THIRTY-SEVEN

You buckled up?” Carney’s voice was loud and urgent. They were about fifteen miles beyond where they had stopped the car. The road had entered a steep descent with hairpin curves and sheer drops into a deep ravine. The ride since fixing the flat had been silent, and Carney’s voice came as a surprise to Pierce.

“What?”

“Buckle up. Fast. Car’s lost the brakes. Knew I should have had it checked out.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Does this look like I’m kidding?” Carney angled into a set of guardrails. The car body shrieked, and sparks flew in a cascade past Pierce’s window. “Got to grind this thing to the slowest speed possible!”

The car kept shuddering against the rails, and it seemed to be working. Carney rammed the car into a lower gear, the car jerked, and the engine roared as the lower gear slowed the car more.

Then the railing ran out, and Carney was forced to swerve back to center to avoid plunging down the ravine.

“Hang on! Next corner looks worse!”

To Pierce, it seemed like the car tilted on just two wheels as it went through the corner. But making the turn wasn’t much consolation. Another corner loomed ahead.

“Don’t know if we can—!” Carney shouted again.

The car shot through the turn. Small trees and bushes filled the windshield, then horrible popping sounds of impact. Branches shredded against the grill and the sides of the car as it plunged forward, bouncing violently.

Time altered for Pierce, slowing in a weird way, like he was prisoner in a dream. The car bounced, throwing him side to side. He expected it to plunge straight down any moment; he’d seen the drop-offs at some of the curves.

Then, with a suddenness that seemed equally violent, total silence engulfed them. No motion, no sound.

Pierce drew in a breath and said nothing. Let it out.

“Pretty good ride, huh,” Carney said. “Almost like I knew what I was doing.”

Pierce slowly refocused. Carney had turned and grinned at him.

Pierce still didn’t say anything.

“You can talk now.” Carney lifted a hand, showed a set of wires with loose ends. “We’re clear.”

“Clear?”

“Just yanked out video and audio. We’re clear, but the footage of the crash that went in should be spectacular.”

“Glad to be part of the show.”

“You don’t know half of it.” Carney kicked open his door. He opened the back door for Pierce, threw Pierce keys to the handcuffs, then went to the trunk.

First he came out with a shotgun he’d loaded there before leaving for the factory, and handed it to Pierce. By the time Pierce unshackled himself and crawled out of the car with the shotgun, wobbling on shaky legs, Carney had opened a small can of gasoline and held a lighter.

“Here’s where we die,” Carney said. He splashed gasoline all over the interior of the trunk. “You might want to stand back.”

Carney lit the gasoline. Small flames sprang upward.

“Run!”

Carney threw the gasoline container in the trunk and shut the lid. He jumped backwards and sprinted down the hill. Pierce followed him through the trees and down to the river, trying to be cautious with the shotgun. This explained why the car hadn’t dropped hundreds of feet. The final corner had been almost to the valley bottom.

“Explosion should do a good job of slowing Bar Elohim’s people down,” Carney said, looking back toward the crash site.

“Cars don’t explode when they burn,” Pierce panted. “That’s just a myth.”

Carney grinned and plugged his ears. Within a second, a massive whomp came from the car, and a moment later, pieces of steel spiraled upward.

Carney waited a few seconds. “Helps when there’s dynamite hidden in the trunk.”

Pierce nodded, starting to understand. “Some accident.”

Carney didn’t answer but motioned for his shotgun. “Like I said. Almost like I knew what I was doing.”

Brij had walked off into the woods again, leaving Jordan alone on the porch. An elderly woman stepped up the path, holding flowers. She was the one who had woken him by placing a wet cloth on his face. She had white hair and a deeply wrinkled face but moved with surprising vitality.

“Hello, Jordan. I’m Gloria Shelton and I lived in Cumberland Gap. They only told me your name and to be with you when you woke. Is the Clan helping you too? Or are you one of their own?”

“You could say that.” He wasn’t in a mood to talk but didn’t want to be unfriendly.

She moved to the other rocker, farther down on the porch from Jordan. In the shade of the overhang it was pleasant, especially with a breeze. If it weren’t for the anxiety about Caitlyn gnawing at him, Jordan would have been content to lose himself in the moment. Although Brij would try to protect her, so much could still go wrong.

Jordan stared at the edge of the far mountains for a few more minutes. The mysterious blue haze always enchanted him.

Jordan had spent years slipping into Clan territory to give medical help. It was how he had earned Caitlyn’s passage Outside. He wished he and Caitlyn could have lived among the Clan from the beginning. But her only chance to be normal was surgery, and he had needed to be registered at the collective to get that kind of specialized medical help. Nor was it an option to take her back Outside before the surgery.

He realized this after leaving the surgeon’s office the day after Caitlyn’s sixth birthday, that there would be a short window of opportunity once she was old enough for the operation. He’d needed to make sure he could help her get Outside, almost as soon as she was recovered. He’d been planning the escape from that day forward. She couldn’t remain inside Appalachia after the surgery; the oppression was almost as much of a prison as the abnormality of her body.

“I looked carefully. I didn’t see barbecued bodies anywhere.” She smiled at him. “You know, like all those stories we hear.”

“Most of the stuff that the outlaws do gets blamed on the Clan. Bar Elohim likes encouraging those myths. The Clan doesn’t discourage them either. Keeps people from making casual decisions about trying to escape. For the most part, the outlaws only do anything to people who fail their tests.”

“I thought so,” the woman said. “That man, Brij, told me he was going to talk with me about whether I wanted to join the Clan. Does it only help believers?”

Jordan was startled enough to pull himself away from his thoughts. “No…then they’d be no different than the rest of Appalachia.”

