The engine roared and I roared, my eyes peering through the dust, pinned to the closing gates. As the truck sped toward him, one of the guards let his gate go. He left it half-open and turned to level his machine gun at me.
The next moment, a jagged bullet hole appeared in the windshield, a spiderweb network of cracks instantly stretching out on every side of it. I heard the bullet sing past my ear. I heard it rip into the back of the cab just behind my head.
Panicked, I wrenched the wheel again, but before the truck could get out of the line of fire, I guess another bullet must’ve struck because now the windshield shattered completely.
The truck was turning as it hit the gates. It hit off center, but that seemed to help somehow: the hood shoved the half-open gate open wide. I stomped on the gas again. The truck let out another throaty roar and fired forward through the gates and out of the compound.
This is what I saw in that next insane, panicked, terrified second. I saw a dirt road leading through a small field of grass and wildflowers. I saw the field end in forest—what looked like deep forest that went on a long, long way. I saw the dirt road become a dirt trail that vanished among the trees. I saw the blue sky and big, lofty clouds blowing by over the treetops.
I wrenched the wheel one more time, straightening the truck on the dirt road. I sped toward the trailhead, toward the protection of the forest.
I never made it.
The road was rough. There were deep holes in the dirt. Big rocks strewn about everywhere. It wasn’t a road made for fast travel. And I was traveling fast—very fast—as fast as that truck could go. The pedal was hard against the floor. My speed was increasing with every second. The cool air was streaming in on me through the broken windshield, and so was the blinding dust. Grass and white wildflowers, meadow and woods and sky were rushing by the windows on either side. The truck was bouncing crazily, lifting up high on every rock, dropping down hard, diving and jolting with a sickening crunch into each new hole.
I didn’t care. I paid no attention. I never touched the brakes. I never let up on the gas. I could still hear the rattling coughs of those machine guns behind me—at least I thought I could—that sound was stuck in my imagination now. I could hear it in my mind, anyway, and I could practically feel the bullets flying after me, searching out my flesh, trying to tear into me, to tear me apart. All I wanted was to get to those trees. That’s all I cared about. To get into the darkness of the woods before the guards and their guns caught up with me.
But it was no good. It was too fast—too fast for that road, those rocks, those holes. I was too wild with panic, too desperate and afraid to keep control of that speeding truck for long.
It was a rock that did it in the end. A great, flat gray rock hidden in the rough dirt road until the last minute. I saw it only a split second before my left front tire hit it with full force. At that speed, that was all it took. The pickup lifted into the air. The steering wheel became useless in my hands. I wrenched it to the side, tried to land the truck again, but it made no difference. I had no control. The truck went over. It hit the ground with a force that made my eyes rattle. The next thing I knew, it was turning over and over, hurling me this way and that inside the cab.
Instinctively, I let go of the wheel. I threw my arms up to protect my head. There was nothing now but nauseating chaos. I caught glimpses of the trees turning sideways through the jagged frame of the broken windshield. I saw the sky turning and the clouds turning and everything rolling over and over. My body was smashed against the ceiling, then against the door, and then thrown sideways across the passenger seat.
Then it was finished. The truck lay still. There was silence—only it wasn’t really silence—it was just my own muddied consciousness, too shocked and battered to take in anything going on outside. I don’t know how long I was like that. Not long, I guess. It was probably just a few seconds before my mind began to clear, before the sounds of the world started to come back to me. They were the same sounds as before, the same sounds that seemed to have been surrounding me for hours now, maybe forever. The sound of the chattering rifles, the sound of shouting—“Get him! Go!”—the sound of running footsteps, muffled now as my pursuers left the compound and came toward me across the meadow.
