The Chosen One (17 page)

“Kyra?” Laura stands in the doorway of our room.

I start. My hands are full of fabric. I see I’ve dropped some of it. It’s there on the floor, at Laura’s feet.

“What are you doing?”

When I open my mouth, no words come out at first. There! Now Laura will see my change. She’ll see I’m different. How does she recognize me? At last I say, “I’m leaving.”

She pads across the floor, puts her arms around me and the strips of fabric. Presses her lips to my face.

“Where are you going?” Her breath is warm and I close my eyes.

“Away from here,” I say because the changed me doesn’t care where. Just out. Just get out.

When I look at her, there are tears on Laura’s face. “Don’t go,” she says. But she kisses me good-bye. Again and again.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you, too,” I say.

She stands on the porch and watches me walk away. Her voice follows me into the near darkness. “Good-bye, my Kyra.” Her voice tells me she’s still crying.

I stop off at Uncle Hyrum’s place. Spread the fabric all over the steps, all over the bushes near the front, on the lush grass of his yard. If he hadn’t wanted to marry me, I wouldn’t be leaving. If he hadn’t wanted me, Joshua might still be here. Baby Abigail would be alive. Patrick would be alive.

But no, that’s not completely right.

This all goes past Uncle Hyrum.

It’s not
just
his fault. Maybe not his fault at all.

I stop and squeeze my hands tight, then start back toward my Russian Olive trees. Mother and Father believe. They believe they are doing right. I am sure of this.

Or I was before I changed.

THE DOOR TO THE
Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels opens without even a noise. I pull it shut behind me, but not quite all the way. Then I untuck Patrick’s cell phone from where I’d hidden it in my dress and turn it on. My hands shake like crazy.

No service. That’s what it says. I look back at the spilled books.

There’s an extra key in the Ks. He said that. Patrick said it. A key to the van, I’m sure.

It’s hard to walk in the almost dark, through all these novels. Do I step on stories I’ve read? Is that first book,
Bridge to Terabithia
, in this mound?

A few books move under my foot and I slip to one knee. I crawl to where the Ks are. The shelf is near the ground.

Using the cell phone as light, I pull the titles out and stack them into a neat pile. Dick King-Smith, Gordon Korman, Uma Krishnaswami. And then there it is. Taped to the shelf. A key.

It’s cool and a little sticky in my hand. I crawl back over the books and climb into the driver’s seat. Into Patrick’s seat. I put the phone in the cup holder where those Big Gulp cups sat.

I squeeze my eyes shut. “Just get to cell-phone service,” I whisper. The shaking has moved from my hands to my knees. It’s like my legs have no bone.

Outside, it’s dark enough that if I didn’t know this Compound like my own sisters’ faces, I would be in trouble.

“Oh, you’re in trouble, all right,” I say. The new me almost smiles. I ease the van into neutral.

The Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels, banged up and dented all around, starts the first time I turn the key. The sound is like a bomb going off to my ears. Hopefully I’m far enough away from the God Squad that I’ll have some time.

I put the van into drive. It lurches almost from under me and I slam on the brakes, jerking forward in the seat. “You’ve driven with Mother,” I say. Then I grasp the wheel with all my power and hold on for dear life. For my own dear life.

“You can do this, Kyra Leigh Carlson. You can.”

You have to
, I think.

Thank goodness they parked the van here, so close to my home. There’s no fencing this side of my home, just at the front of the Compound. I creep along. Afraid to go too fast. I steer near the trailer. Laura is on the steps, waiting. She watches as I drive past her and I think my heart might give me up right this second. I look as hard as I can at her, hard as I can as I drive away. Put my hand on the window. And she watches me, too. Standing there. My sister. Her hand raised to me. I think we can almost touch.

Then she is gone. And I move away from my home, my father’s trailers. My brothers and sister. My mothers.

I ease the van past everyone’s property, behind gardens but near to fields, going so slow, my foot shaking on the gas pedal. With a gasp I suck in air, realizing I haven’t been breathing. Now—it seems an eternity—now I drive past the fence and turn the direction I went with my mothers just a few days ago. The direction I went with Patrick, poor Patrick, yesterday.

