Article 5 (24 page)

“Please Eddie!” bawled the thief’s wife. “Please, let’s go!”

The man brought both of his hands to his head. The barrel of the gun pressed lengthwise against his temple.

He’s going to shoot himself,
I thought, horrified.

“Look, I’m putting my gun down, okay?” said Chase. “You put yours down, too, and we’ll get you some food.” I watched in shock as Chase bent to lower his gun. Negotiations had been part of his training, but was this right? He was about to be defenseless!

A crack in the bushes a few feet away refocused my attention.

The boy was leaving his hiding place.

“Hey kid!” I whispered. “Get down!”

He didn’t listen. He seemed to think that Chase had defused the situation.

“Dad!”
The boy began running toward the rancher, whose surprised expression lapsed into terror. He dropped the bat.

The thief swore, startled, and jerked the silver handgun toward the boy charging out of the bushes.

“Ember, STOP!” roared Chase.

I hadn’t until that moment realized that I’d stood as well, and that my feet were running, too. Toward the boy. I was closer than the father. I could stop him first. Those were my only thoughts.

Crack!
The shot was fired the moment the kid and I collided. We tumbled into the grass in a heave of expelled breath and tangled limbs.

“Ronnie!” The rancher flung me to the side as he desperately clutched his young son’s body, searching for injury. My eyes ran over him as well. The jeans and sweatshirt were mud stained, and his innocent face was white with shock. Still, he had not been shot, and I felt no pain apart from getting the wind knocked out of me, which only left …

“Chase!” I was on my feet at once, sprinting over the patches of damp grass and puddles toward the two men on the ground. It took me a full second to see that they were both struggling. Neither, at least so far, had been fatally injured.

As I rounded the dead cow it became clear to me that Chase was winning. He outweighed his opponent by fifty pounds and had youth and training to his advantage. The woman had attacked him too, though, and was flung to the side, sobbing miserably. Somehow, both guns were lying on the ground.

My eyes found Chase’s first, as it was closest. I scooped it up quickly, forgetting about safeties and chambers, and pointed it at the jumbled mass of blood-stained clothing that rolled frantically over the earth.

My hands trembled. I couldn’t shoot one without risk of hitting both.

“Stop!” I shouted.

Chase elbowed the thief savagely in the face. The man clawed at Chase’s wounded arm, and Chase hissed in pain.

Something changed inside me then. A bolt, straight down my spine. The blood ran hot and fast through my veins. My vision narrowed into compressed slits, and over it descended a red veil. Suddenly, I didn’t care how pitiful this stranger was or how hungry.

This had to stop.
Now.

I raised the gun upward, toward the sky, and pulled the trigger. A loud
pop
slammed through my eardrums. The metal recoiled, sending a vicious kick through my wrist, down my forearm. I yelped, and the gun fell from my numb hand to the ground. My mind went absurdly but peacefully silent.

Chase lunged to a stand, shoulders heaving. All the calm negotiating had been stripped from his face to reveal the ferocity beneath. His eyes searched wildly for the source of the shot and came to rest on me.

The woman helped her husband to a stand. His mouth and nose were a mess of blood and dirt. They fled into the woods without another word.

I stared after them, feeling suddenly displaced, like a hammer with no nail.
What do I do now?
Everything had happened so fast and had ended just as abruptly.

When I turned around, Chase was coming toward me. His gait told me that he was furious before he ever opened his mouth.

I couldn’t think clearly. My ears were ringing from the shot, and my mind buzzed with the fleeting remnants of rage. Tears blurred my vision. The fear, momentarily paused, returned with full force, and in this frantic, baffled state I ran to him, and leapt into his arms.

He seemed surprised at first but soon was squeezing back.

“It’s all right,” he soothed. “No one’s hurt. You’re okay.”

His words sliced through me, and for the first time since he’d taken me from school, I knew the truth about us: I could not be okay if he was not okay. Pain, nightmares, fighting—all of it aside—he was a part of me.

“Don’t do that again! Not ever again!” I told him.

“I should say the same to you,” he said. I could feel his breath, warm on my neck.

