The Chosen One - Carol Lynch Williams Page 0,52

Mobile Library on Wheels, I can hear books sliding this way and that as I drive along this pot-holed road. My hands are clenched so tight they feel frozen. And in my head, right behind Patrick’s voice, there is a small pain, growing.

“Is that where they’ll shoot me?” I say.

“You’ll be fine,” Patrick says. “Just fine.”

Beside me, Brother Laramie has rolled down the window. He calls out. “Kyra,” he says. “Sister Carlson.”

I refuse to look at him.

“Patrick?” I say. “Patrick?”

“Pull on over, girl,” Brother Laramie says. “You don’t have much gas.”

He’s right. I can see that on the control panel. Looking down causes me to almost hit the God Squad’s car. They drop back some.

“Slow and steady wins the race.” This is Mother Sarah’s voice. Telling me the tortoise and the hare story. In my head I see her standing near to Patrick. And then there’s Father.

“Run, Kyra. Get out of here. Get free.” His voice is as soft as the other two, but the words are more urgent.

“I’m trying, Father,” I say, gripping the steering wheel.

I speed the van up. Go a little faster. In the distance I can see the sun turning the sky a clear blue.

“Drive to town,” says Joshua.

Joshua’s here!

“I am,” I say.

I’m nowhere near where they stopped us before, where they stopped Patrick and me before, when the phone lets out a little singsong sound. I see it there in the cup holder, all lit up.

“It can’t be,” I say.

“Pull over, Kyra,” someone yells out at me.

But that is all the time I have for them in the car next to me.

I’m careful when I dial. Careful when I push the speaker button on the phone. Careful when I set the phone back into the Big Gulp cup holder.

“This is nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

“I’m running away,” I say.

“Please speak louder.”

Under my hands, the steering wheel shakes as I drive over the washboard dirt road.

“Stop the vehicle now.”

I glance at Brother Laramie. I can just see Brother Nelson. And a gun. He has a gun!

“Help me.” My voice is loud.

I don’t want to die.

(Patrick didn’t want to die either. He had a wife and a son.)

“They have a gun,” I say. “They have a gun.” Will I get this far and follow Patrick?

“Where are you?”

I tell the woman that I’m heading toward town. What I am driving.

“You’re in a mobile book van?” she says.

Brother Laramie points to the side of the road with the gun.

I pretend like he’s not there.

“They’ve killed people already,” I say. I tell her Patrick’s name. Give them Ellen’s name, too, though they wouldn’t know her. “If I stop, they’ll kill me. I know it.”

“I’m sending help,” the woman says. “We have an officer in the area.”

Out here? Out here in the middle of nowhere?

“Keep talking to me,” she says.

I’m not sure if I can drive faster and talk at the same time, but I push the van forward. The light on the control panel comes on with a ding, letting me know I am almost out of gas.

“Who are you?” the operator asks.

I can’t say anything. Just hold the wheel.

“Kyra,” Patrick says in my head. “Tell her that. Tell her where you live.”

“The Chosen Ones,” I say. “I’m part of The Chosen Ones.” It sounds like my voice is trying to escape from me.

She talks to someone else, calling for backup.

The Hummer keeps pace beside me.

Tears splash down my face. I didn’t even realize I was crying.

My hands hurt.

The pain in my head, the place where they’ll shoot me if I stop, intensifies.

Brother Laramie sticks the gun out the window. He fires at the back of the Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels. I hear the bullet rip through metal. I scream.

“Hold on,” the operator says. “Hold on. I have someone coming for you.”

And just as she says it, I see flashing lights headed in my direction.

THE POLICE CARS, two, three, four of them, roar past and stop Brother Felix, who is in his police cruiser (how did I miss him back there?), and both Hummers that followed me. They are all stopped, pulled out of their cars, and while I’m watching, handcuffed.

I’m swept to a police car where a woman officer looks so angry when she sees my face that she makes her partner wait before they talk to me.

“You’re not going back there, O’Neil,” the man cop says.

“The hell I’m not,” she says. “I’m sick of what this community is doing to these children.”

I watch her march in the