Sanctuary (14 page)

So you can imagine my surprise when Rob opened his mouth and this is what came out of it:

“To be born white,” he said, “is an honor and a privilege. It is time that all white men and women join together to protect this bond they share by their blood and faith. The responsibility of every American is to protect the welfare of
ourselves
—not those in Mexico, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or some other third-world country. It is time to take America back from drug-addicted welfare recipients living in large urban areas… .”

Whoa. If Rob had my attention with this stuff, you can bet he had Jim Henderson’s attention—not to mention the rest of the True Americans. You could have heard a pin drop, everybody was listening so intently.

“It’s time,” Rob went on, “to protect our borders from illegal aliens, and stop the insidious repeal of miscegenation laws and statutes. We need to do away with affirmative action and same-sex marriages. We need to prevent American industry and property from slipping into the hands of the Japanese, Arabs, and Jews. America should be owned by Americans—”

Applause burst from one of the tables at this. It was soon joined by standing ovations from several other tables. In the thunderous cheering that followed, I stared at my boyfriend with total disbelief. Where on earth, I wondered, had he gotten all that stuff? Was there something about Rob I didn’t know? I had never heard him say any of that kind of stuff before. Was Claire right? Were all Grits the same?

The applause was cut off abruptly as Jim Henderson climbed to his feet. All eyes were on the tiny figure, really no taller than I was, as he eyed Rob, one finger thoughtfully stroking his thick mustache. Again, the room was silent, except for Chigger, who was enthusiastically licking a now empty plate.

Staring at Rob with a pair of eyes so blue, they almost seemed to blaze, Henderson finally thrust an index finger at him and commanded, “Get … that … boy … some … chicken!”

Cheers erupted as one of the women hurried forward to present Rob with a plate of fried chicken. I couldn’t believe it. Chicken. They were giving Rob chicken! Easy as that, he’d been accepted into the bosom of the True Americans.

Or was it possible that they knew something I didn’t? Like that Rob was maybe already a member?

Hey, I know it was a disloyal thought. And I didn’t believe it. Not really. Except that … well, it was kind of weird that he’d known exactly the right thing to say to get these freaks to believe we were on their side. And knowing what I did about his dad, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine there might be a few things Rob hadn’t told me … and I didn’t just mean what he was on probation for.

Rob stood there, smiling shyly as he was applauded. I couldn’t help it. I
had
to know. So I asked him, out of the corner of my mouth, “Where’d you come up with that horse shit?”

Rob replied, from the corner of his own mouth, “Public access cable. Would you get this chicken away from me before I barf?”

I grabbed the plate just as Rob was engulfed in a crowd of happy white supremacists, who slapped him on the back and offered him chews from their bags of tobacco. I stood there like an idiot watching him, the plate of chicken getting cold in my hands. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been. Of
course
Rob wasn’t one of them.

But it was scary how easily I’d been swayed into thinking he might have been. Prejudice runs deep. Grits and Townies, blacks and whites … you grow up hearing one thing, it’s hard to believe that something else might actually be true.

Hard to believe, maybe. But not impossible. I mean, look at Rob. He was nothing like your stereotypical Grit, gleefully chowing down on fried chicken while discussing the supremacy of the white race. Rob didn’t even
like
fried chicken. Who knows how long I would have stood there, admiring the genius of my boyfriend, if a voice at my elbow hadn’t gone, “Well, just don’t there stand there, girlie. Give that chicken to one of the men and then git on back to the kitchen fer more.”

I turned and saw a doughy-faced woman with a kerchief holding back her long blonde hair glaring at me.

“Go on,” the woman said, giving me a push toward one of the men’s tables. “Git.”

I got. I put the chicken down in front of the first man I saw—a gentleman who did not appear to have as many teeth as he did tattoos—then followed Kerchief-Head out a side door… .

Into the cold night air.

“Come on,” the woman barked at me, when I froze in my tracks, shocked by the sudden cold. “We gotta git the mashed potatoes.”

I followed her, thinking,
Well, at least this way, I’ll have a chance to look for Seth
. I knew he was here on the compound somewhere. I knew that he was no longer tied up or gagged, but locked into a small, wood-paneled room. That didn’t mean he wasn’t still scared, though. I could feel his fear around me like a second coat.

