Gated (24 page)

I need to tell them all about what Cody said. I need to warn them. But I want to tell my parents first, without Pioneer listening in. I’m hoping they’ll know what to do next. Still, carrying the information around is weighing on me. I’ll be glad when it’s not my responsibility anymore.

When we finally pull up to Mandrodage Meadows, I practically leap from the car and then instantly regret it because my head aches in protest.

Every person in the Community seems to be out in the streets, packing their golf carts with boxes full of stuff—blankets and clothes.

“We’re moving all of our things into the shelter now,” Pioneer says as he shuts his car door and follows us into the street. “Tomorrow will be our final day above ground.”

Did he just say ‘tomorrow’?
I knew he would speed things up, but this is so much faster than I expected.

I can tell by my mom’s expression that she wasn’t aware of this either. I start to walk away from the car. I’m anxious to get home. I want to tell her what I know.

“Don’t forget your things, Little Owl,” Pioneer says, interrupting my thoughts. He’s holding up my backpack. I have to work not to look completely alarmed at how close he is to the contraband I’ve smuggled here. I’d let it completely slip my mind. I make myself smile at him and take the pack. “Thanks, I almost forgot.”

“Don’t worry, it’s my job to remind you,” he says.

I shoulder my pack. Pioneer is staring at me. Does he sense my doubts about the Silo and the end? Does he somehow suspect what happened between Cody and me? I try to walk away from him slowly, casually, but I can feel the stiffness of my gait betraying my inner panic, exposing me to him.

“We need to get underground before Sheriff Crowley
comes here and does any more investigating,” Pioneer tells us. He steps in front of me, blocking my way. “And when we are safely in the Silo tomorrow, you will tell me everythinting that went on at that hospital. Understand?”

Mr. Whitcomb rushes up to us and whispers something in Pioneer’s ear. Then Pioneer strides off without another word. There will be an awful lot to do between now and tomorrow. He must be anxious to get a head start. He’s walking toward the stables.
Indy
. This is the longest I’ve gone without seeing him. I strain to get a look at the corral, to see if I can spot him. He’s normally out having his exercise about now. But the corral’s empty. With all that’s happening, I guess our normal routine is going to suffer. I’ll have to bring him an extra helping of carrots later to reassure him, just as soon as I’m done talking with my parents. I don’t want to think about having to say goodbye to him. Maybe after my talk with my parents, I won’t have to. I fidget as they gather their things. I’m ready to get home, to tell them everything Cody told me.

“Lyla!” Suddenly Will runs up and scoops me into a gentle hug. “I was so worried.” He kisses me lightly on the mouth. I’m too startled to kiss back … and maybe just a little too guilty.

“You’re okay?” He searches my face.

“I’m fine,” I say for what feels like the hundredth time since the accident. Actually, the more people ask, the less fine I feel. And anyway, I can’t look at him directly.

Will gives me a strange look and puts me down.

“I’m just a little sick … and so tired,” I say.

He smiles softly. “Sure. I get it. I’ll let you go get some rest. I guess come tomorrow you’ll have lots of time to tell me all about what happened.”

He kisses my forehead. I don’t pull away, although I want to. I watch him turn and amble off in the general direction of his house. Then I turn and follow my parents home.

Once we’re safely inside, I ask my parents if we can talk, and we all sit down at the kitchen table. After I spend a minute debating the best way to explain things to them, I just blurt it out. There is no good way.

“That boy at the hospital, Cody, said that his dad is investigating us. They think we’ve got some kind of illegal weapons or something. They’ll be coming out here again tomorrow to search the place really well.”

When I mention the weapons, my dad winces like maybe he knows about them and gets why we might be in trouble. My heart starts jack-rabbiting in my chest. I was hoping that maybe they’d laugh off what I said and then spend the next few minutes convincing me that I’m mistaken, but they don’t.

I tell them about the sheriff’s questions about the accident. I have trouble meeting their eyes when I tell them that he thinks Pioneer’s been hurting me. My mom looks furious, but my dad does something that I don’t expect. He gets up from the table and walks over to the kitchen door’s frame and rests his head on it and closes his eyes. The look
on his face makes me want to put my arms around him. He looks so sad. I leave out my meeting with Cody. I make it sound like the sheriff told me about the earthquakes and the hurricane and their separate occurrence dates. I don’t want them to suspect my feelings for Cody. And I don’t trust myself to talk about him without getting upset.

“I’m sure Pioneer had good reason for telling us what he did and showing us the news clips all together,” Mom says. 1D;set.

“It was a kindness, really,” she adds.

“If the sheriff and the ATF do come here, it’ll be a major problem,” Dad says. “They will try to force us to leave. This sort of thing’s happened before to people like us. It could be Waco all over again. It’s why we’ve tried so hard to stay under their radar.” He shakes his head. “I warned Pioneer about buying those guns the way he did. It was a big risk.” He gets up from the table and walks over to the back window. He stares out into the backyard.

“But we’ll be underground now by the time they come,” Mom says. “They don’t know about the Silo, right?”

She looks at me for confirmation and I try not to hesitate before I nod. I don’t want to admit that I told them
much more than I was supposed to. I need some more time to figure things out. “They never mentioned it to me.”

“If we hide the Silo’s entryway really, really well, they may think that we just ran off.” She’s unusually calm. I can’t figure it out. Maybe she doesn’t totally believe that they’ll come at all, or maybe she just has that much confidence in the Silo’s ability to protect us. Either way, I’m not sure she’s facing up to reality.

“So we’re really going into the Silo tomorrow?” I don’t know what I was hoping for, but I am beginning to realize that it wasn’t this.

They both look at me.

“Of course, why wouldn’t we?” Mom asks.

