The Darkest Minds

My face was flushed, but something inside of me had gone very cold. It had been half a second, no more, but it was plenty long enough to notice the way his eyes had darkened with something that might have been frustration.

Chubs was in the front seat folding and unfolding something in his lap, over and over again, almost like he didn’t realize he was doing it.

“Will you cut that out?” Liam burst out, agitated. “You’ll rip it.”

Chubs stopped immediately. “Can’t we just…try? Do we need the Slip Kid for this?”

“Do you really want to risk it?”

“Jack would have.”

“Right, but Jack…” Liam’s voice trailed off. “Let’s just play it safe. He’ll help us when we get there.”

“If we get there,” Chubs huffed.

“Jack?” I didn’t realize I had said it aloud until Liam’s eyes looked up at me in the rearview mirror.

“It’s none of your business,” Chubs said, and left it at that.

Liam was only a little more forthcoming. “He was our friend—in our room at camp, I mean. We’re trying…we’re just trying to get in touch with his dad. It’s one of the reasons we need to hit up the Slip Kid.”

I nodded toward the sheet of paper. “But before you guys broke out, he wrote a letter?”

“The three of us each did,” Liam said. “In case one of us backed out at the last minute and didn’t want to come or…didn’t make it out.”

“Which Jack did not.” Chubs’s voice could have cut steel. Behind him, house after gorgeous colonial house passed in rapid-fire succession, their colors winking at us through her window.

“Anyway.” Liam cleared his throat. “We’re trying to put his letter in his dad’s hands. We tried going to the address Jack gave us, but the house had been repossessed. He left a note saying he was going to D.C. for work, but no new address or phone number. That’s why we need the Slip Kid’s help—to find where he is now.”

“You can’t just mail it?”

“They started scanning mail for this exact reason about two years after you went to Thurmond,” Liam explained. “The government reads all, speaks all, and writes all. They’ve crafted a lovely little story about how we’re all being saved and reprogrammed back into sweet little darlings at camp, and they don’t want anyone to get wind of the truth.”

I honestly had no idea what to say to that.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean to give you a shakedown about it.”

“It’s okay,” Liam said, after the silence had stretched to the point of breaking. “It’s fine.”

There wasn’t a way to explain how I knew. Maybe it was the way Liam’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, or how he kept glancing in his side mirror throughout the conversation, long after a silver car had passed us from the other direction. It could have been the way his shoulders sagged, sloping down in a way that was so defeated. I just knew, long before I caught his worried eyes in the rearview mirror.

Slowly, without disturbing Zu and Chubs as they watched an endless stream of forest pass by the side windows, I crouched between the two front seats again.

Liam met my gaze for a split second, nodding in the direction of his side mirror. See for yourself, he seemed to say. So I did.

Trailing behind us, back about two car lengths, was an old white pickup truck. With the rain fogging up the air between the two cars, I couldn’t tell if there were one or two men inside. They looked like little more than two black ants from where I was sitting.

“Interesting,” I said, keeping my voice even.

“Yep,” he said, his jaw clenched. The muscles of his neck strained. “Gotta love West Virginia. Glorious Mountain State. Land O’Many John Denver Songs.”

“Maybe…” I began slowly, “you should pull over and look at a map?”

It was one way of feeling out the situation. Liam was about to turn onto George Washington Highway—slightly wider than the twisting road we were leaving. If the truck was following us, they wouldn’t be able to stop without revealing it. In any case, whoever was driving the truck wasn’t being aggressive about it. If he was a bounty hunter, as Liam apparently thought, they were probably feeling us out, too.

We continued up Gorman Road, following its natural curve. Black Betty slowed in anticipation of the upcoming turn. Liam hesitated half a second before flipping his turn signal on. I looked in the mirror, my heart lifting when I saw the truck turn its other blinker on. They were turning right. We were going left.

Liam blew out a long sigh, finally sitting back against his seat as the minivan reached the intersection of the highway and the road. There was another car turning off the highway, a small silver Volkswagen; both Liam and I threw up a hand to block the intense glint of the sun against its windows.

“Okay, Old Man River.” Liam gave the car an impatient wave. “Go ahead and turn before the next century. No, take your time, shave, contemplate the universe…”

Lynyrd Skynyrd was blasting through the pickup truck’s open windows as it pulled up alongside us, creaking and groaning in the way all old cars seem to do. “Free Bird.” Of course. It had to be Dad’s favorite. Two seconds into the damn song, and it was like I was back in the front seat of his squad car, cruising around town. That was the only time I got to listen to the good music—when it was just the two of us, cruising. Mom hated the stuff.

A laugh bubbled up inside of me as I watched the driver bob his head in time with the music. He howled the words at the top of his lungs, exhaling each lyric with a puff of cigarette smoke.

And then it was replaced by a different sound—a shriek of sorts. I looked up just in time to see the Volkswagen slam on its brakes right in front of us, jolting to a stop and sending another blinding glare of sunlight our way.

“You have got to be kidding me!” Liam made as if to press his hand down on the horn, but not before the driver of the Volkswagen rolled down his window and pointed something black and gleaming at us.

No. The world went into sharp focus. Sound evaporated around me. NO.

I reached up and slapped Black Betty’s radio button on, turning it up as loud as it would go. Liam and Chubs both started yelling, but I knocked Liam’s hand away before he could switch it off.