The old man's words came again from the sky, talking like dead snow: You can't go this way.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Freeman's heart was pounding so hard he could feel his pulse in his temples. A bullfrog croaked and splashed. From the darkness beyond the rhododendron came the hoot of an owl.
"Let's go," Freeman whispered.
"But he said-"
"Who cares what he said? He's gone and besides, he's dead. What can he do to us?"
"I don't like this."
Freeman glanced at the night sky. The moon had risen higher. The ground was well-lighted now, and they could make good time if they kept moving. Every minute counted when you were serious about running away.
"Do you trust me?" he asked.
"Trust doesn't mean anything. You trusted Starlene Rogers, but you left her back there at Wendover, in that creepy basement. No telling what's happened to her."
"She's a grown-up. She's one of them. The enemy. You have to stomp people who get in your way, like De Niro in Raging Bull. She'd end up shrinking you to nothing if you gave her half a chance."
"I'm going to be nothing anyway."
"Someday we're all going to be nothing. But we have to keep trying, keep dodging, keep running as long as we can. I don't know about you, but I'm not going down without a fight."
Vicky pulled away from him and sat on a flat stone at the edge of the path. "And I thought you were brave. You really fooled me, didn't you?"
Freeman walked away from her, to the edge of the lake. He looked across the water where the mist had disappeared.
"You can stand up to a bully like Deke," she said. "But you can't stand to look inside yourself. You play tough but you're nothing. You're as scared as any of us. Clint Eastwood, my ass."
"No fair. You don't know anything about me."
"I went inside your head, remember? Triptrapping works both ways when you're dealing with somebody else who can do it."
"You didn't see anything. I've got all that stuff locked away. I'm over it. Nothing's bothering me anymore."
"Except your Dad. And what he did."
Freeman balled his hands into fists. He wasn't going to lose it. Not like Clint in Dirty Harry. Though it would feel so goddamned good.
The heat rushed through him and he fought the pain in his head. He wasn't going to cry in front of a stupid girl. Especially one who was nothing but skin and bones, who was so messed up she couldn't eat a solid spoonful of food. Who was she to tell him what was going on inside his own head? The best shrinks in the state system hadn't been able to touch him. He was fucking by-God bulletproof.
"I know about the acetylene torch," she said quietly. The water lapped at the shore with a series of tired sighs.
"He didn't burn me on purpose."
"Not the first time. And I know what happened to your Mom. What you saw-"
Freeman wheeled and stormed over to her. He could break her in half, she was so scrawny and brittle. He could slap her and make her skull shatter like an eggshell. He could rearrange her face until she shut her big fat mouth.
"You don't know a goddamned thing about my Dad, or my Mom, or about me," he yelled, so loudly he could hear his own echo across the water. Anyone listening from Wendover could have heard him, but he didn't care.
"Admit you're scared, and I'll show you the way out."
Freeman had lied plenty of times in his life. Lying was a survival skill when you were in the system, when you were one of society's mistakes. And right now, he could lie and get his way. He could fool Vicky into thinking he was scared, because girls seemed to get the emotions of anger and fear mixed up. He could play her, manipulate her the way he'd done with every group home shrink and sociologist in the state.
But Freeman wasn't going to lie, not this time. "I'm not scared. I just want to see what it's like to live one night under the stars, to not have somebody tell me when to go to bed and when to wake up, or make me get in touch with my feelings. Or shock me like a freaking lab monkey until I do tricks and turn flips. Even if they catch us, I need one night where I belong to me."
"You know something, Freeman? You're a selfish bastard. You had people looking up to you, kids like Isaac and that boy Dipes."
"He's okay for a little brat."
"See what I mean? Even Cynthia said she thought you were cool. You give other people hope, Freeman. But all you're worried about is your own damned neck. All you want to do is run away."
"You're one to talk."
"I only run away for a little while. I don't know if I can handle the world outside these walls."
"All the more reason to take off." Freeman's anger had left him, his soul a deflated tire.
Vicky stood. "I wonder if the old guy in the lake is coming back."
"He said we couldn't go this way. But I think he's as bad as the rest, just trying to keep us boxed in. Even the dead people are against us."
Vicky laughed, a sound that was out of place in the still night. "You've got a hell of a chip on your shoulder, don't you?"
"You can stay here if you want. I've had enough."
Freeman turned and jogged down the trail. He tried to tell himself it was the mist off the lake that blurred his vision, but the truth stung like salt. Clint Eastwood never cried. Clint Eastwood never looked back, either.
He gained speed, hoping the cold air in his lungs would shock him into numbness. The path thinned and branches slapped at his face. Soon he was among the tall stands of oak and hickory that bordered the rear of the property. The foliage blocked the moonlight, so he crept forward in the silent dark, the fishy smell of the lake now mingling with the odor of rotting leaves.
He reached the fence as the moon broke through a gap in the branches overhead. The light caught the curled razor wire atop the fence. Insulators hung on poles, and several lines of bare wire ran along the top of the stone wall. The air tingled with ozone.
They had electrified the rear fence.
The dead man had tried to warn them. Somebody didn't want them to leave. A low growl came from the dark woods beyond the fence. It sounded to Freeman like what a troll might sound like, a monstrous creature whose claws could shred skin, whose teeth could grind bones, whose tongue could lick a skull clean.
Freeman hadn't felt this afraid since He held his scarred wrist to the moonlight. There was more than one means of escape. Except, if he died here, he might become one of those people underneath, the squirrel-shit nutty, the scared the obsessed, the forgotten.
Eternal losers.
The ones even God couldn't heal, the ones who had never been defended or protected. Doomed to seek peace in a charnel house of the insane run by the insane. Freeman suspected this was one fight that would even have Clint holstering his six-shooters.
TWENTY-THREE
Bondurant pressed close behind Starlene. God sent along these tests once in a while, and God had so far given Bondurant plenty of latitude. God forgave the drinking, smiled down upon his punishing of the children, and looked the other way when Bondurant falsified state reports. God forgave, just like the Good Book promised God loved the sinners perhaps even more than He did the saints.
Sometimes He let the sinners crawl up from hell just to be reminded of what they had lost. This basement was close enough to hell for Bondurant to feel the cold spiteful breath of the dead things.
"What does it mean?" Starlene said not understanding the scope of this new reality.
As if everything had to have a meaning. When you gave it all over to the Lord everything fit the plan. A season for this and that, after all, whatever it was that the Book of Ecclesiastes said. For every season and all that happy bullshit.