“I was worried about that.” Gloria plucked at a few flower petals. “I’m a believer, but I’ve always thought it was wrong for one person to impose morals on another. Not even Jesus did that. He gave people a choice, didn’t he?”

She appeared to slip into a contented silence, assisted by the beauty of the valley.

Jordan thought about Caitlyn. How badly he wanted her to have a chance at living where she wouldn’t be judged. On her unique differences or by moral guardians. Like Bar Elohim and the Elders.

Outside, most people knew that decades ago, the religious fundamentalists lost the ability to transform society when they became a political movement. Their boycotts and protests were so commonplace, any outcry against anything beyond the narrow range of what they saw as biblically acceptable was dismissed as a knee-jerk reaction. Once Appalachia was established, there was no one Outside who opposed liberalism and humanism.

Caitlyn, he thought again. If only there had been a check in place to stop experiments on humans.

When the river widened again, the canoe floated into a shallow pool, separated from the bank by a narrow and long island. A young woman with dark hair sat on the edge of the bank, startled by Caitlyn and Billy. She wore a ragged blue dress, and she’d pulled it up to her knees, soaking her feet in the water.

Two boys, close to Theo’s age, splashed in front of her, wearing only shorts. The woman jumped up immediately and called to the boys. “Let’s go!”

One of them hesitated, pointing to a small pile of clothing on the narrow island. “But our money!”

“No. Now! Let’s go!”

The boy still hesitated.

The woman shouted. “Leave your money. Let’s go.”

The boys ran through the shallow water and followed her into the trees, gone before Caitlyn could reassure them that she and Billy meant no harm.

The canoe slid past the small island. A couple of shirts lay in the pile. Worn shoes. And two wallets.

“Should we try to find them?” Billy raised the paddle and water ran from its edges. “They’ll want their money.”

“I’m sure they’ve stopped where they can watch us,” Caitlyn said. “They’ll see us go by and see that the wallets are still there. They’ll come back out when they feel it’s safe.”

Billy nodded. He began digging the paddle into the water again, leaving the island behind as they approached another bend.

Once they rounded the bend, four men on horses trotted into the water. All of them were armed with rifles, pointing their weapons directly at Billy and Caitlyn.

The lead man, wearing a ball cap that kept his face in shadow, jumped down from his horse. He walked through knee-deep water, grabbed the front of the canoe, and steadied it. He looked wiry, a good ten years older than Billy. He was close enough that Caitlyn smelled a combination of grease and smoke on the man’s denim pants and jacket.

“This is judgment day.” His accent was peculiar, one that Caitlyn had heard only occasionally, the result of generations of isolation in these hills. “Keep your mouths shut until I tell you otherwise.”

He began to pull the canoe to shore.

Caitlyn saw Billy’s shoulders tense, so she shook her head, warning him not to move.

Before the man in the ball cap had made it to the moss-lined bank, the woman in a ragged blue dress stepped out of the woods, hands on her hips.

“They touch the wallets?” the man in the cap asked her.

“No sir.”

The man in the cap grinned at Caitlyn. “You passed the test. That means you live. At least long enough to tell us what you’re doing on your way into Clan territory.”

Billy groaned. She glanced over.

Billy had his arms clutched around his stomach.

“Billy!”

He remained doubled over. “It’s bad. Real bad. I never felt it this bad before.”

Pierce watched Carney prop the shotgun up against a tree. The sheriff pulled off his shirt, then his undershirt. Not much fat, Pierce noticed. In their hours together, he had learned Carney didn’t do things without reason.

“Get us a couple pieces of deadwood.” Carney put his top shirt back on.

Pierce didn’t have to go farther than the nearest underbrush. He looked back at Carney before picking up the wood.

“Not logs, but good-sized branches, understand?” With the jackknife he’d used on the car tire, Carney had begun to cut long strips from the undershirt.

Again Pierce followed directions without asking questions. He was interested in seeing where this went, as long as they weren’t headed to the Church and closer to Mason Lee.

“If Mason’s in this valley,” Carney said, “then he found a way to move his registered vidpod so that anyone tracking him believes he’s miles away.” The sheriff lifted one of the pieces of deadwood and used a strip of cloth to strap his vidpod to it. “We’re going to do the same.”

When Carney seemed satisfied that he’d tied it tightly enough, he tossed the branch into the stream. “Dang things are indestructible. Hopefully, it will look like we’re walking downstream for help. After surviving the explosion.”

“We?”

“Toss me your vidpod. You don’t want to go back to Cumberland Gap. And you don’t want to wait around until someone investigates the wreck.” Carney began wrapping Pierce’s vidpod to the other stick. “But you do want to find Mason because he’s after the girl. You’ve still got a way to track him with that device you planted in his cast, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. After a couple of miles on the river, we’ll go up into the hills…the hard way. Outlaws mainly watch the river farther down and the easy paths along it, so we’ll avoid them.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know it. That should be enough for you.”

Pierce made a point to watch the current as it bumped the sticks with the vidpods until they rounded the next bend. He deliberately surveyed the steep walls of the valley on each side, then turned back to Carney. “I don’t understand you, Carney. Wrecked car. No vidpod. You get home and you’re in a factory. Automatic.”

“It should be obvious by now that you won’t be allowed to take the girl Outside through official channels,” Carney said. “You’d be stupid to let Bar Elohim put you in custody, which is his plan. He and Mason Lee will get the girl, and Lee will probably torture and kill you. Bar Elohim doesn’t see any value in you, so you need to get out of Appalachia. I assume you’ll want help.”

“One way or another.”

“Exactly.” Carney grabbed the shotgun and started walking. “It’s the same thing I want. Escape, then asylum. We can help each other.”