THE seconds passed. I still felt the urgency to fly, but my feet were stuck in the mud. The weight of my words hung between us, and though part of me feared his reaction, I did not regret them. I knew what he was capable of; he needed to know the same about me.
After what seemed like a long time, he shrugged.
“Hope you’ve got good shoes. It’s a long walk to the check-point.” He lifted his arm toward the road. His eyes mocked me, but there was a hint of something else in them, too. Almost like fear, but that couldn’t be. He wasn’t afraid of anything.
“I… I can catch a bus,” I stammered, glancing into the corn for Alice’s mother. She’d had a car behind her house. What if she drove to town to look for me? It didn’t seem so ludicrous based on the strength of her delusion.
“A bus? To a transport station? Great idea. Watch out for the soldiers that search the vehicles, though. And the Missing Persons boards. And the cashier who’ll need your U-eleven form. And…” His tone became increasingly sharper.
“I’ll give a fake name, and I have… money,” I shot back.
“You have my money. Probably only half of what you need, too. Why don’t you go back and ask your friend to spot you the rest?”
“I get it, okay!”
I hated him then. For everything he knew. Everything I didn’t.
“You don’t get it!” he said with sudden ferocity. I jumped at the volume of his voice but was surprisingly unafraid. “Other places, they aren’t like home! There’s no safe side of town out here. There are no doors that lock after curfew. Jesus, they told us girls like you were dangerous, but I didn’t believe it until now.” He looked very close to pulling his hair out. If he didn’t soon, I thought I might do it for him.
I could picture him sitting in a classroom while an MM officer wrote terrible things about “girls like me”—girls with scarlet fives pinned to their shirts—up on a board. The thought of him believing it was infuriating.
“I’m dangerous? Me? You almost killed that guy! You would have if I didn’t stop you!” It flew out of me, the disappointment, the confusion. Like waves pummeling a concrete dam. I didn’t even care in that moment if he had been injured.
I saw the change come over him slowly. The rise in his shoulders. A slight bulge in the veins of his neck. The narrowing of his black eyes, more like a wolf than ever. He moved toward me, large and ominous, blocking the light. I took a step back, bumping into the truck, forced to acknowledge the sudden panic in my chest.
“They were going to hurt you.” His voice was low and uncontrolled.
“So that makes it okay?” I countered. No, I didn’t want to be hurt—I certainly didn’t want to die—but that didn’t excuse murdering someone, however foul, based on speculation!
A crack of thunder shattered my concentration, and my eyes shot back into the cornfield. Was the woman coming? Or was she still on the floor, weeping for Alice? Only a few minutes had passed, but it seemed like much longer.
“Yes, that makes it okay,” he said between his teeth, eyes flashing with the lightning. “And don’t pretend you wouldn’t have done the same thing.”
“I would never!”
“Never? Not even if they’d threatened your mom?”
His words pierced clear through me. If I had been Chase, and my mother had been me, nothing in the world could have peeled me off of Rick.
I realized then with terrible clarity that maybe Chase and I weren’t so different after all. Everyone knew that a dog backed into a corner bites. I’d just never actually considered that the dog could be me.
At the same time, Chase had just used the love I felt for my mother to justify his actions. Like the two were somehow on the same level. It was a cheap shot, even for him.
He’d watched the transition of my thoughts in silence but could hold back no longer.
“If you think you’re safer on your own, stay here. Otherwise, get in the truck.”
His knuckles whitened as he gripped the door, but he did not advance any closer. He was not going to force me inside. He was giving me a choice.
I had to go with him. Despite how much I hated it, he was right. I needed to get to the carrier, so I needed him.
He slammed the door after me and rounded the hood, but he paused outside with his hand on the driver’s side handle before he joined me in the cab. Maybe he was making the same decision I had: to risk his life to stay with me or to go his own way.
We didn’t speak immediately. A puddle of rainwater soaked the seat and pooled on the rubber floor mats. My feet sloshed in wet shoes. My fingers had gone numb with the cold. Chase’s hands disappeared beneath the dash, bringing the engine to life. A moment later we were jostling along the path back to the main road, wrapped in prickling, uncomfortable silence.
The clock on the radio said 10:28 A.M.
“Oh no,” I whispered miserably. I’d wasted so much time! We would have been nearing the checkpoint by now if I hadn’t run away. Soon the MM would be gunning for us, and who knew how late the carrier would wait.
Chase knew all this, too. I’d put us in grave danger, and he would not pretend I hadn’t.
