Banished (9 page)

C
HAPTER
11

I
T WAS COMING
from the other side of my bedroom door, and it sounded like Gram.

Prairie bolted to my side, clapping a hand over my mouth. Before I could protest she leaned in close and whispered, “
Quiet
. Take Chub in the closet and close the door and stay there. Don’t come out.”

“But—”

“
Do
it, Hailey. Please.”

Chub was a heavy sleeper—once he was out, he could sleep through anything. I picked him up, which took some effort because he’d gotten so big, and he snuggled in next to my neck, his skin hot and damp.

I glanced back, but Prairie was gone; the door to the room was open a few inches. My heart thudded as I went to the closet.

I yanked a bunch of clothes off their hangers, put them on the floor and laid Chub on them, covering him with a long sweater that I tucked in like a blanket. I kissed his cheek and then left the closet, closing the door almost all the way.

As I crossed my room, I heard a man yell, “Stop right there!” and a pair of sharp cracks and then Prairie’s voice, speaking softly, something I couldn’t make out. I had to find out what was happening. I wasn’t worried about Gram, exactly—but I had to know what kind of trouble Prairie had brought with her.

I tiptoed down the hall, flattening my back against the wall, and peeked around the corner so I had a view into the kitchen and the living room.

What I saw made me suck in my breath.

A man stood a few feet from the door, pointing a gun at Gram and Prairie. It was one of the men from the car I’d seen at the drugstore—I recognized his gray jacket and his blond buzz cut. Gram was sitting in her chair and I could tell from the drool trail that still shone wet on her cheek that she’d passed out, like she sometimes did. She was blinking fast and patting at her hair nervously. Prairie stood behind her, hands held out at her sides.

Dun was exactly where I’d last seen him, slumped over the table, except there was a leaking pool of red coming from his mouth.

Prairie looked furious. I wanted to signal to her somehow, but I knew I couldn’t do it without the guy with the gun seeing me.

“You,” the man said in a clipped, calm voice. “Old lady. Get down on the floor. Lie on your stomach with your hands straight out to the sides.”

“You ain’t supposed to—” Gram protested. I suddenly smelled urine sharp in the air and I knew she had peed her pants.

A movement in the corner of the kitchen caught my eye. As it flashed past I realized that Rattler must have hidden behind the refrigerator—but why? Was he helping the man with the gun somehow? Before I could even finish the thought Rattler’s arm came up and there was a flash of metal as he buried Gram’s chef’s knife deep below the man’s shoulder.

I screamed. I tried to scream, anyway, but what came out was more of a choked gasp.

“Get back, Hailey!” Prairie screamed at me.

Rattler let go of the knife handle. He didn’t wait for the man to fall but threw him onto the kitchen floor as he scrabbled at the knife sticking out of his shoulder. Then Rattler reached for Prairie.

“Get Chub,” Prairie yelled. “
Now
. Run!”

I turned and sprinted for my room. I got Chub from the closet—he didn’t even stir in his sleep. From the other room I heard a crash and glass breaking. I looked toward the window and considered jumping out with Chub—it was only a few feet to the ground, we’d be fine—but I realized that without Prairie, and the car, there was no chance we could get away. It was a long way across the yard to the woods, and we wouldn’t have any cover.

And—I didn’t want to leave Prairie.

As I ran down the hall there was another loud crack and then a man yelled, “Get
back!
” I skidded to a stop just before the corner and looked around it again, shielding Chub in my arms.

Dun had slid out of his chair and onto the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the table. The guy with the knife in his shoulder sat next to him, making gasping sounds, his blood-covered hands around the knife handle. A second man stood in the doorway, pointing his gun at Rattler. It was the other man from the car, slightly shorter than his partner, with black hair and eyes and wearing a black track jacket. He stepped neatly over the pile of splintered wood and glass that had been our storm door, and placed himself squarely between Prairie and Rattler. For a second I had the crazy idea that he was protecting Prairie, that they had come here to save us from Dun and Rattler and Gram, but then the man spoke, never taking his eyes off Rattler, who slowly sank to his knees and raised his hands in the air, looking not so much afraid as amused.

