Darla tapped the throttle, lightly this time, and the bulldozer inched forward. When the blade hit the bank, the tracks slipped, and the dozer rocked backward.
“We’d better get out and run,” I said anxiously.
“No, I’ve got this.” She tapped the throttle again and again, setting up a rocking motion. Dirt, ash, and snow fell from the creek bank where we were battering it.
I looked back. The lead Humvee was halfway down now. Two more followed behind it.
The bulldozer’s motion got more and more violent. Darla was rocking in time with it, tapping the throttle as her body swayed back and forth against the seat. The dozer knocked big chunks of earth off the far bank each time it rocked forward, slowly battering its way out of the creek.
I glanced back again. The lead Humvee was now within shooting range. I jerked my head back inside the cab. “Keep your head down, they’re close!” I yelled. Darla crouched lower in her seat and rocked the bulldozer forward-hard. It slammed into the bank, but this time the tracks bit. We tilted up at almost a forty-five-degree angle. When we crested the bank, the dozer fell with a crash that threw me forward on the armrest, right into the throttle. The bulldozer accelerated to its max, heading straight toward a huge sycamore. I scooted back, and Darla grabbed the throttle, slamming it to one side. We turned, narrowly missing the tree. I glanced behind us. The first Humvee was mired in the creek. Two more were lined up behind it, unable to pass. I realized I’d been holding my breath and let it out in a heavy sigh.
We rumbled over a flat area dotted with huge trees. Darla veered in an S-pattern around two more sycamores and started the bulldozer up a long, gentle ridge on the far side of the valley.
The ridge was deceptive. It lured us in with the promise of a gentle slope but got steeper and steeper as we ascended. Still, the bulldozer climbed easily, crushing underbrush and small trees beneath its blade and tracks. Near the top, the slope became completely vertical, ending in a line of broken rocks and cliffs. They were only seven or eight feet high-easy to climb on foot, but impossible for the bulldozer.
Darla raised the blade to maximum height and eased the bulldozer forward until it touched the cliff. We clambered out of the cab and onto one of the big metal arms that supported the dozer’s blade. Darla took two steps up the sloped strut and grabbed the top edge of the blade. Then she pulled herself onto it and balanced there for a couple seconds before stepping forward to the top of the cliff.
I started to follow. The arm felt slick under my boots. I tried to walk up it, wobbled a bit, and thought better of it. I sat down and shimmied up on my butt. I grabbed the edge of the blade-it was sticky, coated with sap from the trees we’d mown down. I dragged myself slowly upright, standing on the arm and gripping the blade. Stepping up to the top of the blade looked easy when Darla had done it, but I had a terrible time getting even one foot up there. I straddled the blade instead, pulling myself slowly up and holding on with a death grip all the way.
Darla stepped back onto the blade beside me. She had one foot on the blade and one on the cliff. “Give me your hand.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. This should be easy.” My face was hot despite the freezing weather.
“You’ve been on a starvation diet for almost two weeks, and you probably got a concussion when the guards clubbed you with their guns.”
Darla pulled me to my feet. I tried to control my trembling knees as I perched atop the blade. I sucked down a deep breath and stepped across the gap, pushing my leg into the snow on top of the cliff while I held Darla’s hand for support.
She stepped back across the gap. I took another step away from the cliff and put my hands on my knees, resting and trying not to collapse altogether.
Darla waited beside me for a couple of minutes, then we slogged on up the hill. The slope wasn’t as steep here, but it was still tough going. The snow was almost three feet deep. We had to high-step, lifting our feet up and dragging them through the top layer of snow. We started out side by side, but I quickly fell behind and took to walking in Darla’s footsteps. Also it was dark, and without the running lights of the bulldozer, bushes and trees suddenly loomed at us from out of the night, forcing Darla to detour often.
After a few minutes of this, my pants legs were soaked through. Darla’s fatigues were damp all the way up to the small of her back-she was getting the worst of it since she was breaking the trail. I felt cold, but the effort required to move forward was keeping me from freezing. I imagined that if we stopped now, without a fire or shelter, both of us would be hypothermic in no time.
At the top of the slope, the woods ended, and we stepped into a field. Darla bent double to rest. “Which way?”
“Northeast, somewhere. I sort of remember how to get there. In a car, anyway. We’ll have to find a road.”
“I was planning to stay off the roads until we were farther away from the camp.”
“Makes sense. How did you manage to steal a bulldozer, anyway? That was… wow.”
Darla looked away. I couldn’t see her cheek very well in the darkness, but she might have been blushing. “I just did, okay?”
“It was amazing. I was trying to figure out some way to escape, find you, and slip out of the camp, and then wham! You knocked the whole hut down.”
“Do we have to talk about it?”
“No, I guess not… What’s wrong?”
Darla didn’t answer right away. “You remember when Captain Jameson was telling you about the ‘evening entertainment’-”
“Yeah, I hope I broke his nose.”
“You did. Both his eyes were turning black by the time he dragged you into that hut. I followed and watched from inside the fence.”
“So that’s how you knew which hut I was in.”
“Yep. So anyway, he should have called it a prostitution detail-”
“I knew that’s what he was talking about. Something about the way he said it-I could hear the slime oozing off his voice.”
“So, anyway… I volunteered for it.”
“You what?”
“You heard me.”