I lay in the cab of the truck, dazed. I lay there and listened to the sounds. The sounds made me feel—I don’t know—very sad and very tired somehow. I felt much too tired to do anything, to try to run anymore or fight or escape. I just wanted all these evil people to go away. I just wanted them to leave me alone. I wanted to be home again, back in my own house, in my own bed, waiting half-awake for my mom to call upstairs and tell me it was time to get ready for school. Why were these people hurting me? Why were they after me? How could I stop them? I was just a kid. I lay there in the cab of the overturned truck and I just wanted to break down and cry with weariness and frustration.
Lazily, my head rolled to one side. My vision seemed dull. The world seemed covered with shadows. Through those shadows, I could make out the light of day. I could make out the scene through the truck window. The world out there seemed to be very far off. It seemed as if it had nothing to do with me.
There they were. Same as before. Those men. Those men running after me. Those men with rifles coming to get me, coming to drag me back to the compound and strap me back in that chair and shoot that poison into me and watch me scream and scream until I was dead.
There they were. Coming closer every second.
And I was just too tired, too sick, too beaten to go on running anymore.
CHAPTER NINE
Lunch
Lying there, my spirit broken, my mind flashed back in time again, my heart went home. A series of images swam swiftly through my dazed brain. That last morning . . . my karate demonstration . . . Beth . . . Alex . . .
It seemed now like a sweet, simple time: the last good day. It seemed now that my life had been perfect then. I had food to eat, and a house to live in, parents to take care of me. I lived in a wonderful, free country where I could say what I wanted and do what I wanted and be anything I had the talent to be. No one was shooting at me or beating me up or strapping me to chairs and trying to inject acid into me. I should have woken up every morning and thanked God for his blessings. I should have headed off to school each day whistling a happy tune.
But at the time, it didn’t seem like that at all. At the time, I thought I had plenty to worry about—plenty. I mean, I was in high school, for one thing. What could be more worrisome than that? For another thing, this was the year I had to take calculus. It was insanely hard, and I worried it would wreck my grade point average. And if it didn’t, there was Mr. Sherman, my history teacher, to worry about. I thought he was out to get me because I argued with him all the time, and a lot of the time I won. For instance, he stood up in class once and said all these nasty things about America. He said America was racist and violent and greedy. So I just got up and told him that he was wrong and that the facts proved him wrong. I told him, sure, people in America make mistakes because people everywhere make mistakes. But when you came right down to it, there was not one place on Earth where people had any freedom or dignity or human rights and America hadn’t helped it happen or helped it stay that way. I challenged him to name one place—one single place on Earth—and he couldn’t, because there isn’t one. Ever since then, I’d been getting lower grades on my papers for his class.
So that made me worry I wouldn’t get into a decent college. And that made me worry I couldn’t fulfill my secret ambition in life, which I hadn’t told anyone because I worried it would make my mother’s head explode in terror and because I wasn’t even sure it was realistic anyway— and I worried about that too.
And maybe more than anything, I worried about Beth Summers. Whom I couldn’t stop thinking about and who seemed kind of impossibly out of my league. Every time she even got close to me, I started to sound as if my IQ had dropped forty points and someone had superglued my tongue to the
top of my mouth. “Heddo, Bet, it gud to tee you.” Plus there was a rumor that she had kind of a thing for someone else and that he had kind of a thing for her— and that this someone else was Alex Hauser, who happened to technically still be my best friend.
Josh Lerner had passed this story on to me in his IM guise as the supremely irritating GalaxyMaster. He said that this past summer, when both Alex and Beth had been working part-time at the Main Street Blender-Benders, they had become good friends. They’d started walking home after work every day, and Alex had talked to her about his folks splitting up and all the trouble in his life. Of course, Beth had listened to him in that way she had that made you feel like you were the only person on Earth. So Alex had fallen for her because . . . well, who wouldn’t?
The way GalaxyMaster told it, Beth had sort of fallen for Alex, too, really developed a crush on him. But that was about the time when Alex started hanging out with the jerks he was hanging out with, and doing the stuff he was doing and talking the way he was. Egged on by his new buds, he’d started getting rude and creepy with Beth, pushing himself on her and bothering her to do a lot of stuff she didn’t want to do. Well, you can figure it out for yourself.
