by JL Bryan
Then the truck immediately behind that one crashed into it, which boosted the flaming truck forward. Ruppert waited, idling, at the western gate, and could only watch it approach, like a burning barge on a swift current.
Lucia scrambled toward the open window. Already, another Goblin Valley truck was nosing its way around the side of the bombed truck, its driver struggling to avoid the burning pyre on one side of him and the solid concrete wall on the other. The truck crept forward.
A guard leaned out the passenger side door and raised something long and black in his hands.
“Get the fuck down!” Lucia screamed as she slithered in through the window. She smacked Ruppert’s face sideways into the seat, then rolled on top of him. Ruppert reached for Nando, but the boy was gone—he’d already tucked himself down on the floorboard, knees drawn to his chin. His face was eerily placid. A sane boy would have been screaming right now. Ruppert felt like screaming himself.
The machine gun sounded like a thousand corks popping from a thousand bottles of champagne. The guard strafed the truck, obliterating the front and rear windshields, the headrests, chunks of the steering wheel and upper dashboard, the side view mirrors. Lucia tumbled down to the floorboard to protect Nando with her body.
The stutter of bullets ceased, and Ruppert dared to poke his head up and look over the dashboard, through the remnants of the windshield. Miraculously, the western gate was rolling aside. Already it stood half-open, nearly wide enough for the truck.
He turned his head and looked out the rear at the next Goblin Valley truck, the one that had shot at them. It had forced its way past the burning truck and now accelerated towards him.
“We’re going.” Ruppert still spoke in a whisper, despite the sirens screaming behind them and the loudspeakers chanted Arabic battle prayer. “Get ready with number six.”
Lucia pulled herself up to a kneeling position on the floorboard and grabbed the final bomb.
Ruppert swung his feet down to the pedals, so that he was halfway between sitting up and lying on his side. He stomped the accelerator and swerved the truck to drive it through the opened portion of the gate. Twin metallic squeals sounded along the sides of the truck as the side mirrors sheared away. The truck scraped between the gate on one side and the concrete wall on the other.
Then they pulled loose and they were free, charging towards the menagerie of stone goblins filling the valley. Ruppert squinted against the wind pressing in on him through the open windshield area.
“Now!” Ruppert yelled, but Lucia was already pitching number 6 out through the demolished rear window. It struck the ground just outside the open gate, a few yards ahead of the caravan of trucks.
Lucia clicked the remote, and a fireball engulfed the gate area, which was still close enough behind that a wave of heat ruffled through Ruppert’s hair. She hurled the remote itself, entirely stripped and useless now, out the window, and it shattered against a passing boulder.
With all his mirrors shot away, and a field of giant boulders ahead, Ruppert couldn’t waste time looking back to see whether the bomb had destroyed the next truck, or in some other way blocked the gate. They would know soon enough.
He pushed himself upright and rammed the gas pedal to the floor, and soon he was dodging the maze of elevated boulders on their narrow sandstone stalks. The fire and smoke at Goblin Valley School retreated behind them. Ruppert let himself breathe again, and glanced down at Nando, who’d remained silent through the entire ordeal.
The boy glared up at him, his mouth fixed in a thin, straight line, his dark eyes blazing. Was the kid going to cause trouble now?
“Incoming!” Lucia cried. She grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it to the right. A screaming, whistling sound punctured the air next to Ruppert’s ear. He saw the artillery rocket slam into a cluster of the big goblin boulders ahead, enveloping them in flame, kicking up wide jets of sand. The dirt track they were traveling led directly into the flames and the swelling black cloud of smoke.
Two large boulders, the first one the size of a beach ball, the next one much larger, hurtled out of the smoke, rolling towards them.
Ruppert slewed off the road into sand, and found himself dodging rock formations that seemed leap towards him wherever he turned. Some of them towered above the truck.
More artillery pounded the unbalanced spires of rock around them, and a rain of shattered stone hammered the roof of the cab, denting it in more than a dozen places. Ruppert threaded among the goblins as best he could, losing most of his speed to the difficult maneuvering and the jagged, rocky ground. A few times he even caught a tire against a boulder and had to reverse and change course.
The rockets screamed down at them, toppling more of the rocks, which not only pummeled the truck but also blocked off many of their potential escape routes. Ruppert noticed they all seemed to land very close to the truck. The guards, or perhaps students, weren’t shelling the valley at random, but knew exactly where to find Ruppert and Lucia.
“GPS!” Ruppert shouted at Lucia. She was reaching down and trying to take Nando’s hands, but the boy wanted nothing to do with her. Nando ignored his mother, but he was glowering at Ruppert.
Lucia kicked at the underside of the console, then grabbed underneath it, gritted her teeth and pulled. She ripped free a plastic module the size of a poker chip and flung it out the passenger window.
Ruppert continued to push ahead, and within a minute they were out of range of the falling shells. He looked behind him, but saw only solid black. Smoke and clouds of sand occluded the valley.
He found his way back to the dirt road, and at last he could really make some time.
“Sir?” Nando asked. He was still lying curled on the floor, staring up at Ruppert.
“What is it?” Ruppert asked. “Are you hurt?”
