Page 55 of Chaos
Rey comes back empty, and we load back up in silence.
The second drop spot is in a burned-out trailer home a few miles away that looks like the kind of place my mommight have grown up, weeds on either side of a dirt track, a crumbled front porch with a sagging, stained sofa, a roof that’s got more cracked and missing tiles than good ones.
Again, Jacquetta stays in the truck while Rey, Kelly, and I circle to the back where a cracked bird feeder hangs from the gnarled branch of a leafless tree. She reaches inside and pulls out a roll of papers.
We don’t speak again until we get to the truck.
“You ride up front,” she says to me, tugging at the rear door.
She sits in the back, her face and flashlight concealed by Kelly’s jacket, and reads as Jacquetta drives.
It all corroborates everything we’ve heard so far.
General Orr is growing a huge army. Everyone over age fourteen serves in the army. Anyone caught attempting to desert is arrested and killed. There are rumors about public hangings, feeding people to gators, and forced breeding requirements.
The only new information is that there was an offshoot of people out of DC stationed in Norfolk, and General Orr had them all brought back to Charleston as prisoners. “They were paraded through the streets and hanged,” Rey reads.
I take it in silently. It sounds like what Colleen was worried about, societies without due process, leaders unchecked.
A set of round glowing eyes gleam from the bushes behind the school as we pass. A mountain lion? A fox? The forest gets closer to the road every season. At some point, the branches will hit the cars when we try to cut through.
It would make it safer up here.
We get close to the neighborhood with the solar panels, shiny and that odd iridescent purple gleam in the moonbeams.
And this time, it registers for me.
It’s not a fancy neighborhood. This was a poor area, all of West Virginia generally, most of Appalachia, this townspecifically. Most people here would have worked for the state prison, Thornewood itself, or commuted the hour plus to Roanoke.
And it’s not just one house.
It’s all of them.
“Slow down,” I tell Jacquetta, and she does.
Rey falls silent. The penlight flicks off with a click.
Kelly lowers her jacket and shucks it back over her shoulders. “You see something?”
“Maybe. Turn right,” I say.
Jacquetta does, and the truck swings toward the solar panels. Less than a hundred yards now. More rooftops come into view.
“Why have solar panels here?” I murmur.
She pulls the truck to a stop beside a holly tree.
I tug open the door, and climb out, back into the eerie silence, the biting cold, my breath thick white clouds that seem to linger far too long.
Rey and Kelly climb out beside me.
The area is clear. No fallen trees. No vines draping the power lines, and the power lines, now that I’m looking at them, don’t look like the city put them up. They look like someone moved them recently and did a poor job of it. Thick black cords run from one roof to another, tangled and sagging heavily.
I jog over to one of the dilapidated houses, cheap windows, flimsy siding, cracked concrete sidewalk, overgrown with weeds. I check the crooked front steps. They’re dusty.
I peer in the window. Also dusty.
But the road is clear.