Dee walked down to the water and unrolled the sleeping bag across the dirt beside the remnants of another camp—candy bar and potato chip wrappers in the grass.
Kicked off her boots, zipped herself in.
She studied the map. By highway, they were roughly two hundred and seventy-five miles from the Canadian border, with one major city to deal with—Great Falls—but she could cut around and actually save time.
She closed the map.
No trees in this open, arid country. Sagebrush everywhere and she could see forever. A range of mountains to the north, the top thousand feet glazed with snow that glowed under the stars and the moon.
Soundless. Windless. The water so still she could see the stars in it.
She eased back into the sleeping bag, said her husband’s name. Tears burned down her face. It had been five days without him. She lay there trying to feel if he was gone. From a purely logical standpoint, it seemed impossible that he wasn’t, and she certainly felt apart from him. But, for whatever it was worth (and she had to acknowledge maybe nothing and the probability of self-delusion), she didn’t feel his absence. She felt that Jack was still alive, somehow, under the same night sky.
* * * * *
THE semitrailer reeked of shit, urine, vomit, body odor, blood, and something even more malignant. Jack leaned back against the metal wall, his left hand throbbing with such intensity he prayed to lose consciousness again. With the rear door closed, it was pitch black inside and Jack could feel his shoulders grazing the shoulders of the people he sat between as the rocking of the trailer jostled them together. The noise was bewildering—the distant big-rig growl of the V12 Detroit Diesel, the closer rumble of the tires underneath him, a baby wailing, a woman crying, a half dozen voices in whispered conversation.
A man sitting across from him against the other side of the trailer, said, “This is for the guy who just got put in here. Where are we?”
“A mountain pass in Wyoming. Not far from Jackson. Do you know where they’re taking us?”
“Nobody knows anything.”
“How’d you get here?”
“They picked me up two days ago in Denver.”
“Did someone die in here?”
“Yeah, that’s what the smell is. They’re toward the front.”
The pressure in Jack’s ears released as they descended the pass. What was left of his ring finger dripped on his pants, and he tucked his hand under his jacket and tried to wrap his undershirt around the open wound, felt a surge of whitehot pain that nearly made him vomit when he touched the jagged phalange of his ring finger.
The baby went on crying for what he guessed was thirty minutes.
He said finally, “Is someone holding that baby?”
“I’m sorry.” A woman’s voice. “I’m trying to calm her—”
“No, I’m not complaining, I just. . .I can’t see anything, and I wanted to make sure someone’s holding her.”
“Someone is.”
No light slipped in anywhere.
They rolled down what felt like a winding road, and after a while the sharp turns diminished.
Someone shoved a plastic jug of water into his hands, said, “One sip,” and Jack didn’t even hesitate to lift it to his mouth and take a swallow.
He passed it on to the person beside him.
“Thank you.” Voice of an older woman.
Every passing moment, he was moving farther away from his family, and the thought of them alone out there, every bit as hungry and thirsty and scared as he was, simply made him want to be back with them or die right now. He tried but he couldn’t stop himself from picturing Dee and the kids inside the pipe, beginning to wonder where he was. After a while, when he didn’t return, they’d search the construction site, and soon after, start calling his name, their voices traveling into the forest. Calm at first. He could almost hear them and it broke his heart. He hadn’t told them where he was going. Hadn’t known himself. Maybe they’d walk up to the pass, but there’d be nothing there, certainly not him, and by then, Dee would be getting frantic and Naomi crying. Possibly Cole as well if he grasped the situation. Would they think he’d abandoned them? Wandered into the woods and somehow gotten injured or killed? How long would they keep looking and what would their state of mind be, when finally, they gave up?
Jack opened his eyes. The diesel engine had gone quiet. The baby had stopped crying. His head rested against the bony shoulder of the old woman to his right and he felt her hand on his face, her whisper in his ear, “This too shall pass. This too shall pass.”
He lifted his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“It’s okay, I don’t mind. You were crying in your sleep.”
Jack wiped his eyes.
The rear door shot up and the light of a sunset flooded the semitrailer with a blast of freezing air. Two soldiers stood on the ramp with automatic weapons, and one of them said, “On your feet everybody.”
The prisoners began to haul themselves up all around him, and Jack struggled onto his feet as well.
He descended the metal ramp into the grass, lightheaded and unstable.
A soldier at the bottom pointed across the open field, said, “You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
“Food’s that way.”
“Why are we being—”
The solider rammed his AR-15 into Jack’s chest. “Get going.”
Jack turned and stumbled along with the crowd, everyone moving through an open field and folding into streams of more people filing out of four other semitrailers—two hundred prisoners by Jack’s estimate. They looked haggard and addled and he searched for the old woman whose shoulder he’d used for a pillow, but he didn’t see anyone who met his mind’s imagining of her.
Over his shoulder, Jack spotted several buildings, and though impossible to be certain in the lowlight, they appeared to be surrounded by small airplanes and a handful of private jets.
Everywhere, soldiers were directing the prisoners toward a collection of tents a quarter mile away on the far side of the field.
“Hot food and beds,” someone yelled. “Keep moving.”
Jack looked for the man who’d cut his finger off, but he didn’t see him.
They crossed the asphalt of a runway. The tents closer now, and straight ahead, less than fifty yards away, a mountain of dirt and a bulldozer.
Jack smelled food on the breeze.
On ahead, people were stopping near the pile of dirt and he could hear soldiers yelling. They were lining the prisoners up shoulder to shoulder.