Anyway, the upshot was—so the story went—that Beth told Alex she didn’t like the way he was acting and Alex said fine, what did he care, there were plenty of other girls around, and so have a nice life and good riddance. And he stormed off. And Beth realized that was for the best, but she was still really sad about it because she really did have a thing for Alex, and she felt as if her heart was broken.
That was the story, anyway, according to GalaxyMaster. And I have to admit it made things with Beth a bit more complicated. See, Alex and I had known each other since we were in kindergarten, and we’d been best friends for a long time. For years, he spent practically every Saturday at my house, and when he wasn’t there, I was at his. We rode bikes together. Played ball together. For a while, Alex had even taken karate lessons with me. Then he’d gotten more into baseball and joined the Legion League and didn’t have time for karate. But that was okay. We were still friends, we’d still hang out together and go for hikes or to the movies or whatever.
Then, about a year ago, after a lot of arguments and yelling and crying all around, Alex’s dad moved out. Not just out of the house either. He moved to a whole different city. His mom didn’t have as much money as before, and she and Alex and his brother had to move to another part of town. That meant Alex had to change schools, too, so we hardly saw each other at all. After a while, Alex even stopped coming by my house on the weekends. In fact, he pretty much stopped talking to me altogether. I mean, I’d try to make contact. I’d call him. I’d e-mail. I’d even drop by his new place, even though it was almost forty minutes by bike. But Alex didn’t seem interested in talking to me anymore. He didn’t just ignore me. He kind of snorted and rolled his eyes when he saw me coming. He practically told me to go away and leave him alone. So I did leave him alone. But I sent him one last e-mail. It said, basically: Look, I know you’re going through a hard time, but just so you know, I’m still your friend and if you want to talk about it or just hang or whatever, you know where I am. I still hoped he’d take me up on the offer because he was always a good guy and I missed seeing him.
Now, look, I wasn’t going to not ask Beth out because it might annoy Alex. She could make her own decisions and he could fend for himself. But it was just one more thing to worry about, if you see what I mean. Not to mention the little matter of working up my courage to talk to Beth in the first place.
But that problem, strange to say, suddenly solved itself.
It happened right after my karate demonstration. I was feeling good. In fact, after the way everyone clapped and cheered for me, I was feeling really good. Really. Everyone was coming up to congratulate me. People would start clapping again when they saw me walking past in the halls. Guys were giving me approving punches in the shoulder as I walked past, and girls . . . well, maybe it was my imagination, but they just seemed to be looking at me a little differently, smiling at me a little more and so on. Breaking a cinder block with your fist may not be the most useful skill you can develop, but it sure seems to impress people. Even Mr. Sherman made a joke about it in history class: “Charlie may be a small-minded tool of America’s fascist overlords,” he said, “but given his self-defense skills, I’m not sure I’d want to say that to his face.” Well, whatever.
After Sherman’s class, it was time for lunch. I sat at my usual table. Josh Lerner and Rick Donnelly were already there with their brown bags when I approached with my lunch tray. Wednesday was mac ’n’ cheese day, the one day I shelled out the extra cash for a hot lunch at school. Rick and Josh looked up from opening their bags long enough to jut out their chins in welcome. At the same time, Kevin Miles—Miler Miles, we call him, because he runs long-distance— joined us with his mac ’n’ cheese. We all sat down together, same as always.
“So, dude,” Josh said to me. “You are the man of the hour.” Josh was a geek and looked pretty much like he’d been made at the Geek Factory: short, hunch-shouldered; big, thick glasses over a constant, nervous smile; a tight head of black curly hair.
“Only next time, you oughta break the cinder block with your forehead,” said Rick. Rick had a big cheerful face, dark brown, the color of chocolate. He was one of the tallest guys at school. Tall and so thin, he looked like a big wind would bend him double. But he was actually strong and quick and was one of the best players on the school’s basketball team, the Dragons.
