by Terry Persun
Keith saw that his dinner plate, which he had set on the ground outside his tent, had been collected for cleaning. The others were very attentive and efficient in the camp, almost as efficient as Newcity.
He crawled inside the tent, still a little hungry, and ate a few of the crackers from his pack. He thought to take notes, but rejected the idea in favor of sleep. The darkness inside the canvas would have made it difficult to see anyway.
He slipped out of his shoes and socks, pants and shirt and climbed into the sleeping bag. As the light from outside dimmed into complete darkness, noises became more noticeable: a scraping sound, buzzing, occasionally something moving through the fallen leaves. Keith listened for a long while, trying to imagine what each sound belonged to. He had heard many of the sounds before, in movies, but had never been in nature as long as he could remember, although he knew that he had been on the outside as a young man, perhaps until he was the age of the boy with the bullet hole in his forehead. Even when he glimpsed a memory of his family, they were always inside a house or apartment, but the general feeling was that they were somewhere other than inside Newcity.
Before allowing himself to nod off, Keith asked the boy how long he was supposed to stay awake, but there was no answer. He asked the angel with one wing the same question, but received more silence. Finally, he asked for help from his father. “What must I do now?” Again, there was no answer. The tent closed in on him then and he slept dreamlessly.
DAY 5
It wasn't morning when he was roused from sleep by a hand over his mouth and a voice in his ear saying, “Be still; it's me, Stacy.”
Keith rose to a sitting position and let his head clear.
A small amount of light sifted into the tent, allowing him to see her brown eyes and blonde hair close to his face. Shadow highlighted the roundness of her cheeks. Her breath was stale.
She turned her face away from him and whispered for him to get dressed as fast as he could and to grab his pack.
He acknowledged her command, and tapped her back when he was ready. He followed her through the flap and into the misty night air. The light came from the sky, but Keith couldn't tell its source, and only guessed that it was the moon and not lights set up around the camp.
Stacy reached for his hand and tugged aggressively for him to follow. He stumbled only once as they traveled the paths at night. There were twists and turns into side paths that he could not have remembered. As they came to a halt he wondered if this was the reason the boy had asked him to stay awake. He wondered how long he had been asleep. Was it minutes or hours?
There was little time to consider those thoughts. A large truck stood before them. Stacy dragged Keith to the rear of the vehicle where it was open. Inside were crates. Some were marked EXPLOSIVES in large block letters. “Weapons,” Stacy said. “Do you see?”
Before he could answer, she tugged on his arm and he followed her for a short distance farther until they reached a parked van. The van looked similar to the one that had brought him to camp the morning before. Even in the moon's light, Keith could see that this one was dirt-streaked along its sides, and the windows were darkened with a layer of dust. A door opened along the side and Stacy guided him into a seat in the rear next to a man who already occupied the bench. The rest of the van was filled with people he couldn't recognize in the dim light.
No sooner were they settled into their seats than the van pulled away slowly onto the dirt road. The farther they got from camp, the faster the van transported them, until it bounced like a rolled ball rolled over an embankment. Keith held to the seat cushion on either side of his legs, pulling upward to affix his butt to the seat. The rescue had happened so quickly that he didn't have time to consider what might be going on.
When they finally hit an asphalt road and the ride smoothed considerably, he turned to Stacy. “Where are you taking me?”
“To safety,” she said.
“Or not,” someone said in front of him. The man turned and Keith recognized him as one of the escapees. “What's going on?” Keith asked. They weren't stable enough to be on their own. He glanced around to locate Ben, but only recognized one other person, and that was Sam, who was driving the van. Keith could see his profile whenever he turned to listen to the conversation that had started. “Sam?”
“Yes,” Stacy said. “We planned this to get you out of there. Sam convinced Bradley to relocate your tent, making it easier for us to get you to the van. We weren't totally ready, but they were going to integrate me and we knew that Ben would try to kill you.”
“Kill me? But if he just came from Newcity…”
“Don't kid yourself,” she said. “That is when we're most violent. I don't know why you haven't noticed it in yourself.”
“Yes, you do,” Sam yelled back.
Others from in front of Keith turned to look at him. He recognized several escapees, but didn't know others in the group. He did remember the man who sat next to him as the same man who had held hands with Stacy when he first met the cluster of them. Then he noticed another fact that surprised him—the group he rode with appeared to be paired off. There were two women and two men in front of him and a woman rode in the seat next to Sam. The feeling it brought on was one of separation, of loneliness. He lowered his eyes and reached inside for a reason why they'd pair up, as well as why they would kidnap him from the camp, from Bradley.
“When are you going to tell me what's going on? What's really going on?” he said forcefully, knowing that Stacy would break.
