FSF, October 2007 Read online

  "You don't mean to say you actually brought any food on this getaway bus,” Lexi said in her best withering voice, hoping her relief didn't show.

  He grinned. “Sure did. Let's see here.” He got up and opened the lid of a cooler on the seat behind him. “Ham and Swiss with lettuce and mayo? Coke?” When she nodded he handed her a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, and a green bottle, then took another sandwich and bottle for himself and slid back into his seat.

  Except for the driver, they had the whole big bus to themselves, a shockingly unGaian waste of resources. Lexi couldn't remember getting off TRAX and boarding the bus; she'd slept right through the whole thing and had been sleeping off and on for hours while the three of them roared along through the dark. I bet they drugged me, she thought darkly. She'd had tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner on the train. I bet they put ground-up sleeping pills in that soup. So I wouldn't yell and give them away when we switched to the bus. I would have, too, I would've yelled my head off!

  Now it was morning. They were deep in mountains Lexi didn't recognize, heading toward the sun. She unwrapped the sandwich avidly, wondering who had made it, and twisted the cap off the Coke bottle with caffeine free stamped in raised letters right in the glass.

  The sandwich was heavenly; Lexi tried not to wolf it but she pretty much did. The Coke was cold and delicious. “Want a cookie?” Jared held a round tin box across the aisle. “Oatmeal raisin?” The cookie was extremely good. Lexi ate several more cookies and started to feel a lot better. Cookie by cookie, the dopiness was dissolving out of her head . She stared out the window, wondering where the heck they were taking her.

  It couldn't hurt to ask. “Where are we going?” she asked above the roaring of the motor.

  "Sorry. Can't tell you that.” Jared smiled when he said this, but Lexi could tell he wasn't going to budge.

  Would he maybe relent and tell if she sobbed and begged him and acted distraught? After watching her gobble a sandwich and seven cookies? Not likely.

  Time dragged by, and they were still on the mountain road, not going very fast. She couldn't deduce anything from looking out the windows except that the road was in good shape, so this was a regular bus route, not an unmaintained highway that carried no traffic. Once in a while a vehicle—an ambulance, a recycling lorry, another bus—would pass them going the opposite direction, but all were unrevealing except for the bus, which said salt lake express on the front. That wasn't very helpful. All the road signs had long since rusted over or disappeared from their posts. Nobody had replaced them. In a world where private cars were forbidden, what was the point of signs?

  Lexi leaned her head against the window and thought about Pam. If Pam had been in Salt Lake, instead of Santa Barbara, her mom would never have dared get involved in the kidnapping, not in a million years. Thinking about how her mom had helped Granpa shove her into the sledcar, Lexi's eyes filled up; but she blinked hard and swallowed, and decided to be mad at Pam instead. Pam had no business going to California! Pam was supposed to stay here, making sure stuff like this didn't happen, that was her job! Righteous indignation swelled Lexi's chest. She thought about the scathing things she would say to Pam after Pam had rescued her from the kidnappers—I'm not speaking to you!—and how sorry Pam would be, how she would apologize over and over and promise never to go away again. This line of thought was deeply satisfying, for a while; but then Lexi remembered sitting at Pam's kitchen table with Pam and Humphrey, all three with big plates of spaghetti in front of them and big red circles around their mouths, and how Humphrey had talked about what Pam used to be like when she first went to the Bureau of Temporal Physics as a kid not much older than Lexi herself, the only girl in the first class of Apprentices, what a gifted mathematician and quick study she'd proved to be, the first Apprentice to learn how to place the numbers in the time transceiver fields, how she used her mind to do this with such beautiful precision. Lexi had seen Pam watching Humphrey while he was explaining all this, she knew what that look meant. Pam loved that weird-looking, hairy old Hefn. When Humphrey ordered her to go somewhere, she had to go. That was her job too, doing what Humphrey said.

  The swaying of the bus was making Lexi drowsy. In spite of herself she dozed off again. Then it was later, and the bus had slowed even more as the driver geared down. Outside were drab-colored flat-topped mountains under puffy, flat-bottomed white clouds. They were coming into a town. Jared had moved over next to her, and one of his big hands had a grip on the back of her neck; that was what had woken her. “Stay right like you are, Alexis. I don't want to hurt you but I will if you try to yell or signal out the window."

