"No," I said.
But he wouldn't let me finish. He held up his hands and stared at us with eyes so full of sorrow that everything I would have said just evaporated away.
"Please don't," he said. "You need to go. You have a reason. I don't. Everything I've ever had is here. Everything I'm ever going to have is here. Let's not talk it to death. You guys need to go. Just you guys."
I swallowed hard, then nodded.
Billy squeezed me close. He said, "Go wake up Connie. It's time."
Chapter 28.
I held Connie in my arms. Billy carried our bags. Together we ran down to the creek and cleared the brush away from the raft Billy had made of coffin pine. It looked like a surfboard to me. I sucked in a breath, realizing how slim our chances really were. Billy pushed it into the water and waded in so that he was waist deep in the inky, muddy water of the creek. He stood next to the raft, steadying it, so that Connie and I could climb on board. Once we were in place, Billy pushed himself onto the raft and we all settled into our places. I spooned Connie and Billy spooned me. Chunk, on the shore, spread the SWAT sniper blankets over us and covered the blankets with brush. The idea was that we were a piece of scrub brush that had broken off a nearby tree during the last storm and was now floating harmlessly down the water. That was what we hoped the helicopter patrols would see, anyway.
I lifted a flap of the blanket so that a little sliver of the shore showed. Chunk was there, our house behind him in the distance. He raised his right hand and showed his palm. Not a wave, just an open hand, a forever goodbye. We floated down the creek, the world around us graveyard quiet, and I watched Chunk. His hand was raised the whole time, and he was going, going, and finally gone. We were alone, the three of us, lulled into the quiet by the gentle lapping of the water against the raft. I felt Connie breathing in my arms, and I reached over the back of her head and kissed her cheek. In the dark, I imagined her smiling bravely.
"Mommy?" she said.
"Yes, honey."
"What's going to happen?"
"We're going to leave here, honey. We're going someplace safe."
"Why?"
Not where, why. The hard question.
"Something bad is coming, Connie. We can't be here when it gets here."
"What about Uncle Reggie?"
I cupped her hands in mine. She was holding the blue jay Billy had made her tightly in her fist. I thought about how a single blue jay will attack a pack of wild dogs to protect its nest before I answered her.
"Uncle Reggie will be okay," I said, and prayed that wasn't a lie. "Quiet now. Shhh."
We'd planned it out without really getting too specifics. There hadn't been time, and we hadn't really known how. Neither of us had ever escaped from hell before. Billy had gone down to the creek the morning before with Connie's binoculars and a can of orange paint. He'd poured some of the paint into the water and watched the cloud as it drifted down stream with the intention of timing ita"to see how long it would take us to drift the third of a mile from our house to the wall.
The only trouble was, the cloud of paint either sank, or became so diluted it became invisible. He tried the same thing with a Coke can, but it kept getting caught up in the brush along the banks of the creek. In the end, he had to give up the experiment and settle for a big unknown. And so we drifted for the better part of an hour, coming closer all the while to the horror of freedom.
It was a warm, clear night, not unusual for late August in San Antonio, and we had been in short sleeves before we got in the water. But afterward, after we'd spent all that time curled up together, feeling scared and claustrophobic and blind and wet from the water that constantly lapped over the sides of the raft, we began to shiver. Connie especially was feeling the cold, and she shook in my arms like an epileptic.
I spoke to her in hushed, easy tones, telling her it was going to be okay, that it was almost over, but still she shivered.
She said she wanted to go home.
When we heard the first helicopter pass overhead, she began to mew like a kitten and my quiet reassurances changed to harsher "Shhhs" and "Stop that."
I was scared too, and I tend to bark when I'm scared.
It didn't help.
The helicopter passed overhead then backtracked. Their routine patrols were never the same, or, if they followed a pattern, it wasn't one that I could ever figure out. The pilot's whim seemed to be the only deciding factor, and the pilot of the helicopter above us seemed happy to spend his night flying over the same patch of ground time and time again. Just our luck.
