In Time

FIVE

OUR next stop is a lonely little gas station in Deer Valley, just south of Anthem and Cave Creek. I doubt Zu is familiar enough with Arizona to know how close we are to Scottsdale, and that from there, it’s spitting distance to Phoenix. But with no warning other than a sharp intake of breath, she seizes the steering wheel and nearly gets us into an accident as she jerks it toward the exit.

“Jesus—! What the hell?”

One hand points to the gas light and the other points to the gas station next to the off-ramp.

“With what money, Dorothy?” I ask. “I barely have enough for a gallon, since I still haven’t been able to turn your ass in.”

Trust me. I narrow my eyes, but she meets my gaze head-on. Trust me.

Unsurprisingly, we’re the only ones here. I navigate the truck around, picking the pump farthest from the small convenience store and the worker peering out his window at us. The gas tank is on the driver’s side, which means that Zu, when she follows me out, jumping down from the door, is blocked by the body of the truck.

“Now what’s your plan?”

She mimes putting a credit card into the slot, but I could have told her before that the pumps don’t take card payments anymore. You have to pay up front in cash.

Zu doesn’t look fazed. Instead, she jerks a thumb back toward the store and the man still watching me and then does that jibber-jabber motion with her hands, pressing her four fingers against her thumb repeatedly.

Distract him!

I shake my head, stuffing my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, but I do like she asks. Because there’s no chance that could go horribly wrong.

It’s already about thirty degrees warmer than it was in northern Arizona. I come down here so rarely that the hundred-degree heat always feels like opening an oven door and leaning in. The station attendant at least has the fans cranked up behind him, even if the owner is too cheap to shell out for real AC.

The bells above the door jangle. I glance back over my shoulder, surprised to see the formerly blank-screened pump suddenly light up with numbers. I don’t know what the attendant can tell from watching his register’s screen, and I don’t know what the hell the girl is doing, but a quick plan comes together in my head. It’s as dumb as it is simple.

I feign a big trip, crashing headlong into the shelves of candy. I thrash my arms out, knocking most of it to the ground in mess of epic proportions. The attendant must think I’m having some kind of a seizure, because all of a sudden, he’s at my side where I’m sprawled out on the floor, checking my pulse, shoving a thick candy bar between my teeth, like he’s afraid I’m going to bite my tongue off.

“Sir? Sir? Sir?” I don’t know that anyone has ever called me sir before, much less three times in fewer seconds. “Are you all right? Can you hear me? Sir?”

I make a big show of moaning, clutching my head as I turn onto my side. Just past the attendant’s hip, I can barely see the pump Zu is working, the way the numbers are spinning and ticking up, like she’s somehow pumping gas without paying for a cent of it.

“I’m going to call for an ambulance—”

The poor guy is so old and so genuine that I do feel a little sorry about all this, until he has the nerve to say, “It’ll be okay. You’re okay, kid.”

“I’m just… It must be the heat,” I say, grabbing his arm as he starts to pull away. “I’ll be okay. Do you have… Can I buy a bottle of water from you?”

Please say I have enough left to buy a water bottle.

“No, no, no,” the man says, rubbing what little white hair he has left off his sweaty forehead. “You wait here. I’ll get you a cup of water from the cooler in the back.”

I know it takes more than a few minutes to fill the truck’s tank, but whatever Zu’s managed to pump is going to have to be enough. I wait until the old man staggers onto his feet, straightens his ugly polyester blue uniform, and disappears into the back before I jump up and go running for the truck.

The timing is just right. She sees me coming around and jams the nozzle back onto its resting place. I give her a boost up into the cab, glancing at the pump’s screen. She’s somehow just stolen over three hundred dollars’ worth of gas.

The tires squeal as we go tearing out of there. I’m whipping around corners, looking for the on-ramp back to the I-17, laughing, laughing, laughing because I can’t seem to get rid of the adrenaline any other way. Zu reaches over and buckles me in, then does the same for herself. Her round face is flushed, but I think she looks pretty smug. I would be, too.

“Your brother teach you how to hijack a pump like that?” I ask when I can breathe normally again.

She shakes her head. No—it’s a new trick. I want to think about all the thousand ways that could have gone wrong, how there’s a good chance if the store has cameras, my face and the car is likely on them. I don’t know how this works, though—if that old man is going to shuffle back over to his register and see that someone’s been pumping gas without paying. And who’s going to smack the law down on me? Would the police really have time to follow up on this when they already have enough trouble to deal with in Phoenix?

Who cares? If they come after us, they come after us. They can try.

