“In a war zone?”
“Worse than that.” She leaned forward. “You’re going to be on the wrong side of history.”
He took off his glasses and set them on the desk. “That may be so,” he said. “But that doesn’t change this morning. No march, Rhonda, silent or otherwise. No service at the checkpoint.”
“Oh, hon, there’s going to be a march whether you want one or not. Your only decision is to figure out how you’re going to respond to it.” She glanced at her watch. “Well, I better get going. Oh, and afterward we’re having a breakfast at the church. You like biscuits and gravy, don’t you?”
“Are you inviting me?”
“You and as many of your men as you want.”
He chuckled. “I don’t think so. It’s a little difficult to eat through those breathers.”
“Well, we’ll think of something else, then. Maybe a softball game? If we’re going to keep our people from killing each other, I figure they should get to know each other.”
Chapter 22
PAX CAME DOWN out of the trees at the western edge of a fog-wreathed field. In the distance, the orange, quavering sun struggled to rise over blue hills. The clouds glowed a score of shades between blue and violet.
A few hundred yards away were the first of the mobile homes that made up the improvised neighborhood of the Coop. He’d come in behind them, their white backs and small windows all alike. No one moved between the buildings. He aimed for the nearest trailer and set off across the field.
The frost-rimed grasses burned silver; they wet his shins and crunched beneath his shoes. So beautiful. He wondered if he would have noticed any of this if he hadn’t been riding a wave of chemicals.
He passed between two trailers on the outermost row and stopped. No one was outside. He thought about knocking at one of the trailers at random.
He walked on until he reached the innermost row of homes that faced the main drive. To his right was the big sheet-metal building at the center of the compound. As good a place to start as any.
Before he reached the building a door opened at a trailer in front of him and he heard the squall of a baby. A tall, older beta woman stepped out, holding a tiny child whose smooth, ruby head gleamed like a marble. The woman had taken two steps down from the front porch before she noticed him.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m looking for Reverend Hooke.”
She stared at him. He wondered if he’d known this woman before the Changes. Maybe she’d gone to his church. Maybe she’d been a friend of his mother’s.
She nodded in the direction Pax had been walking. “Elsa is two down,” she said.
“Thank you,” Pax said. “Good luck calming her down.” The baby’s cry sounded no different from that of any human baby.
He climbed the short steps to the reverend’s trailer and knocked. He put his hands in his pockets, huffed steam. The woman with the baby paced along the drive, not bothering to hide that she was studying him. He knocked again.
The door opened, and a beta woman dressed in a bathrobe looked down at him. The size of her belly, even through the robe, was apparent.
“Paxton?” the reverend said.
He looked up, embarrassed. “You know, I’d noticed at the town meeting and at the funeral that you were dressing differently, that you seemed… bigger. But I never took the next logical step.”
“You’re a man.”
“I suppose that’s why,” he said. “Or maybe it’s just me. I miss a lot of things.”
“Why are you here, Paxton? It’s awfully early.”
“I came to tell you that you can’t take the girls away. Sandra and Rainy.”
“How did you-?” She stopped, looked around, and saw the woman with the baby staring at them.
Pax said, “And I also came to tell you I know where you were the night Jo died.” The reverend’s face was as still as any beta’s, but he could feel the woman’s alarm. He said, “Do you want to do this out here?”
She pushed the door wider. “Come inside,” she said. “It’s cold.”
She walked across the small living room with a slight hitch in her step. Maybe the pregnancy was hurting her. Or maybe the limp had always been there and he’d never noticed.
She eased herself into a chair, and he sat down opposite her. After a moment she said, “I’ve seen you like this before, Paxton.”
Right, the night his father baptized him. Rebaptized him. “I apologize,” Pax said. “I took an awful lot of vintage a while ago.”
“You were with the girls?” Her anger was clear. “Where? At your house? Tommy’s been looking all over for them.”
“They’re safe,” he said. “I found them in the woods outside Jo Lynn’s house. They ran away because Tommy was going to kidnap them.”
The reverend made a disgusted noise. “He’s not kidnapping them. Did the girls say that?”
“They don’t know what he’s doing. All they know is that Tommy’s going to-”
“This is not Tommy’s idea, Paxton. It’s something we all agreed to-Rhonda, Deke, and I. Rhonda called it genocide insurance.”
“Genocide? What are you talking about?”
She sighed. “We’re smuggling members of our clades out of Switchcreek, just in case the government tries to…” She made a vague gesture. “… take measures against us.”
“You think the army’s going to kill you all?”
“We all thought Rhonda was being paranoid when she raised the idea years ago. We never thought-I never thought-there’d be another quarantine, and even if there was, I didn’t think we’d be threatened with that. But after Deke was killed…” She exhaled heavily. “We can’t take the chance. We can’t let the government make us disappear. If something happens at Switchcreek, the clades need to survive. So we have to get a few of us out. The first group will have two families from our clade, a handful of charlies, and two argo couples.”
“But that’s suicide-the roads are blocked, there are soldiers everywhere-”
“This plan existed well before the quarantine, Paxton. They’ll be hiking out of Switchcreek to a rendezvous several miles away. At that point they’ll be met by six vehicles, and they’ll scatter-every car in a different direction.”
“That’s crazy! What if a helicopter-”
“We have it covered, Paxton. The National Guard will be busy with the march.”
Before he could reply a little bald girl walked into the room, face scrunched against the light. She was three or four, dressed in green footy pajamas.
“Go back to bed, pumpkin, it’s not time for breakfast yet.”
“I’m not tired,” the girl said, and started to climb into her mother’s lap. Then she saw Pax. “Who’s that?”
“I’m Paxton,” he said. Then to the reverend he said, “Your youngest?”
“Not anymore,” she said, and pushed up from the chair and took the girl’s hand. “How about some Cheerios and bananas?” She led her into the kitchen.
Pax leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He was still cold, but at least his hands weren’t shaking. Yet. He could feel the vintage buzzing in his veins, adding meaning and import to everything he saw and heard. In the kitchen the reverend murmured to her daughter and he could feel her love for the girl in each note of her voice. And when the reverend returned to the room a few minutes later he felt the air shimmer with trepidation, wariness. The woman didn’t know what Pax would say next, and Pax didn’t know either.
Then he said, “It must have been a shock when you learned you were pregnant again.”
“Pregnancy is always difficult.” She stood with one hand gripping the back of her chair. “That girl in there nearly killed me-cardiomyopathy. I couldn’t walk for a month after the birth.”
“What did they say would happen if you got pregnant again?”
She was silent for a moment. “Doctors don’t know everything,” she said. “Especially about betas. I decided to take the risk.”
“Decided?” he asked. “I thought you couldn’t choose when to get pregnant?”