“You’re not really a staff sergeant, are you, sir?” the boy asked.
“Nando,” Lucia said, and the boy cast her a sharp look. “Don’t you know who I am?”
Nando stared at her for a long moment. “Are you in the movies?”
“Nando, I’m you mother.”
The boy’s brow furrowed. “Is this…an interrogation exercise?”
“Please, Nando.” Lucia’s eyes glistened. “Try to remember.”
They climbed up out of the smoke-filled valley, heading northwest. Then, at last, the fires among the ordinance sheds must have touched something serious, because a narrow geyser of flame ejected straight up and out of the smoldering school compound, reminding Ruppert of the pillar of flame in the movie Exodus. He thought of the boys he’d left standing at attention, and hoped they’d had the sense to scatter and lay low when the fighting started.
Nando climbed up to look out the passenger window, and Lucia moved aside to let him sit.
“My parents died in the wars,” Nando said. He stared at the pillar of fire. “Like all the kids at school. My dad in Nigeria, my mom in the Philippines. Commandant Redding told me. He showed me pictures.”
“It isn’t true, Nando.” Lucia reached for his hand, but again he jerked away.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“It is your name. Fernando Luis Santos. And mine is Lucia Santos. Your mother.” She took his hands in hers. "Look at me, Fernando."
Lucia leaned close to his ear and whispered, most of it too low for Ruppert to hear. It was Spanish, too low and fast for Ruppert to understand.
“Stop it,” Nando said. His voice was low and quivering. “I have to think.”
“Nando,” Lucia whispered. “Do you remember—”
“I have to think!” the boy snapped. He looked directly ahead, squinting into the wind that rolled over the bullet-scarred dashboard.
Lucia looked at Ruppert with a pained expression, her lips drawn and thin. He tried to smile, and he drove on.
Ruppert felt himself relax a little as they pulled into the tight canyon where they’d stashed the Bronto. Lucia and Nando left the Goblin
Valley truck, while Ruppert lingered inside to change out of the bloodstained school uniform, in the process lifting the cash from the staff sergeant’s wallet. Through the shattered windshield, he overheard them:
“Where are we going?” Nando asked.
“We’re leaving for somewhere safe, up north.”
“When do I go back to school?”
“You don’t ever have to go back there. You’re free now, Nando.”
“I’m always free,” Nando said. “I’m an American.”
“Yes, you are, Nando.”
“If you’re my mother, is that man my father?” Nando whispered.
“No.”
“Is he your commanding officer?”
“No, I am the commanding officer.”
“Excuse me?” Ruppert asked. He’d finished changing, and now closed the door of the Goblin Valley truck behind him.
“I am,” Lucia insisted. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I know we have one more thing to do before we can go.” Ruppert glanced at the rear of the Brontosaur, sheathed in its desert tarp. Lucia nodded.
“Nando,” she said, “Why don’t you go stand at the front end of this truck, and wait there for a minute, all right?”
“Yes, sir.” Nando turned on his heel and marched to the front of the camouflaged truck, where he stood at attention.
Ruppert and Lucia lifted the tarp from the back of the truck and pushed it forward, unveiling the rear half of the Bronto. They lowered the tailgate and raised the door panel in the back of the truck’s camper top. Ruppert stared at the heap of forest-colored tarp for a moment.
After seeing what the school did to boys in their charge, he felt a bit less sorry for the men they’d hurt or even killed in the course of extracting Nando. He hoped some of the other boys had used the opportunity to escape, though he didn’t know where they might have gone. Perhaps they were too brainwashed to try such a thing, in any case.
He lifted up the tarp. There was nothing underneath but a long smear of partly dried blood.
“Shit,” Ruppert said, just before the impact on the back of his head spun him forward and slammed his head into the side of the camper top. He felt like he was caught in a small tornado as something swept him up, pulled him back, slammed him a few times against the side of the truck, then pitched him forward, Ruppert’s face dragging the desert-colored tarp off the remainder of the truck.
A large pair of rough, calloused hands grabbed Ruppert up and shoved him back against the door of the Bronto. The school official, the staff sergeant Ruppert thought he had murdered, loomed before him, the size of a grizzly bear, his upper torso and his entire head encrusted with sand glued on by dried blood, one eye swollen shut, looking very much like one of the wilderness demons Pastor John preached about. He snarled at Ruppert through broken teeth.
The staff sergeant hissed, his body curling to one side. Lucia had slashed him across the ribs with her obsidian blade, and then scurried back from him. He dropped Ruppert and charged after her.
Ruppert struggled to his feet, pushing himself up along the truck door. He thought he could hear a bass drum thumping somewhere deep inside his brain. The moonlit world around him blinkered in and out.
The staff sergeant snatched Lucia’s knife hand in one of his own, then pinned her thumb back while twisting her wrist. The blade spilled from her fingers and stabbed deep into the sand at her feet.
Ruppert forced his right foot to slide forward, then his left. He focused on the staff sergeant’s twisted, glowering face, pushing himself toward the bigger man. His ribs ached from repeated slamming against the truck, possibly cracked. He didn’t know what he would do when he reached the man—Ruppert doubted he could do much more than lean on him.