I’m not thinking straight—I know I’m not because the next words that come out of my mouth are so batshit crazy I almost don’t recognize my own voice. “If you help me find another kid, I won’t have to turn you in.”

But really, is it that crazy? She’s already proven herself to be a hell of a lot more resourceful than I am. She’s handy and basically means an unlimited supply of gasoline whenever and wherever I need it. And who knows? Maybe they have some kind of psychic link to one another. They can move cars and start fires and move a grown man across the length of a field. How is that any crazier? It doesn’t have to be her.

The smile slides down her cheeks bit by bit, and the disappointment I see in her eyes tells me the answer is no, long before the shake of her head.

It doesn’t make sense to me. I’m giving her a way out—I’m saving her life, and she doesn’t even pretend to act grateful? Maybe I was right before and she really does want to be taken in. She’s tired of running, tired of being hunted, and she just wants to walk back into the arms of the nearest black uniform and be done with it. That would at least explain why she didn’t run all of the times she could have. She wasn’t staying with me because she liked the company, obviously.

Look, I’m not a proud guy. I’m nobody’s favorite. I’m just getting by and have been for pretty much all my life. I’m not interested in college because I want to go on and be a doctor or a lawyer or one of those assholes who sit around with their heads in their hands on the stock market floor. On the scale of winners to losers, I know I fall somewhere in the middle.

I’m just trying to get myself to the point where I at least have options. I don’t understand why little Zu doesn’t feel that need, too, why she’d throw her freedom away like this. I don’t know anything about these camps, but I know if nobody is allowed to whisper a word about them, they can’t be good. If she can’t see that, she’s too trusting—she’s that man in the gas station offering to give me water while we’re robbing him blind. People like them, they can’t see the world for the wreck it is.

I mean, okay, I will admit it stings a little bit to know she’d rather be locked up than with me. Maybe—It could be she just doesn’t understand what she’s throwing away here. Maybe I need to explain it to her?

We’ve been sitting in the parking lot in front of the PSF station for almost ten minutes now. Unlike the one in Prescott, there’s a steady flow of people milling in and out. This includes the clusters of PSFs and the National Guardsmen they brought in to help smother the food riots that started the last time they tried to pass out rations to the growing population of homeless. Because, hey, guess what? When your average summer temperatures are over 105 degrees, people are going to do whatever they possibly can to get bottles of water, including trying to knife one another.

The generic-looking building is in the shadow of a number of empty skyscrapers, including the silky blue glass column of Chase Bank’s former hub. The baseball field named after the company was closed even before all the professional sports drizzled from a few games a season to none. I’ve heard rumors that a number of homeless have overrun the field; it’s constantly being fought over by gangs looking to expand their territory. At least, those are the rumors. Heaven forbid any of these government clowns ever give us real information about what’s going on, outside instructions to “avoid central Phoenix whenever possible.”

Three beige stories of tiny windows—it looks so harmless. You’d never know it was a military base from a distance, and I know it probably wasn’t built to be, but it just adds to the feeling that I’m about to go in and make a business transaction.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I tell her. “That’s all these people think you’re worth.”

She doesn’t say anything. The afternoon sun is low and gives her ivory skin a warm glow. The bandages I applied yesterday are starting to peel. Every now and then she has to reach over and smooth the edges back down. I can tell that Zu is thinking hard about something. Her throat is bobbing, like she has to swallow the words one by one.

“You did this to yourself,” I say, my voice going hoarse. Jesus—I can feel my stomach turning as I look back out across the cracked asphalt. A car pulls into the space to the right of us, one of those white, windowless vans that serial killers seem always to use.

Out comes this woman with this head of bleach-blond hair that’s been so fried by chemicals there are these horrible kinks in it. She’s wearing acid-wash jeans and a leer as she catches sight of Zu in the passenger seat. When she spots me, her smile falters a little, but she recovers and bends down to Zu’s eye level. The little condescending wave she gives the kid makes my stomach twist and turn over.

And then Zu shoves the door open as hard as she can, right in the lady’s smug face.

“Holy shit!”

The skip tracer goes down in a limp, unmoving heap. Zu, meanwhile, is all action. She shoves the door open the rest of the way and steps over the woman to get to the van. By the time she wrenches the sliding door open, I have enough sense to start crawling after her.

The woman is out cold—you’d have to be to stay on the burning asphalt that long willingly. I glance around, horrified that someone’s witnessed this, but Zu only has eyes for the small figure that’s curled up in a little ball of leather straps and chains in the middle of the van. She waves me over impatiently, like, Can you catch up with the rest of the class, please, and I jump from our car to the other, only bending down to pluck the keys from the unconscious woman’s hands.

