attention.
Ruppert and Lucia lifted the tarp from the back of the truck and pushed it forward, unveiling the rear half of the Bronto. They lowered the tailgate and raised the door panel in the back of the truck’s camper top. Ruppert stared at the heap of forest-colored tarp for a moment.
After seeing what the school did to boys in their charge, he felt a bit less sorry for the men they’d hurt or even killed in the course of extracting Nando. He hoped some of the other boys had used the opportunity to escape, though he didn’t know where they might have gone. Perhaps they were too brainwashed to try such a thing, in any case.
He lifted up the tarp. There was nothing underneath but a long smear of partly dried blood.
“Shit,” Ruppert said, just before the impact on the back of his head spun him forward and slammed his head into the side of the camper top. He felt like he was caught in a small tornado as something swept him up, pulled him back, slammed him a few times against the side of the truck, then pitched him forward, Ruppert’s face dragging the desert-colored tarp off the remainder of the truck.
A large pair of rough, calloused hands grabbed Ruppert up and shoved him back against the door of the Bronto. The school official, the staff sergeant Ruppert thought he had murdered, loomed before him, the size of a grizzly bear, his upper torso and his entire head encrusted with sand glued on by dried blood, one eye swollen shut, looking very much like one of the wilderness demons Pastor John preached about. He snarled at Ruppert through broken teeth.
The staff sergeant hissed, his body curling to one side. Lucia had slashed him across the ribs with her obsidian blade, and then scurried back from him. He dropped Ruppert and charged after her.
Ruppert struggled to his feet, pushing himself up along the truck door. He thought he could hear a bass drum thumping somewhere deep inside his brain. The moonlit world around him blinkered in and out.
The staff sergeant snatched Lucia’s knife hand in one of his own, then pinned her thumb back while twisting her wrist. The blade spilled from her fingers and stabbed deep into the sand at her feet.
Ruppert forced his right foot to slide forward, then his left. He focused on the staff sergeant’s twisted, glowering face, pushing himself toward the bigger man. His ribs ached from repeated slamming against the truck, possibly cracked. He didn’t know what he would do when he reached the man-Ruppert doubted he could do much more than lean on him.
Then the staff sergeant rolled backward out of his field of vision. Ruppert’s aching neck turning slowly, and he saw the large man sprawl out on his back onto sand and sharp rocks, a look of shock on his face.
Nando scurried on his hands and knees away from the man’s legs and up to his head. He held Lucia’s blade in one hand, and it was dripping. In one nimble, fluid movement, he knelt beside the fallen man, raised the blade high with the tip of its blade pointed straight at the man’s Adam apple, and then he stabbed it downward in a perfectly straight line.
The man’s hands wrapped around Nando’s upper arms, and his legs kicked from the knees, his feet flopping uselessly. Ruppert saw that the Nando had slashed across the man’s heels, severing both his Achilles tendons.
Nando dragged the blade around the man's neck, with the calm expertise of a butcher, halfway decapitating him. Then Nando let the staff sergeant's head flop back, bleeding out into the sand. Every muscle in the man twitched, as if he were having a small seizure, and then he died.
Lucia stepped gently toward her son.
“Nando? Nando, are you all right?”
Nando swiped both sides of the knife across the man’s chest, painting a bloody X.
“That’s Staff Sergeant Meyers,” Nando said. “Now I can never go back.” He stood, and he offered the blade to Lucia, handle first. “The Commandant is going to kill me.”
“He won’t find you,” Lucia said. “Come on, we’re behind schedule now.” She began gathering the desert- colored tarp. Nando and Ruppert stared at the dead man.
“Are you all right?” Ruppert asked him. The boy nodded. “Thank you. You saved our lives. I’m sorry you had to do it.”
Nando stayed quiet for several seconds, and then he shrugged. “It’s okay. Everyone wants to kill Staff Sergeant Meyers.” And the boy turned and marched toward the Bronto’s cab.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Lucia drove them north, into the Rocky Mountains and Wyoming, following a course of high, twisting roads through one of the least populated regions in America. They’d siphoned the gas from the Goblin Valley truck before leaving, and now the Bronto could travel for several hours before stopping again. Ruppert sat on the passenger side, still aching from his fight in the desert.
Nando sat in the back seat of the Bronto, alternating between long periods of silence and long barrages of questions.
“If you’re really my mom, how come it took you so long to come get me?” he asked at one point.
“I tried, Nando. The officials keep your location secret. They don’t want your parents to find you.”
“I don’t believe that. Who was my father, then?”
“I have not seen him in a long time, Nando. He was taken to prison.”
“For why?”
“For helping the wrong war victims. Practicing medicine.”
Nando frowned. “The Commandant told me my father was in Special Forces, and he commanded a regiment of the Nigerian army against the Islamofascists. He died defending America.”
“He commanded a…small regiment of volunteers. Like me. He was a very, very good man. You would have loved him, and he would have loved you.'
Nando took that in for a moment, then pointed at Ruppert. 'If he’s not my father, and he’s not your commander, who is he?”
“My name is Daniel,” Ruppert said. “I’m just helping your mother.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s helped me, and now it’s my turn.”
“Oh.” Nando sat back and stared out the window again. Then he asked, “Where is your base?”
“We don’t have a base, Nando,” Lucia said. “We aren’t part of an army.”
“So you’re irregulars.”
“We aren’t soldiers,” Lucia said.
“Intelligence?”
“No.”
“You aren’t civilians, I saw everything you did back there. You’re terrorists, aren’t you?”
“We’re just people, Nando,” she told him. “Just trying to survive.”
“You bombed our base,” Nando said. “You took me prisoner. Who was that on the P.A.?”
“That was me,” Ruppert said.
“You don’t speak Arabic too good.”
“I don’t speak it at all,” Ruppert said. “Just what you hear on the news.”
Nando recited a long, fluid Arabic verse, then smiled and translated, “‘In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds.’ That’s the opener for the Koran.”
“They teach you about Islam?” Lucia asked.
“It’s just for controlling foreigners,” Nando said. “In church we study the New Dominion Bible.”
“That’s what we used at my church, too,” Ruppert said.
After a long pause, Nando asked, “Am I going to Hell for going AWOL?”
“No, Fernando,” Lucia said. “You’re going to be fine.”
Lucia shifted gears to climb a steep, narrow dirt road. They were far from any highway, once again relying on the maps stored in Archer’s dashboard computer. Ruppert hoped there weren’t any surprise washouts ahead, or fallen rocks blocking their path.
The driving was rough, steep, and much slower than they would have liked, but the Rockies provided far