“On your stomach, arms straight out, or I
will
shoot you,” the man barked, and Rattler complied. I saw Prairie’s hands scrambling on the counter behind her, knocking against a glass, a dirty plate, a box of Cheez-Its. The toaster was just beyond her reach. I wanted to scream at her to grab it and throw it at the guy, nail him in the head, but I couldn’t speak. I was clutching Chub so tightly that he was whimpering into my neck. I didn’t know if I should run back down the hall and take our chances with the window after all, or try to help Prairie.

Before I could decide, Gram pushed her chair back and struggled to stand.

“Stop right there, lady,” the man said. “Down on the floor like your friend here, arms out.”

But Gram lurched toward him, her gray stringy hair plastered to her drool-damp chin, her hands paddling the air at her sides. “But I’m the one who—”

“Down!” he yelled as his arm swung toward her. I could see what was going to happen in the split second before the gunshot echoed through the room, as Gram kept lurching forward, straight for him.

Except it wasn’t a single gunshot—it was two, one right after the other, and Gram flew back through the air, a misting red hole in her back. Then Rattler hurtled up off the floor, the first guy’s gun in his hand.

The shooter took longer to fall than Gram did. Rattler had shot him in the side, but it didn’t look that bad. He stumbled, putting his hands to the wound and sucking air. Rattler didn’t have any more patience with him than with his partner, and he caught him under the chin with the butt of the gun. The man fell to the sound of his own jaw breaking.

There was a second of perfect silence. I took everything in: Gram on her back with her eyes wide and staring, Dun lying next to the two men Rattler had wounded. And in the center of it all, Rattler. If I’d thought his eyes were frightening in the past, they were ten times more frightening now. As I watched from the darkness of the hallway, he slowly lowered the gun to his side, dangling it loose in his hand.

“Ladies,” he said, drawing out the word as though he was tasting it. “That was sloppy of me. What I git for doubtin’ myself. Won’t happen again. Prairie, guess we’ll take your car.”

“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Prairie spat.

Rattler shook his head. “Now, Prairie, don’t you fret. I ain’t gonna do nothin’ besides take you somewhere’s I can keep an eye on you.”

Prairie’s eyes widened and I saw fresh fear there. I couldn’t believe there could be anything worse than this—four people lying in a sea of blood on the floor, Rattler threatening us with a gun—but Prairie looked terrified.

It was her fear that finally made me move. I remembered the kitchen scissors, in a mason jar with the spatulas and spoons next to the sink, and I ran for them. I waited for the slam of the bullet even as my fingers closed on the handles of the scissors and my hip hit the counter hard. There was an “oof” behind me and the gun went off and—Was I hit? Was Prairie hit?—I whirled around and Rattler had disappeared and Prairie was still standing and I was still standing—

“Now Hailey now!” Prairie screamed. I didn’t have to be told twice. Chub wailed in my arms, struggling against me. I dropped the scissors and ran, holding him as tight as I could, and followed Prairie out the door, crunching glass under my feet, slipping on the blood, and then we were in the yard, sprinting for her car.

Rascal was sitting in the center of the yard. His eyes glowed golden in the moonlight. It looked eerie, and I couldn’t figure out why he was so calm when strangers had been breaking in, shooting, trying to kill us. Why hadn’t he come tearing after them, snarling and barking and snapping the way he did when he treed a squirrel or chased a rabbit?

I didn’t have time to dwell on that now, though. “Prairie, I have to get Rascal!” I screamed. I thrust Chub at her and she took him, protesting as I ran and picked Rascal up.

I tightened all the muscles in my back, waiting for the impact of a bullet as I ran to the car, but none came. Rascal was warm and soft in my arms, and he didn’t protest at being bounced around. I almost dropped him as I opened the car, and when he landed on the floor of the backseat, he nearly fell.