The kid—this boy who’s twelve, maybe thirteen at the most—stops struggling the minute Zu takes the blindfold off his eyes. I’m not really believing what I’m seeing. The van smells terrible, and it’s clear from the stain that the boy’s gone and wet himself like the baby he really is. He’s shaking, screaming something at her around his gag. I let Zu take the keys and undo the handcuffs around his wrists and ankles herself.

I see it out of the corner of my eye, resting on the front passenger seat next to a small handgun—a shiny black tablet, the kind they only give to registered skip tracers.

“Oh my God,” the boy cries when she’s able to untie the gag. His chest is heaving with every breath he takes, and he’s crying the way I used to when I was a kid and I came home with a bad grade or after a lost soccer match and my mom would tell me not to be so goddamn pathetic about such stupid things. He’s sobbing the way I did the night I found my dad’s body.

“Thank you, thankyouthankyou,” he sobs, clinging to me.

The boy’s legs don’t seem to be working, so I lift him into my arms and carry him to my truck. I already know it’s not going to be this one, either.

I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore.

I hit the I-10 and all of a sudden I’m just driving, going as fast as I can without catching any attention I don’t want. Every time I look up into the rearview mirror, I expect to see some kind of military SUV gaining on me, streaking down the freeway with guns blazing. Or at least a white van with a frizzy-haired woman sporting a new shiner leaning out her window to fire at me mid-chase.

I’ve seen too many action movies.

Zu calmly holds the boy’s hand, and he actually lets her. I guess that’s the difference between kids these days and the kinds of kids I grew up with. They don’t have much pride—at least not enough pride to act like a punk and be rude because he’s secretly humiliated about having pissed himself and cried in front of a girl. I guess they can overlook these things, given their circumstances. It’s kind of sweet, in a way…like normal puppy love, only with the addition of freak superpowers and hormones.

I have to hand it to him, too. Now that he’s calmed down, I think he might be trying to flirt with her. He keeps asking her questions, but she only nods or shakes her head.

“She doesn’t talk,” I explain finally. “But she understands what you’re saying.”

“Oh.”

I look at him out of the corner of my eye—ginger, an explosion of freckles across his face, dressed in nice enough clothes to tell me someone out there cares enough to know he’s missing. He fidgets and shrinks back against the torn leather seat.

“What’s your name?”

“Are you like the woman?” he asks instead of answering. “A skip tracer?”

At this point, I am the exact opposite of whatever a skip tracer is supposed to be. Zu points at me and gives a big thumbs-up, and I feel like she’s just singlehandedly elected me the next president of the United States.

“Oh,” he says again. “Okay. My name’s Bryson.”

“Nice,” I say. “I’m Gabe. This is Dorothy.”

She reaches around Bryson and punches me in the arm again. “Ow. Fine. Zu.”

“Zu?” Bryson grins. “That’s cool.”

Okay. It is a little cool. Better than, like, Pauline, I guess.

“How’d you get picked up?” I ask. After two days of talking to myself, it feels weird to be having a conversation.

He sighs, banging his head back against the seat again. “It was really stupid. Della’s gonna kill me.”

“Della being your mom?” I didn’t start calling my mother by her first name until I turned twenty and was embarrassed to have the word associated with her.

“No, she’s…she’s watching me and my brother and a couple other kids. She and her husband are really nice and they’re taking care of us until things get better.”

“She’s hiding you?” I ask. Wow. The lady must have balls of steel. I should know. Terror’s got mine in a viselike grip. “Then yeah, I’d say Della is probably going to kill you.”

The whole setup is really fascinating. This woman, Della, and her husband, Jim, had recently moved to a quiet neighborhood in Glendale—one that was still hanging in there while the streets and cities around it started vacating with foreclosures. They didn’t have children of their own but were the friendly kind and, more importantly, were open enough with their views on Gray to be immediately trusted by the others. It started with one kid in Bryson’s neighborhood disappearing the night of his tenth birthday. Then, a few months later, another kid vanished. Finally, when it was Bryson’s birthday, his mother woke both him and his brother up in the middle of the night and brought them over to Jim and Della’s house, telling them only that they needed to be good and stay hidden until she came back for them.

“You didn’t like it there?” I ask.

“No—no, Jim and Della are the best. She’s a really good cook and Jim’s been teaching us how to fix cars in the garage. It just sucks to have to stay in the attic a lot of the time. We don’t really get to go outside, either.”

“And you got caught because you got sick of it?”

