“Was that a gunshot?” I whispered.
He gave a stiff nod, and I covered my mouth against a bout of nausea.
“God, please,” Remy whispered. “Please.” I reached for her and she wrapped a hand around my arm, pulling me close so she could press her face to my shoulder. I put my hand over hers.
“They’ll be okay,” I whispered.
As we crouched in the cornfield, full busses began to pull away. I stared at the side door, willing our loved ones to burst out, but it remained firmly shut.
“I want to go watch with Tater,” I whispered.
“Me too,” Remy said.
“All right,” Ry whispered.
I led the way, moving slowly and carefully as I’d seen my brother do, until we got to the corner of the field where Tater was watching intently.
“I haven’t seen them,” he said before I could ask.
“Did you hear the gunfire?” Rylen asked him.
“Yeah.” Their expressions were the grave masks of soldiers.
We watched as two more busses were filled, driving away.
At the same time, Tater, Rylen, and I jolted at the sight of Mom, Dad, Abuela, and Livia being shuffled among the herd of people down the walk toward the busses. Crap, Julian wasn’t able to get them! I was relieved to see they were okay, but scared to death at the thought of them getting on a bus. So, where was Julian?
“Shit,” Tater muttered. He started to stand, but Rylen grabbed him.
“If you walk out there now, they’ll kill you,” Ry said.
Tater clenched his fists.
“My parents!” Remy said, pointing. Sure enough, her dad had his arm around her mother, who appeared to be crying. Her dad kept looking around. Remy let out a sob. “He’s trying to find me! I need to go!”
“Remy, you can’t. Just like Tater can’t. If we come strolling out of the field they’ll know we tried to escape and they’ll be suspicious of us. You saw how easily they kill, and you heard Julian say how they’re taught to mistrust.”
“I can say I just got here. That I was late.”
Tater shook his head. “They’ve got your name on the list.”
“We can’t let them be taken,” I said, watching as the line moved forward. All I could think about was gas chambers and body pits. I know it was morbid, but these people brought out the worst in my imagination.
“I’m going!” Remy shot up, and Tater grasped her around the waist with a strong arm, pulling her down until she was sitting on his lap. She struggled and he covered her mouth. He held down her arms when she clawed at his hand.
“Remy, calm down,” I whispered. “Tater, don’t hurt her!”
“I’m not! She freakin’ cat-scratched me.”
“Remy,” I said. “Promise you won’t yell or try to run, and he’ll let you go.” She breathed heavily through her nose, and her eyes shone with emotion.
Rylen took a knee beside her. “We can’t go out there. How do you think your parents would feel watching you get shot?” Remy’s eyes shut and all the fire went out of her. Tater carefully let her go and to my utter shock, Remy turned her face and buried it into Tater’s chest. He froze in confusion until her body shuddered. Then he hesitantly put his arms around her.
“It’s all right,” he whispered into her hair. At the sound of his voice, Remy pulled back abruptly, as if a trance and been broken, and jumped off his lap, moving to crouch beside me and glare at him instead. He eyed her back just as hard.
“Focus,” Ry told him.
I ignored them and watched our families. It looked like they’d end up on the same bus. My heart nearly stopped when the side door we’d come out of opened with a click. All four of our heads wrenched to the side, watching in horror as Julian came stumbling out with one hand holding his bloodied neck. He fell to his knees.
Shit!
Rylen cursed and I covered my mouth against a scream. The gunshots . . .
“Stay here,” Tater said. “I’ll get him.” He moved fast through the field, disappearing from our view, then cut across the lawn toward the school at a sprint. He was out of sight of the people in the front of the school, but I prayed nobody would hear and come to investigate.
Within a minute, Tater had carried Julian into the corn field and I raced to meet them.
I skidded in the dirt to stop beside Julian’s head. The side of his neck was gaping. It wasn’t spurting, but I was guessing the worst of the bleeding had happened in the building. I immediately grabbed and held tight with both of my hands. This was not good. This was an artery.
