touched his arm, my fingers brushed against sharp bone poking from the skin and he screamed.

  Terrified, I carried Chub from the car as carefully as I could. In the moonlight I could see that his arm was broken above the elbow. As my heart plummeted, his cries became even sharper with pain.

  “He’s hurt, he’s hurt,” I shrieked at Prairie. She ran to my side and stretched out her arms to take him, but I held him even tighter.

  “I can fix him,” Prairie said.

  “No. I’ll do it.”

  “But you’re just starting, you’re not ready yet—”

  “I need to do it,” I insisted. My fingers were already closing around the injury, carefully avoiding the protruding bone, gently finding their place on Chub’s fevered skin.

  For a moment Prairie said nothing, but our eyes met and there was almost a glow around us, an energy that bound the three of us. “All right,” Prairie finally said.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and willed my thoughts to slow down, my mind to empty, and soon I could feel the energy begin to flow from me to Chub.

  “Tá mé mol seo …,” Prairie murmured, and I joined in, my lips forming the words that seemed as familiar as if I’d been saying them forever. Our voices blended and twined together until they were almost one. I felt Chub’s pulse go slow and steady, and then his whimpers eased and he was quiet.

  The torn flesh met and closed beneath my touch, and I felt the shift of his arm bones as the broken place mended. I brushed my fingertips along his skin and found the ridge where it had split, but even that seemed to smooth out as the seconds passed.

  “I healed him,” I said in wonder.

  “Yes.” There was something like awe in Prairie’s voice. “You are a true Healer, Hailey, a natural. Even your mother had to work hard at it, and she was twice the Healer I’ll ever be. But you … you’re something even more rare.”

  Through the haze of my focus on Chub, I heard the black car sparking and sputtering in what I could now see was a dry creek bed. The land behind the barn led to the creek bank and stopped abruptly. The banks had been carved by the rushing waters of years of spring floods, leaving behind craggy dirt walls that dropped several feet in places.

  “We have to go,” Prairie said, taking my arm and pulling me away from the Volvo and the barn and the wreck of the black car. “Tell Rascal to come.”

  Only then did I notice him sitting by the car. He didn’t look frightened or even particularly interested in the commotion.

  “Come on, boy,” I said, and he got to his feet without hesitation and trotted to catch up with us. I looked past him at the wre
ck and wondered if the men inside had survived. “Shouldn’t we see if—I mean, what if they need help?”

  “They were trying to run us off the road, Hailey. Do you really want to give them a chance to catch up with us?”

  “No.” I quickened my pace to keep up with her, glancing back to see if our pursuers were clambering out of the car.

  “Someone’s bound to call this in soon,” Prairie added. “The smoke’s got to be visible for miles.”

  She was right; the smoke pouring from the wreck was an ugly cloud spreading across the pristine, starry sky. I forced myself to look at the ground in front of us; it wouldn’t do to trip over something and drop Chub. He’d already been hurt and healed twice in one evening; I figured that was plenty.

  “Where are we going?”

  We were on a faint path, a trail of flattened weeds running parallel to the creek bed. Far off to the left, up a hill and past a neat vegetable patch surrounded by chicken wire, was a square farmhouse. The trail was narrow enough that we went single file, Prairie leading, then me and Chub, with Rascal taking up the rear.

  “We’re nearly to Tipton,” Prairie said softly. “This is the Burnetts’ place.”

  “Old Man Burnett?”

  “Well, he wasn’t that old, back when I knew him. I knew his youngest. Claude.”

  I recognized that name. Claude Burnett was a man in his late thirties, and people said he wasn’t quite right. He came to Gypsum some Saturdays in a clean shirt tucked into pants pulled up too high, his father leaning on him and leading him at the same time.

  With a flash of regret I remembered I’d once teased Claude. I’d offered him half of a Milky Way bar I’d been saving. He was waiting in the shade outside the drugstore while his dad picked up a prescription or something. I showed him the candy bar, and when he put out his thick hand for it, I whipped it around behind my back.

  “You didn’t say please,” I’d said, relishing the feel of my heart pounding under my T-shirt. I was eight or so, and it was such a novelty to see someone who made people even more uncomfortable than I did.

  “I know him,” I said now.

  “He was your mom’s friend. She was always nice to him. She taught him to talk.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Prairie shrugged. “He didn’t talk much, only a couple of words. Clover got him saying whole sentences. Just another kind of healing, I guess. I played here too, when I was little. Mary used to bring us. There’s a shortcut—just a little ways,” Prairie said. “Or at least there used to be. Here, I think this is it.”

  She led the way off the path, down to a series of flat stones set into the creek bed, barely visible in the moonlight. We didn’t need them to cross, since the creek was dry, but I stepped carefully so I wouldn’t twist an ankle as we eased down the bank.

  I was thinking about Claude … and about Chub, who was also not a talker. Could Chub be … healed? That way?

  Prairie led us up the other bank. “This comes up on Ellis land. You know the Ellises?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Their kids went to school with me and your mom … but here … yes, I think this is it.…”

  The path continued on the other side, a tramped-down, narrow trail that led up over the bank and toward a cluster of lights far ahead. As we drew nearer I saw it was another farmhouse with a barn and some sheds set back a few hundred yards.

  “How did you know to do that?” I demanded. “How did you crash into the right part of the barn and all? How did you know the car would break through and not, like, hit a beam or something?”

