Nando’s eyes snapped open and he immediately tried to swing his arms, then his feet. Ruppert struggled to keep his feet pinned. The boy was incredibly strong for his small size.
Nando grunted and tried to speak, but Lucia kept him muffled. His eyes rolled to her and grew wide, and he bucked his entire body several times, trying to break loose. He reminded Ruppert of a spooked horse.
“Sh,” Lucia whispered. “It’s okay, Nando.”
Nando continued struggling until he looked at Ruppert. His gaze dashed over Ruppert’s hat and jacket, and then the boy fell limp and quiet. It took Ruppert a moment to realize the boy was automatically obedient to any adult wearing the school uniform.
“Stay quiet,” Ruppert whispered. “Come with us right now.”
Nando nodded, and they released him. He stood, saluted Ruppert, then strode towards the foot locker at the end of his bunk bed. Lucia took him by the arm, shook her head. Nando looked to Ruppert, who shook his head and pointed towards the hall.
Nando walked towards the empty doorframe on the balls of his bare feet, making no sound on the warped floorboards. Ruppert did not have as much luck-one of the boards groaned under his shoe.
A boy in a top bunk sat up suddenly, like Frankenstein’s monster jolting to life. His eyes locked onto Lucia and scanned down her body: long hair, breasts, curving hips. From the horrified expression on his face, she might have been a slimy, tentacled alien. He reacted in probably the only way he knew how. He opened his mouth and screamed:
“ Foreigner!”
The other boys snapped up to a sitting position as if each one were a spring-loaded bar on a mousetrap. The call repeated itself from bunk to bunk. Boys jumped to their feet and hurried towards them, falling into a tight semicircle formation around Ruppert, Lucia, and Nando.
“Stop!” Ruppert yelled, and they froze, straightened up their backs, and saluted him. He noticed puzzled looks on some of their faces-he’d probably used the wrong terminology. He sifted his memory for war movie dialogue.
“Atten-tion!” he said. Twenty boys, including Nando, lay the flats of their hands parallel to their sides and lifted their chins, their faces stoic. Ruppert struggled to think of something to say next. As he looked among them, it occurred to him that it might be best to say nothing at all.
He tapped Nando’s shoulder. “Come along…” Happily, the school’s name for the boy popped into his mind. “Liberty.”
“Yes, sir.”
The three of them moved on into the hall and towards the front door. Ruppert’s nerves were on a hair trigger, urging him to run, but he fought them down.
He opened the front door, looked out into the road. It seemed clear. They left the lodge, down the steps, and towards the Goblin Valley truck, and then a pair of high beams swung out from a corner down the road and rushed towards them.
“Get going!” Ruppert shouted, and they hurried to the truck, Lucia half-dragging Nando, then boosting him up through the passenger door. She climbed in after him.
Ruppert was running around to the driver’s side, unfortunately located in the direction of the approaching headlights, when the lights swerved and a Goblin Valley truck parked slantwise in front of him. A second truck pulled in behind it.
A uniformed, pimpled young man with very bloodshot eyes leaned out the driver’s side of the nearest truck.
“Hey Gus, what the hell are you doing back here?” the young man asked, blinking rapidly.
“That ain’t Gus,” said the other uniformed man riding shotgun with him.
Ruppert jumped up into the cab and slammed the door. He cranked it and slammed the gas. The two trucks peeled out as they turned to pursue him. Piercing blue lights strobed from their headlamps and grilles-apparently Goblin Valley trucks had been authorized as police vehicles, too. Sirens howled from both trucks.
“Permission to speak, staff sergeant?” Nando asked. Ruppert swerved around a tight corner, intent on reaching the gate before the guards put the school in lockdown. It took him several seconds to process what Nando had said, then grasp that the boy was addressing him.
“Yeah, go ahead.” Ruppert glanced in the rearview and could have wept. There were now four trucks chasing him, blue lights flashing. He made another sharp turn, tires skittering and squealing across the pavement, then righted the truck and accelerated.
Lucia found the controls for the blue lights in their own truck and switched them on.
“Is this a special night exercise, sir?” Nando asked.
“Sure, call it that,” Ruppert said.
The boy frowned and sat back, folding his arms in.
Lucia lifted her modified remote, which no longer had any wires dangling from it. She pressed the PLAY button. Every loudspeaker in the compound sprang to life, repeating a single phrase again and again:
“ Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”
It was the suicide bomber slogan “God is great!” They hoped it would confuse the people in the compound about what was happening-maybe they would think the next event was a suicide bombing.
Lucia pressed the 4 button on her remote, and thunder and smoke exploded behind the wall, which was now on the right side of the truck. Seconds later, char and ash rained down on the trucks behind him.
She worked back from 3 to 1, summoning columns of flame behind the aluminum wall. The last bomb actually blasted loose a panel of the aluminum fence, which slammed into the truck immediately behind him. That truck swerved and crashed sidelong into a cinderblock wall, but more trucks were close behind.
Lucia lifted one of the two remaining bombs.
“I’m taking 5,” she said. She slid open the rear window of the truck and crawled through it, then dropped facedown into the truck bed behind Ruppert. Ahead, the western gate blocked his path, and hadn’t even begun moving for him. He remembered how long he’d waited last time, and swore under his breath. He lightened up on the accelerator.
He glanced in the rearview. Lucia squirmed on her stomach along the bed of the truck, bomb in one hand, remote in the other. He hoped she kept her fingers away from the number buttons. Blue lights flashed from the rear of his own truck. Maybe some of the pursuers in the back would lose track of which truck was the quarry, since they all looked identical. In the confusion, some of them might not even grasp that they were chasing one of their own trucks.
His speed dropped to fifty, then forty-five. The gate wasn’t budging.
Lucia leaned up over the tailgate and flung the bomb. It cracked into the lead pursuer’s windshield, then she pressed the remote and dropped to the truck bed, covering her head with her arms.
Red light filled the rearview mirror. Ruppert had no choice but to slow even more as he approached the gate. Fire engulfed the truck behind them. Fortunately, the driver had managed to hit the brakes and slow the truck, or it would have slammed directly into Ruppert’s tailgate, and into Lucia.
Then the truck immediately behind that one crashed into it, which boosted the flaming truck forward. Ruppert waited, idling, at the western gate, and could only watch it approach, like a burning barge on a swift current.
Lucia scrambled toward the open window. Already, another Goblin Valley truck was nosing its way around the side of the bombed truck, its driver struggling to avoid the burning pyre on one side of him and the solid concrete wall on the other. The truck crept forward.
A guard leaned out the passenger side door and raised something long and black in his hands.
“Get the fuck down!” Lucia screamed as she slithered in through the window. She smacked Ruppert’s face sideways into the seat, then rolled on top of him. Ruppert reached for Nando, but the boy was gone-he’d already tucked himself down on the floorboard, knees drawn to his chin. His face was eerily placid. A sane boy would have been screaming right now. Ruppert felt like screaming himself.
The machine gun sounded like a thousand corks popping from a thousand bottles of champagne. The guard strafed the truck, obliterating the front and rear windshields, the headrests, chunks of the steering wheel and upper dashboard, the side view mirrors. Lucia tumbled down to the floorboard to protect Nando with her body.
The stutter of bullets ceased, and Ruppert dared to poke his head up and look over the dashboard, through the remnants of the windshield. Miraculously, the western gate was rolling aside. Already it stood half-open, nearly