But there was no time to worry about him. Prairie had got the seat belt across Chub, and it looked like it would hold him in for now. She got in the driver’s seat and started the engine, and I barely had time to jump in the backseat with Rascal and Chub before she started rolling across the lawn, accelerating as if she meant to plow straight through the speed of sound, the speed of light, as if she meant to put an eternity between us and the wreckage of my old life.

PART TWO: RUNNING

C
HAPTER
12

W
E HIT THE ROAD
with a squeal of tires. Prairie yanked the steering wheel and the car fishtailed back and forth before straightening out.

Something was wrong with Chub. His cries turned to hiccups and I felt a widening pool of damp along his leg, his corduroy pants warm and wet. When I closed my fingers on his shin, he shrieked in pain.

“Oh my God, Chub’s hit—”

Before I got the words out Prairie braked hard and headed for the shoulder. We had gone only a few hundred yards down the road, but she jerked the car into park and hit the dome light with the heel of her hand, twisting in her seat toward me.

“Give him to me,” she commanded. I was terrified and didn’t know what else to do. I lifted his heavy body feetfirst. He was coughing and crying at the same time, and my muscles strained with his weight, but Prairie helped me slide him onto the front seat. She straightened his leg gently, the bloodstain black in the dim light, and then she did something that stopped my breath.

She skittered her fingers up and down Chub’s leg and then stilled them. Ducking her head, she started chanting. I only had to hear a few words to know that she was saying the lines from the pages I’d found in my mother’s hiding place.

It didn’t take long—just ten or fifteen seconds—and as Prairie murmured softly, Chub snuffled and sighed and finally quieted. She took her hands off his leg and carefully rolled his pants up and ran her fingertips over his skin. Then she rolled the pants down again.

“He’s all right now,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”

She gently handed him back to me and I took him into my arms. His little hands went to my neck and he slumped against me. I could feel his long eyelashes brushing my cheek. I felt along his leg, the sticky hardening blood and the torn place in the fabric—and underneath, where his skin was smooth.

“See if you can buckle him in again,” Prairie said, and eased the car off the shoulder and onto the road, picking up speed as the tires spun gravel. We were headed east, and as I fumbled with the seat belt, we blew past the Bargain Barn, the KFC, the old Peace Angel Baptist church that they’d tried to turn into a restaurant for a while and now was nothing at all.

“What just happened?” I asked when I had Chub more or less secured. “What did you do?”

But I already knew the answer, even as I fought back my hysteria. It was what I had done to Milla. What I had done to Rascal.

Prairie was silent for a moment, the outskirts of town blowing past in a blur of mailboxes and gravel drives and leaning shacks.

Finally she took a breath and slowly let it back out, and when she spoke, she was as calm as she had been when I first saw her sitting at our kitchen table that afternoon.

“I’m a Healer,” she said. “And so are you. It’s in your blood.”

I knew it was true, yet her words still stunned me. I hadn’t yet put a name to it. “I’m … it isn’t—”

“I know you healed Rascal,” Prairie said gently.

I felt my face go hot. I thought about denying it, but there didn’t seem to be much point. Prairie already knew. And in a way, I wanted her to know. I needed someone else to understand.

“Was he your first?” Prairie asked.

“Um.” I looked out the window at the farmland flying by, the barns and outbuildings dark shadows rising from the fields.

I almost didn’t tell her.

And then I did. I told her about Rascal’s accident, about the blood and the terrible damage to his body, about the way it had felt to carry him home, to put my face to his fur. About the rushing, needful urgency of the energy inside me flowing through my fingers into his wrecked body.

I told her about Milla, about how I barely remembered running to her side, about the words in my head, about Ms. Turnbull shoving me to the floor, and the way my senses came back with a prickling abruptness. About watching Milla roll over and throw up—and how she was fine after.

“The gift is strong in you,” Prairie said, a note of awe in her voice, when I finished. “I’ve never heard of anyone being able to do it without someone guiding them. Your mom and I practiced for hours with Mary in secret, so Alice wouldn’t know, but it took us months before we could use the gift.”

“But Milla says we’re cursed,” I said, hot shame flooding my face. “That we’re freaks.”