We passed a truck flipped on its side with a shredded tarp tied around the top wheel well. It had probably been a lean-to at one time. The material now floated in the static breeze like a flag of surrender. I looked away, fighting back the hopelessness.
I slumped in the seat, stripping off my jacket and wiping my puke-covered hands on the rainwater that had gathered in the hood. There seemed no better place to put it than the floor, as it was still soaked. Without the barrier, the cold air of the cab needled through my sweater. I had dry clothes in Chase’s bag, but I wasn’t about to ask him to stop so I could change. We had to make up for lost time.
“You need to know something,” Chase said abruptly, startling me as I swished water from one of the bottles around in my mouth.
When I glanced over I found him sitting perfectly straight, his eyes boring holes through the windshield.
“I’ll get you to the safe house, and then I’ll be gone. I won’t bother you again. But while we’re together, you don’t have to be afraid of me. I won’t hurt you. I promise I will never hurt you.”
It wasn’t just his proclamation that surprised me but his proposal. I’d seen what soldiers could do—what they’d done to my mom, and Rosa, and Rebecca. So maybe Chase wasn’t like that—he had taken me from rehab, and despite my discomfort, defended me with his life—but that didn’t erase the cold, hard look on his face when he’d taken away my mother. There were plenty of ways to hurt someone without using your fists.
Still, I wanted to believe I was safe with him, despite the soldier that was so easily triggered inside of him. I wanted to trust him again, maybe not like I had in the past but in a different way. Yet here he was, saying he was going away again.
But that’s what I had wanted, wasn’t it? That’s why I’d run away, because I needed to get away from him. Suddenly that decision—despite how much I’d thought it through—seemed very impulsive.
“Okay,” I said.
His shoulder jerked, reading my confusion as disbelief.
“When noon comes, the game changes.”
“I know.”
“I can’t get you to South Carolina without your help.”
I glanced over at him. It surprised me that he was giving up some control.
“What do I need to do?”
“Don’t take off,” he said. I crossed my arms, annoyed.
“Is that all?”
He pulled in a deep, steadying breath.
“You have to listen to me,” he said authoritatively. “I mean really listen. If I tell you to hide, do it. If I say run, you move. And you have to let me call the shots. You’ll stick out too much as a Statute violator otherwise.”
Lean the way I lean, he’d once said. Don’t fight me.
I remembered all the demeaning lectures on the proper, subservient role of a woman from the reformatory, but couldn’t help thinking Chase was going a little overboard.
“I think I know how to blend in, thanks.” I had done it my whole life, after all. It was how I’d kept us off the MM’s radar. How I’d planned on reaching South Carolina.
He scoffed. “You’ve never blended in. Even when you were… You just can’t,” he finished, slightly flustered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” he stammered. “Look, people lock in on you. That’s all.”
I felt his eyes on me now. And suddenly I was eight years old, biting back tears after falling off my bike. The neighborhood boys were calling me “crybaby,” which hurt more than my skinned knees. Chase, forsaking the consequences of defending a girl, was running them off. My ten-year-old hero.
The déjà vu receded, but the feelings echoed through the space between us. Fear, embarrassment, intimidation. Security.
“I never asked you to protect me,” I said quietly. Not then, not now.
I could see from the look on his face that it would be no use arguing with him. Even if he acknowledged that I was completely capable of taking care of myself, on some level he would still be hardwired to look after me. A pressure grew in my chest the longer I watched him. I turned away.
“Anything else you want to tell me?” I asked.
“What?” He sounded startled.
“Rules,” I said, scowling. “Any other rules?”
“Oh.” He shook his head. “For God’s sake, don’t trust anyone.”
I agreed, but only halfheartedly. Because despite everything, I had gotten back in the truck with him. And since I’d made that choice, I hadn’t been afraid.
AT eleven thirty, we arrived in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
My eyes were seeing double from staring vigilantly out the windows for the MM. Every few moments I would glance down at the tiny print on the road map to help Chase navigate, but the moment I assured we were on track, I was scanning for soldiers again.
The rain had stopped, and this road was clearer, although we had to swerve around the occasional fallen tree. A few cars had passed, but none for a while.
The outskirts of town were mostly rural. High wooded mountains climbed in the distance to our right. The atmosphere cast a purple hue over the layers until, far against the horizon, the soaring peaks blended completely with the sky.