“Promise me!” I demanded.

“I … I promise.”

“I can’t lose you.”

In that moment, I didn’t care about getting to South Carolina. I meant that I needed
him
. The way he had been. The way he still could be if he never let go. I don’t know what made me say it, but in that moment I had no regrets.

He hesitated, then pulled me even closer, so that I could barely breathe. My feet no longer touched the ground. I could feel his hands grasping my coat.

“I know.”

My heart rate slowed but pounded harder than ever before. He
did
know. He remembered now what it was like when we were together. I could feel it in the way he let himself go, in the shimmer that connected us when he stopped thinking. Here, returned at last, was my Chase.

Someone cleared his throat.

We detached like the wrong ends of two magnets, and what had felt so solid between us shattered like brittle glass. Having forgotten anyone else was present, we now faced the rancher. The baseball bat was tucked under his amputated arm, and his opposite hand rested on his son’s head. The boy was now smiling foolishly. My face heated, despite the falling temperature that came with the evening.

“Sorry to interrupt. My name’s Patrick Lofton. And this is my son, Ronnie.”

*   *   *

TWENTY
minutes later we were following Patrick and Ronnie down to the main house. Much to the rancher’s chagrin, we had to leave the cow where it had fallen until morning, when he could bury it properly. They couldn’t butcher it; they didn’t have a cold room large enough to store the meat, and their buyer, a man named Billings, wasn’t due for another week. At the mention of the slaughterhouse, I shuddered; it made me think of the dead dog hanging in the woman’s trailer.

Patrick had insisted that we stop in so his wife could thank us properly with a meal. When we told him we had to move on, that we had family waiting in Lewisburg, he offered to drive us there, and we agreed: The unknown tenants of the ranch house had to be safer than the desperate, starving people in the woods.

Besides, we weren’t going to be a whole lot better off than the drifters if we didn’t eat soon.

Chase had introduced us as Jacob and Elizabeth, and Patrick seemed to accept the pseudonyms, despite the fact that we’d used each others’ real names earlier. I didn’t like them; I looked nothing like an Elizabeth. The only one I’d known was Beth from home, and she was five inches taller than me with bright red hair. But at least it wasn’t Alice.

Chase had then created a flawless story about our displacement to Richmond after the Chicago bombings, which encouraged Patrick to share that he too had borne witness to such atrocities. He’d been a soldier in the U.S. Army, stationed in San Francisco, when it had fallen. It was there that he had lost his arm.

We approached a rickety red barn with white trim and a green tractor outside its oversized doors. A pasture lined the land opposite it, where thirty or so black cows were just barely visible through the failing light.

“Mind dropping your firearm here, Jacob?” Patrick asked, pausing in front of the barn. “Just until we leave. We don’t bring guns in the house, what with Ronnie so young.”

I nearly said something about the child not being too young to be shot at, but held back, knowing the request had more to do with Patrick’s concerns about us than with his son’s youth. I felt Chase straighten, then nod in agreement. He still had his baton and knife, after all.

“Sure. No problem.”

Patrick forced open the creaking door of the barn. We were blasted by the musty scent from the hay bales that lined the splintering wooden walls. In an open space before us, a motorcycle with wide silver handlebars leaned on its kickstand. I felt a trickle of nostalgia looking at it.

“Whoa. They stopped making Sportsters before the War,” said Chase in awe.

Patrick laughed. “Not bad. You know bikes, huh?”

“I used to have a crossover. It didn’t have a customized transmission or—”

“Dad, come
on.
We’ve gotta get Mom!” Ronnie interrupted.

Patrick’s smile from the compliment faded, and he opened a cabinet in the back corner with a key from his pocket. On the top shelf was a hunting rifle. He added the thief’s handgun to it. Chase left his there as well, with only a moment of hesitation.

The Loftons’ house was warm and spacious. The living room, just past the laundry room, was littered with toy cars and action figures. A fireplace was embedded into the wall, and on its mantle were a dozen family pictures. All smiling faces.

Chase and I scraped off our boots as he removed the backpack. I looked at him, brows raised, and he returned the sentiment.

The Loftons had money.

