“We made Violet a promise.” This was Edie.
“You made Violet a promise,” Berto said. “I didn’t promise her anything.”
“It’s her mother,” Marta said. She was leaning against the hood of the car. Today was November 1, she thought. She’d seen that on the computer’s task bar just before they called David. (What must be going through David’s mind now?) “I’d be more worried about traveling with her if I thought she was a person who could kill her own mother.”
“No one said that she had to be the one to pull the trigger.”
“We have to have some honor here,” said Edie, “if we’re going to trust each other long enough to get out.”
Berto shook his head, disgusted, and clammed up. Marta remembered her first conversation with him and Anastasia, back at the OLE training center. They were lawyers, they’d told her—lead partners at a firm specializing in commercial litigation. Anastasia was thirty-eight, Berto, forty-one. No children. “Maybe after we get back in one piece,” Anastasia had said with a laugh. They had beauty, money, early success in their chosen profession, a profession they both seemed legitimately to enjoy. They had each other. Funny how much you learned in a month of intense acquaintance, but how little you really knew, still. Marta had learned Berto’s first dog’s name—Luther—and that his beloved father died two years ago of cancer of the esophagus. She’d learned that he and Anastasia met during law school, when they were both part-time baristas at the campus Starbucks. She’d learned that their politics were conservative, their zone loyalties fierce, and a lot of what motivated them to do the OLE tour was their belief (or Berto’s—this had felt more like Berto than Anastasia) that very bad days were ahead, apocalyptic days, and they had to train for every exigency. She’d learned that they had been doing weekend training retreats for a full year before the three-week mandated training, and they considered themselves experts now on all sorts of matters: how to kill and dress game, which fungi of the eastern Appalachians were edible, the quickest way to start a fire, the best brand of portable water-filtration system. Lots of other things. And yet: they’d been cheerful, warm—more like people engaged in a satisfying hobby than people who truly believed that their acquired skill set was the only thing standing between themselves and the loss of everything they held dear. And yet: when the day came that they might have tried to stage a heroic escape, take Marta’s Quicksilver, and steal off with Tia toward home, they’d declined.
And so Marta didn’t know if Berto could really shoot someone—as an act of rage, even as an act of defense—or if he just really wanted to believe that he could. She suspected he didn’t know, either.
The front door opened, and Violet strode out, businesslike. “Let’s go,” she said. “It’ll take them a while to get out of there, but I want to put plenty of miles between us before then.”
Berto started, “Why don’t we just—”
“Enough,” Violet said. “Enough. Have you ever killed someone?”
Berto’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t respond.
“Because I’m up to four now. No more.” She threw open the front passenger-side door, and it emitted a squeal so sharp everyone winced. “Who’s driving?”
“I am,” Berto said.
“Good. Let’s go.”
Marta, Wes, Ken, and Edie crowded into the car’s backseat. Violet dug a set of keys out of her pocket and selected one. “Here,” she said to Berto.
He started the engine.
The noise of tires on gravel was very loud, the car’s motion choppy. Marta twisted around to watch through the back window, a part of her certain that the door was going to fly open and out would come Randall, firing some gun he’d found in the house. Then the drive curved, and the house disappeared behind a row of trees. In another few minutes, they were back on the paved road, or at least the crumbling remains of it. “Left,” Violet said. “You go right and you’ll drive us right into the Lenoir substation.”
Berto turned left.
They drove for ten minutes, fifteen. Marta only realized how tightly she had been gripping the handle over her door when she relaxed her hold on it. Her palm was hot, the fingers aching.
“We did it,” Ken said disbelievingly. “We got away from them.”
Marta nodded a little. He reached for her hand and gripped it. She smiled, squeezing it back.
“Is that right, Violet?” Wes asked. “Are we clear?”
She threw a glance back at him. “Yeah. Yeah, it looks that way.”
“OK,” Wes said. “Then please find a safe place to pull over, Berto.”
“What?” Berto said. “You need to take a piss or something?”
“Not exactly.” He pushed up the sleeve of his microsuit and held out his right forearm. On the plump healthy skin just below the elbow was a taut red bump, about the size of a mosquito bite. A little dark spot, like an apple seed, was visible under the surface. Around this bump were three smaller red dots. Wes dug into these welts with the fingernails of his other hand, leaving pale grooves, and Marta, cold with fear, grabbed his hand to stop him.
He tensed in her grasp, shuddered. His temples, she now saw, were beaded with sweat.
“I got bitten during our little showdown,” he said between gritted teeth. “I didn’t want to say anything. I mean, I didn’t want to be a distraction.”
“Oh, Wes, no,” said Edie.
“So pull over, please,” he said. “I don’t know how quickly these things will burst.”
Twenty
The sun was setting when they finally emerged from the room. Of all the people Violet could have left her with, June wished it hadn’t been Randall, though she doubted that Joe or Andy could have managed as quickly as Randall did to come out of his zip tie (Randall half-sawed, half-pried his off using a crooked nail head on one of the boards over the room’s one window), or to wriggle the pins out of the door’s three rusted-over hinges. In the hours it took to do this, Randall cursed and raged, and June sat watching him uselessly, hands still bound because he didn’t bother to free her after he’d freed himself. “There’s the nail head,” he said, face slimy with sweat. “Have at it.” She tried with no luck. It was too high for her to reach at any kind of a workable angle, and she couldn’t get her balance if she stood on one of the rickety chairs.
“Their asses better be gone if they know what’s good for them,” Randall kept saying. “I will slaughter them. I will bash their fucking skulls in.”
June, for the first time in twenty years, was mute—afraid to contradict him, afraid to pose a suggestion. A couple of zip ties, a tiny room, a nailed-shut door: and suddenly she had no power. Had Violet known it would be like this? Surely she hadn’t.
At last he’d pulled the door free, almost growling, with a terrific screech of the hinges and a crack as the wood along the nailed side splintered. The board that Violet had propped under the knob as she left clattered to the floor.