LAURIE LONGRIN WAS a strong and happy girl because her family was strong and happy. She had figured that out long ago.
If your family was a mess, your dad a sex-crazed tail chaser and your mom one of those who floated her breakfast cornflakes in booze, well, then your chances of being strong and happy weren’t promising. But if your dad and mom loved each other and worked hard—especially when their work brought beautiful horses into your life every day—you were more than halfway to being strong and happy. The rest was up to you.
Of course Laurie could still screw up, like when she zoned out or even fell asleep during nearly every Sunday sermon. Or like when she used the word horseshit more often than the average almost-thirteen-year-old girl.
If you were strong and happy, you were able to recognize those qualities in others. And if you could admit to your own evils, like the overuse of the word horseshit or a tendency to get snarky with ignorant people, just to name two, then you were better able to see evil in others and know them for what they were.
For instance, Agent Janis Dern, who was an FBI bad apple if she was FBI at all, who wasn’t just psycho-sick but also as pure evil as Cruella De Vil. Except if given the chance, Janis Dern wouldn’t make a fancy coat from Dalmatian-puppy skins but instead from little-girl skins.
When she stepped out of the room to talk with the guy named Chris, Janis closed the door, but they didn’t lower their voices. Laurie could still hear them. She was pretty sure Janis wanted her to hear them. When Janis had first talked about the injections that would make Laurie a zombie, it had sounded half true and half like, well, horseshit. But she and Chris talked about six more of their kind coming here as backup, talked about injecting Daddy and maybe Mom and maybe Laurie herself, and the more they talked, the more real it sounded, too real by the time they were talking about sex and doing each other.
Laurie wasn’t just sitting there, zip-tied to her desk chair, hysterical about the danger she was in, hoping Ethan Stackpool would miraculously appear and rescue her from death and worse than death. Ethan Stackpool was amazing to look at, sweet, smart, strong for his age, but he was in the seventh grade, like Laurie, so he was still a few years away from being an action hero able to knock the plumbing out of a dozen bad guys. Although she couldn’t help thinking about Ethan Stackpool at times like this—and lots of other times—Laurie was busy saving herself the minute Janis stepped into the upstairs hallway and closed the door behind her.
Evil is stupid. Doing evil might get you what you wanted in the short term, but it never worked in the long term. Laurie had learned this from books, from some movies, and just from general observation of life.
For instance, in the general-observation category, Janis Dern was evil and stupid. She’d bound each of Laurie’s ankles to the front stretcher bar of the desk chair and her left hand to the left arm of the chair, but let the right hand remain free so she could make that idiotic nasty crack about nose picking and booger eating. Janis probably also didn’t cuff that hand because, when the two of them were face-to-face and she was ragging Laurie, she wanted to be given the finger and really would have used the butt of her pistol like a hammer, as she had promised, to shatter all three knuckles in the offending digit. But Janis Dern, agent of the FBEI, Federal Bureau of Evil Idiots, had apparently given no thought to what might be in the drawers of a schoolgirl’s desk besides bubblegum and barrettes. Among other things, Laurie’s desk contained a pair of scissors.
The moment the door closed, while Laurie listened to the crazy-sick talk of the two agents and thought about Ethan Stackpool, she opened the pencil drawer in the desk and took out the scissors. She cut through the thick plastic tie that restrained her left hand. She bent forward in the chair and cut the tie on her left ankle, then the tie on her right.
With her left hand, she presented the middle finger to the hallway door, and she kept the scissors in her right hand because they were the only weapon she had.
Only a day earlier, she would not have thought she could stab anyone, not in a million years. But now that the choice was between stabbing someone or being turned into a zombie slave, she could be a stabbing machine if it came to that.
Waiting for Janis to return and trying to surprise her was a bad idea. Janis was strong, crazy, and evil.
Better to raise the bottom sash of the double-hung windows, raise the bug screen, and slip out onto the roof of the veranda that encircled the house.
She was on the north side of the house, where she couldn’t be seen from the stables, though she was looking down on the Cadillac Escalade that blocked the private lane leading in from the state route. The Cadillac stood under a lamppost. A woman leaned against the farther side of the big SUV, smoking a cigarette, her back to Laurie.
Because the veranda wrapped the entire residence, Laurie was able to move along the shingled roof, around the corner to the back, the west side, where she was not visible from either the driveway or any of the stables.
To the west lay a fenced meadow, beyond that open grassland and a lot of darkness. Lights at two other spreads—one to the north, one to the south—were so far away they looked not like ranches but like distant ships on a vast, dark sea.
She could jump down to the backyard and try to make her way to Stable 5, far from where they were holding the employees in Stable 2. She could find a suitable mare and ride out for help.
But in a minute or two, Janis would discover her prisoner had escaped, and in three minutes every FBEI agent on the property would be hunting her. There wouldn’t be time to saddle the mare. Laurie would have to ride bareback, which she could do, though there might not even be time for that.
Besides, these people were big-time bad hats, rotten enough to kill people, so they might shoot a horse out from under her if given the chance. She couldn’t live with herself if she was responsible for the death of a horse.
The other alternative was to enter the house by a window of a different room and then go to a place that these invaders might not know about, where there was a phone that she could use. Her parents’ bedroom was here at the back of the house. At this time of year, the upstairs windows were never locked because they were often opened for fresh air.
The bedroom was dark beyond the glass. She quietly slid up a bug screen and then the lower sash of a window.
2
SEVERAL MILES SOUTH of the town of Borrego Springs, the Anza-Borrego Desert, Monday fading into Tuesday, the temperature still at seventy-nine degrees almost six hours after nightfall …
The valley floor in this area stubbled with mesquite and sage and nameless brush, but nonetheless ashen under a paling moon, as eerie as some dreamscape where alien terrors wait below to ascend through sandy soil as easily as sharks through water …
Along this lonely stretch of Borrego Springs Road, the sign stands where it was erected Monday afternoon: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR DESERT FLORA STUDY GROUP TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.