The blankets over us made us invisible to the helicopter's night vision equipment, just as it kept us from seeing the world beyond the banks of the creek. But I could see enough to know what the crew of the gunship was doing. They were in random patrol mode, not actively searching for anything, their spotlights groping the ground like a blind man's fingers. Several times they flew low over us, so low that the wash from the rotors beat on the blanket as if it were a cleaning woman beating the dust out of an old rug on a wash line.
Connie began to scream and writhe in my arms. Billy and I both pleaded with her to be quiet, but she couldn't, the poor thing. She was way too scared. The sound of the helicopter drowned out her screams. The ground on either side of the creek flickered in the spotlight.
I grabbed Connie and pulled her tight. "Stop it," I said. "Look at me."
She screamed again, her eyes closed tightly.
"Look at me," I said. "Look at me."
She opened her eyes, her face still twisted by the scream.
"Connie," I said, my voice quiet. "It's Mommy, honey. Look at me. We are going to make it. We are going to get out of here. Stop moving."
Suddenly she went limp in my arms. Her legs stopped kicking mine.
"I'm scared, Mommy."
"Me too, honey."
I squeezed her tightly.
Everybody reacts to extreme fear and stress in different ways, and most of those ways are bad, counterproductive. But children Connie's age seem to have the gift of being able to shut down. That's what Connie did. After fighting in my arms like a feral tomcat about to get its first bath, she went to sleep. She just went limp, groaned, and fell asleep. I envied her. We drifted the rest of the way to the wall in relative quiet. Connie slept, and the gunship meandered off farther down the length of the wall.
The front of our raft bounced off the heavy, weed-choked grating that allowed Vespers Creek to pass through the containment wall. Billy slid into the water and held the boat steady while I woke Connie. This part of our escape was going to be tricky. The storm had washed out enough of the bank just to the left of the grate that we could slip through, but we would have to get out of the water and push the boat through the hole. It wasn't as easy as floating to safety.
Once I had Connie safely on the bank, on her belly and covered by a sniper blanket, I examined the hole. It looked like it was going to be a tight fit to get the raft through it. Billy hadn't been able to get close enough to measure it, after all, and he had been forced to guess how wide the hole was.
I put my hand on the wall and was shocked at how cold it was against my palm. Only then did it occur to me that I was actually touching the walls that for so many months had dominated my life. I was touching the outer limits of my prison.
"Help me push it up there," Billy said.
I grabbed the front and pulled. Together we got it right up to the hole and pushed.
It was too big. By less than an inch. We tried it every which way, but it wouldn't go through. We tried to dig the hole wider, but the soft dirt was just a thin skin over solid rock. We tried to bend the grate and gave that up almost immediately. Under the sniper blanket, Billy and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do.
"Should we leave it here?" I said.
"Somebody may spot it."
"What about putting some brush over it?"
He looked at the hole again, at the baggage and the food and the supplies we'd stowed on the raft and said, "Damn it."
"We'll carry it," I said.
"Yeah, we're gonna have to."
We off-loaded our stuff, then stashed the boat in the weeds next to the bank. As Billy was covering the raft and I was helping Connie stash our bags into the hole, I heard the sound of the helicopter again. Our pilot friend was coming by for another pass.
"Billy," I said. "The helicopter."
"Shit," he said, and frantically piled twigs and grass and anything else he could find on top of the raft.
"Hurry," I said. I know from experience that the equipment on those helicopters can pick you up long before they're close enough for you to see or even hear them, and Billy was standing in the open, without the protection of the sniper blanket.
"Hurry," I said.
"Got it." He hit the ground and rolled toward the hole where I tossed half the blanket over him just as the spotlight legs of the helicopter walked over us.
From under the wall, under the blankets, we listened as the helicopter continued on with its patrol. The sound retreated into the distance until it was only a bad memory.
"That was close," I said.