  Saying this, he pushed her head down nearly to her knees and ducked down beside her. Grinding its gears, the bus moved slowly through the town. From her bent-over position Lexi couldn't see out at all. Being pressed down made her panicky; her heart thumped while she desperately willed herself not to struggle. If she gave in to the panic and started to fight Jared, whose hard breathing was a rasp in her right ear, he would hurt her. He had said he would, and she believed him.

  After a few minutes the bus turned right, into what felt like a driveway. It changed directions several times, then stopped.

  Jared sat up cautiously and looked out, then took his hand off Lexi's neck. “Okay, Alexis, we're getting off now. Now, what I'm gonna do is, is I'm gonna hold your hands behind your back. Now, don't you make one sound, okay? Not one single sound. Just do like I tell you and you'll be fine. Okay, come on."

  He pulled her up and clamped her again, gripping both her wrists together in the same hand that had held her face to her knees. “Ow!” she said—though it was more uncomfortable than painful to be held that way—but all he did was clamp her tighter and hiss: “What did I tell you? Not one sound, not a one! Now get going."

  He thrust her ahead of him to the front of the bus and down the steep steps. Through the windows she could see that the bus was parked between two identical long, low buildings. As Lexi stepped the last high step down to the ground, she caught a glimpse of deep blue sky and tall pink cliffs that did look a little bit familiar, and thought, I bet we're somewhere near the parks. The driver had maneuvered the bus so that the door was only a stride away from a door in one of the long buildings, which Jared now opened with his free hand. He started to push her inside—

  —and let out a startled yelp, and Lexi was jerked backwards. She hit the ground on her left side, hard, hard enough to knock the wind out. While she fought to breathe there was a commotion overhead—scuffling—the thwacking sounds of a fistfight, also the sound of the bus roaring and screeching away.

  She got her breath back finally and tried to roll onto her hands and knees, but something was wrong with her left hand. She heard herself yell. Then a woman was helping her up, saying “Are you okay, Alexis?"

  "Something's wrong with my arm,” said Lexi. A few feet away, a group of people she'd never seen before were holding onto Jared. One of them had Jared's arm bent behind him in a way that looked to Lexi like it must hurt. Abruptly, humiliatingly, she threw up.

  The woman examining her arm was unperturbed. “Looks like you broke your wrist when you fell on it. Ever had a broken bone before?” Lexi shook her head, feeling extremely strange. A moment later she was lying on the ground again. “Keep still, honey. You fainted. We need to get you to a doctor."

  Somebody brought her some water. In a little bit somebody else helped her stand up again, and held her up while the woman arranged her arm in a makeshift sling. “We'd better get you down to Moab, the medical facilities are a lot better down there."

  The sling helped. “Where's Pam?” said Lexi. Not for an instant did she doubt who had brought about her rescue.

  The man who had helped her stand the second time said, “Pam's on her way to Salina. The plan was for us to meet up at Salina, and she'd take you back up to Salt Lake. I'm Harley Kroupa, by the way—I'm sachem of the Moab Mission."

  "The Gaian Mission?"

&
nbsp; "That's the one.” His grin made his mustache wiggle.

  Lexi managed to smile back. “Where are we? What's this place?"

  "This is Green River,” said Harley Kroupa.

  "Oh. I was here one time. We went rafting. Oh, so that's the Book Cliffs then.” She glared at Jared, wilted and sullen in the custody of the victorious Gaians, and back at Harley. “Is Pam coming to Moab too?"

  "We'll have to see. Let's us get over there and get Jaime on the phone; I expect he'll know how to reach her. And you might as well let this fellow go,” he told the man who was holding Jared in a half-nelson. “Let him get on back to Salt Lake whatever way he can. I expect he'll be wanting to speak to the First Minister of the Church."

  The Gaians all laughed, and the man holding Jared turned him loose. Jared worked his shoulders and looked down at Lexi. “Listen, I'm sorry you got hurt, Alexis. If these goons hadn't of interfered, not a thing would've happened, you'da been fine."