Kerchief-Head threw open the door to the ranch house. This, apparently, was where all the cooking was done. I could tell by the intoxicating odors that hit me as I came through the door. Chicken, potatoes, bread … it was a dizzying set of aromas for a girl as hungry as I was.

But when we got into the kitchen—which was crowded with other doughy-faced, long-haired women—and I tried to bogart a roll, Kerchief-Head slapped my hands.

“We don’t eat,” she said, harshly, “until the men’re done!”

Whoa
, I wanted to say.
Nice operation you got going here. If you’re a guy
. What is it with women like Kerchief-Head? I mean, why are they so willing to put up with that kind of treatment? I would way rather have no guy than some guy who tried to make me wait to eat until after he was done.

But I didn’t want to blow things with the True Americans, so I dropped the roll like a good white supremacist housewife and asked, “You got a bathroom around here?”

Kerchief-Head pointed down a hallway, but she didn’t look too happy about it. I guess she thought I was trying to shirk kitchen duty or something.

I’ll tell you something, those True Americans were pretty scary. Even their bathrooms were filled with racist propaganda. I couldn’t believe it. Instead of issues of
National Geographic
or
Time
magazine, like in a normal house, there was a copy of
Mein Kampf
to peruse while you were otherwise indisposed. Like these guys had totally missed the part where Hitler turned out to be a maniac or something.

When I was through in the bathroom, I looked up and down the hall to make sure Kerchief-Head or any of her cronies weren’t lurking around. Then I started testing doorknobs. I figured when I got to a locked one, that’s the one I’d find Seth behind.

It didn’t take me long. It wasn’t like the house was so big, or anything. The room they were keeping Seth in was way at the end of the hall, past the homeschooling room—instead of the old red, white, and blue, there was another one of those “Don’t Tread On Me” flags hanging in there. The door was locked, but it was one of those cheap button locks you only have to turn from the right side to undo. I turned it, opened the door, and looked inside.

Seth Blumenthal, tears streaming down his face, sat up in bed, and blinked at me in the semi-darkness.

“Wh-who are you?” Seth asked, hesitantly. “Wh-what do you want?”

How else was I supposed to reply? The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. I mean, I’d only seen the movie like seventeen times.

“I’m Luke Skywalker,” I said. “I’m here to rescue you.”

C H A P T E R
13

S
eth didn’t fall for the Luke Skywalker line. This was one kid you obviously couldn’t pull anything over on.

“No,” he said. “Who are you, really? You don’t look like one of them.”

I closed the door behind me, in case Kerchief-Head came looking for me. There was no light in the room, except the moonlight that came filtering in between the wooden boards that covered the windows—always a Martha Stewart “do,” boarding up your windows, by the way.

“My name’s Jess,” I said, to Seth. “And we’re going to get you out of here.” But not through those windows, I now realized. “Are you hurt anywhere? Can you run?”

“I’m okay,” Seth said. “Just my hand.”

He held out his right hand. It wasn’t hard to see, even in the moonlight, what was wrong with it. Somebody had burned a shape into it, between Seth’s thumb and forefinger. The burn was red and blistered. And it was in the shape of a coiled snake.

Just like the shape that had been carved into Nate Thompkins’s naked chest.

I knew now how they’d gotten Seth to tell them where to find the Torah.

And I wanted to kill them for it.

First things first, however.

“Six weeks hydro-therapy,” I said to him, “that puppy’ll be gone. Won’t even leave a scar.” I knew from my own third-degree burn, which had been roughly the same size, but which I’d received from a motorcycle exhaust pipe when I’d been around his own age. “Okay?”

Seth nodded. He wasn’t crying anymore. “That policeman,” he said. “The one they shot, back at the trailer. Is he okay?”

“He sure is,” I lied. “Now listen, I’ve got to get back to the kitchen before they notice I’m missing. But I promise I’ll be back for you just as soon as the shooting starts.”

“Shooting?” Seth looked concerned. “Who’s going to start shooting?”

“Friends of mine,” I said. “They got the place surrounded.” I hoped. “So you just hang in there, and I’ll be back for you lickety-split. Got it?”

“I got it,” Seth said. Then, as I started for the door, he went, “Hey, Jess?”

I turned. “Yeah?”

“What day is it?”

I told him. He nodded thoughtfully. “Today’s my birthday,” he said, seemingly to no one in particular. “I’m thirteen.”

