Chapter 22 Cap #2
I went to the window on the east side and slid the shade with two fingers.
Daylight had climbed the ridge in a mean, gray band.
The access road down below was empty. The lot was empty.
The woods weren’t. You couldn’t see people in them, but the trees told on them, little tremors, a bird that decided not to land, the way cold air carries sound when nobody’s breathing.
“They’ll try to clock who came and who goes,” I said. “We’re a station. We have a truck. We have a radio. We have warm bodies. We look like a problem and a prize.”
“Can we run?” the ranger kid asked, honest.
“We don’t run,” Wrecker said. “We leave.”
“Difference,” Ranger said, deadpan.
“Yeah,” Wrecker said. “One’s blind.”
Amanda looked from the map to the door to the radio. She was doing the math of how many choices you can make at once before they all count as one. “He’s fast,” she said. “How did he find us this fast?”
“Because we told the world we were here,” I said, not loving the answer. “We lit up a radio and called our people. He owns more ears than we do.”
“So, he heard me,” Amanda said, like she wanted to fight the air for the right to take it back.
“He hears everything,” Ghost said. “Doesn’t mean he understands it.”
The radio hissed. “Bay clear,” the young voice said. “Ridge units advance.”
Every head turned to me like I was supposed to have a lever to throw that would drop a wall between us and an idea. I didn’t. What I had was exit routes; the way the gravel slid off the access road; the fact that the Crew doesn’t leave a mess in a place that feeds locals.
“Pack it,” I said. “No evidence you were ever here. Ranger, you lead with the ranger kid. Doc, you take the sisters. Ghost, lights out on a thirty count. Wrecker, you’re with me.”
“Where,” Wrecker asked, because he likes to make me say my bad ideas out loud.
“West path,” I said. “Creek bed, ten down. We break line of sight and cut south to the fire road. Two trucks split east and west. Nobody drives the main for a mile. If they want the station, they can have the empty box.”
“Copy,” Ghost said. He already had the light switches mapped in his head. It’s his thing.
Ariel stood. Not smooth. Purposeful. She pulled the parka tighter and scanned the pile on the desk with one sweep. Water bottle. The printout stack. The folded map. She grabbed the map and shoved it into Amanda’s bag without asking.
“Hey,” Amanda said, not fighting, just making sure she’d remember where it went.
“We don’t leave proof on the table,” Ariel said. “That’s your line.”
Amanda blinked like she’d just been quoted to herself. “Yeah. Okay.”
Doc moved them toward the back door, hand on Amanda’s elbow, then Ariel’s shoulder.
He didn’t herd. He just made a lane. Ranger opened the door to a crack and did the look a man does when he learned to count in places where counting saves lives, breath fog, wind direction, nothing moving that shouldn’t, everything moving that should. He nodded.
“Go,” Wrecker said.
They went.
Ghost hit the first two switches and killed half the room. The click sounded like louder things. The space heater died, and the sudden absence of useless warmth made the cold honest again.
I stayed long enough to sweep the desk for anything with a name on it, then palmed the fuse box cover and snapped all of it down with my knuckles. Dark.
Wrecker stood by the door and looked at the radio one last time like he wanted to stab it or hug it or both. He left it. Proud of him.
We slipped into the hallway and out the back like the building had learned how to keep secrets. Boots on concrete. Then boots on dirt. Then quiet.
The creek took us like it’s taken men longer than any of us have been alive. Cold up to the ankles. Stones slick enough to make you honest. We moved in a line: Ranger and the kid and Doc and the sisters, Ghost sliding the rear like a shadow that had opinions. Wrecker beside me.
“Think they have the station surrounded?” he breathed.
“Think they will,” I breathed back. “Give them five.”
He nodded. We didn’t look back. Looking back is for when you don’t have work in front of you.
At the bend, Ranger lifted a hand. We stopped. The sun was trying to be a thing through a mean layer of cloud. It failed. The ridge kept its secrets in a dull strip of light. From where we were, you could just see the roofline of the station through the pines.
A voice carried. Not the radio. The real kind. Men giving each other directions like they liked the sound of their own authority.
“North side clear.”
“Bay clear.”
“Check outbuildings.”
I felt Ariel flinch in the water next to me, then reset. Amanda’s grip on her hand stayed high and tight. Doc’s hand hovered at a distance where it could become pressure if either of them listed.
We moved again. South. Then east at the cut where the creek loses interest in being a creek and turns into mud and bad ideas. The fire road met us the way bad roads do, sullen, rutted, useful.
By the time we hit the trucks, the men on the ridge had settled into their version of caution.
Ghost slid behind the wheel of the back vehicle, heart rate the same as if he were making tea.
Ranger and the kid took the lead truck. Doc beeped the flashers twice in that pattern we always use when we want the other car to know we’re still in the same story.
Wrecker looked at me over the hood. His mouth did a small shape that said what he didn’t.
“Yeah,” I said.
The radio in my pocket woke up long enough to sing static and one more line of someone else’s plan pushed through the noise.
“Green light holds,” the voice said. “Ridge units advance.”
Ariel met my eyes. She didn’t ask. She already knew.
“He found us first,” I said.
And that was the whole problem.