Then the staff sergeant rolled backward out of his field of vision. Ruppert’s aching neck turning slowly, and he saw the large man sprawl out on his back onto sand and sharp rocks, a look of shock on his face.
Nando scurried on his hands and knees away from the man’s legs and up to his head. He held Lucia’s blade in one hand, and it was dripping. In one nimble, fluid movement, he knelt beside the fallen man, raised the blade high with the tip of its blade pointed straight at the man’s Adam apple, and then he stabbed it downward in a perfectly straight line.
The man’s hands wrapped around Nando’s upper arms, and his legs kicked from the knees, his feet flopping uselessly. Ruppert saw that the Nando had slashed across the man’s heels, severing both his Achilles tendons.
Nando dragged the blade around the man's neck, with the calm expertise of a butcher, halfway decapitating him. Then Nando let the staff sergeant's head flop back, bleeding out into the sand. Every muscle in the man twitched, as if he were having a small seizure, and then he died.
Lucia stepped gently toward her son.
“Nando? Nando, are you all right?”
Nando swiped both sides of the knife across the man’s chest, painting a bloody X.
“That’s Staff Sergeant Meyers,” Nando said. “Now I can never go back.” He stood, and he offered the blade to Lucia, handle first. “The Commandant is going to kill me.”
“He won’t find you,” Lucia said. “Come on, we’re behind schedule now.” She began gathering the desert-colored tarp. Nando and Ruppert stared at the dead man.
“Are you all right?” Ruppert asked him. The boy nodded. “Thank you. You saved our lives. I’m sorry you had to do it.”
Nando stayed quiet for several seconds, and then he shrugged. “It’s okay. Everyone wants to kill Staff Sergeant Meyers.” And the boy turned and marched toward the Bronto’s cab.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Lucia drove them north, into the Rocky Mountains and Wyoming, following a course of high, twisting roads through one of the least populated regions in America. They’d siphoned the gas from the Goblin Valley truck before leaving, and now the Bronto could travel for several hours before stopping again. Ruppert sat on the passenger side, still aching from his fight in the desert.
Nando sat in the back seat of the Bronto, alternating between long periods of silence and long barrages of questions.
“If you’re really my mom, how come it took you so long to come get me?” he asked at one point.
“I tried, Nando. The officials keep your location secret. They don’t want your parents to find you.”
“I don’t believe that. Who was my father, then?”
“I have not seen him in a long time, Nando. He was taken to prison.”
“For why?”
“For helping the wrong war victims. Practicing medicine.”
Nando frowned. “The Commandant told me my father was in Special Forces, and he commanded a regiment of the Nigerian army against the Islamofascists. He died defending America.”
“He commanded a…small regiment of volunteers. Like me. He was a very, very good man. You would have loved him, and he would have loved you."
Nando took that in for a moment, then pointed at Ruppert. "If he’s not my father, and he’s not your commander, who is he?”
“My name is Daniel,” Ruppert said. “I’m just helping your mother.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s helped me, and now it’s my turn.”
“Oh.” Nando sat back and stared out the window again. Then he asked, “Where is your base?”
“We don’t have a base, Nando,” Lucia said. “We aren’t part of an army.”
“So you’re irregulars.”
“We aren’t soldiers,” Lucia said.
“Intelligence?”
“No.”
“You aren’t civilians, I saw everything you did back there. You’re terrorists, aren’t you?”
“We’re just people, Nando,” she told him. “Just trying to survive.”
“You bombed our base,” Nando said. “You took me prisoner. Who was that on the P.A.?”
“That was me,” Ruppert said.
“You don’t speak Arabic too good.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t speak it at all,” Ruppert said. “Just what you hear on the news.”
Nando recited a long, fluid Arabic verse, then smiled and translated, “‘In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds.’ That’s the opener for the Koran.”
“They teach you about Islam?” Lucia asked.
“It’s just for controlling foreigners,” Nando said. “In church we study the New Dominion Bible.”
“That’s what we used at my church, too,” Ruppert said.
After a long pause, Nando asked, “Am I going to Hell for going AWOL?”
“No, Fernando,” Lucia said. “You’re going to be fine.”
Lucia shifted gears to climb a steep, narrow dirt road. They were far from any highway, once again relying on the maps stored in Archer’s dashboard computer. Ruppert hoped there weren’t any surprise washouts ahead, or fallen rocks blocking their path.
The driving was rough, steep, and much slower than they would have liked, but the Rockies provided far more cover than the flat, open lands to the east or west. Lucia said that mountains were the best setting for guerrilla war, the kind of terrain that yielded least to control by central governments, which were more interested in ruling cities and masses of people than rocks and goats.
Nando launched into an enthusiastic monologue on the subject, describing in detail tactics employed by mujahideen against Soviet and American soldiers in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. He seemed to be adjusting to the sudden events fairly well, enjoying the sight of moonlit mountain pinnacles outlined against the stars.
They drove through the night, northward along the roughest mountain roads, Ruppert fading in and out of consciousness. They shared a jug of juice, a bag of nuts and dried berries, a few squares of chocolate. Eventually Nando fell asleep as well.