She leaned forward and smiled at her partner, then looked into Keith's eyes. “That never did work, you know. Didn't you hear me a moment ago? I just told you that they were going to integrate me, actually all of us. You would have been left in that camp with Ben and the crew that came through with him. He led them and they're going to follow his lead until they gain some sort of self-awareness—at least enough to question his authority.”
“So, you're the leader here?”
Several of the people laughed. Stacy looked around and put a hand on the man's shoulder in front of her, “Hear that, Will?”
Will shook his head and said, “I hear it.”
The man next to Keith said, “We were all going to be integrated. We're beyond that stage. Stacy's just our spokesperson, you might say. We've decided that it would be better if you were addressed by one of us rather than all of us. We had no idea what to expect when we heard you had come through alone. We expected that everyone in your group had been detained, or worse.”
“Then we saw you and knew that only you could have come out alone,” Stacy said. “We know that you are here for a reason.”
Keith couldn't fully understand how they all must have felt when they saw him, but he did know that he wasn't any kind of savior. There was no reason. At this point in his departure from Newcity, he didn't know what was happening. His struggle was internal, to figure out whom this new person was who occupied Keith's Newcity body. He still identified with both of them; only the outside person had definitely taken over the majority of his actions. “What about Sam?” he said, “And the others?” He meant those he didn't recognize.
“Molly is with Sam, up front,” Stacy said. “She came out with us. So did Will and Rebecca,” she patted the man's shoulder in front of her once again. She leaned to look around Keith. “And Brent, of course,” she added, and then pointed to the two remaining people in the van, sitting side by side in front of Brent and Keith. “Robert and Amanda came through several months ago.”
Robert turned around and raised his hand. “Sam and I are good friends.”
“So, Sam's the only non-Newcity person here?” Keith asked.
“Bradley used me to deal with the escapees because my personality is so attuned to yours,” replied Sam. “At least through some of the stages. He didn't realize how much closer I feel to you than to them, even though I haven't gone through what you've all gone through.” Sam kept his eyes on the road as he talked. “This is where I
belong.”
Stacy leaned close to Keith and said, “And he knows Bradley's plan.”
“What's that?” Sam said.
“I told him that you know Bradley's plans,” she said.
“You have no idea,” Sam said shaking his head.
“Do you?” Keith said to Stacy.
“Not completely, but you saw the weapons, the explosives. Sam said he'd debrief us when we got back into the city.”
Keith didn't like the sound of that. The last place he could imagine going to would be back into the city. “Wouldn't that be a little close to Newcity? Aren't you afraid you're going to get caught?”
“I told you, they're not after us,” she said.
“We're going back to warn them?” Keith said, recalling their conversation earlier that day.
“You are. We're not sure how we come into this yet. But you'll tell us when it's time.”
Chapter 13
It occurred to Keith that his companions could as easily be delusional as they could be coherent. He thought that Sam might be more logical about things, but he had not heard what Sam knew that the others didn't know in order to decide for sure. And the pairing off was one of the stages the escapees went through on their way to being normal – at least according to Bradley. If that were the case, it was difficult to imagine that they were going to be integrated unless integration was how they would eventually socialize and break their initial attachments.
They drove on for another hour or so before light began to ascend from behind the distant hills. Patches of fog settled in an area over the embankment and to the right of the road they traveled. The gray curled up from the ground in slow motion.
“Riverbed,” Brent said. “It'll burn off early this morning.”
Keith loved the way the fog meandered through the trees following the steady flow of the hidden river. He stared as the van rumbled along, the steady hum and vibration placing him in a sort of meditation. His head lolled and his mind wandered until he saw something out the corner of his eye. Rotated so that he could see into the rear of the van where supplies had been loaded, Keith's neck cracked from a settled stiffness. What he saw tucked into the corner was the boy with the bullet hole in his forehead. Keith still hadn't fully accepted that the boy was a younger him. In fact, he refused to think of the boy as himself with a bullet hole in his forehead. The whole idea felt too strange and unnatural.
He acted nonchalant about what he saw in the back area of the van because he knew that the others were unaware.
“We have enough supplies for a few days,” Brent said. “It should be enough.”
The boy pointed out the rear window.
Keith saw another van speeding toward them, still some distance off. “Someone's coming,” Keith said.
Brent craned his neck to see. “It looks familiar,” he said.
“Shit,” Sam said. He speeded up.
The van bounced over the rough road, jostling its passengers as Sam attempted to keep it stable.
Keith straightened back around in his seat as though nothing was going on. But, he listened closely as the boy rustled behind him to get comfortable.
After only a few minutes, the boy said in a very clear whisper, “Turn left.”