“Julian, sweetie,” I said. “Stay with me.”
His glazed eyes peered up at me. He’d seen enough injuries to know.
“They . . . know . . . four are . . . gone.” His words started as a rasp and ended in a gurgle that made the backs of my eyes burn.
“Julian.” I swallowed the moisture that pooled in my throat. Blood seeped from beneath my hands.
“Safecamp . . . in . . . Mo . . .” His eyes fluttered.
“Where, Julian? Stay with us.” I looked up at Tater and said, “Pat his cheeks.”
Tater did, and Julian’s eyes opened. “Mojave.”
“They’re taking them to Mojave Desert?” Rylen asked.
His eyes closed and he let out a barely audible sigh of, “Yeah.” His chest heaved with great effort and he commanded, “Get . . . out . . .”
Julian went still, and his blood flow slowed beneath my fingers. I could barely see him through the tears that began to silently trail down my face. “No,” I whispered. In two days I’d watched two people I cared about breathe their last breaths. I’d held their lives in my hands and been unable to save them. Remy sat at Julian’s feet, staring at us from just above her knees, watching as the guy she used to flirt with died.
“No,” I said louder. “Wrap his neck in something. One of your shirts.” I grasped Julian’s chin and tipped it up, pinching his nose to begin CPR.
“He’s gone,” Tater said. “He’s lost too much blood.”
“No.” I bent to take his mouth, and Rylen pulled me back, holding me tightly.
“He’s gone,” Tater repeated. “You heard what he said. They’re looking for us. We need to get the fuck away from the school.”
Another bus pulled away, but we couldn’t see it. I began panting, struggling to breathe.
“Oh, my God . . . that was their bus. They took them.”
“We’ll get them back,” Rylen assured me. He looked at Tater and down at Julian. “We should take his uniform.”
I watched, helpless, as my brother and Rylen stripped Julian’s dead body down to his boxers and undershirt. I’d seen countless crime scenes and accidents, and watched people die. It was never easy, but never before had I felt such loss and desolation as I did at that moment. I’d sent Julian back into the school. He’d died trying to help us.
I put a hand on Julian’s chest. “I’m so sorry, Julian.”
The guys worked quickly to hide the blood, covering it in loose dirt and fallen stalks.
“Come on,” Rylen whispered, touching my shoulder. “We have to get further into the field.” Rylen bent as if he were going to hoist Julian’s body up.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We can’t leave his body. We’ll take him and bury him when we can.”
“Yeah,” Tater whispered. “If they found his body without the uniform they’d know.”
Tater helped Remy up, and the four of us moved just in time. We were halfway into the huge field when the side door banged open and stern voices rang out. We went completely still, sinking down. I looked, but all I could see were yellowed stalks, dirt, and sky. From the corner of my eye I saw Rylen on a knee, leaning to the side to balance the weight of Julian’s body over his shoulder.
Shouts periodically filled the air, and it sounded as if Derps were running around the perimeter of the field. What if they came out here? We might be able to outrun them, but they could blindly shoot
into the field and we couldn’t outrun bullets. Remy and I hunkered close, breathing fast, and I listened so intently it felt as if my eardrums throbbed.
We remained there for what seemed like hours, our bodies alert, until voices faded and eventually cars started, their tires crunching in the distance. Then silence rained down upon us and our reality became achingly clear.
They’d taken our families. And we were officially outlaws.
We waited in the field awhile longer to be sure everyone was gone before we moved toward the farmhouse at the other end of the crops. The house was empty, of course, but we were there for one purpose: to bury Julian.
We stayed close to the edge of the cornfield in case we needed to run back in to hide. Remy cried quietly the entire time the guys and I took turns digging, and then lowered him into the ground, each holding one of his limbs. Then we covered him in dirt and stood there, exhausted in every way possible.