“Oh, that would be so cool,” said Miler. He drove his head down toward his macaroni tray and made a crashing noise. Miler was a small guy, lean and compact, with short blond hair and a kind of long face with sharp green eyes. I always thought Miler ought to have a little sign on his forehead that said, “I am going to be a corporate lawyer one day and make a gazillion dollars.” It was one of those things you could tell just by looking at him.
“Or wouldn’t it be cool if, like, you drove your head into a cinder block and it didn’t work?” said Josh.
“Hey, thanks a lot,” I said.
But Rick laughed. “Yeah. What if you just, like, drove your head into the block and it went, like, splosh, you know, and there’d be, like, brains and blood everywhere.”
“Yeah!” said Miler, laughing. “And Mr. Woodman would say, ‘Hmm, well, Harley-Charlie, I guess you’ll have to practice that move a little more.’”
“Harley-Charlie,” said Josh with his trademark snicker. “I loved that. That killed me. What do you say from now on we just call you Harley-Charlie all the time?”
“Hey, Josh,” I said. “You remember what happened to that cinder block when I punched it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what do you say, from now on, you don’t call me Harley-Charlie at all?”
“Whoa!” said Rick, and he gave me a high five.
Josh snickered into his ham-and-cheese sandwich.
“You know what else would be cool?” said Miler Miles. We all turned to him to find out. But we never did. Because he didn’t say anything else. He just sat there, kind of staring into space.
“Well?” said Josh. He snickered some more. “He’s, like, you know what would be cool, and we’re, like, what, and he’s, like, just sitting there . . .”
Somewhere during Josh’s vivid recap of events, it occurred to me that Miler wasn’t just staring into space. He was actually staring at something. Or someone. So I turned around to see what it was.
What it was was Beth Summers.
She had come up right behind me. She was just standing there—I guess she was waiting for a chance to get my attention. She had her purse over one shoulder and her books in her other hand as if she was on her way somewhere else. Which made sense, because she didn’t usually have lunch the same period as me.
“Beth!” I blurted out, surprised. I stood up. I’m not sure why I stood up—I just did. I stood up and twisted around out of my c
hair and faced her.
The guys—Josh and Rick and Miler—all sort of sat there staring up at the two of us, Josh with the words dying on his lips, Rick and Miler with their lips sort of parted. They looked about as stunned as the people in New York City when they looked up and saw King Kong for the first time. It wasn’t that Beth was too good or too stuck-up to talk to me or anything. She wasn’t like that, not at all. And it wasn’t that I was the least popular guy in school either. That would officially be Al Dokler. It was just that she was Beth and I was me, and if I’d told one of these guys she was going to come over to my lunch table to talk to me, he would’ve said, “Yeah, only in your dreams,” and I would’ve thought, Yeah—he’s right. Only in my dreams.
But here she was. And there was no point just standing there, staring at her like an idiot. So instead I stood there and stared at her like an idiot and said, “Hi, Beth. What’s going on?”
“I just wanted to tell you how cool your thing in assembly was today,” she said. And there was that whole nice, warm business I was talking about. The way she said it, as if no one’s thing in assembly had ever been cool before.
“Thanks,” I said.
“When you came down on that block? When I saw what you were going to do, I was, like, oh my goodness, he’s gonna kill himself, like, break his hand into a hundred pieces. Then, when you actually broke through the block like that, I was, like, so, so relieved.” She really sounded like she was so, so relieved too. So, so worried about me, and so, so relieved. It was nice.
“Thanks,” I said again. I was really pushing the conversational envelope here.
“Anyway, it was cool. It was really cool,” she said.
And guess what I said? “Thanks.”
Then she stood there for another second, as if there was something else I was supposed to say. I felt like there was something else I was supposed to say, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think of what it might be. I didn’t want to say thanks again, and I couldn’t figure out anything else, so I just did the whole stand-and-stare-like-an-idiot routine again.