Billy's face was covered with mud. When he smiled at me, his teeth looked white as clean cotton.
"We're still going," he said, and kissed me on the mouth with his muddy lips.
We slid through the hole, crawling on our bellies, and slipped into the water on the other side of the wall. Once we were through, I had a moment when I felt like Lot's wife. I just had to look back.
I don't know. Maybe I expected my first breath of air on the other side to taste sweeter. Maybe I expected the containment walls to look different from the other side. But none of that happened. The air still smelled like water and hummus, and the walls looked just as ominous, a tall, dark sheet against the sky.
"Mommy," Connie said, tugging on my t-shirt. "What are we gonna do now?"
A good question.
"We're gonna wade through the creek till we get to the Guadalupe River," I said. "From there, we'll drift down to Culver Falls. We can get on a bus there in the morning and it'll take us far away from here."
"Where, Mommy?"
"Some place safe, honey."
We put our arms around each other, squared the blankets over our heads, and together, as a family, made our solitary way out of hell.
Chapter 29.
On October 1, less than two months after we escaped San Antonio, Billy pulled the beat up 1984 Chevy pickup we'd bought from a used car lot in Billings for seven hundred dollars to the curb on the main street of a small town called Morgan's Creek, Montana.
A slushy, wet snow fell, as I got out and ran to a mailbox that stood in front of a tiny drugstore.
I smiled at the gray sky, at the brisk, cold wind on my cheeks, turning them apple red. I hadn't seen snow since I was a little girl, since the same year our beat up Chevy was made. In fact, when San Antonio got buried beneath a freak desert snowstorm of 14 inches, and the whole city ground to a halt for three days, was the last time I'd seen snow.
Even in the grayness of it all, I could look down the street and see the snow-covered mountains rising up into the sky. It felt good, and I felt good, stronger.
Morgan's Creek had a population of twenty-eight hundred people, fewer than the number of cops in San Antonio, and they were good people. They welcomed us, the young couple and their daughter who told everyone they were from Houston and were looking to escape the grind of the big city, and as I looked to the truck and saw Billy and Connie smiling back at me, I prayed that things might really be getting better for us. Maybe here, in the mountains, we could escape the coming storm.
It was with that hope in mind that I dropped my package into the mailbox. The package contained a one hundred and seventy page manuscript, describing everything that had happened to me and my family during our stay under quarantine. I asked only that my family's new location be kept a secret.
I told about Bradley's murder, about Cole's theory, and about Laurent's reckless pride. I told about the cover up, and the truth about the anarchy that constantly threatened to boil over in San Antonio's streets.
My prosecution guide was included. So was a pirated copy of all the evidence Laurent had prevented me from giving to Dr. Herrera, the copy I had made on the equipment in Cole's van while we waited for EMS and the others to arrive. I even tossed in a copy of Bradley's journal.
I sealed it all up and addressed it to Samuel Clayton Walder, a science writer whose work I'd first read in National Geographic, but who was now working for the New York Times.
I ended my one hundred and seventy page manuscript with an urgent plea for him not to ignore the importance of the information in his hands.
"Millions of lives are risk," I wrote. "Don't drag your feet on this. Tell the world. Make sure they're ready. In less than a month, the first wave of grackles will pass through San Antonio on their way to Northern Mexico. If the world isn't ready by then, WE ARE ALL GONERS."
About the Author.
Joe McKinney is a homicide detective for the San Antonio Police Department and a full time writer. He has also served on the SAPD's Critical Incident Management Team, where he helped coordinate San Antonio's responses to large scale flooding, hazardous materials spills, and the mass evacuations of New Orleans and Houston following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He has a Master's degree in Medieval Literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio, and currently writes in a wide range of genres, including horror, mystery, and science fiction. Author of the novels Dead City and Peacekeepers, he has been nominated for the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award.
He has also published nonfiction articles on Texas history and his various culinary interests. It is rumored he makes the best batch of chili in Texas.