We moved closer as Remy said a quiet prayer for Julian’s soul and for the safety of us and our families. When she finished, we stared at each other. My only comfort was knowing there were three people in front of me who understood exactly how I felt at that moment. We weren’t alone. As long as we had each other, there was hope.
“Should we go back and see if our cars are still there?” I asked. If they weren’t, we were screwed.
Tater and Rylen both nodded, and the four of us headed back through the dried stalks toward the school.
At the other end of the field, we stared out at the eerily silent school grounds. When we were sure not a soul was in sight, we darted to the parking lot.
Tater hissed, “Yessss,” under his breath when we spotted the cars. Then he froze, scaring the shit out of me. “I don’t have the keys.”
“I’ve got one.” I pulled Mom’s set of keys out of my pocket and twisted Dad’s car key from the chain, handing it to him. “We only have one key, so don’t lose it.”
He saluted me and jumped in Dad’s SUV. To my surprise, Remy flung open the passenger door and jumped in beside him. Traitor. I looked at Rylen, who gave an amused shrug as we jogged to Mom’s car and jumped in.
“Wait,” I said. “Where the heck are we going?”
“Southwest to Mojave,” he said simply, as if it were a tiny park and not a desert that spanned three states.
I rolled down my window and Remy did the same. Tater leaned forward to see me through the passenger window.
“We need to stay off the main roads.”
Tater nodded. “I got this. Follow me.”
We made it out of town and onto a back road quickly. The good thing was, a caravan of school busses could not possibly move very fast, so we had a decent chance of spotting them and keeping track. Especially with Tater’s lead foot leading the way. We just had to keep out of their line of vision.
Rylen stared out the passenger window as I drove. Part of me wanted to fill the silence with words, but I let him be. After an hour of driving, my stomach gave an embarrassingly loud gurgle that filled the quiet car. The corner of Rylen’s mouth came up as he turned to me.
“Sorry,” I said, and he shrugged.
“We haven’t eaten in almost a day,” he pointed out.
He was right. I felt my body shaking a little, as it always did when my blood sugar got low. Next would come dizziness.
“Let me see if I can reach anything in the back,” he said. Rylen climbed over the seat as nimbly as an obstacle course, and I forced myself not to check out his ass. He pulled up a lever on the back seat and pulled it down to reveal the contents of the stuffed trunk. “Bingo.”
I heard him riffling around and then the seat clicking back into place. He unscrewed the cap on a bottle of water and handed it to me. I worked really hard not to snatch it away and moan as I drank it. I forced myself to stop halfway through the bottle and save the rest. I could have drunk five of those bottles at that moment.
Next he handed me a bag of turkey jerky and a chocolate chip granola bar.
“Oh, my God, I love you,” I said. The moment the words left my mouth my face flamed and a wave of dizziness hit. I had to grip the wheel harder. Rylen laughed it off and tore open the granola bar, handing it to me before ripping the top off the jerky bag.
I felt him watching as I took an overly large bite and struggled to chew it. Since I couldn’t talk, I pointed to the bag of jerky, then at his mouth.
“I don’t want to eat all of your food,” he said.
I forced myself to swallow so I could say, “Don’t be crazy! You have to eat too. It’s for all of us. You’re part of this family, Ry. You always have been.”
His eyes met mine, and pure emotion seemed to spill straight from his spirit into mine. The gratefulness and love he gave off took my breath away. I had to swallow and peer back at the road. I cleared my throat and swallowed again.
From the corner of my eye, I watched him put one piece in his mouth and start to close the bag, but I gave his hand a slap. “Eat more.”
“Dang, boss lady.” He shoved another piece in his mouth and I took one too.
Once I’d had enough to stop shaking, I asked the question I’d been thinking about all day.
“What do you think is really going on? I mean, safe houses? All I can think of are concentration camps. Am I being paranoid?”