Keith leaned toward Stacy so that he could see out the front windshield past Sam. A crossroads lay up ahead. Keith's heart pounded and he became fidgety, but he didn't say anything.
Brent asked what was bothering him. “You're looking for something,” he said.
Keith closed his eyes and shook his head.
The boy said, “Left.”
“We need to turn left up here.” Keith whispered at the same tone level as the boy.
Brent shouted to Sam, “Make a left, Sam.” He glanced out the back window. “There's a rise in the road behind us. They've disappeared for a second. But hurry.”
Sam didn't hesitate. He put on the brakes, shifting everyone forward faster than expected. Several of them reached to the seat in front of them for support. Both Brent and Stacy reached across Keith, holding him back in his seat as they leaned into the slowdown.
“Keep it coming,” Brent said.
Keith stared forward, but could hear the boy in the back. “A right turn in about a mile,” he said.
Keith clenched his lips together.
Brent reached around and put an arm over Keith's shoulder. “We know you're being guided. Please, for all our sakes, just accept it. What else do we need to do? It's okay.”
“Make a right turn about a mile from here,” Keith said.
“Did you catch that?” Brent called to Sam.
“No. Where're we going?” he asked.
“Right turn up ahead.”
Sam made the turn onto a narrow macadam road. “Now where?”
Brent patted Keith's shoulder.
Keith turned in his seat to look into the back, but the boy was gone. He shrugged his shoulders. “I don't know.”
“Keep driving until we get another sign,” Brent said. “Did you see him? Before, I mean?”
“Yes, he was in the back, but he's gone now,” Keith said.
“It's amazing,” Amanda muttered to Robert, who sat next to her and in front of Brent.
“I'm not so sure,” Keith responded. Then he laughed at his own comment. He watched out the window as they drove over the road.
The sun crested the hills, sending rays of light through the trees that flanked their travels. Splotches of sunlight strobed the road as they sped along.
“There's something up ahead,” Sam said.
Keith leaned over to see what he was talking about and noticed an old barn to the right. Someone stood in the yard, and as soon as Keith recognized that it was the angel with one wing, he gasped.
“Slow down,” Stacy ordered.
“Pull into the barn,” Keith said, watching the angel motion them through the open barn door.
“I don't see a house anywhere,” Sam said.
“It must be a storage barn of some sort,” Brent said.
“Let me out first,” Keith demanded.
Sam stopped the van and Stacy ducked as she exited the van. Keith stepped from the van and stood silently. Stacy remained beside him. “What is it?”
“The girl,” Keith said.
Brent had a foot on the van's running board, but Stacy motioned for him to stay inside and said to Sam, “Get the van into the barn. Quickly. We'll be there in a moment.”
The van crunched over a stone drive, popping and crunching its way into the barn. Once inside, the engine was shut down and the doors opened and closed with the sharp sound of air being displaced.
“You can go,” Keith said, but Stacy didn't move.
“I didn't know there was a girl.”
“Sam didn't tell you?” Keith said.
Stacy shook her head. “Who is she?”
The angel with one wing stood only ten feet from Keith. He could see the bulge from the wing lift slightly above the girl's shoulder. He wanted to see her wing, but didn't know why. He wanted to touch her, but knew that he shouldn't. He took a step forward and she took one backward. “Talk to me,” he said.
She pointed for them to enter the barn. “Hide,” she said. “Do it now.”
“We're to hide inside,” he said.
Stacy reached for his hand and they rushed off together. Although her hand felt soft her grip was firm. Keith could have done without them touching even though he longed for contact. He followed Stacy's lead and kept an eye on the angel as long as he could. Stumbling over a root or a rock made him momentarily lose his concentration, and the angel was gone. “Let's go,” he said.
Once they were inside, Sam slid the barn door closed enough to hide the van's presence, the. The rollers squealed and the door shook as it moved. Dust floated in the air. Several stalls in the front of the barn were empty. The dirt floors had been brushed clean a long time ago. Two back stalls held bags of grain, and one stall was stuffed with bales of hay, but there were no sign
s of recent activity.
Seven of them poked around the barn's interior, while Will and Rebecca stood near the entrance. Keith meandered in the center of the space where he could watch the others.
“Sam?” Will whispered from the front of the barn.
Sam, Molly, and Robert inspected the grain in one of the back stalls. Sam pointed out that rats had eaten through most of the bags. After kicking one, dust rose into the air. The three of them left the pile and headed back toward the van. “What is it?”
“The van that was behind us just drove past,” Will said. “It was one of ours.”
Sam slapped Keith's back. “You saved us from getting caught. Now do you believe that you're here for a reason?”