Most of the homes were deeply set on acres of land, boarded up and tagged with spray paint, like the abandoned buildings in Hagerstown. From the highway I couldn’t discern the details, but I had a feeling it was the same symbol: an X over the MM insignia. I began to feel a slight swell of pride wherever I saw it; it was proof there were some people out there that hated the MM as much as I did.
Chase exited onto a street cratered with mud-filled potholes. The truck jostled from right to left like a theme-park ride, until finally the asphalt gave way to gravel, and the grassy hills beside us rolled like waves.
Rudy Lane was nearby, but Chase didn’t want to park in front of the checkpoint. We were leaving the truck, and whatever extraneous supplies we couldn’t carry—Rick and Stan’s shotgun included—behind.
If Chase hadn’t insisted we hike off road in the high overgrown tangles, I would have run the whole way there. Even though I knew the chances were slim, I couldn’t help but hope that maybe my mother was still at the checkpoint. I might see her in just a few minutes! After everything we’d been through, we were finally close.
The time passed, indifferent to my impatience, and soon we entered a small rural neighborhood. As we edged around a central clump of trees, a narrow, two-story Victorian house appeared. It struck me as a pleasant place: sunshine yellow, with white decorative trim, wooden steps, and a quaint little porch. It might have been welcoming had the two rocking chairs not been chained to the railing, and had the thick boards not been nailed across the front door.
190 Rudy Lane.
“This is it?” I asked, feeling a growing sense of unease. It did not look inhabited, but maybe that was for security.
“I think so.” He removed the gun from his belt. It wouldn’t be left in the bag after what had happened at the sporting goods store. The precaution sent a quiver of anxiety through my chest.
We followed the circular step-stones around the yellow siding to where the back door gave way to an open brick patio. The edge of the yard was bordered by a broken-down laundry line, and beyond it lurked a dark, dense forest. Chase continued around the perimeter before returning to the entrance.
“Come here,” he called after a moment. I followed.
There, posted on the side paneling of the house, was a dented tin sign, marked by black, spray-painted letters. It wasn’t crossed out like the MM insignia we’d seen around, but it was clearly FBR propaganda.
One Whole Country, One Whole Family.
Chase had a perplexed look on his face.
“You don’t think it’s a trap, do you?” An image filled my mind of soldiers meeting here, but then I realized how ridiculous that was. The MM paid for buildings and signs, not abandoned houses tagged with graffiti.
“No,” he answered, but could not provide a better answer. He turned back toward the rear of the house.
We knocked on the back door. Nothing.
The concern that had been brewing within me finally boiled to the surface.
“Are you sure it was Thursday?”
Chase’s temper flashed. “That’s what my uncle said.”
Your uncle also abandoned you at the age of sixteen, I wanted to say. I’d foolishly trusted him because Chase trusted him, but I’d forgotten that I barely trusted Chase.
“Do you think we’re too late?” It wasn’t yet noon, but we didn’t know when the carrier left. My mistake was looming just over my head, ready to rain down its punishment.
One shoulder shrugged. I jiggled the doorknob hard, but it was locked.
No answer.
This had to be it. We weren’t wrong. We couldn’t be wrong. Not after everything we’d been through.
I hadn’t realized how fragile I was until that moment, when all the fear and anxiety slammed into me with the force of a sledgehammer and I cracked. I beat my hands against the wood. I kicked the door, bruising my feet. I screamed for them to let me in. I barely registered Chase’s arm around my waist, yanking me back.
He set me aside with one stern look. Then he backed up slightly and, with a heave, kicked the door, just above the handle. A loud crack split the air. He kicked again, and the wood bowed, dislodging the lock.
“Stay here,” he told me as he pushed through into the dark room and disappeared. I was still breathing hard and shaking. A few moments later he returned, beckoning me forward into the glow of his flashlight. Without a thought, I reached for the switch, and to both of our surprise, an overhead light poured brightness into a quaint, rectangular kitchen.
“Huh,” said Chase. “We must be close enough to a city to get standardized power.”
The space smelled heavily of mildew, but after a short while I no longer noticed. Atop the counter were blankets, a cardboard box of secondhand clothes, and empty cans of nonperishable foods. Canned vegetables. Tuna fish. There was a paper shredder plugged into the wall and a stack of blue forms about the size and shape of index cards.
U-14 forms.
Chase had referenced this when we’d been pulled over. This was what you had to have to cross into a Red Zone.
This certainly seemed like the right place. So where was the carrier?
Down the hallway was a bedroom with not much more space than a double bed and dresser required. A dining room followed. The overhead chandelier blanketed the room with a nostalgic kind of elegance, despite the cobwebs that connected each light. There were fresh footprints in the dust on the floor.