Another sigh. “Because they said they were going to take us to California, to a place there that was safe, and my brother, he’s such a baby—he didn’t want to go without this stuffed bear he used to sleep with. I just thought…it’s not so far between our houses, and if I snuck out during the night I could be real quick, you know?”

Zu nods, all sympathy, but there’s something about her expression that makes me think she wants to ask him a question.

“I’m guessing the skip tracer was lurking around the neighborhood, waiting for one of you missing kids to turn back up?”

“I guess.”

This is the part where I’m supposed to say something to make him feel better. I know it is, because Zu is giving me this look like That’s your cue, buddy.

“Well…it was nice of you to try. I’m sure, um, your brother appreciated it.”

“If I were smart, I would have taken Marty with me. He’s a Blue—he could have, like, thrown her down the street to help us get away, or something.”

“What are you?” Do not say Red, please, God, do not say Red….The Yellow was scary enough at first. I’m not really sure I could handle that.

“Green.”

“Which means what?” I press. Jesus, where am I even going? I need to pull off eventually, but I just want to get as far away from Phoenix as possible. “You have a good memory?”

He shakes his head. “I’m just good at math—puzzles. Sooo dangerous. Too bad you can’t throw puzzles at a gun.”

I let out a low whistle, more at the bitterness in his tone than the mental image.

“I’m really…I’m really scared I messed it up for everybody. That somehow the skip tracer figured out where I was hiding and got Della and Jim in trouble and the others—”

“Nah, man, I doubt it, not unless you said something,” I say, cutting him off. If I’m not allowed to panic and freak out about this situation, no one else can. “Do you have a way to contact them?”

He has a phone number I can call; it’s just a matter of finding a working, unoccupied pay phone. They basically went extinct once cell phones came around, and then, when no one could afford cell phones or their service, suddenly there were lines around the block to use the precious few pay phones remained.

I find one, finally, at one of those outdoor strip malls that have one nail salon and one Chinese food restaurant still open. I have no idea what they’re doing that the rest of us aren’t, but whatever. Good for them.

Just to make sure no one’s going to stumble across us, I decide to wait it out a few minutes. Make sure it’s safe to leave them here alone. When I’m convinced it’s safe, I turn to interrupt their conversation.

“But I’m sure Della would let you stay, if you wanted to,” Bryson is saying from where he and Zu are huddled in that little bit of space between the dash and the seat. “The attic is big and we have video games!”

I snort, but a second later, a sharp pang cuts through me. I look down at Zu for her reaction as she scribbles out her response on the back of the same worn scrap of notebook paper I saw her looking at earlier.

I lean over his shoulder to see her response. It’s weird, because her handwriting looks the way I’d expect her voice to sound—big, girly, light. I’m going to my uncle’s ranch in San Bernardino.

Which is…where, exactly? California, I think. If she expects me to drive her all the way out to Southern California, she has another think coming.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell them. “Lock the doors, okay? And stay down.”

I pick up the receiver gingerly, wiping down the mouthpiece against my shirt, like that’s going to help. I pop in the dollar in change and dial the number Bryson wrote out on the back of my hand. It takes a moment for the call to click through to the tone; I glance back over my shoulder, making sure they aren’t peeking over the dashboard to watch when I specifically told them not to.

It rings three times, and just when I’m sure I’m going to be kicked to voice mail, a breathless voice answers.

“Um, yeah, hi, I think I…” Oh, shit. Does Gray still have his cronies listen in on calls? I mean, would they have any reason to listen in on this particular house’s calls? “I think I found your, um, stray…ra-dog.”

Shit, I almost said rabbit. Be cool, Gabe.

The woman—Della, I’m assuming—is silent.

“I’m happy to drop him off, but maybe it would be, um, better for you to come get him? He is a big dog. Nice…uh, reddish fur? Do you know which one I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” she says, her voice soft. She’s Southern—unexpected. “Can you tell me where you are? I’d be happy to meet you.”

I lean back out of the booth, trying to see the nearest street name. Sweat is pouring down my back, and not just because of the heat. “I’m grabbing dinner at Mr. Foo’s on Baseline and Priest Drive.”

“All right.” I can hear her keys rattle as she grabs them. “Okay, I’ll be there in less than a half hour. Do…do I need to bring anything with me? To thank you?”

“What do…” Oh. Oh. She’s asking if I need some kind of reward, I think. Crap. I mean…I guess I just assumed the only financial gain was in turning the kids in, not, you know, returning them. I’m so stunned I can’t think of a thing to say.

“Hello?”

“Some gas money would be great, I guess,” I manage to get out, “if that’s okay?”

