I’m confused. I cough blood. I look around for Houdini, and my eyes find him a little space away in the corn, stumbling and rising, stumbling and rising, shaking raindrops from his dirty coat.
The big man walks to the saddlebag, unbuttons it and takes out a small sack. He dumps out the contents, charcoal briquettes, and they fall with a series of horse-manure thuds onto the gravel path.
“Sir?”
He lifts the bag above me, and I flinch. It’s such an archaic word, saddlebag. When did I even learn that word? The world has become so strange.
“You mustn’t, mustn’t say those words,” he says, and then he pulls the bag down over my head and cinches it tight.
The big, thick-necked Amish man doesn’t kill me. I suffer a long terrible moment lying on the ground, my head encased in darkness inside the bag, waiting for him to kill me. Over the rush of the rain I hear him moving around, back and forth to his horse, boots on the road, muted clanks—he’s putting down his gun and pitchfork, he’s gathering things from the bags.
My arms are bound loosely behind me, wrist to wrist. His hands shove in under my armpits and lift me like a broken doll and set me on my feet. He pushes me in a direction, and we begin to walk. Through the rows, crunching over small slippery mounds of rotting husks, the brush of dead stalks against my legs and hands.
“Please,” says my captor, each time I slip or stumble, his strong hands shoving urgently at my back. “You will continue.”
I am trapped inside the thick stale odor of the briquettes, the canvas of the bag scratching at my face and scalp. The woven fabric is not enough to blind me completely. I get fleeting glimpses of the cornfield, flickers of moonlight peeking in through the material.
It might be the same man, the man that Sandy described, or it might not be. How many burly sixtysomething Amish men must there be, black beards flecked with gray, out here “down county,” guarding their farmsteads from strangers on the road? What are the odds that this is the right place—the right man—that he can answer my questions? What are the odds that he is about to shoot me and leave my body in an unsown field?
“Sir?” I begin, turning my head slightly, still walking. How even to ask? Where to begin?
But he makes a harsh Germanic shushing noise, like ech, repeats what he said before: “You will continue.”
I continue, I stumble forward through the cold rain in my mask of darkness.
I hear a sharp nervous yelp, just behind me at waist level. I hadn’t realized he was carrying the dog. I twist in my restraints, try to separate my wrists from each other inside the tight encircling rope.
“If—” I say, and my captor says, “Quiet.”
“If you shoot me,” I say, “then please—” I can’t say it. “Please take care of my dog. The dog is ill.”
He’s not listening. “Quiet,” he says. “You must be quiet.”
We walk for close to half an hour. I lose track of it. I am lost in the pain of my broken ribs, the pain of my cut forehead, lost in worry and darkness and confusion, tromping at gunpoint through the fields. I keep waiting for the Amish guy to stop walking and order me to kneel. I think of Nico, of Sandy and Billy, and then of McConnell and her kids back at Police House, working jigsaw puzzles, catching fish for dinner. I should have stayed with those guys. Should have stayed with Cortez at the police station; stayed with Naomi Eddes at Mr. Chow’s, flirting over greasy lo mein. A million places I should have stayed.
“Sir?” At last we stop walking and I try again: “Sir?”
The man doesn’t answer. From where he’s now standing, a few yards away, a new noise, a rattling chain. I squint, make out dim shapes through the sack.
He’s taken us to a building—a house? I stand in the rain, shivering, waiting. Then the distinct creak of a rusted door being pulled open. A massive door. Not a house. A barn.
He grabs me again beneath my armpits, firm but not rough, and lifts my body and thrusts me forward through the doorway. The smell of it is immediate and unmistakable: horse manure and warm stale hay. He lays my wounded, exhausted body on the ground and binds my legs as he has my wrists.
“Sir?” I say, jerking my head around, looking for his face through the burlap. He’s moving again. Back to the door. “I don’t want to take your farm, I don’t want food. Do you hear me? I’m not that kind of person. Sir?”
“Forgive me,” he says, quietly, almost whispering, and it’s the same as before: he’s not talking to me. It’s not my forgiveness that interests him. I stumble around in a circle, a frightened animal, blind and bound. I start to cough, and I taste my own spittle and the heat of the inside of the bag.
“Don’t leave me here,” I say. “Please don’t do that.”
“I will bring you food,” says the man. “If I can. I may not be able to.”
Hot panic now, panic and fear and confusion: I feel like a man trapped in a cave, in the rubble of a building collapse. If the old man leaves me here, then that’s it, my investigation ends right now and never will I know what happened to my sister. The asteroid will careen into the earth and catch me wasting away, hooded and hungry in a dilapidated barn.
The man comes over and kneels beside me, and I flinch as I feel something press against my head. It’s a knife blade—he’s cutting the sack away from my scalp, peeling it off like a caul. The world is revealed, only marginally more visible than when I was hooded. A moonlit barn, dark and cobwebbed and warm. The smell of horses and horse shit. I take three long gasping breaths and find the man’s face and stare him in the eye.
“You can’t leave me here.”
“It is four days only,” he says, pointing at the sky. “Only four days.”
He places the dog gently at my side. Houdini immediately begins to lap the dirty water of a puddle.
“Have mercy,” I say to the man. He draws his hand down along his face, surveys me lying in the dirt.
“This is mercy,” he says, and then he goes. The rattle of a chain, tying the barn door closed. The loud crunch of the Amish guy’s boots through the cornfields, quieter and quieter as he walks away.
2.
Country silence. Country darkness.
Don’t fall asleep, Henry. Don’t go to sleep.
That’s the first thing. The first thing is simply to stay awake. The second thing is to keep things in perspective. Surviving challenging circumstances, I have found, is very often a matter of keeping things in perspective. The last time I found myself in a situation like this, left high and dry like this, I hadn’t merely been kicked by a horse, I’d been shot. I’d taken a sniper’s bullet high in my right arm, which ruptured the brachial artery, and that was bad, that was definitely real bad. I was bleeding out in a tower watching the day fade to night, until my sister came to rescue me on a helicopter, of all things, the blades swicking against the sunset, the big loud thing lowering to get me.
This time she won’t come. Of course not—I’m supposed to be rescuing her.
The first step is easy. Now that I’m not being force-marched through a field in the rain, now that the mask has been pulled from my eyes and I can concentrate, it takes all of five minutes to pry my wrists far enough apart to access the knots with my long fingers and worry the knots open and free my hands. A couple of minutes more and my legs are free also, and I can get up and stagger about the barn.
Where’d they get it, I think suddenly. That helicopter. The troubling thought appears as it has on occasion before, floating to life unbidden like a laughing ghost… if they’re such hapless dimwits, Nico’s pals, if they’re deluded losers chasing their illusory asteroid-foiling scenario like children playing dress-up—then where’d they get a helicopter? Where, indeed, did they get the Internet access that Jordan allowed me the use of, that last night in Concord; the same night he stood, smug and taunting, telling me there was more to it than I could possibly know. More than Nico could possibly know…