I wandered to the bathroom and found the glass-box shower, immediately remembering how dirty I was from the mud and the ash and the vomit. Linens were stacked in the narrow closet behind it. For some reason the sight of clean towels made me miss home terribly.
Chase searched upstairs, but there was no one home.
“Do you think we missed him?” I asked urgently.
“I doubt it. I think he might just be out for a while. No one would be stupid enough to leave those forms on the counter for a full week.”
Unless he didn’t have the time to clean up. Neither of us voiced what we both thought.
Maybe Chase was right; he was out just for a little while. Or maybe he was making a run to South Carolina. Worst-case scenario, we’d have to hide out here for the next few days. I tried to think positively, but the prospect of waiting another week to see my mother was a crushing disappointment.
I used an extra pillowcase to wipe down the counters in the kitchen and was somewhat heartened when water gurgled then shot out of the spigot into the sink. The stove worked as well. The moment I turned it on, my stomach began to growl. I hadn’t been able to eat anything since I’d thrown up in the cornfield.
Luckily, resourceful Chase had taken a camping pot and a knife-spoon combo from the store earlier. I filled the pot with water and set it on the stove, preparing to make vegetable soup from a packet of dried crumbles.
While I stirred the soup, Chase sat at the table and flipped on the MM radio. The mere sight of it retriggered my apprehension, but I was morbidly curious to hear if we’d made the headlines.
It crackled with static. I was so intently staring at it that Chase’s clumsy attempt to remove his jacket caught me off guard. I slid over to assist, glad for the distraction.
“I forgot,” I acknowledged guiltily. “Here, let me help.”
He lowered his hands, and I tentatively released the zipper, biting my lip as I pulled the jacket off his right shoulder. He’d replaced the flannel shirt for warmth, but the sticky blood had formed an adhesive, binding the shredded fabric to his skin. My empty stomach turned.
I had seen it happen and now remembered just how easily the metal had sliced into his flesh. Chase allowed me to touch his arm, gauging his condition from the expression on my face.
“You need to take off your shirt,” I told him, instantly blushing. It wasn’t like I’d meant anything intimate by it; I’d seen him hundreds of times without a shirt when we were kids. Maybe not after our friendship had changed into something different—we’d never gotten quite that far—but still. There was no reason to be embarrassed. No reason whatsoever.
He didn’t try to lift his injured arm, and I wondered just how much damage had been done in the hours his wound had gone unattended.
When he struggled, I slid between his knees, and tried to act like my fingers freeing each wooden button down his chest had no effect on my drumming pulse. He nodded a curt thanks and then stared out the window.
The same voice from the previous night filled the kitchen, erasing the static over the radio. Though it was stupid, I felt like we’d been caught doing something we shouldn’t.
“Colonel David Watts, covering Region Two-thirty-eight. It is Thursday, March tenth. Here begins the daily report.”
It had been only a day since I’d been at the reformatory, I realized. It seemed months ago.
I left Chase momentarily to click off the stove and place the pot of soup on the table. Wispy ringlets of steam swirled into the cool kitchen air.
Colonel Watts discussed continuing efforts to secure the Canadian and Mexican borders from the “traitors to the cause,” Americans trying to escape, and reported that there was still no information regarding the missing uniform truck in Tennessee. I finished helping Chase out of his flannel. He was wearing a thermal underneath, and when I pulled it over his head, his undershirt came off too, along with the pathetic wrap he’d managed to secure around the wound.
I’d never seen Chase like this before, and what I’d imagined paled in comparison. Hard lines of muscle cut into the copper skin of his shoulders and collided into his broad chest. His abdominals were perfectly sculpted; the slight indention of a V disappeared beneath the denim waistline.
My fingertips tingled. I wondered if his skin felt as smooth as it looked.
“Hand me the pack. There’s a first-aid kit in there,” he said. I jumped at the sound of his voice, and then flushed so darkly my cheeks must have been purple.
What had gotten into me? We’d just broken into a house, and I was preparing to look at a knife wound. Nothing about our situation spelled romance.
I’m just tired, I told myself, even though I knew I wasn’t. When I bent down to retrieve the bag, I flattened my hair against my face, hoping that it would hide my mortification.
He found the first-aid kit and opened it on the counter beside the cooling soup. I laid out the materials I would need: a handful of gauze, a miniature bottle of peroxide, and a damp towel. Then, as gently as I could, I pressed the cloth against the wound, mopping up the blood that had painted his skin. The cut was deep and spiraled from the inside of his bicep around his shoulder.