“Happy birthday,” I said. Well, what else was I supposed to say?

I was just sauntering away from the newly relocked door when Kerchief-Head appeared.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded. One thing I had to say for the wives of the True Americans, they weren’t very polite.

“Oh,” I said, giving my ditziest giggle. “I got lost.”

Kerchief-Head just glared at me. Then she thrust a huge bowl of something white and glutinous in my arms. Looking down, I realized it was mashed potatoes. Only the True Americans, unlike my dad, hadn’t put any garlic in them, so the aroma they gave off was somewhat nondescript.

“Take this to the men,” Kerchief-Head said.

“Can do,” I told her, and headed out the door.

The big question, of course, was would it work. I mean, would Chick and his friends show up in time for us to get Seth out? And what about Dr. Krantz? Let’s not forget about him. The Feds had a major tendency to mess things like surprise attacks up, big time. Would Chick be able to get around whatever idiot scheme Dr. Krantz was probably, at this very moment, cooking up?

I hoped so. Not for my own sake. I didn’t much care what happened to me. It was Seth I was worried about. We had to get Seth out.

Oh, yeah. And kill every True American we possibly could.

I don’t normally go around wanting to kill people, but when I’d seen that burn on Seth’s hand, I’d felt something I’d never felt before. I am no stranger to rage, either. I get mad fast, and I get mad often. But I could never remember feeling the way I had when I’d seen that burn.

I’d felt like killing someone. Really killing them. Not breaking someone’s nose, or kicking someone in the groin. I wanted him to pay for branding that kid, and I wanted him to pay with his life.

And I had a pretty good idea who that someone was.

When I got back into the barn, everyone had calmed down from Rob’s little speech, and was busy chowing down again. Being the mashed potato girl, I was pretty popular. Guys kept on raising up their plates as I passed, holding them out for me to glop mashed potatoes onto. I obliged, since what else was I supposed to do? I got through it by pretending I was a prison guard, and all these guys were demented serial killers that I was mandated by the state to keep fed.

In the back of my mind, however, this mantra was playing over and over. It went,
Hurry up, Chick. Hurry up, Chick. Hurry up, Chick. Hurry up, Chick
.

When I reached Rob, I saw that he and Henderson were already well on their way to becoming best friends. Well, and why not? Rob would be a boon to any hate group. He was good-looking, great with his hands, and—though I hadn’t been aware of this talent until very recently—he was obviously a passionate and lucid orator. I had a feeling that, given enough time, Rob would have been appointed Jim Henderson’s right-hand man.

Too bad for the True Americans that it was all an act.

A good one, though. Claire Lippman would have been astounded by Rob’s theatrical flair. As I leaned over his chair to lump potatoes onto his plate, he didn’t even seem to notice me, he was so wound up in what he was saying … something about how the criminals in Washington were selling us out with something called GATT.

Wow. Rob had obviously been watching a lot more CNN than I had.

After piling some potatoes onto Jim Henderson’s plate—only for a second did I fantasize about pretending to accidentally drop them into his lap—I moved on to the rest of the table, trying not to notice as I did so a disturbing thing. There were lots of disturbing things to notice in that barn, but the one that I kept coming back to was the men’s hands. Each and every one of them had the same tattoo on the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of their right hand. And that was the coiled snake of the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. The same snake that had been on Nate’s chest. The same snake that had been burned into Seth’s hand. This was some fraternity, let me tell you.

It wasn’t until my bowl was almost empty that I felt the cold, wet nudge on one hand. I looked down and saw Chigger, his big brown eyes rolling up at me appealingly. Gone was the menacing growl and raised back hairs. I had food, and Chigger wanted food. Therefore, if I gave Chigger food, I would be Chigger’s friend.

I let Chigger lick what remained in the bowl.

I fully intended to go back to the ranch house kitchen and refill that bowl without rinsing it out first. In fact, I was headed toward the barn door to do just that when I noticed something that I didn’t like … that I didn’t like at all. And that was Kerchief-Head, over at Jim Henderson’s table, leaning down to whisper something in his ear. As she whispered I saw Jim glance around the room, until at last his gaze found me. Those piercing blue eyes stayed on me, too, until Kerchief-Head finished whatever it was she’d had to say and straightened up.