Cathedral of Dreams (18 page)

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

I
t 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.”