Among the Brave

Chapter Thirteen

The Grants’ house was on the outskirts of a huge city miles and miles away from the Talbots’ mansion and Mark’s family’s farm. That meant Trey had hours of sitting in the pickup truck, regretting every revolution of the wheels beneath him.

Mark provided no conversation to distract him. Trey wondered if the fear was catching up with Mark as well, because his face seemed to grow paler and paler the farther Trey went his skin seemed to stretch tighter and tighter across the bones of his face.

At least Trey saw no other vehicles after Hobart’s. Indeed, the landscapes Trey traveled through seemed utterly deserted, utterly devoid of any signs of life. Trey wondered if Hobart’s tales of soldiers everywhere were mere figments of his imagination; he wondered if the news reports of riots were lies as well. Riots required people, and there appeared to be no people anywhere.

Finally, when Trey had lost all track of time, and all sense of how long Trey’d been traveling and how much farther Trey had to go, Mark suddenly veered off the road.

“Wha — Mark! Wake up! You’re driving crazy!” Trey screamed, convinced that Mark had fallen into a trance of sorts as well.

“I’m going this way on purpose, stupid,” Mark hissed through clenched teeth as he steered the truck down a steep dirt slope. A river lay directly ahead.

Trey clutched the dashboard and squeezed his eyes shut. This wasn’t the way he’d expected to die.

The truck stopped suddenly Trey hadn’t felt any dramatic leap over the riverbank, and he felt no water lapping at his feet, so he dared to look again.

They’d stopped in a small woods. All he could see through the windshield now were thick branches and leaves, jarringly red and orange and yellow.

“Has there been some sort of nuclear contamination here?” Trey asked.

“Huh?” Mark said.

“The leaves,” Trey said. “They’re — not green. Is there radiation? Is it safe?”

Mark’s jaw dropped, ever so slightly.

“It’s October,” he said. “Fall. Didn’t nobody never tell you that leaves change colors in the fall? Didn’t you ever notice?”

“Oh,” Trey said. He remembered now. He’d seen pictures in books, of course, but the autumn leaves had never looked so bright and gaudy in pictures. “I was never outside until last December," he said defensively. Mark was staring at him.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You never once stepped foot outdoors until last year?”

“No,” Trey said.

“Didn’t you ever even peek out a window?”

“No. It was too dangerous.”

Mark’s jaw was practically dragging the floor of the truck now, he looked so stunned.

“I think. .,"he started. “I think if I’d never seen the outdoors, I’d keep my eyes open once I was in it.”

“I do!” Trey said.

“No you don’t. You had your eyes closed practically the whole way here.”

“No I didn’t!”

“Yes you did! I bet we passed dozens of trees with turned leaves. Why didn’t you ask if any of them was contaminated?”

Now that Trey thought about it, he remembered a few swirls of colors along the way. But he wasn’t going to admit to Mark that his way of looking out windows was mostly by way of quick, fearful glances. He had kept his eyes open, but he’d mainly been looking at the dashboard.

“Never mind,” Mark said suddenly, in a rough voice. “It don’t matter.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I was thinking, we’re almost there. If we hide the truck here and go the rest of the way on foot, we won’t stick out so much.”

‘We don’t want to be conspicuous,” Trey agreed. So he didn’t know anything about trees and leaves — so what. At least he could supply Mark with a better word than “stick out so much.”

“Uh, yeah,” Mark said. “I have maps for getting over close to the city, and Peter — Smits… whatever you want to call him — he told me where his house was. So I know where to go. But, um…”

Trey waited, but Mark didn’t seem inclined to keep talking. He just sat there, staring out the windshield at the branches and brilliant leaves.

“What?” Trey prompted.

“We was on back roads up till now,” Mark said. “I avoided every single bit of civilization I could. But now… I ain’t never been in a city Is there anything I should know? So I don’t make any mistakes, I mean?”

Trey looked at Mark, in his flannel shirt, faded jeans, and heavy work boots. Under his dusty cap, Mark’s face held a mix of fear and hope. He looked like he really thought Trey could give him good advice.

“I don’t know,” Trey said. He’d grown up in a city, of course, but what had he ever seen of it? “Just don’t say ‘ain’t’ anymore, okay?”