“No,” Prairie corrected me sharply. “You have a
gift
, Hailey. You can do something that others can’t.”

That made me feel a little better. Just days ago I’d thought there was something wrong with me, one more difference between me and every other kid, but Prairie made it sound like something to be proud of.

But that didn’t change the fact that we were running from killers, that the kitchen floor was soaked in blood, that Gram was dead. “Who were those men at the house? Were they there because I’m a Healer?”

Was it my fault?

“Those men were … professionals.”

“What does that even
mean?
Like hit men?”

“More like trained … investigators, I guess you’d call them. They’re killers when they need to be, but I don’t think that was their main objective.”

She was so calm. It made me panic even more. “What did they want?”

“I’m pretty sure they wanted
you
, Hailey.”

“Me? Why would they want me?”

“Because you’re a Healer.”

“But how would they know that? I only just found out myself.”

Prairie sighed. “That’s a long story. I work for a man. Not a good man, though I didn’t know that until very recently. His name is Bryce Safian. We were doing research, in a lab outside Chicago. Trying to find ways to use my healing gifts, to replicate them so they could be used to fight disease.”

“What do you mean, like turn normal people into Healers?”

“Well, more or less. We analyzed my full genome and compared it with a control population to isolate the element that controls the gift. The next step would have been to figure out how to use a special process to change a person’s DNA to match mine.”

“I thought all that DNA stuff was, like …” I tried to remember what I’d learned in my science class earlier in the year, wishing I had paid more attention. “That it’s still not understood all that well. That it’s mostly a mystery.”

“Yes, that’s true to a great extent, but Bryce is very well funded. We had access to the latest research. We had a laboratory, equipment, a team of scientists. We were at the very forefront.”

“But that all sounds like a
good
thing.” Not like a reason to kill someone.

“Yes, but … Bryce had other plans. Other ideas about what to do with the research once we isolated the healing gene, to put it in simple terms.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“He … had figured out a way to use the healing gene in warfare. In a battle setting.”

“What, like to heal wounded soldiers? To fix up their injuries so that they could keep fighting?”

“That’s … well, something like that,” Prairie said hesitantly. “The point is that he was willing to sell the research, our results, to the highest bidder. He didn’t care who it was, as long as they paid.”

Her words sank into my mind. “You mean like … other countries?”

“Possibly,” Prairie said quietly. “Anyone who would pay.”

“But I still don’t understand why he needs
me
if he already discovered how to do it using all your research.”

“It’s not quite that simple. You can’t really decode the DNA without a population, which means more than one person, and Bryce was desperate to find another subject. So he investigated me, and he found out things that even I didn’t know.” She gave me a small, sad smile. “Like, for instance, that I have a niece, someone who could be predicted to share the gift.”

“So he had those guys spying on me, those men that were at Gram’s,” I said. “It had to be. They were following me around. I saw them outside the house one morning, and in town talking to people.”

“Yes, I think that’s what happened. Bryce must have hired someone in Chicago to find out everything they could about my background. Once they figured out I was using a fake identity, they tracked down who I used to be. Who I really am. And once they got to Gypsum, it was just a matter of talking to the right people. You know how it is in a small town, everyone knows everything about everyone else. And if they offered money …”

“Everyone’s broke,” I finished the thought. People in Gypsum tended to mistrust outsiders, but if money was involved, it probably wouldn’t take a whole lot of convincing before they started telling everything they knew. “But nobody knew about the healing. I mean, I never did it before—I didn’t even know about it myself.”

“I’m afraid Bryce knew that it was hereditary because I told him,” Prairie said, her voice heavy with regret. “I just never imagined that there was anyone left. I mean, besides Alice, and she can’t heal.”

“So if your boss knew that Gram was weak, that she didn’t have the gift …”

“That’s why his men didn’t think twice about shooting her. She was useless to them. All they wanted was you.”

“So they came here and … someone in Gypsum led them to us for a few bucks.” I felt the bitterness build inside me, hot and sharp.

“I doubt anyone had any idea what it would lead to. These were professionals, Hailey. They would have had some story, some compelling lie that would make people trust them. And besides, the money Bryce would have offered—it would have been hard for anyone to resist.”

