“It’s okay,” Liam said, after the silence had stretched to the point of breaking. “It’s fine.”
There wasn’t a way to explain how I knew. Maybe it was the way Liam’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, or how he kept glancing in his side mirror throughout the conversation, long after a silver car had passed us from the other direction. It could have been the way his shoulders sagged, sloping down in a way that was so defeated. I just knew, long before I caught his worried eyes in the rearview mirror.
Slowly, without disturbing Zu and Chubs as they watched an endless stream of forest pass by the side windows, I crouched between the two front seats again.
Liam met my gaze for a split second, nodding in the direction of his side mirror. See for yourself, he seemed to say. So I did.
Trailing behind us, back about two car lengths, was an old white pickup truck. With the rain fogging up the air between the two cars, I couldn’t tell if there were one or two men inside. They looked like little more than two black ants from where I was sitting.
“Interesting,” I said, keeping my voice even.
“Yep,” he said, his jaw clenched. The muscles of his neck strained. “Gotta love West Virginia. Glorious Mountain State. Land O’Many John Denver Songs.”
“Maybe . . .” I began slowly, “you should pull over and look at a map?”
It was one way of feeling out the situation. Liam was about to turn onto George Washington Highway—slightly wider than the twisting road we were leaving. If the truck was following us, they wouldn’t be able to stop without revealing it. In any case, whoever was driving the truck wasn’t being aggressive about it. If he was a bounty hunter, as Liam apparently thought, they were probably feeling us out, too.
We continued up Gorman Road, following its natural curve. Black Betty slowed in anticipation of the upcoming turn. Liam hesitated half a second before flipping his turn signal on. I looked in the mirror, my heart lifting when I saw the truck turn its other blinker on. They were turning right. We were going left.
Liam blew out a long sigh, finally sitting back against his seat as the minivan reached the intersection of the highway and the road. There was another car turning off the highway, a small silver Volkswagen; both Liam and I threw up a hand to block the intense glint of the sun against its windows.
“Okay, Old Man River.” Liam gave the car an impatient wave. “Go ahead and turn before the next century. No, take your time, shave, contemplate the universe . . .”
Lynyrd Skynyrd was blasting through the pickup truck’s open windows as it pulled up alongside us, creaking and groaning in the way all old cars seem to do. “Free Bird.” Of course. It had to be Dad’s favorite. Two seconds into the damn song, and it was like I was back in the front seat of his squad car, cruising around town. That was the only time I got to listen to the good music—when it was just the two of us, cruising. Mom hated the stuff.
A laugh bubbled up inside of me as I watched the driver bob his head in time with the music. He howled the words at the top of his lungs, exhaling each lyric with a puff of cigarette smoke.
And then it was replaced by a different sound—a shriek of sorts. I looked up just in time to see the Volkswagen slam on its brakes right in front of us, jolting to a stop and sending another blinding glare of sunlight our way.
“You have got to be kidding me!” Liam made as if to press his hand down on the horn, but not before the driver of the Volkswagen rolled down his window and pointed something black and gleaming at us.
No. The world went into sharp focus. Sound evaporated around me. NO.
I reached up and slapped Black Betty’s radio button on, turning it up as loud as it would go. Liam and Chubs both started yelling, but I knocked Liam’s hand away before he could switch it off.
The White Noise cut straight through the music from the speakers, tearing at our ears. Not as loud or as powerful as I was used to, and not even close to as bad as it had been last time, but still there, still agonizing. My radio trick couldn’t drown it out, not completely.
The others crumbled around me, shriveling at the first piercing shriek.
Liam fell forward against the wheel, mashing his hands up against his ears. Chubs knocked his head into the passenger seat window, as if trying to ram the noise out of his head. I felt Black Betty began to drift forward, only to jerk to a stop when Liam hit the brakes instead of the gas.
The door opened beside me, and a pair of arms circled Chubs’s waist, trying to untangle him from the seat belt. I pulled myself up off the floor and lashed a hand out, catching the man’s cheek and raking my fingernails down as hard as I could. It was enough to startle the truck driver, the same one that had been nodding his head to “Free Bird” two seconds before, into dropping Chubs. He was left half hanging in his seat, half hanging out.
The driver stumbled back against the bed of his truck, his words drowned out by the thunderstorm of noise that had settled over the three cars. It was only then that I saw the badge hanging around his neck on a silver cord, and the bright red Ψ stitched there. They weren’t skip tracers.
Psi. PSF. Camp. Thurmond. Capture.
The man from the Volkswagen had opened the driver’s side door of the van and was trying to unhook Liam’s seat belt. He wasn’t large in any sense of the word—he looked like he could have been an accountant, with thick glasses and hunched shoulders from spending too many hours at a desk. But he didn’t need strength, not when he was holding the black megaphone in his hands.
Some of the PSFs at Thurmond carried the noise machines around with them, blasting them at small, rowdy groups, or just to see a few kids squirm. What did they care? They couldn’t hear it.
Every nerve in my body was singing, but I launched my elbow into the chest of the pickup truck driver. He fell back again, and I pulled the door shut and locked it. I only had a second to look back at Zu as I dove across Liam’s body, fist-first. I nailed Volkswagen in the glasses, knocking them off his face. Somewhere behind me, Pickup Truck had moved on to the sliding door, and this time he wasn’t empty-handed.
Zu didn’t flinch as the rifle was pointed in her face—by the way she was moaning, her eyes scrunched up and her yellow gloves curled over her ears in agony, I don’t think she was seeing straight.
I didn’t know what to do. My hands were on Liam, trying to shake him back into consciousness. His eyes flashed open, clear and so blue, but it was only for an instant. The megaphone was suddenly two inches from my face, and the White Noise sunk into my brain like an ax. My bones went to jelly. I didn’t register the fact I had fallen over Liam until I was there. The only thing louder than the White Noise, than the radio, than Chubs’s screams, was the sound of Liam’s heart racing.
I squeezed my eyes shut again, my fingers curling into the soft leather of Liam’s coat. Half of me wanted to push away, put enough distance between us that I had no chance of sliding into his mind—but the other half of me, the desperate part, was already trying to push through, to anchor myself to him and will him to move. If I could hurt someone, shouldn’t that mean I could help them, too?
Get up, I begged, get up, get up, get up, get up . . .
There was a high-pitched wail, a sound that couldn’t have possibly come from a human. I forced my eyes open. Pickup Truck had his rifle in one hand and the collar of Zu’s shirt in the other, and he was tugging both in the direction of the truck. I tried to scream for her, even as I felt Volkswagen’s hands in my hair, yanking me up and out of the door. He let me hit the ground hard, the loose gravel cutting open my legs and palms.