“Uh, okay,” Mark said, but he looked like Trey had slapped him. Trey wanted to take his words back Trey were two ignoramuses going into danger Trey couldn’t even imagine. What did a little strangled grammar matter?

Mark shoved his door open, banging it on a tree branch.

“Help me cover the rest of the truck so nobody sees it from the road,” he said gruffly.

Following Mark’s instructions, Trey broke off branches to drape over the back of the pickup, where it stuck out the most. Even Trey could hear the edge in Mark’s voice as he patiently told him that everything Trey tried to do was wrong.

“No, Trey, you can’t break off a ten-inch-thick branch with your bare hands — you’d need a saw for that….”

“No, Trey, if we just pull off a leaf or two at a time, this is going to take hours….

When Mark was finally satisfied that the truck was hidden well enough — even creeping back up to the road to see for himself — he and Trey got out some of the food Trey’d taken from the Talbots’ house and sat down in the brush to eat

“Eat the heaviest stuff first,” Mark told him. “We’ll carry the lighter food with us.”

And then Trey had to compare. Was a banana heavier than a peach? Was a bag of peanuts heavier than a box of raisins? Mark watched him in disgust.

“Just eat whatever you want,” Mark said. “We’re strong enough to carry it all. Or — I am.”

Trey wanted to say, “Why are you bringing me along? What good am I if you don’t even think I can carry a knapsack?” But he swallowed his words, along with the peanuts. Both stuck in his throat.

Their meal was a quick affair. In a matter of minutes, Mark was on his feet again, pouring food into the knapsack. Trey climbed back into the cab of the truck and pulled out the papers he’d taken from first the Grants’ house, then the Talbots’.

“Put these in there too,” he said.

Mark hesitated.

“I don’t know,” he said. “If anybody stops us — if Trey search our bag..

Trey knew what Mark meant The papers could make them look like thieves. How could he explain where he’d gotten them? But the papers were all he had left. He had nothing from his life with his parents, nothing from his life at Hendricks. The papers were the only link he had to any point in his life when anyone cared about him.

“I’ll carry them myself then,” Trey said. He stuffed the most important Grant papers — and a few of the Talbots’ papers he’d grabbed blindly — into an inside pocket of his flannel shirt. He wanted to take everything, but it wouldn’t fit without bulging. He knew he couldn’t push his luck too far. He shoved the leftover papers back into the slit in the seat.

Mark’s eyes looked troubled, but he didn’t object. He turned away and rearranged the branches over the truck one last time.

“I thought we could walk along the river,” Mark said quietly. “If we’re lucky, there’ll be trees the whole way.”

Trey nodded, but panic clutched him. Trey were leaving the truck behind. For all Trey knew, the Grants’ house might still be miles away. Did Mark really expect Trey to walk that far outdoors? And once they arrived, they had no guarantee whatsoever that Lee would be there too.

“Are you sure this is the best way?” Trey asked. “What if — what if the phones are working now? Shouldn’t we at least check?”

“You see anyone standing around offering us a free call?” Mark asked mockingly. “Would you trust anyone who did?”

“No,” Trey whispered.

Mark turned and started off walking. Trey scrambled to keep up.

Walking, Trey found, was possible as long as he stayed right behind Mark. He kept his eyes on the gray plaid of Mark’s flannel shirt, and didn’t look up or down or side to side. This made Trey stumble every so often, and he probably looked like a total fool, always lifting his feet too high, just in case there were any logs or undergrowth in his path. But Mark didn’t say anything about it, just looked around every now and then to make sure Trey was still nearby.

After they’d gone a few yards, Mark whispered back over his shoulder, “Down!” When Trey didn’t respond right away, Mark grabbed him by the arm and jerked him toward the ground. Trey lay flat, his right ear pressed hard into the dirt. Was he hearing tramping feet or just the beating of his own heart?

“We’ll crawl from here on out,” Mark whispered.

Trey didn’t ask why, just silently panicked. How could he keep his eyes on Mark’s shirt if Trey were crawling?

Mark was already sliding away from him. The toe of Mark’s boot disappeared over the edge of a branch, and suddenly Mark was out of sight. Trey was alone again.

