"What?" I said.
"Are you …" He raised his eyebrows. "You are."
"I'm what?"
"Crying," he said. Then his eyebrows met in a rush over the bridge of his freckled nose. He scowled at me. "What are you crying for?"
"Nothing," I said. I reached up and wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist. "I'm not crying."
"You're a damned liar," he said.
"Hey. Don't swear." I began hitting buttons on the phone again.
"Why not? You do it. Who are you calling now?"
"Someone who's going to get us the hell out of here," I said.
C H A P T E R
19
It was a little after midnight when I heard it: the same motorcycle engine that I'd been straining my ears to hear on and off for the past couple of weeks. Only this time, it wasn't roaring down Lumley Lane, the way it had in my dreams.
No, it was roaring through the empty parking lots of Crane Military Base.
I leapt up off the bed where I'd been dozing and rushed to the window. I had to cup my fingers over my eyes in order to make out what was going on outside. In a circle of light thrown by one of the security lamps, I saw Rob. He was riding around, his face—hidden by the shield of his motorcycle helmet—turning right and left, trying to figure out which building I was in.
I pounded on the windowpane, and called his name.
Sean, curled up on the bed beside mine, sat bolt upright, as fully awake as he'd been soundly asleep just a second before.
"It's my dad," he said in a choked voice.
"No, it's not your dad," I said. "Stand back while I break this window. He can't hear me."
I knew I only had a few seconds before he thundered past the infirmary. I had to act fast. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find—a metal trash can—and heaved it at the window.
It did the trick. Glass went flying everywhere, including back over me, since a lot of the shards ricocheted off the metal grate. I could feel tiny slivers of glass in my hair and on my shirt.
I didn't care. I yelled, "Rob!"
He threw out a foot and skidded to a halt. A second later, his foot was up again, and he was tearing through the grass toward me. It was only then that I noticed that behind him were about a half dozen other bikers, big guys on Harleys.
"Hey," Rob said when he'd thrown down his kickstand and yanked his helmet off. He got off the bike and came toward me. "You okay?"
I nodded. I can't even tell you how good it felt to see him. It felt even better when he reached through the metal grate, wrapped his fingers around the front of my shirt, dragged me forward, and kissed me through the bars.
When he let go of me, it was so abrupt that I knew he hadn't meant to kiss me at all. It had just sort of happened.
"Sorry," he said—only not looking too sorry, if you know what I mean.
"That's okay," I said. Okay? It was the best kiss I'd ever had—even better than the first one. "Are you sure you don't mind doing this?"
"Piece of cake."
Then he went to work.
Sean, who'd observed the whole thing, said in a very indignant voice, "Who's that?"
"Rob Wilkins," I said.
I must have said it a little too happily, however, since Sean asked, suspiciously, "Is he your boyfriend?"
"No," I said. I wish.
Sean was appalled. "And you're just going to let him get away with kissing you like that?"
"He was just glad to see me," I said.
A particularly hairy face had replaced Rob's in the window. I recognized his friend from Chick's, the one with the Tet Offensive tattoo. He snaked a chain through the grate, then secured the other end to the back of one of the bikes.
"Stand back, y'all," he said to us. "This here's gonna make a helluva racket."
The face disappeared. Sean looked up at me.
"These are friends of yours?" he asked, in a disapproving voice.
"Sort of," I said. "Now stand back, will you? I don't want you to get hurt."
"Jesus," Sean muttered. "I am not a baby, all right?"
But when the biker gunned his engine, and the chain rattled, theh went taut, Sean clapped his hands over his ears. "We are so busted," he moaned with his eyes closed.
I had a bad feeling Sean was right. The grate was making ominous groaning noises, but not budging so much as an inch. Meanwhile, the motorcycle engine was whining shrilly, its wheels kicking up a ton of dirt, throwing it and bits of grass back through the grate and into the room, already carpeted with glass.
For a minute, I didn't think it was going to work—or that, if it did, the noise would rouse Colonel Jenkins and his men, and they'd be after us in a heartbeat. The grate was simply too deeply embedded into the concrete window frame. I didn't want to say anything, of course—Rob was trying as best he could—but it looked like a hopeless cause. Especially when Sean dug his fingers into my arm and hissed, "Listen. . . ."
Then I heard it. Above the shriek of the motorcycle's engine, the sound of keys rattling outside the infirmary door.
That was it. We were busted.
What was worse, I'd probably gotten our rescuers busted, too. How long would Rob end up in jail because of me? What was the mandatory sentence for trying to break a psychic free from a military compound?
And then, with a sound like a thousand fingernails on a mile-wide chalkboard, the entire grate popped out from the sill and was dragged a few feet until the biker slammed on the brakes.
"Come on," Rob said, reaching for me over the crumbling sill.
I shoved Sean forward. "Him first," I said.
"No, you." Sean, in an effort to be chivalrous, tried to force me through the window first, but Rob got hold of him and hauled him through.
Which gave me a chance to grab my backpack—which Special Agent Smith had so graciously brought me—then vault over the window sill behind them, just as the dead bolt on the infirmary door slid back.
Outside, it was a humid spring night, silent and still … except for the thunder of motorcycle engines. I was astonished to see that, in addition to Rob's friends from Chick's, Greg Wylie and Hank Wendell, from the back row of detention, were also there, on majorly cherried-out hogs. I have to admit, I got a little teary-eyed at the sight of them: I had no idea I was so well-liked by my fellow juvenile delinquents.
Sean, however, was not so impressed.
"You have got to be kidding me," he said when he got his first good look at his rescuers.
"Look," I said to him as I pulled on the helmet Rob handed to me. "It's these guys or your dad. Take your pick."
"Boy," Sean said, shaking his head. "You drive a hard bargain."
Hank Wendell shoved a helmet at him. "Here ya go, kid," he said. He made room on his seat for Sean's eighty-pound frame, then gave his engine a rev. "Hop on."
I don't know if Sean would have gotten on if, at that moment, an eardrum-piercing siren hadn't begun to wail.
One of the guys from Chick's—Frankie, who had a tattoo of a baby on his bicep—called out, "Here they come."
A second later, some military types came running up to the barless window, shouting for us to stop. Headlights lit up the parking lot.
"Hang on," Rob said as I swung onto the seat behind him and wrapped my arms around him.
"Halt," a man's voice bellowed. I glanced over my shoulder. There was a military jeep coming toward us, with a man standing up in the back, shouting through a megaphone. Behind him, I could see lights turning on in the buildings all across the base, and people running outside, trying to see what was going on.
"This is U.S. Government property,"'the guy with the megaphone declared. "You are trespassing. Turn off your engines now."
And then the night air was ripped apart by an earth-shaking explosion. I saw a ball of flame rise up in the air over by the airstrip. Everyone ducked—
Except Frankie and the guy with the Tet Offensive tattoo, who high-fived one another.
"Oh, yeah," Frankie said. "We still got it."