The vehicles, a car and a van, were ancient-looking, the metal shells barnacled with painted-over rust. One of the men waved Edie and Jesse to the van, on the heels of Wes and Marta. This man was tall and bone-thin, with olive skin and long black hair—it fell to the middle of his back—pushed back from a high forehead. Midforties, maybe. No head cover, no microsuit, just a canvas button-down shirt and pants, navy blue but cut like military fatigues. Despite his lack of precautions, his visible skin was much clearer than Andy’s: a few older-looking Stamp scars on his face and neck, a few more on the backs of his hands. Edie thought she’d heard Andy call him Joe. He was, for no good reason, the one among their captors she’d deemed kindest, most susceptible to pitiable displays, despite the fact that he wielded his weapon with as much casual brutishness as the rest of them. Maybe it was because he talked the least. The big hulk of a guy wearing the bandolier—his name was definitely Randall; Edie knew because she’d heard Andy hiss the name with impatience more than a few times during their endless hike—was a yapper. Body of a Rottweiler, personality of a Yorkshire terrier. He’d be a bully and a coward, both, Edie thought, and if she could get a stolen moment with Jesse, it would be wise to warn him to stay off that one’s radar. Jesse, she imagined, would be exactly the type to push Randall’s buttons.
But Joe, maybe-Joe, was waving Edie and Jesse to the van, and when the travelers had assembled beside it, he slid the side door open, releasing a terrific squeal that made them all flinch. Edie and Jesse, at the back of the group, were the last to board. There were two and a half bench seats, all occupied hip to hip, or hip on hip, the floor space crammed full of packed tents and knapsacks. The interior was rank with body odor and bad breath, and Edie’s optimism about the van dissipated when she scanned the expressions of her fellow travelers, hoping to find a face generous and open enough to impose upon. Can I suffocate you with my body and bags? They were understandably stony, hostile; they’d shifted their anger from their kidnappers to Edie and Jesse, and Edie thought of every ride she’d ever taken on the school bus, every tray of lunch she’d brought to a table in her high school cafeteria, and—inevitably—of the one time she’d flown in a plane. That was back when she and her mother moved from Gulf to Atlantic Zone, seven months after her father’s death, and they’d only had the money to fly Group Economy, where the seats were first-come, first-served and the storage spaces an unregulated free-for-all, notorious for provoking fistfights among customers trying to sneak in extra carry-ons. But this was worse.
Jesse paused on the step behind Edie. “Aw, no,” he said. “How are we supposed to make this work? There isn’t any room left.”
“Figure it out,” Joe said. “Or stay here. It’s no matter to me.”
Edie cast a desperate look to those who were seated. “You all know we can’t do that. Please don’t make us do that.”
“You better hurry,” Joe said.
There was a pregnant moment—probably seconds, felt like much longer—when no one moved, no face twitched with understanding or even sullen resignation. Then Wes Feingold, seated in one of the narrower nooks toward the back, lifted his hands. “Here,” he said. He exchanged glances with Marta, who nodded a fraction. “We’ll make room here.”
Which was progress, but Edie thought the declaration meant about as much as “I’m going to make this woman disappear” would have. Wes and Marta had maneuvered their packs off their backs and into their laps, an operation not easily reversed because of the zip ties. They were seated next to the Tanakas. Wendy appeared to have already fallen asleep—Edie marveled at the fact that she’d made it this far—and Ken appeared unwilling to shift over even a millimeter. His jaw was a rigid L, his shoulders set as if expecting a blow.
“Please move over,” Marta said to Ken. Her tone of voice was low and polite, but steely. There was something else to it—a command, even a threat. And to Edie’s great surprise—what threat could this petite woman in her fifties really pose?—Ken shifted to the left, adjusting Wendy’s unconscious body so that her weight was centered on one hip and her torso rested heavily against his.
“You get up,” Jesse said to Marta, and Edie winced at his rudeness. He motioned. “You sit on him, and Edie’ll sit on me.”
“Now wait a minute—” Wes began, but Marta shushed him.
“It’s fine,” she said. “It probably wouldn’t work any other way.”
The door rattled shut behind them. So Edie and Jesse hunched and slipped their packs over their heads, then arranged themselves in the back between Wes, Marta, and the Tanakas. The air was close and hot. The van chugged loudly into motion, and Edie, perched clumsily on Jesse’s knees, straddled the tent between her legs, leaning on it for balance each time the van hit a bump in the road, which was often. Jesse weighed only twenty pounds or so more than Edie, most of it in his length, and he grunted in an affronted way whenever the bumps sent Edie’s weight back onto him. Bastard, she thought. Her head kept knocking against Marta’s, and she muttered an embarrassed “sorry” each time, but Marta patted her knee as if to say, “Don’t be.”
Time inched forward. The windows, which ran only along the driver’s side, were caulked shut and grimed with filth, so it was impossible—from Edie’s vantage point, at least—to make out where they were going, what they were passing. Trees and more trees, probably. Every now and then a wedge of bright sunshine pushed through a window to land hotly on a face or arm. Someone sniffled and hiccupped. Edie’s hips and calves burned with the strain of keeping her upright, and she thought about the exercise ball she used at night (in another life) when she watched her webshows, the one that was supposed to firm up her core and better her posture.
She strained to peer over her shoulder, planning to ask Jesse if he still had his watch, but Jesse’s face was slack with sleep. She caught Wes’s eyes on her.
“Must be nice.” His words dripped with contempt.
“Jesse can sleep anywhere,” she said. Dared to say, because she knew that a sleeping Jesse was beyond the reach of her voice, beyond anything but a scream or vigorous shaking. “He’s like a child that way.”
She could see Wes wanting to retort to that, to take the opening she’d given him, but he only smirked. He was, Edie was beginning to think, the kind of man who wanted to be capable of greater nastiness than was really in his nature.
“He always does this before concerts,” she continued. She was whispering, but the bodies around her were silent, yearning for distraction. Her words, she knew, were going into every ear. “A thousand people in the audience, and they’re all chanting his name, and Jesse’s flopped out on a couch backstage. Then his manager yells, and he’s up, he’s ready to go.” She was bragging out of habit, in the way she used to do in those heady days of their relationship after the abortion, when—freed of the crushing burden of pregnancy—Edie’s life shifted surreally from bartending, grieving, and suffocating worry into months of extended play: travel, good food, late-night jam sessions in Jesse’s penthouse apartment, where nothing more was required of her than to lean on the arm of a sofa, consider the twinkle of the city outside the expanse of windows, and nurse a whiskey and cola, watching Jesse and his bandmates cover old folk songs, spirituals, Irish punk, weird, wonderful stuff that they would never play at a paying show. That was all done now. Those easy days were gone. She was so tired she could barely keep her head up, and Jesse’s bony knees were digging into her thighs, and she was wan with the van’s rough motion.
Suddenly, they stopped. The travelers started murmuring to one another: “Can you see anything?” “How far do you think we went?” Jesse came gasping violently awake, as he did in bed whenever Edie tried nudging him into a position where he wouldn’t snore. He’d have dumped Edie into the floorboard if there was any empty floor for her to land upon. “Wha—?” he gasped. “What? What? Where are we?”
“No one knows yet,” Marta snapped. “Be quiet.”
The van’s door rolled open.