And all I can say is, “I don’t know, I guess.” Maybe my attraction to Cody is clouding my judgment more than I thought. They don’t seem rocked by what I’ve told them at all. I try to push away the lingering doubt that I have, but it’s not easy. My chest keeps clenching uncomfortably. I wish I could just lie down and sleep, forget the past two days altogether.

Dad leaves right away to tell Pioneer what I’ve told him. Then Mom puts me to work filling boxes with our pictures, blankets, and clothes. We load them into a golf cart and drive them over to the Silo. It doesn’t take long to put everything away. We don’t have much to unpack. I look around our tiny rooms and try to imagine them as home. I can’t. All I want is to be outside in the open air,
in the stables with Indy.
That
still feels like home, like life. This place … feels strangely like death.

We finish preparing our private quarters and then help everyone else move what we need from the clubhouse. I visit the stables when I can. The horses are restless and ill-tempered. None of them have been let out all day.

I go into the tack room to get Indy’s saddle. At least I can work him out before I have to help with dinner. But when I open the tack room door, all the saddles, blankets, and reins are gone—as well as all the rifles we keep there. I’ll have to ride him bareback.

I put my hand on Indy’s side and lead him out. The other horses bang on their stall doors and whinny. They want out too, but I can’t take them all by myself. Still, I ref. ndy&solve to remind my dad to put them in the corrals before we enter the Silo for good. They can’t be cooped up in their stalls until someone comes out here again. The way the sheriff talked, it might only be a couple of days, but I don’t want to rely on that. It’ll be hard enough to say goodbye to Indy today without worrying if he’s okay. I don’t like leaving him out here, but I don’t have a choice. The Silo’s no place for animals.

I grab Indy’s mane and pull myself up onto his back. I nudge him in the flanks and he takes off. We barely miss the corral’s fence as we thunder past. I work to guide him with my legs. It’s almost as if he can sense the changes we’re making and he’s balking at them. I try not to think about what will happen to him and the other horses once
we’re underground. The sheriff will take them with him into town. But they only have weeks left no matter what. I don’t want Indy to die.

Pioneer said that the end will come quickly. It makes sense to me. I can’t imagine that the Brethren would let them suffer, not the animals. If I thought they might, leaving Indy and the others would be unbearable. It almost is now.

I’m crying. I wipe at my face and I lean over to bury my head in Indy’s mane. He’s panting hard now and slowing to a stop.

“I don’t want to leave you, boy,” I whisper. Maybe I won’t have to. If the sheriff and Cody are right, this isn’t the end. “This isn’t goodbye,” I tell him. “It can’t be.”

Once word gets out about the impending raid, there’s some discussion about sealing ourselves in right away and not waiting for morning. But ultimately, if we’re going to make it look like we abandoned Mandrodage Meadows and made a run for it, there are too many loose ends to tie up tonight. We have to do something with our trucks and trailers or they’ll know that we haven’t actually left. Some of the men decide to drive them farther out into the prairie, maybe try to sink them in the lake that’s not far from where we are. They decide to take a few ho
rses and then ride them back. This should buy us a little time, get us closer to the point when our whereabouts will be the least of the sheriff’s concerns.

Dad stays gone for the rest of the day. Mom and I stay
busy transporting books and food from the clubhouse to the Silo’s library area and kitchen. Eventually we stop for a late supper. We eat all fresh things—apples, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and corn. I try to enjoy it. After all, I won’t get to eat these kinds of foods much longer, especially if we can’t immediately get the hydroponics garden up and working inside of the Silo. Still, the food sticks in my mouth and throat like pieces of rock. We’re running headlong toward our future now, and despite my parents’ continued confidence in it, I’m getting more and more terrified that we’re making a mistake.

Someone’s screaming.

At least, I think that’s what I hear before there are a series of hard clapping sounds. The screaming is almost too high-pitched and at first I think it if. ndustify">s a small child, but the volume seems impossibly loud. It’s eerie, inhuman … and besides, there are no children here, not anymore. Whatever it is, it wakes me from a sound sleep. Now my heart’s thundering in my chest and I’m trembling with the kind of intuition that seems to accompany this kind of interrupted sleep. Something’s very wrong.

The raid
.

Can they have come for us this quickly?

I look out my open window. The screaming’s stopped. There’s nothing now but the sound of the trees shushing together in the breeze and the singing chatter of the crickets. The moon’s bright and flat enough to look unreal. I wrap my arms around myself. My oversized nightshirt seems too thin; the air’s finally turned cold.

The street is empty. It’s still the middle of the night.
I’m sure that everyone else is sleeping and yet there’s an undercurrent of energy riding the wind outside, making the hairs on the back of my neck stiffen and rise. I squint out at the darkest shadows, sure that I’ll see men with guns and uniforms, but everything’s still. The shadows are empty.

I tiptoe to my parents’ room. Mom’s there, but Dad’s not. I don’t wake her up to ask her where he is. Whatever’s woken me up and put me on edge feels urgent. She might try to keep me close and stop me from investigating on my own.

I throw on some clothes and creep downstairs. I check the few rooms there just in case, but Dad isn’t in the house at all. I open the front door. The screams start again briefly, dying out just as quickly as the ones that woke me up. There’s the clapping sound all over again. Like fireworks going off … or gunshots.

I walk across the porch and jump down into the yard. I start heading in the direction that the sounds are coming from. Where are the night guards? The streets aren’t just empty, they’re deserted. I look toward the front of the development. The gate is still closed. There’s no real sign that there’s trouble, just those screams and clapping sounds. I hold my stomach and try to calm the queasy feeling there. I’m still dizzy; the street heaves up to meet my feet and I realize that I’m walking funny, high-stepping to make sure that I don’t stumble. Still, I have to keep going. I need to know who’s screaming and why.