Mariah didn’t stir. Tegan nudged her harder. “Come on! Mariah!”
Still nothing. Exasperated, Tegan jabbed Mariah’s ribs several times with the toe of her shoe, hard. “Mariah!”
When the other girl refused to budge, Tegan leaned back against the wall as best she could and brought her knees up to her chest, resting her forehead on them. Quietly, she snarled, “Tony, you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do when we get out of here. Mark my words.”
T
he boys and Marshall scouted the fork in the road, praying with every fiber in their being to find a hint that would tell them which way the girls’ abductors had gone. They searched for trash recently thrown out of a window, a piece of fabric, anything at all. They had no luck. Marshall had parked the Mustang on the side of the road so it wouldn’t be in the way of other drivers. That seemed unlikely though, as no other vehicles came by.
“Where do both of these lead?” Kody asked, stepping onto the right side of the fork and stomping on it as if the road would suddenly open up and a huge flashing arrow would point them in the right direction.
Aari scratched his forehead, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “Gimme a sec while I open the map and—”
He stopped himself when he saw Marshall pull a physical map out from his cargo pants and unfold it with a serious expression; it looked exactly like the one he’d held out to them the evening he’d tossed the smoke bomb into their car. The Sentry studied it for a few moments. When he noticed that the boys had gone completely silent, he looked over at them. “What? You can’t have too many of these, right?”
The trio stared at him as if he’d just sprouted four extra arms and a tail. Aari slowly slipped his phone back into his pocket. “Not sure how quick and effective that will be, but okay . . . ”
“Deming, Deming . . . ” Marshall scanned the map. “Here we go. If we keep heading north, the next major town is Silver City. If we were to take the road to the right and head east, we’ll hit a town called Hatch.”
“Which way would they have gone, though?” Jag asked, fiddling with the crucifix around his neck.
“Well . . . ” Marshall pulled the map closer to his face, but Kody caught sight of Aari impatiently whipping his phone back out and furiously tapping away at the screen.
“Okay, look,” the redheaded boy said, “to the right we have a long, mostly empty stretch with houses that are really spread out. It looks pretty bare, actually.”
“Wouldn’t that make sense?” Kody asked, staring down the right fork. “If they wanted to keep the girls out of sight, they would have taken them to somewhere secluded and out of the way, right?”
“Possibly,” Jag said. “But that’s not for sure.”
Kody snorted. “Do we have anything better to go on?” He turned to Marshall. “What do you think?”
Marshall lowered his map, then nodded slowly as he folded the chart. “We need to cast the net as far and wide as we can, so why not? They’ve only got an hour’s lead on us.”
“Hold on,” Aari interjected. “What are we gonna do? Go knocking door to door and ask if there are a couple of kidnapped girls inside?”
“You’re forgetting something, smart guy,” Kody said. “My hypersenses. I’m sure I’ll be able to hear them or pick up a scent if they’re within range. And remember, Tegan uses that lavender-lilac shampoo her mom makes—don’t look at me like that, I’m not being creepy, it’s just a unique fragrance—so I should be able to pick it up.”
“Oh, good, I forgot we had our own bloodhound.”
The four of them hurried back to the car. When they came to the fork, Marshall took the right-hand road.
“Hey, Marshall,” Kody said, leaning to the front of the car, “what are
your
powers?”
“My
abilities
, Kody, will perhaps be revealed in time. They’re definitely useless right now, anyway.”
Kody, though wanting to question the Sentry further, chose not to. They drove for a bit, then stopped near the first cluster of houses that came into view. “Man, this place could do with a facelift,” Kody observed. “Let me out here.”
Marshall stopped the car and Kody hopped out of the back. Quickly but light-footed, he ran to the first house, listening and trying to pick up scents. All he got was the smell of stale food somewhere inside the building and diesel fuel from the trucks parked in the yard. As for his ears, they picked up three distinctive snores from within the household. At one point he caught the howling of coyotes but quickly came to the realization that the animals were some distance away. He even heard the flutter of a bird’s wings but that wasn’t nearby, either.
He moved swiftly, raking through each residential building with his senses, but none housed Tegan and Mariah. He loped back to the Mustang and jumped in beside Aari. He shook his head at the others and sighed. “I wish my enhanced vision would let me see through walls. It would make this a lot easier.”