I can’t really sort out my thoughts, even as I hang the phone up and make my way toward the car. The kids both turn and look at me, these little faces with big eyes, as I slide in and slam the door behind me. My forehead falls against the steering wheel as I lean into it, closing my eyes.

“Did you get Della?”

There’s a rustle of paper and faint scratching. I open one eye just in time to see Zu pass a note back to Bryson. It’s such a natural, typical thing for these kids to be doing in such a bizarre setting under such horrible circumstances that I have to smile, just a little bit.

“Zu wants to know if you need her to find us something to eat,” Bryson says, reading the paper.

I sit back, giving her an exasperated look of my own. “Della’s coming in a half hour. If you’re hungry, I can get whatever fifteen bucks will buy at Mr. Foo’s.”

They both shake their heads, and I realize, my exasperation blooming to a whole new level, that they’re worried about me being hungry. “I’m fine. We’ll wait until Della gets here.”

It’s my job to keep a lookout in the parking lot for her car or anyone or anything that could be suspicious—which in this day and age is pretty much everything, but this part of town is as dead as we could hope for. Out of boredom, I start fussing with the skip tracer’s tablet I swiped.

The home screen is a map of the United States that quickly zooms in on Arizona and then drops a red pin on the location of the PSF base in downtown Phoenix. A window pops up, letting me know it can’t connect to a local wireless network, but would I like to engage the satellite service for a small fee?

No. Hell no. That means someone on the other end can use that same connection to trace the location of the tablet.

What’s surprising, though, is that I can still use it without letting it hook up to the Internet. Maybe all the information is preloaded into the tablet, and you only need the Internet to download updates? That seems reasonable; the only thing spottier than the Internet these days is President Gray’s resume as leader of the free world.

The main menu is a series of buttons that range from GPS services, to a digital version of the handbook, to something called “Recovery Network.”

So this is what Hutch was going on about. After I tap the button with my finger, the screen changes, switching over to a list of names and pictures of kids. Most of the photos are kind of heartbreaking—they look terrified in them. The ones that are in camps have the red word RECOVERED across their photos. None of them list where the camps are, but in each profile is a kid’s basic information—approximate height and weight, hometown, parents’ names, whether or not the kid was turned in or “recovered.”

It’s curiosity, I’ll admit it. There’s a search bar at the top of the screen, so I type in Zu. I try not to glance down at her as the tablet loads the results. And, great, over three hundred names come up. It went through and picked out any kid who had zu in any part of their name, including a surprising number of Zuzanas and Zuriels.

But her name is Suzume. I know it the minute I see it, even though her doll-like face is framed by thick, glossy long hair. The tears hadn’t finished drying on her face when they’d taken the photo. She looked at the camera like the lens was the end of a gun waiting to fire.

Twelve years old, from Virginia. An only child.

At large, her listing says. Yellow. $30,000 reward for recovery. Highly dangerous, approach with caution. Then, because it’s all not horrible enough, it lists the date she escaped her “rehabilitation program” as being only four months ago. The number they gave her is 42245.

Below that is the field the skip tracers use to leave tips. There are two sightings reported in Ohio and one dated a few months ago, in late March, in Virginia.

A pounding between my ears starts at a low, uneven beat and races to a shattering pulse. Suddenly, I’m seeing two screens instead of one, and then they’re both blurring and I can feel my blood start to fizz beneath my skin, pounding at my temples. My whole body heats, like it’s being taken by a fever. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I’m going to be sick.

They cut her hair short, I think.

She can’t talk, because of what they did to her, I think.

It was so bad there she had to escape, and every day she has to deal with assholes like me trying to send her back, I think.

Why did I never think this was a possibility? Not even once. I was so focused on turning her in I hadn’t even considered she’d already been inside, and what she’d found there had been horrible enough that she had to escape. And she did it. She got out. We both got out and we found each other, and maybe it wasn’t an accident after all. Maybe this is really what I was supposed to have been doing all along.

I want to ask her about it. I want to know the truth, even if I can’t hear her form the words. She can write it out for me, I don’t care. I want to hear what they did to her there—who did it to her—and I want to kill every single one of them. My mind is flashing with images of my friends. In their black uniforms, marching the kids up and down the halls. The crushed look she gave me when I forced her hands into those gloves and tied them together, like she was some kind of animal. More than anything I can’t stop thinking about the expression on her face watching that stupid movie in my motel room—the way it visibly lifted when Dorothy stepped out of that house and into the sweet dream of Oz.

Because she knows what it’s like to live in a world of black, and black, and the tiny bit of white, but when she escaped it, she didn’t find the rainbow of colors, the dresses, the singing, the dancing. She only found ugliness.

She only found me.