“But-”
“But nothing. How else was I supposed to get in the guards’ enclosure? Chet always watched me during the day, and I figured we’d have a better chance to get away at night, anyway.”
“But that’s why I kicked the guy. Because what he was suggesting was so repulsive in the first place. Because I wanted to protect you.”
“Then you did a crappy job of it. He was propositioning me, not you, and I didn’t try to beat him down. What were you thinking? If you’d kept your cool, I wouldn’t have needed to offer to prostitute myself, wouldn’t have needed to steal a bulldozer and break your ass out of that hut.” Darla poked me in the chest with one finger, hard.
“I would have gotten-”
“You don’t even know how bad off you were! I wheedled it out of Chet. They may call those doghouses ‘punishment huts,’ but they’re not for punishment. Nobody comes out of them alive, Alex. They throw troublemakers in there to die, so there’s no physical evidence to contradict the reports they file with FEMA. ‘Died of exposure’ doesn’t call for an investigation. It’s safer for them than putting a bullet in your fool head. Although a bullet in the brain might not kill you, because it’d sure miss all the organs you do your thinking with.”
Darla whirled away, following the tree line to our right.
For about fifteen minutes I struggled to keep up with the furious pace she set. Then I stopped and called to her. “Darla,” I said between gasps for air, “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know that sorry cuts it.” She strode back to me, kicking through the snow. “As it happened, I only volunteered to be a camp prostitute. I didn’t have to go through with it. But so what if I had? So what if I’d screwed every motherless guard in that godforsaken camp?”
“I don’t-”
“Would that have made me less of a woman in your mind? Less of a person? Just one of those girls, the easy ones, the ones the high-school cliques gossip about and call sluts? Is that the kind of boy you are, Alex? Is that the kind of man you want to be?”
“No, I…” I didn’t know what to say. I’d been angry when she began her rant, but it occurred to me that she was right. I had reacted impulsively when I kicked Captain Jameson. That had made things worse for both of us. A thought hit me almost physically, like the sound wave of the eruption eight weeks ago: I realized exactly how much Darla had been willing to sacrifice on my behalf. I fought back tears. There was only one thing I could say. “I love you, Darla.”
I held out my arms. She stumbled into them, whispering, “God, I was scared, Alex. I was so scared.” She was crying, and I lost the fight to hold back my own tears. We stood in the icy snow and hugged for a while.
“So,” Darla said, “I was filthy, like everyone else in the camp. Captain Jameson had some grunt take me to the showers. He stood guard outside the shower room door-either to keep me from escaping or to stop anyone from bothering me, I don’t know.”
“Your hands still feel greasy.”
“I didn’t shower. When I got in there, I noticed it was built of temporary walls under a big canvas tent-no ceiling. So I flipped on the water and climbed over the back wall into the next room.”
“How’d you know what was on the other side of the wall?”
“I didn’t before I climbed up there. Turns out it was an empty barracks room. I stole a uniform and ditched my old clothes. I was hoping I could pass for a guard-at least at a distance.”
“And that worked?”
“Yep. I walked out to the vehicle depot. Nobody was around that late at night, so I used a hammer to bash open the lockbox and grabbed the key to my favorite dozer.”
“That was crazy. And brave. Thanks.”
“They should call us the seven-mile-an-hour bandits.”
“Huh?”
“Top speed for that bulldozer. Seven miles per hour. Well, eight in reverse.”
I laughed. “Lot better time than we’re making while we stand here and talk.”
Darla nodded. “Let’s go.”
As the night wore on, I got slower and slower. Darla was breaking the trail, but she still had to stop every few minutes and wait for me to catch up. I tried to up my pace, to force myself to keep up with Darla by willpower alone, but I couldn’t. It doesn’t matter how hard you push down on the accelerator of a car, if there’s no gas in the tank, it won’t go.
On top of that, the edge of the woods was meandering, following the contour of the hillside. I had no idea if we were still going east-if we even had been in the first place.
“We’ve got to find a road,” Darla said.
“Be a lot easier for Black Lake to find us.”
“I don’t think they’ll be looking-”
“Of course they will. They chased us in those Humvees.”
“Yeah, but that was a knee-jerk reaction. Chet said Black Lake gets paid by how many refugees they’ve got in the camp. It’s worth a lot more money to round up some of the thousands of people who ran than to chase the two of us.”
“Maybe. But it might be personal to them now.”
“We’ve got to risk it,” Darla said. “I don’t think I can keep up this pace all night, pushing through deep snow like this.”
What she really meant was that there was no way I could keep up. I hated the fact that I was holding us back. I hated that she had to break the trail for us. I even hated her a little for being so damned nice about it.
Darla turned away from the woods, cutting across the field. At the far side, we stumbled onto a berm of snow. After we’d struggled across it, we found a gift: there was the road. It was a two-lane county road, but someone had plowed it to a solid layer of packed snow.
“Which way?” Darla asked.
“I don’t know. We’ve got to find Stagecoach Trail. It runs mostly east-west.”
“Okay, so I think we were going north, or maybe east. If we were going north, then this is an east-west road, and it might be Stagecoach Trail, so we should turn right.”
“I don’t think it’s big enough.”
“If we were going east, then we should turn left, and we’ll run into Stagecoach Trail.”
“And what if we were going south or west?”
“Then we’re screwed. So which way do you want to turn?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know this area. You do. You have to decide.”
“Left,” I said, just because I was tired of talking about it.