“Wouldn’t that be something,” Aari muttered. “Not sure Jag’s cousin would appreciate it the next time she comes to visit, though.”
Kody punched Aari in the arm as Jag let out a short snort of laughter—it was known that Kody fancied Jag’s older cousin. Even Marshall was amused despite the gravity of the situation.
At the next set of intermittently placed houses, Kody was out of the car before the vehicle had come to a full stop. He went around sniffing and listening once more, and had to scale a couple of pitiful fences. The thought of being caught intruding on private land didn’t even occur to him—he wanted to find his friends and that was all that mattered.
At the last house, he quietly crept around the side but paused mid-step. A large bulldog was chained to a tree, fast asleep. Though Kody’s experiences with these types of dogs had been positive, he only did a three-second scan of the house before tiptoeing all the way back to the car.
“They’re not here, but there’s a pooch in the back that could wake up any moment,” he said to the others.
“Must be nearly deaf if it didn’t hear the car come up in the first place.” Marshall put the Mustang in drive. “All the same, let’s move out before it does decide to get up and wake the entire neighborhood.”
They continued for over an hour, Kody repeating his methods with the other houses along the road. There were a few long stretches where there were no buildings at all. In some areas, Marshall had to go onto dirt roads to check out the homes that were more remote. They kept the search going until they approached the town of Hatch, where traffic slowly began to build.
When they arrived at Hatch, Kody was done in. The anxiety and the exhausting search, coupled with the lack of sleep had all but completely drained him.
Not wanting to drive further into town, Marshall dolefully pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned on his hazard lights.
Jag banged his head with his fist. “They’re. Not. Here.”
“Maybe they took the road that led north to Silver City,” Kody said wearily.
“If they did, then they’ve got at least two hours on us.” Jag turned around to face Kody. “Are you a thousand-percent sure you didn’t miss anything?”
Kody was defensive. “My senses work just fine. If the girls were there, I would have picked up something. I want to find them as much as you guys, so why wouldn’t I have searched properly?”
The hardness in Jag’s look dissipated. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Aari ran a hand through his hair. “Let’s think this through. Why would they drive all the way out to Deming, New Mexico—a place that’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere—just to pass through it if their destination wasn’t nearby? I think they were closing in on their final stop not far from here. Their destination must lie either on this road or the other. When was the last time they stopped for gas?”
“Gila Bend, where Gwen refueled as well,” Marshall answered.
Aari looked down at his phone. “Okay, that’s nearly five hours from their last fuel stop, but if they were making good speed, it would have taken them three and a half hours, maybe four to get to Deming. A midsized car like that would run for about six hours on a full tank at the speed they were doing. That would put them within a hundred to a hundred-fifty-mile radius of Deming.”
Kody looked lost. “So?”
“
So,
that means it’s very likely that they’re not far from here. They would have around two hours’ worth of gas left. Our search grid should be, as I said, within a hundred or a hundred-fifty-mile radius.”
“They wouldn’t have used this road to go past Hatch, then,” Marshall said slowly.
“Don’t think so. The road to Hatch leads to Canam Highway, and Canam actually merges with the highway all of us traveled on. It would be really dumb to use this route when they could have just stayed on the original highway. Their destination can’t be too far from here.”
“Back toward Deming we go, then.” As Marshall turned the car around, he added, “Great deduction, Aari.”
Kody took notice of Aari looking a bit surprised and even pleased by the praise, though he didn’t respond to the Sentry.
Marshall floored it all the way back to the fork and continued on North Gold Avenue this time. Kody, although worried sick about the girls, couldn’t hold back a large and noisy yawn. Aari and Jag yawned shortly after him.
“If you guys need to grab a nap, feel free to do so,” Marshall said. “You’re gonna need your energy.”
“You can probably expect Kody to pass out, but not Aari or me,” Jag said thickly.
“I’m not going to,” Kody grumbled. “I may be tired, but if you think I can sleep with Tegan and Mariah missing, you’re mistaken.” He slouched down in his seat. “I just hope we find them sooner rather than later. If something horrible happens to them, so help me God I’ll make someone pay. We’re family and you never, ever mess with family.”