Still I am cautious. Still I am slow. Hoping this engine makes no sound. Hoping no one but Laura knows I’m gone. Hands shaking, my knees weak. I pull out on the road and when I think no one can hear this old bookmobile, I push the pedal down and I am free, going forty-five miles per hour. Away.

“
DID YOU THINK
you would get free without a fight?” That’s what I say to myself when I see the headlights come up on the road behind me.

“As if I wasn’t shaking enough before,” I say to the blood on the window.

This is as close as I’m getting to Patrick. Talking to his blood.

In the rearview mirror I see the car lights blink off and on.

“I’m not pulling over,” I say.

I don’t speed up at all. Just keep the Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels going at that easy forty-five miles per hour.

“You realize,” I say to what is left of Patrick, “that they’ll kill me, too.”

The Hummer pulls up to the side window. They snap on the interior light. I can’t quite look at them. I’ll wreck sure. When I ease up on the gas, my leg jumps, I’m so scared. I can just see Brother Laramie in the passenger seat. He points to the side of the road, making his finger like a gun.

“All you have to do,” Patrick says in my head, “is get to the Ironton County line. We were almost there before. We almost made it.”

“I can do that,” I say. “I’m not so good at driving, but I can get there.”

“Just get to service for the phone. Then dial nine-one-one.”

If you’re there, God
, I think,
please help me
. But He didn’t help Patrick, did He?

“You only have a few more miles to go.” Patrick’s voice is like a whisper in my brain.

In the bed of the Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels, I can hear books sliding this way and that as I drive along this pot-holed road. My hands are clenched so tight they feel frozen. And in my head, right behind Patrick’s voice, there is a small pain, growing.

“Is that where they’ll shoot me?” I say.

“You’ll be fine,” Patrick says. “Just fine.”

Beside me, Brother Laramie has rolled down the window. He calls out. “Kyra,” he says. “Sister Carlson.”

I refuse to look at him.

“Patrick?” I say. “Patrick?”

“Pull on over, girl,” Brother Laramie says. “You don’t have much gas.”

He’s right. I can see that on the control panel. Looking down causes me to almost hit the God Squad’s car. They drop back some.

“Slow and steady wins the race.” This is Mother Sarah’s voice. Telling me the tortoise and the hare story. In my head I see her standing near to Patrick. And then there’s Father.

“Run, Kyra. Get out of here. Get free.” His voice is as soft as the other two, but the words are more urgent.

“I’m trying, Father,” I say, gripping the steering wheel.

I speed the van up. Go a little faster. In the distance I can see the sun turning the sky a clear blue.

“Drive to town,” says Joshua.

Joshua’s here!

“I am,” I say.

I’m nowhere near where they stopped us before, where they stopped Patrick and me before, when the phone lets out a little singsong sound. I see it there in the cup holder, all lit up.

“It can’t be,” I say.

“Pull over, Kyra,” someone yells out at me.

But that is all the time I have for them in the car next to me.

I’m careful when I dial. Careful when I push the speaker button on the phone. Careful when I set the phone back into the Big Gulp cup holder.

“This is nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

“I’m running away,” I say.

“Please speak louder.”

Under my hands, the steering wheel shakes as I drive over the washboard dirt road.

“Stop the vehicle now.”

I glance at Brother Laramie. I can just see Brother Nelson. And a gun. He has a gun!

“Help me.” My voice is loud.

I don’t want to die.

(Patrick didn’t want to die either. He had a wife and a son.)

“They have a gun,” I say. “They have a gun.” Will I get this far and follow Patrick?

“Where are you?”

I tell the woman that I’m heading toward town. What I am driving.

“You’re in a mobile book van?” she says.

Brother Laramie points to the side of the road with the gun.

I pretend like he’s not there.

“They’ve killed people already,” I say. I tell her Patrick’s name. Give them Ellen’s name, too, though they wouldn’t know her. “If I stop, they’ll kill me. I know it.”

“I’m sending help,” the woman says. “We have an officer in the area.”

Out here? Out here in the middle of nowhere?