They weren’t rich. In fact, they probably had less than we’d had when my mother still had a job. There wasn’t even a television in the living room. But there was a glass vase and a decorative lamp on the end table, toys and books lying around, and extra clothes cluttering the floor that the boy—Ronnie—had shed at some earlier time. These were all things I would have sold when we’d been in a tight spot. The fact that they hadn’t needed to meant that they were doing significantly better than most of the country.

The kitchen had a skylight centered above an island. The walls were painted burgundy, and the towels and utensils on the counter were all fashionably black. A delicious salty scent emanated from an oversized slow cooker atop the marble counter. It had been a long time since I’d had meat; the soup kitchens never carried it, and with standardized power we couldn’t maintain a fridge. It took everything I had not to stuff my face in the cooker. The familiar hum of a generator outside distracted me.

I couldn’t tell if my stomach gripped from hunger or the sudden onslaught of nerves.
A generator?
They were commonplace in businesses, but not in private homes. Who were these people, friends of the president? They obviously made a good living; the price of beef was sky-high.

“Honey!” called Patrick. “Mary Jane! It’s all right, come on out!” He placed his keys in a ceramic bowl beside the fridge.

I heard a lock click down the hallway, and a door pushed open over carpet.

“When there’s trouble, the family hides in the basement,” Patrick explained. Ronnie ran back into the kitchen and slid across the linoleum floor on socked feet. “Well, most of the family,” Patrick added under his breath.

“Does this happen a lot?” I asked him.

“More than I’d like,” he responded bitterly. “Once every few months, less often when it’s freezing out. The pistol, that was new,” he added, his expression bleak.

“Ronnie? He’s still with you?” A petite woman bounded urgently into the room. She had ginger-colored hair, cut sharply at her chin, and was wearing an argyle sweater and jeans. She was quite stunning, not at all the plain rancher’s wife I’d pictured, and made me acutely aware of how dirty Chase and I were from days of tramping through the wilderness. She stopped abruptly when she saw us.

Patrick introduced us, quickly explaining the situation. A blush lit her cheeks. Unconsciously, she began running her hands through her son’s hair. He leaned against her leg like a purring cat.

“Welcome … Goodness, welcome,” she said finally. “And thank you.”

“I thought Jacob and Elizabeth might like to stay for dinner.” At Patrick’s suggestion, my stomach rumbled again. “They’ve got family in Lewisburg. I’ve offered them a ride in the morning.”

Morning?

“You … sure. I mean, absolutely,” Mary Jane said, shaking her head.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound ungrateful. “I was thinking we were going to Lewisburg tonight.” I looked out the window. It wasn’t completely dark yet.

“My uncle hasn’t been well,” Chase added.

Patrick frowned.

“It’s illegal to travel after curfew. Besides, after all you’ve done…”

The way he said
illegal
made my spine tingle. Patrick clearly followed the rules. I stepped stealthily on Chase’s toes, and he nodded once, without looking my way, in silent confirmation.

We had no choice but to stay the night—or at least make them think we were staying the night—unless we wanted to risk them contacting the MM for a curfew violation. They did have a generator, which meant a working phone after dark. Their obedience frightened me.

Mary Jane faked a smile. “Don’t you dare argue. You’re staying, and in the morning I’ll drive you to Lewisburg myself. We wouldn’t have it any other way.”

They wouldn’t. That much was clear.

“That’s very nice,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t sound too grim.

In confirmation of my ragged appearance, Mary Jane hustled me into their bathroom with a tattered old towel that she pulled from the washroom and a bar of soap. Chase followed with our bag. I knew he was getting a layout of the house, the exits.

“They’re awfully friendly,” I whispered while he washed his hands. “We could be serial killers for all they know.”

He made a small sound of agreement in the back of his throat.

“We can’t stay until morning,” I informed him. But my bloody, blistered feet, and the cramping muscles in my lower back and calves argued otherwise.

He didn’t answer, his mood black again, and I found myself resentful that he put on such a happy face for strangers while I got the silent treatment. The moment between us outside had obviously been lost, and that hurt more than I cared to admit.