Ryan didn’t know how much longer he could control his breathing. He lungs were screaming. He opened his eyes long enough to see that the lights were near him but not on him, and dared to cover his mouth with his hand and exhale, oh so slowly.
“There’s nothing there, Brother Samuel. Maybe it was a deer.”
“Maybe we should check with Brother Stephen and have him look in on the prisoners.”
Ryan’s heart nearly stopped.
“Right,” Brother James mocked. “They overpowered him though a locked door.”
“I’m just saying that I heard something.”
“And I’m just saying that there’s nothing out there.”
A light swung away from Ryan’s woods, and played into the woods on the other side-the area he’d just left.
“What’s wrong with you?” Brother James said.
“Maybe it was someone climbing in. We’re at war now, after all.”
“And who would do that?”
“The cops? The FBI? The army? How would I know? But if they found out-”
“Nobody’s finding out,” Brother James said. Ryan could hear the frustration in his voice. “This is just more of that same problem as before. You have no faith.”
“Not true.”
“It is true. I’m not going to report you-at least not yet-but you’re getting paranoid, and the paranoia is making you question all the unquestionables.”
“I am not! Maybe I’m a little jumpy-”
“You’re a lot jumpy,” Brother James accused. “Do you or don’t you have faith in Brother Michael and his plan?”
“Of course I do. But-”
“No, stop. No buts. If you have faith, there’s no room for buts.”
The lights returned to Ryan’s side of the fence. “I know what I heard,” Brother Samuel said.
“I’m not saying you didn’t hear anything. Just that you didn’t hear an invader. Or an escapee. You heard a deer. Or the wind.” One of the lights went out. “Now, turn that thing off before your night vision is ruined for hours.”
The light stayed right where it was. Ryan wondered if Brother Samuel was just making a point by defying the order to turn it off. Finally, darkness returned. The boys-Ryan had come to think of them as teenagers, though he didn’t know why-said some parting words, and then the night became quiet again.
Ryan lay frozen on the ground-in every sense of the word. Were they really gone, or were they sandbagging, pretending to be gone, and just waiting for him to show himself by moving? If he were them-particularly if he were Brother Samuel, who not only felt sure that he’d heard something, but had something to prove to Brother James- he’d stand there and set a trap for a while. He’d read somewhere, or maybe seen on television, that that was how snipers and countersnipers used to wait each other out during World War I and World War II. The one who lost patience first died.
With his hand cupped to his nose and mouth to disperse the clouds of breath, he forced himself to lie completely still, hoping that the hammering of his heart wasn’t audible ten or fifteen yards away.
But how long was long enough? He decided to count to five hundred, metering the rhythm in his head as one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, and on to the end. That would keep him from going too fast.
As he got to a hundred twenty-three one-thousand, he heard Brother James say, “So, can we just say that I was right?”
The sound of his voice made Ryan gasp and his skin nearly stripped itself from his skeleton. Jesus, they had been waiting.
“I guess,” Brother Samuel said. “I was just so sure.”
“Happens sometimes. In ninety minutes, we get relieved, and you can get some sleep.”
“Right,” Brother Samuel said. “Sorry for the alarm.”
This time, Ryan actually heard the footsteps as they walked away. He sent up another prayer of thanks that God had made him so paranoid.
When he could no longer hear the footsteps of the guards, he did a push-up on his frozen hands and brought himself to his knees, his back bent low. They were gone.
But they were also nervous. Brother Samuel in particular would be on a hair trigger, waiting to detect things in the night and shoot them. And Ryan was upwind now, so he needed to be that much more careful about making noise.
He needed to get the hell out of here. Distance was his only weapon.
As Ryan stood and turned his back to the compound, the starlight revealed a lighter strip along the black ground that he presumed to be the extension of the road that he’d been following all along-the road that he hoped was the same one that had brought them here.
It was time to run. It was, after all, the only thing in school that he was any good at. He needed to find the houses he saw on the way in that had electricity burning in the windows. Where there was electricity, there had to be a phone, right? And where there was a phone, help was only a police-car ride away.
Ryan took off at a jog, a thousand-meter pace, as if he were back on the track team-fast enough to outrun just about anyone if they were going for the distance, but about half the speed of the sprint he was capable of for a short spurt. The cold air filled his lungs and dried him out, making him want to cough, but he knew better than that. No sudden noises.
At least the road was paved. If he’d been on gravel, there’d be way more noise, and if he’d been on dirt, he’d have had to worry about the irregularities of surface, and of an ankle twist or a knee jam. As it was, he could run like this for hours.
It turned out that he only had to go about ten minutes. At first, he thought the specks in the distance were headlights, triggering another flash of panic; but as he slowed and got closer, he realized that he was seeing the glow of light from inside a building. Closer still, and he saw that the building was a house. A big one, atop a long hill.
Hope bloomed. His mind conjured an image of a family gathered around the television, watching one of the late-night comedy shows. Wouldn’t they be surprised as all get out when he showed up at their door and told them his story? He wondered if they had any idea of all that was going on at the compound down the road. It would have been like the Germans who lived down the street from the concentration camps. Surprises like that were the ones that no one wanted.
Except the Germans knew. Most of them, anyway, and the rest were in denial. Isn’t that what he saw on Band of Brothers? Absolutely. The American commanders made the townspeople go down to the camp and bury the dead.
Suppose these people knew? They’d have to know, wouldn’t they?
He stopped dead in the middle of the road. All those terrorists had to live somewhere, didn’t they? True, Ryan had barely seen the compound within the fence, but not everyone could live inside there, could they? He couldn’t risk it.
But he couldn’t stay here in the middle of the road, either. He had to do something.
He retreated back to the wood line on the right-hand side of the road-the side opposite the lit-up house-and he slowed his approach to a cautious tiptoe. From this distance, in the dark, the house looked exactly like Hollywood’s version of a mansion, complete with tall pillars out front.
This felt wrong to him. He decided it was not the place to seek help.
He stayed off the road until the lights from the house were no longer visible, and then he dared to start running again on the road. He went a long way, and it took him a long time. He didn’t know how far or how long, but from the sting of his legs and the heave of his lungs, he figured it had to be the equivalent of a 5K race. That meant three-point-one miles, or, to the rest of the world, a long way.
How was it possible to run three miles anywhere and not see anything? Even in Fayetteville-which was close to the capital of nowhere-he’d have passed a house or two on a run this long. He supposed it was possible, given the darkness of the night, that he’d passed the very kind of house he was looking for-empty with the lights off-but how could he know?
