LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Spotsylvania County

      Fred Trinket gently pushed his mother aside as he led the group around the right side of the house. Mitch hated this place, the plump man in khaki shorts, the collectors. His head was like a balloon filled with gasoline waiting to be torched off.

      Kaye felt his anger like heat from a stove. She gripped his arm. If Stella was harmed, in any way, then…If their daughter was harmed, then…

      She could not finish that sequence of thoughts.

      “We’ve fed the runaways a chicken lunch, very nutritious,” Trinket explained. His face was like blotchy marble and he was sweating like a stuck pig. He was beginning to realize the big trooper did not like the way Trinket made money.

      Mitch made a jerk in Trinket’s direction. Kaye drew him back and squeezed his arm until he winced. He did not object, just looked at the gray, square board face of the long building behind the house, the asphalt shingled roof, the steel door with its tiny window and concrete stoop.

      “We keep good, clean facilities,” Trinket said. He had moved ahead of Mitch and Kaye and flanked the big trooper. The younger trooper and the collectors took up the rear. “We’ve had a number of runaways through here,” Trinket continued, louder now with the distance to the door decreasing, his secret soon to be revealed. “We’re a conscientious clearing house. We take good care of them.”

      “Shut up,” Kaye demanded.

      “Keep your temper, ma’am, please,” the big trooper requested, but his own voice was shaky.

      Stella heard the lock in the big steel door and rushed from Elvira’s side down the hall to the inner cage gate. She stood there as the lights came on in the first little room, with the boxes, and saw a big man in a leather jacket and a khaki uniform and behind him, Fred Trinket.

      Stella smelled Kaye and Mitch almost immediately.

      “Mommy,” she said, as if she were three years old again.

      “Open that door,” the big trooper ordered Trinket. There were tears on the trooper’s cheeks. Stella had not seen many police officers in her life, and she had certainly never seen one cry.

      Trinket mumbled and drew the brass key on its string.

      “Mommy, she’s dead!” Stella cried. “She just died, just right now. We couldn’t do anything!” Her voice split and she spoke in two high-pitched, singing, weirdly beautiful streams, as if two young girls stood by the mesh gate, one inside the other. Kaye could not understand, but her heart almost exploded with joy and grief.

      “Open it now!” Kaye shouted, pushing through. Her fingernails raked Fred Trinket’s cheek. He recoiled, dropped the key and squealed in protest.

      Kaye tried to reach Stella through the mesh. The distance between the two doors separated them.

      “Lord almighty,” the younger trooper said. Mitch scooped up Trinket’s key and tossed it to Kaye, then grabbed the man and held him. The big trooper stood back. Kaye opened the mesh gate and then the inner gate and grabbed Stella.

      “Get the others,” Stella said.

      “How many?” the big trooper asked Trinket.

      “Five,” Trinket said.

      “Sir, it’s our duty to assemble and transport all virus children,” the stocky collector asserted, shouldering into the first room. Her tall, thin colleague remained outside, staring at the ground, the steps, anything but what was happening within the long building.

      Kaye, Mitch, and the big trooper walked down the hall. Stella followed her mother closely. Mitch gave his daughter a squeeze around the shoulders and she hugged him close. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

      Mabel and Kevin sat on the couch. Will stood by Elvira. The television blared an old episode of I Love Lucy. Kaye bent beside the prone girl and examined her, face wrinkling in pity. She saw the bloody crust under the girl’s nose, turned her head gently, found more crust behind her ears, felt the lumps under her jaw and in her armpits.

      “How long?” Kaye asked Stella.

      “Five, six minutes,” Stella said. “She just coughed real bad and lay still.”

      Kaye looked over her shoulder at Mitch and the big trooper. Trinket winced but wisely kept quiet.

      “Let me see,” the stocky collector said. She knelt briefly beside the girl. Then she pushed to her feet with a whuff of air and a sharp look at the others and stumbled hastily back down the hall.

      “Is she sick?” Trinket asked. “Can you help her?”

      “What the hell do you care?” the big trooper asked.

      Kaye heard the collector calling for the first aid kit. “It’s too late,” she murmured.

      “You a doctor?” the big trooper asked, bending low over Kaye and the girl on the floor.

      “Close enough,” Kaye said.

      “Get your daughter out of here,” he said.

      “I might help,” Kaye suggested, looking up at the big trooper’s jowls, his intense blue eyes.

      Mitch let go of Trinket and pulled Stella close.

      “Just get her out of here,” the trooper repeated. “We’ll take care of this. Go far away. Stay together.”

      “Can Will and Kevin and Mabel come?” Stella asked.

      Will regarded them all with slit-eyed defiance. Kevin and Mabel focused on the television, their cheeks gold and pink with fear and shame.

      “I’m sorry,” Kaye said.

      “Mother…”

      “We have to travel light and fast,” Kaye said. And they might all be sick.

      Stella pulled loose from Mitch and ran to Will. She grabbed Will’s shoulders and they stared at each other for several seconds.

      Kaye and Mitch watched them, Mitch twitching, Kaye oddly calm and fascinated. She hadn’t seen her daughter with another Homo sapiens novus in two years. She was ashamed it had been so long, but ashamed for whom, she could not say. Maybe for the whole troubled human race.

      The two separated. Kaye took Stella by the hand and gave her the secret signal that she had taught her daughter years ago, a scrape of her pointing finger across Stella’s palm that meant they had to go now, no questions, no hesitation. Stella jerked but followed.

      “Remember the woods,” Will sang out. “Woods everywhere. Woods for the whole world.”

      As they ran down the asphalt road to the truck, they heard the trooper arguing with Trinket and the collectors. “We don’t take kindly to child theft, not in this county.”

      He was buying Stella and her parents time.

      So was the dead girl.

      Mitch drove around the van. The hedge scraped Kaye’s door. “We should take them with us, all of them!” she cried, and hugged Stella fiercely. “God, Mitch, we should save them all.”

      Mitch did not stop.