“Keep talking to me,” she says.

I’m not sure if I can drive faster and talk at the same time, but I push the van forward. The light on the control panel comes on with a ding, letting me know I am almost out of gas.

“Who are you?” the operator asks.

I can’t say anything. Just hold the wheel.

“Kyra,” Patrick says in my head. “Tell her that. Tell her where you live.”

“The Chosen Ones,” I say. “I’m part of The Chosen Ones.” It sounds like my voice is trying to escape from me.

She talks to someone else, calling for backup.

The Hummer keeps pace beside me.

Tears splash down my face. I didn’t even realize I was crying.

My hands hurt.

The pain in my head, the place where they’ll shoot me if I stop, intensifies.

Brother Laramie sticks the gun out the window. He fires at the back of the Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels. I hear the bullet rip through metal. I scream.

“Hold on,” the operator says. “Hold on. I have someone coming for you.”

And just as she says it, I see flashing lights headed in my direction.

THE POLICE CARS
, two, three, four of them, roar past and stop Brother Felix, who is in his police cruiser (how did I miss him back there?), and both Hummers that followed me. They are all stopped, pulled out of their cars, and while I’m watching, handcuffed.

I’m swept to a police car where a woman officer looks so angry when she sees my face that she makes her partner wait before they talk to me.

“You’re not going back there, O’Neil,” the man cop says.

“The hell I’m not,” she says. “I’m sick of what this community is doing to these children.”

I watch her march in the morning sun, her shadow falling long on the road beside her. She is so angry I think she’ll walk right through Brother Felix. She yells in his face, just inches from him. The other officers watch her. One of them is grinning.

She comes back, hand on her gun.

“Who are they?” she says to me. She’s pulled on her sunglasses. They are little mirrors and when she turns to ask me this question, I see myself. Right there. Twin reflections. Me.
Me
.

“The God Squad,” I say.

I move to the side of the police car, somehow getting to the sideview mirror. The lights flash. I see them go across my body.

“Honey?” Officer O’Neil says. She touches my shoulder. “What do you need?”

I look back at her, and there I am again, in her sunglasses. Two of
me
. I can’t answer. I just stare at myself. It’s
me
in the reflection. I haven’t changed at all. Not at all. I touch my lips with my fingers, see the bruising in the morning light, see my mouth trying to heal. I can hear the radio crackling in the police car.

How can this be?

I was sure, sure, I had changed. Sure of it, that only the new me would run. That if I saw me, I would be different. Sure only the new me would have been able to get away. The hollow places inside me start to fill up.

“Honey,” Officer O’Neil says, “come sit down.” She points to the backseat of the police car and I slip inside.

“What is it?” she says.

I look at her—look at
me
—and say, “I’m still here.”

“What?” She raises the glasses. Her eyes are dark brown.

“I thought. . .” I’m not quite sure what I thought. “I thought they might have killed me, too.”

With a gentle hand Officer O’Neil touches my face. “No, honey,” she says. “You’re safe now.”

I TELL THE DETECTIVES
all of it, every single bit, even though my heart feels like it will give out the way it pounds. I tell about the Lost Boys and Bill and Ellen. All about Patrick and the graves of the unwhole children. I tell them about the beatings and the book burnings and how the girls are saved for the old men. I talk and talk until my throat burns when I sip down the orange juice they give me. I talk through tears and sometimes I’m so angry my head hurts.

After I tell them what I know, the police say I’ll be going to a safe house.

“A safe house?” I say to Officer O’Neil as we head off. I remember Joshua saying something about a safe house. Will he be there? It’s dusk and the streets are full of cars, the sidewalks full of people. Are they headed to their homes, all of them? Everything aches from my crying and talking and crying and talking.

Officer O’Neil looks at me, then she reaches for my hand.

“A place where you’ll be safe, Kyra,” she says. She clears her throat. “There’s a warrant for Mark Childs and some of those other thugs.”

By thugs she means the God Squad.

We’re quiet a moment.

“The Chosen have come here before,” she says, flipping on her blinker. We turn and chase the headlights down the road. “To Samantha Oberg’s.”