“Wait!” Trey whispered urgently, and dived over the branch.

Mark was right there, waiting in a hollow of dirt and leaves. Silently he started moving once more, and Trey followed, terrified of losing sight of Mark again.

What they were doing couldn’t properly be called “crawling.” It was more like slithering. Mark had the grace of a snake, slipping unseen through the brush. Trey broke branches and crunched leaves. An elephant, he thought, could not have been any louder or clumsier.

Hey, Dad? Trey thought Why was it more important to learn Latin than this?

But Trey knew. His father had never thought that Trey would ever have to move anything but his eyes as they flicked across lines of print, or his fingertips as they turned the pages of a book.

Why? Trey thought. If you knew I wasn’t going to hide forever— That was too close to dangerous thoughts, thoughts he never wanted to think again. He forced himself to concentrate on keeping up with Mark.

After what seemed like hours — or maybe even days— Mark stopped in the midst of a small clearing. He crouched beside Trey and pointed, whispering, “Is that it?” Trey looked up, even though it was scary to gaze straight toward the sky. The peak of a roof rose just above the tops of the tallest trees. A cupola soared above the roof. Squinting, Trey could just barely make out a stylized “G” in gold on the pinnacle of the cupola. Was it “G” for aGrantn?

“Maybe,” Trey whispered back.

Mark nodded and started crawling again.

“They have a fence, I think,” Trey said, straining to remember. He’d arrived at the Grants~ in a car that had whisked him through. . was it a gate? He hadn’t been paying attention. He’d been too busy worrying.

“I know,” Mark said. “Peter told me everything.”

Trey had to struggle to remember that Mark meant Smits, that Peter was Smits. Then he had to struggle to catch up with Mark before he disappeared behind a tree. When Trey caught up, Mark was still talking.

“The fence goes all around the entire property, but it’s stone, and at the back, closest to the river, there’s a place where a stone comes out, just wide enough for a boy to squeeze through. Peter and his brother used to sneak out that way….

Trey was glad that Mark knew so much. He’d known to I hide the truck, he’d known to follow the river to the Grants’ house, and now he knew exactly how to get in. Really, Trey had nothing to worry about as long as he stuck close to Mark.

Then Mark stopped in front of him, so abruptly that Trey’s nose slammed right into the bottom of Mark’s shoe.

“Listen,” Mark hissed over his shoulder.

A booming voice echoed through the woods. At first Trey couldn’t make out any words, but as he crept forward a little, the voice got louder: “There! And there! Faster!” it screamed in the distance.

Trey looked at Mark, but his face was wrinkled up in puzzlement too.

“Should we turn around?” Trey asked, sotto voce.

Mark shook his head.

“Just be very, very quiet,” he said, so softly that Trey practically had to lip-read.

Trey inched forward at an excruciatingly slow pace. The voice was even louder now.

“Come on, men! You think you’re going to get paid for such shoddy work? I’ve never seen such a bunch of lazy, good-for-nothing louts! Move it!”

They could hear hammering, too, and grunts of pain or exertion. Trey couldn’t figure out why Mark thought Trey should be so quiet: Nobody would be able to hear a few boys creeping through the forest in the midst of all that racket.

Trey saw the stone wall first He was so relieved Trey wouldn’t have to creep past the voice and the hammerers that he couldn’t speak. He tugged at Mark’s sleeve and pointed.

But Mark shook his head warningly. He led Trey along the wall, closer and closer to the noise.

They rounded a curve in the wall, and Mark suddenly jerked Trey behind a big bush.

“There,” he mouthed.

Terrified, Trey peeked through the leaves. All along the stone fence ahead of them, a team of gray-uniformed men — forty? fifty? a hundred? — were driving stakes in the ground and nailing long strands of wire to the stakes.

“Why,” Mark whispered, “would they need a stone fence and a barbed-wire fence too?”

Trey shrugged, totally confused. Why would anyone build a new fence around the Grants’ house after Mr. and Mrs. Grant had died? Who had authorized it? Lee? The chauffeur?

“Let’s just climb through the hole in the stone fence,” Trey begged. “Quick. Before Trey see us.”

“Can’t,” Mark whispered back. “The hole’s over there.” And he pointed straight into the midst of the uniformed men.