  “Luck,” Prairie said, and I could almost hear a faint smile in her voice. “Don’t you think we were due for some luck? Besides, barn doors, Hailey, they’re just big pieces of wood.”

  “But how could you see the doors? I could hardly even see the barn. But you had to have hit it just exactly right, or—”

  Or we’d be dead.

  Prairie slowed, turned on the path in front of me.

  “I just remembered,” she said simply. “I thought about Clover … and how she and Claude liked to play cowboys here, and I shut my eyes and tried to picture it in my mind, where the doors were—”

  “You shut your eyes?” I was dumbfounded.

  She flashed me a grin, and it only lasted a fraction of a second in the weak moonlight. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  The thought of Prairie flying across the field with her eyes closed was terrifying … and maybe just a little bit thrilling. At least, that was what I figured the zip of sensation was that snaked up my spine.

  Prairie continued on the path, striding confidently, and for a crazy moment I wondered if she had her eyes shut now. If she was leading us away from trouble with nothing but a feeling to guide her.

  I don’t know why I didn’t feel more frightened. Weirdly, the thought almost made me feel a little safer. Chub was so heavy in my arms that everything from my wrist down had gone numb, but at least he had quieted, his sweat-damp forehead radiating heat against my face.

  I reached out and touched Prairie’s pretty tailored jacket, and then I gripped it tightly and closed my eyes and willed my feet to walk in her footsteps, Rascal staying right behind me. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. She never stumbled, and neither did I, as we approached the cluster of buildings.

  The Ellises’ barn was in better shape than the Burnetts’ barn, with hay stacked high in the loft and a couple of tractors parked neatly, gleaming in the moonlight, when Prairie and I opened the door.

  “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll try not to be too long.”

  I didn’t even ask her where she was going. I sat on the seat of the smaller tractor—really more like a big riding mower—and it felt good to relax my arms, aching from the effort of holding Chub. Rascal lay down next to the tractor, ignoring the scrabbling and scratching of creatures in the barn.

  I used to be scared of things like that, mice and rats and bats. Now I was happy for the company.

  I closed my eyes and tried to sort through the emotions swirling in my head. I felt as though my defenses were starting to fall apart at the edges. The past few days were like some sort of horror movie, and I couldn’t quite believe that I was a part of it, that any of it had even happened.

  But I had blood on my clothes to prove it. Gram was dead. A lot of people were wounded in our kitchen and in the wreck of a car less than a mile away. And the life I had led before—the one I had hated so much—was in the past.

  I wondered how I’d stayed calm enough to get through the past few hours. Maybe I was in a state of shock, or maybe I had just gotten so used to dealing with the challenges of life with Gram that I’d built up more defenses than an ordinary person would have in a situation like this.

  But I wasn’t sure how long I could maintain my calm. What would happen if I started letting things bother me again, if I let myself start feeling things? The thought was terrifying. At least as terrifying, I realized as I sat shivering in the dark barn, as being shot.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, but when Prairie slipped back into the barn and said my name softly, I jumped.

  “Let’s go,” she said, her voice full of urgency. I lifted Chub and followed her to the front of the barn, where a gravel drive led to the road. A car idled there, exhaust billowing up white against the first pink streaks of dawn. I was surprised to see the car waiting, but Prairie did things. She got what we needed. I didn’t know exactly how, but at the moment, it didn’t matter.

  “Is this the Ellises’ car?” I asked.

  She frowned, her eyebrows pinching together. “Yes … yes, it is. I’m sorry we have to take it, Hailey. We won’t damage it, and they’ll get it back. But …”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. We needed the car. We needed to get away. Even if I didn’t understand exactly what we were escaping from, I understood that.

  When I opened the door, Rascal jumped into the car and lay do
wn on the floor, and I got Chub settled under the seat belt. I was getting good at strapping him in, but as Prairie drove slowly down the gravel drive toward the main road she shook her head and said, “We have got to get that boy a car seat.”

  I sank down low in the passenger seat and watched the farmhouse as we rolled by. The Ellises had a carport, so it would have been easy enough for Prairie to take the car—except she would have had to unlock it and start it, unless she knew how to hot-wire it.

  And if that was what she did, I didn’t want to know. Not quite yet, anyway. I wanted to think of her as someone who worried about Chub having a car seat. Because if she was thinking about Chub, he would be that much safer. As far as I knew, I was the only person who had ever cared about him, and I knew he was a hard kid to fall for. He was behind in so many ways. But Prairie cared about him, and as we pulled out onto the main road and picked up speed, I was grateful.

  I was so tired, riding in the Ellises’ Buick. You wouldn’t think a person who’d been chased and shot at, who had watched people die, would be able to lie down and sleep, but that was what I wanted more than anything. Just to sleep.

  Prairie didn’t look so good. Her mouth was pulled down in a thinking frown and her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly.

  “We should make it in about seven hours,” she said. “Six and a half if we really push it hard.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Prairie was silent for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but eventually she gave me a smile that looked like it took a lot of effort.

  “Home.”

  CHAPTER 14

  WHEN I WOKE UP, the sun was streaming through the Buick’s windows, and I had to go to the bathroom.

  “We’re in Illinois, coming up on Springfield. There’s a Walmart in twenty miles or so,” Prairie said. “We need to pick up a few things. Can you wait that long?”