I knew what I had to do, and I knew he wasn’t going to like it. I drenched the gauze in peroxide.
“Sorry,” I whispered, just before pressing the gauze over the wound.
He swore furiously, nearly knocking me over. His teeth were bared; I could hear the sharp intake of breath through his mouth.
“I said sorry.”
I collected myself, having been flung into the table, and wiped up the new blood bubbling to the surface. I found a clean part of the rag and applied pressure to the cut. The wound was so long I needed both hands. It took me a moment to realize he’d caught me by the elbow with his good arm and was still holding on.
“You probably should have had stitches,” I said with some remorse. “I know it stings, but it’ll ease up.”
“It burns like hell.”
“Don’t be a baby,” I gibed. He shook his head, but his expression was lighter than before.
There was a dark bruise forming on the bottom of his jaw, and an even larger contusion on his side that I hadn’t seen before. I touched it gingerly with my fingertip, and he hissed.
“Did he break a rib?” My fear of Rick was burning into anger.
“No,” Chase said, still wincing. “But you may have.”
“What?”
“Swinging that stick around. You clocked me in the side.”
My eyes grew round, and my mouth dropped open.
“Relax. You hit him at least twice.” He chuckled at this.
“Oh. Good. I think. God, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just remind me not to meet you in a dark alley.”
I half smiled.
When the bleeding had stopped, I closed the wound with several butterfly Band-Aids from the kit, hoping this would be enough. I wrapped clean gauze around his entire arm, securing it in place with heavy white tape.
“Your knuckles look pretty torn up,” he acknowledged, his mouth tightening.
I examined my fingers. They were raw from scraping the gun off the asphalt, bruised and wrecked from the reformatory, and achy now that he mentioned them. I had forgotten my pain in place of his.
I cleaned the skin, but he put the Band-Aids on my fingers. Again, he gazed over Brock’s damage but said nothing about it.
His hands were very warm under mine, and I realized they were swollen from the fight. He couldn’t quite close them, nor could he stretch them all the way open. There were several fingers that didn’t even line up quite right, but I suspected these had been broken long before today.
When he finished, he withdrew his touch quickly.
We began alternating turns with the spoon. The soup was too salty but warm. I tried to ignore that his skin sometimes brushed against mine, but it was difficult.
Chase jerked suddenly and turned up the volume on the radio.
“…assaulted by a man and woman, late teens or early twenties, outside a sporting goods store in Hagerstown, Maryland. The assailants are armed and should be considered dangerous. They are believed to be driving a late seventies era Ford pickup truck, maroon, Michigan or Minnesota plates. Male subject may have defected from the Federal Bureau of Reformation. Victims reported presence of an FBR nightstick used in the beating. A lineup of AWOL soldiers’ photos are under review by the victims. If found, perpetrators are to be detained and brought in for questioning. Any information can be forwarded up your chain of command.”
I lowered my forehead to the table, everything inside of me frozen. The man on the radio continued.
“…list of missing persons grows by two today. Ronald Washington, African American, sixteen years old, runaway from the Richmond Youth Detention Facility. Ember Miller, Caucasian, seventeen years old, possibly abducted from the Girls’ Reformatory and Rehabilitation Center, Southeast.”
My heart stopped.
“Oh,” I said in a tiny voice.
I caught a couple of additional lines: “no leads… call the crisis line if apprehended.” But I could barely focus on the man’s callous tone.
“Brock figured it out,” I said weakly. I had doubled over my stomach. “She must have called to verify the trial.”
If they knew I was gone, “possibly abducted,” it seemed safe to say they knew Chase was the one that had taken me. Soon the highway patrol that had pulled us over would add to the report. Then Rick and Stan from Hagerstown. The pieces fit together, burned into my brain.
I had a hard time swallowing.
Chase’s expression was as gloomy as I’d ever seen it. Not surprised, like mine surely was, but deeply concerned.
“You’re worried about something,” I prompted.
“That’s not enough?” He gestured to the radio, raking a jagged hand over his skull. I could tell he was unnerved but trying to hold it together. Maybe for me. Maybe just for himself.
“It’s more than what we just heard. Tell me. You can tell me,” I assured.
He rolled his head in a slow circle.
“It’s too soon for you to be reported missing. I don’t think the headmistress happened to call Chicago to check on the trial. I think that someone may have contacted her first.”