  "When you were holding my head down,” Lexi said, “I wasn't fine. I wasn't fine at all. I bet the Hefn are going to mindwipe you and I hope they do."

  * * * *

  6

  There was no faster way to get from Salina to Green River than the way Lexi and Jared had come, but at least the twice-weekly public bus continued on to Moab. Harley Kroupa met Pam at the station, a converted film lab. “Great to see you,” he said, shaking hands vigorously. “They pinned her wrist this morning. She's sleeping off the sedative. She wouldn't settle down last night till we told her you were on your way.” He shouldered Pam's backpack. “The Mission's just a couple blocks along here."

  They started walking, past a cluster of small gift and snack shops with closed till september 15 signs in their windows. Hot as it was in Salt Lake, here it was hotter; dry as it was, Pam could feel the sweat pop out on her back. The wide sunwashed street was all but deserted. In the rush to leave Pam had forgotten her hat, and the ferocious light stabbed her eyes. Shading them with her hand, she asked, “How bad is the wrist?"

  "Not very, just a hairline fracture. She'll be fine, but I reckon they might have to write her out of the series for a while."

  She smiled. “That won't do the series any harm. Nothing's better for telly ratings than a little notoriety. So Jaime tells me."

  Harley laughed. “That Jaime is a character.” Pam smiled at him, a lean, weathered man with a drooping mustache, in jeans and boots and a ten-gallon hat. They had conferred often by phone; this didn't feel like a first meeting. “Well now,” he said, “we've been wantin’ to get you down here for a good while. Not quite what we had in mind. You've never been to Moab at all before, have you."

  "No,” said Pam, “and I've always wanted to, especially after I read that Edward Abbey memoir, Desert Solitaire.” Harley grinned, nodding enthusiastically. “I'd love to see Delicate Arch, the bus went right past the entrance to the park, but I don't suppose there'll be time for that on this trip."

  Harley shoved his big hat to the back of his head and squinted at the scenery. “Reckon not, but I hope you'll make it down again soon, now that you've had a glimpse of the country hereabouts."

  "I hope so too,” Pam said, meaning it. “So the rescue went off without a hitch, apart from Lexi's wrist?"

  Harley ducked his head and looked sober. “We all feel mighty bad about that, Pam. I keep going over and over it, wondering if there wasn't some way we could have grabbed him without her gettin’ knocked down."

  "Well,” said Pam—speaking in her role as Gaian Child Welfare Oversight Officer, as well as her other role as Bureau Emissary to the Church of Ephrem the Prophet—"I won't deny it would have been better to pull it off without anybody getting hurt, and especially without the hurt person being Lexi. Besides the effect on her, it gives the Church a stick to beat us with. But you got her out, and I don't doubt you did the best you could in the circumstances, and neither will Humphrey, I'm sure. So, apart from the wrist, things went smoothly?"

  Harley looked relieved. “Slick as a zipper—see, Green River's a pretty dead town most of the year. The town center's basically moved down around the newer motels, there's several of ‘em down there on the Green, right where they launch the rafts, right across from the river museum. Plus the bus stop, the bank, the farmer's market, and so forth ... but the train station's in the old downtown. Well, and the Ephremite church, that's the only church in town of course. Well this time of year there's nobody around as a rule if it's not Sunday, but if somebody happens to see a group of people gettin’ off the train it looks suspicious. So we're keepin’ our heads down and checkin’ up and down the street, there's several derelict motels on East Main. Well, so, we're checkin’ out the ones like Jaime described and talking about what to do, and while we're doin’ that we see this bus pull in at the old Book Cliff Lodge—that one's got two parallel rows of rooms, two buildings you know, one directly behind the other, and of course that means there's space between ‘em to park a bus out of sight of the street."

  Pam, who had been nodding encouragement throughout Harley's narrative, thought: That's it. That's what I missed.

  "So soon as they drive behind the streetside building, all eight of us just hightail it across the street, and the minute they get off we jump the guy that's holding Lexi.” He shook his head ruefully. “And down he goes, and down she goes too."

  "You couldn't have known she'd be on the bus,” Pam said reasonably. “Actually, I can't imagine why they'd risk taking her out again—or taking the bus out again, for that matter, once they'd made it here without getting caught."