Rylen rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know, Pep. I can’t wrap my mind around any of this mess.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let Liv out of my sight. I should have kept her with me instead of sending her to sit with your parents.”
“Ry . . .”
“She’s just as strong as you, but I never give her enough credit. I try to protect her, instead of letting her grow, and now she probably thinks I abandoned her.” He let out a gravely sigh. “I’m just glad she’s with your folks and not alone.”
“You don’t need to feel guilty. I’m sure she knows you’d never purposely abandon her.”
He made a dismissive sound. “Yeah, well.”
“They’ll take care of each other until we get them back.” The words echoed in my mind: get them back. But how? What if we couldn’t?
He must have had the same doubts because he went back to staring out his window in silence.
We’d been driving nearly an hour and a half through the middle of nowhere when I saw Tater and Remy leaning together and pointing. I looked over and saw a faint trail of high-blowing dust in the distance.
“Look!” I pointed.
He stared and a triumphant grin grew. “That’s coming from the main road.”
I couldn’t keep the smile from my own face. “It has to be them.” Our road seemed to run parallel, thought it was rutted with potholes and cracks that I constantly swerved to avoid. Remy turned around to smile at me through the back window and I gave her a thumbs-up.
After nearly two more hours of passing bordering small towns and hopping from dirt roads to side roads, we finally saw the bus caravan enter Amargosa Valley.
Rylen leaned forward and squinted. He had much sharper eyesight than me. “It looks like they’ve got the valley gated.”
Tater pulled up at an abandoned gas station and we all jumped out. My legs and arms ached from digging the past two days and then sitting so long. Rylen stretched his arms. Tater opened the back of Dad’s SUV and rooted around until he pulled out binoculars.
“I’m gonna get on the roof,” he said. Rylen nodded. The two of them went around the small, square building until they found an HVAC unit that was strong enough to let them climb, and then Rylen boosted Tater up.
I walked back to the car to talk to Remy.
“I have to pee so freaking bad,” she said, dancing in place.
“Go,” I told her. “I’ll watch for the guys.”
She squatted next to the car while I peered up at my stealthy brother on the roof. When Remy finished, she covered for me.
“Guys have it so easy,” I grumbled when I was finished. I reached into Dad’s glove compartment for wet wip
es to sanitize our hands.
“You’re such a germaphobe,” Remy said with a laugh when I handed her a wipe. After a second she got serious. “What do you think they’re doing to them? I mean, I know you think it’s something bad, but what if they really are just trying to keep people safe? What if they’re good, and we’re against them?”
I wondered how Remy’s gut instincts could tell her something so much different than mine. She’d always been trusting where I was cautious, and many times my caution had turned out to be unnecessary. What if she was right and we’d made enemies of the good team?
And then I remembered Grandpa Tate and Julian. I swallowed hard and shook my head. Plenty of times Remy’s trusting instincts were wrong, and she was burned.
“They’re manipulating people and using scare tactics to control them. There’s nothing good about that, Rem.”
“But maybe they have to be like that because people are so stubborn and it’s the only way to force us to let them do what’s best for us.”
I stared out at the distance, at the valley pass between two rocky mountains where the busses had disappeared. Before I could answer, I heard the thud of feet hitting the ground and knew the guys were coming back.
Tater nodded at us. “It’s gated. This is where they’re holding them.”
I let out a breath. We knew where they were. This was a great first step, but now would come the hard part. I looked up at the sky which had already started to dim.
“We need to figure out where to stay tonight, somewhere away from here.”
Tater nodded. “I saw signs for Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge not far from here.”
“We can stay there tonight,” said Rylen, “and come out early in the morning to scope out the camp.”
I shivered when he called it a camp.
“Let’s go,” Tater said. “I’m starved.”
We came to the state park down the road. The gates were unmanned, of course, so we moved the barrier aside and drove in, careful to move the barriers back into place so nobody would know someone was there.
When we came to the open landscape, Rylen whistled. “Damn, that’s pretty.”
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