“Your boss has that much money?”

“He has more than you can imagine, Hailey,” Prairie said flatly.

“So if he’s so rich and powerful and all, how did you get away from him? I mean, how did you get here without him stopping you?”

Prairie glanced at me, her expression troubled. Even in the glow of the dashboard, I could see the worry lines etched between her eyes. “A man can be … a genius in some ways, and completely dense in others. Bryce was my lover, Hailey. And even though he managed to keep me fooled for a very long time about who he really was, I guess there were ways that he didn’t really understand me either.”

“You were in
love
with him?” I demanded.

“I thought I was. But when I realized what he intended to do, well, let’s just say I came to my senses fast. So fast that I was able to come up with a plan that would let me get to you first. I convinced him that I thought it was a great idea to find you, to involve you in our work. I pretended I didn’t know about the worst of his plans. I told him I needed a day to buy a few things for you, for your … room … the room he had already prepared for you at the lab. And instead, this morning I drove like hell to get to Alice’s, praying the whole way I would get there before he gave the order to pick you up.”

“But I first saw those men three days ago. Why did they wait until tonight to try to take me?”

“My guess is they weren’t allowed to do anything without the go-ahead from Bryce. And that they were trying to find a way to take you without drawing too much attention, ideally without getting the law involved. Bryce wouldn’t have wanted that kind of trouble.”

“So … how did he figure out you ran away?”

Prairie sighed, a long, sad breath that seemed to weaken her. “I don’t think he did. Bryce is so … confident, I don’t think it would have ever occurred to him that I’d go against his wishes. But his men must have recognized my car and tracked me to the house. I was sloppy; I didn’t stop to think that Bryce would have given them details like that. And I bet as soon as they reported in, he gave them the go-ahead to come and get us.”

“Oh.” I thought about the two men breaking into our house. About the way a gun looked when it was pointed at you. About the way bodies looked when they were dead.

And I couldn’t believe we’d escaped. That we had been attacked and gotten away.

Gram hadn’t. Gram was dead. For all I knew, Dun was dead too. And the two attackers. I searched my mind to see if there was some delayed grief, if I was upset about Gram and it just hadn’t hit me yet.

But I came up empty. If I’d ever loved Gram, that love had died a long time ago. Now all I felt was relief. Relief, and horror at the blood that had flooded our kitchen floor, at the way her eyes stared out at nothing, at the knife sticking out of the blond man’s shoulder, his fingers struggling to close around the handle.

To keep from focusing on those images I checked on Chub. He was sleeping contentedly, and I stroked his soft hair, smoothing it over his warm forehead.

It was only because I was turned around that the sudden headlights behind us cut directly into my line of vision. They came out of nowhere—one minute it was all black behind the Volvo, the next minute twin beams lit up the road, the distance between us closing fast. The other car—big, sleek, black—had to have been trailing close behind, but I hadn’t noticed it, and I knew that Prairie hadn’t either.

“Hold on,” Prairie said. “
Now.
”

I did. I couldn’t see past the blinding light into the other car, but I grabbed the back of the front seat with my right hand, hard, to brace myself. Prairie jammed her foot down on the gas and we shot forward. I heard the whine of the Volvo’s engine straining under the pressure, but the lights of the other car got steadily brighter.

Prairie swung the wheel to the left, into the passing lane, and then she hit the brakes so hard the tires squealed and I could feel the rubber screeching across the pavement, trying to keep hold of the road. There was a terrible jolt as the car behind us hit our back fender.

I was thrown against the passenger seat and my forehead slammed into the headrest, connecting with the hard plastic. Then I was thrown a second time, into the door, and my seat belt pulled up hard across my collarbone as Prairie hit the gas again and steered into the spin, flooring it and coming out of the turn in the direction we had come from.

How?
was going through my mind, and I even moved my lips to say it, but nothing came out. My face hurt and I could feel warm blood trickling out of my nose, and realized I had smacked it against the headrest, but I was too scared to care.