  Harley shot her a surprised look; but they had arrived. “Well, here we are, this is the Mission.” Harley held a door open and Pam stepped ahead of him into the dim relief of a swamp cooler's breeze. Two women stood up from desks as they entered. “Pam Pruitt, this is Mercedes Landrum, my assistant—my gal Jaime, so to speak. She was in the very first class of missionaries to be recruited in Utah.” He waited for them to shake hands. “And this young lady is Sophie Rodriguez, she's a volunteer at the mission, she was along on the raid. She's the one who took care of Lexi."

  Sophie shook hands with Pam too. “I've had some medical training so I volunteered. They were mighty glad they let me come!"

  "It's not a bad break,” the other woman put in. “Sophie did the X-rays herself."

  "We all feel bad about it though. We know the Church will make hay out of it."

  Again Pam went through her acknowledgment/reassurance routine: Yes, it's a pity; no, nobody blames you; don't worry, we'll deal with it. “I'd like to see her as soon as possible. Right away, if the doctors don't object."

  "I can take you to the clinic now,” Harley offered. “You can leave your stuff in the guest room and freshen up if you like, and you can use Mercedes's bike. The clinic's about a mile from here, you passed it on the bus coming in. Several of our guys are standing guard. They wanted to do something to make up for letting her get hurt."

  Pam nodded; it was a good idea. Her eyes had adjusted to the low light in the room, and she saw now that the walls were covered with monstrous attenuated figures, obviously primitive, very striking, rather disturbing in fact. The figures had the massive stillness of Easter Island heads. “Would this be the local rock art?"

  "Some of it, and fairly local,” said Harley. “These come from the Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon. They're thousands of years old. Mercedes is a pictograph expert, among her other virtues; she put these posters up."

  "It's awesome art,” Mercedes said. “We're not the first ones by a long shot to have lived into this land. The people who made these paintings were proto-Gaians for sure."

  * * * *

  More posters plastered the clinic walls, some of rock art in different styles, some of stunningly gorgeous scenery from inside the National Parks. All the rock seemed to be dark red, or red and white, or red-gold and glowing in hard sunlight. The painted figures were dark red. Pam noticed a big picture of Delicate Arch in winter, red rock against white snow.
>
  Lexi was still asleep but the nurse in charge said she should be waking up any time now, and it was perfectly okay for Pam to wait in the room.

  "I'd like to be alone with her when she wakes up,” Pam told Harley. “Thanks for the escort."

  "Sure thing,” said Harley. “See you back at the Mission for dinner, then?"

  "I'll let you know. Probably.” She turned to enter Lexi's room.

  "Oh, and by the way,” he added, “you were saying about how we couldn't have known Lexi would be on that bus? I didn't get a chance to explain—they were only just pulling in from Salina when we got there. We only beat them to Green River by a couple of minutes."

  Pam turned back. “I thought they got there the night before, the night of the day they kidnapped her."

  He shook his head. “Nope, not till yesterday afternoon. From what Jaime'd said we thought they'd be there already too, but they were only just hittin’ town, and if you think about it, they really couldn't have gotten there very much faster. If they holed up somewhere close to Salt Lake to make that viddy, and then had to wait for a train, get a car put on, locate a bus to charter from Salina—you just got off one so you know yourself how long it takes an electric bus to get up and down those mountain roads, they only average about twenty-five or thirty. And there's not that many trains that come this far south either nowadays. We can check the schedule, but I'm pretty sure they got there about as fast as humanly possible."

  He was obviously correct. “Of course you're right. I must've put in an extra day somehow."

  "Not much wonder, with everything that's been going on. See you later, then. Hope the little girl's doin’ okay."

  The room held six white hospital beds, five of which were made up flat. Pam went in quietly and shut the door behind her. Lexi lay in the bed closest to the door. Its head had been elevated, and Lexi's long blond hair lay loosely mussed over the pillow. Her left arm was swathed in a white sling with an ice pack tucked inside it, and there was an IV line taped to the back of her right hand. The line led from a beeping bottle of fluid hooked to a pole.