A
shrill cry of devastation severed the peace and quiet of the house. “
Hugo!
”
Hugo Sanchez scrambled upright in his bed as his wife came barreling into their room. He yanked off the blanket and nearly fell in his haste to push away from the mattress. He rushed to hold her. “Julia! What—”
His wife curled his nightshirt into her fists and wept against his chest. She was still in her sleepwear and her hair fell messily around her shoulders. “The crops, Hugo . . . they’re . . . they’re all
dead
.”
Hugo guided her to the edge of the bed and sat her down. His first instinct had been to hurry outside and take a look for himself, but he knew that he needed to keep Julia calm for the sake of her health. “They’re not really gone?” he asked as he passed her a tissue.
She took it from him, hand shaking. “They are. I—I woke up a few minutes ago, before the alarm was set to go off. Something didn’t feel right, I don’t know what it was. I went outside with the dog and . . . and I saw the crops, completely destroyed. I couldn’t believe it, Hugo, I just couldn’t.” She had wiped her tears away but more still spilled down her cheeks. “The outbreak got us after all.”
Hugo gently rested his hands on either side of her face and leaned over to kiss her forehead, resting his lips against her for a few moments. Julia shut her eyes and wrapped her arms around herself.
“Let me take a look,” he said softly. “Rest,
meu amour
, catch your breath. I won’t be long.”
She opened her eyes slightly and nodded. Hugo rubbed her shoulders gently before walking out of their room. He grabbed a light jacket as he slipped his sandals on. The couple’s Labrador was curled by the front door and stared up at him with big brown eyes as he approached. Gently shooing her away from the entrance, he pulled the door open and stepped outside.
It was six in the morning and the air was only a little crisp. He could see from afar that the wheat stalks were plainly visible and standing.
Julia’s mistaken
, he thought as he walked toward the crops. However, as he neared the field, it became clear that his wife was right after all. The stalks may have been untouched, but the heads of the wheat were gone. He quickened his steps and strode along the tramlines in the field. All of the wheat heads—ripe and ready for harvest—were gone. Distraught, he kept walking.
It looked as if the stalks had been cut off right below the heads. Hugo crouched down to see if the heads had fallen but only found fine, yellow-green dust covering the soil by the bottoms of the stems. He picked up a handful and let it fall from between his fingers before standing up. What kind of an ungodly infection could cause such destruction? He slowly turned around, taking in all of his lost crops, before continuing down the tramline in a daze.
His feet carried him mechanically through the field. He extended his arms, letting them brush each and every stalk that he passed. He didn’t look left or right and watched, uncomprehendingly, as the rising sun cast its golden tint onto the land below, illuminating the ruined wheat field with a surreal glow. It was both strangely beautiful and appallingly devastating.
The sun doesn’t care that whatever its rays touch have been ruined
, Hugo thought as he fought against the mounting lump in his throat.
This can’t be really happening
.
Our crops cannot all be gone.
He carried on with his arms reaching out, gently bending the stems and letting them bounce back upright once he’d passed. His hopes of seeing even one stalk of wheat that still carried its head were cut down soon enough. There was nothing salvageable.
He combed his fingers through his gray hair as he came to a stop. What were he and Julia supposed to do now? More importantly, how was he going to comfort his wife? She was particularly sensitive to stress and did not respond well to anxiety. He needed to be strong for her above everything else. He needed to show her that they would be able to pull through this dreadful situation.
When he returned to the house, he headed straight for the kitchen where Julia was making breakfast for the two of them. He could tell that she was doing everything in her power to distract herself but there was tautness in her face, showing that she could not push her fretfulness aside.
She heard him enter and turned around to look at him. Hugo did what he could to put on a smile for her, but she saw right through him and found the shattered man behind the futile mask. Tears spilled anew from her eyes and she leaned back against the counter, hiding her face from him. Her body lurched violently with what Hugo thought were sobs, but he realized in terror that she was actually gasping deeply for breath. Her hands slid down to her chest and she pierced his gaze with a frightened stare before collapsing onto the floor. Her wheezes and her weeping sounded like a haunting call to Hugo’s ears.