“Not yet. It's pretty open out here.” We'd driven far enough west that the rolling hills had flattened out and turned dusty with few buildings and more scrub than actual trees or bushes. We could hang back quite a ways and still not lose sight of them.
Then the truck turned off the state road into what looked like a field. I slowed our truck to a crawl and had an idea. “Hey, would you mind looking in the backseat for a set of binoculars? They'll be inside a hard case.”
Tarah unbuckled her seatbelt then leaned over the seat back to dig through the piles of stuff. I tried not to get distracted by how the denim of her jeans hugged all those curves she never had when we were kids.
“You mean these?” She held up a camouflaged plastic case. I nodded, and she flipped its catches open. “These are some serious binoculars. Stalk people much?”
I fought the urge to smile and almost won. “They're for deer hunting. Dad and I plan to go this year.” If he could manage to tear himself away from all those mysterious committee meetings he'd had to attend lately.
“Sure they are.” She removed the binoculars, made a face as she tested their weight in one hand, then resorted to using both hands to look through them. “I see the truck. It's stopping at some kind of building.”
I pulled over to the side of the road and squinted. The truck was half the size of my thumbnail at this distance. “Is it the camp?”
“I don't think so. Too small. More like a guard shack or something.”
“Okay. Let's find a parallel road to follow them on.”
We were lucky we were out in West Texas now with its flat, treeless desert-like geography. If we'd still been in East Texas, the rolling hills and dense pine trees would have blocked our view.
I found a long dirt road to turn onto that ran the same direction as the one the military truck had taken. Our path was probably someone's driveway running through a field half a mile away from the internment camp. If anyone showed up and asked us what we were doing on their property, we'd say we were lost.
“I see two buildings, big ones,” Tarah called out a few minutes later. “They're pulling up to them. I think it's the camp. There's a smaller tent-type building too, and a huge fence around the whole place with barbed wire on top.”
The problem with how open it was out here was that the visibility went both ways. Which meant if we could see the camp, then they could see us with binoculars too. We needed more cover.
I pulled over in the ditch on our right, hoping the slope of the dirt would at least partially hide our vehicle if anyone looked our way from the camp. “Come on, let's take a walk.”
We crossed the road then walked hunched over in the ditch closest to the camp, our shoes fighting the sandy dirt for a few minutes, till we found a mesquite tree. The tree wasn't much, its low, zigzagging branches bare for the winter and hazardous to get under with their thousand and one thorns. But at least we wouldn't be the tallest objects out here. I checked for snakes and cacti. Then we hunkered down near the twisted tree trunk, hiding as much of ourselves from view as we could.
“They've got a lot of guards,” she said, frowning as she passed me the binoculars.
I scoped out the camp. She wasn't kidding. In addition to the barbed wire-topped fence that must have been at least twenty feet high and surrounded the entire compound, they had two lookout stands at the double gate entrance, each with a guard posted, two more guards on the ground at the inner gate, and seven more spaced out along the fence. They were armed too, every guard holding a rifle in addition to side arms strapped to their outer thighs.
Strangely, though, none of the guards were facing in towards the prisoners. It was almost as if they only worried about an outside attack on the camp and not the prisoners themselves.
And then I realized why.
CHAPTER 5
I'd expected them to keep everyone locked up inside one of the buildings. Instead, the camp looked more like an old fashioned asylum for the insane, with zombie-like “patients” shambling around or seated on the ground.
The military truck pulled into the center of the camp yard and parked. The soldiers exited first, dragging out prisoners between them. But none of the prisoners from the truck seemed able to stand, their feet dragging behind them, so it took two soldiers to unload each prisoner. They set the prisoners half upright on their knees in the dirt in two long lines as more soldiers came out of the tent building to help, followed by someone in a white coat like a doctor might wear. I zoomed in more and noticed each new prisoner now had what looked like a nicotine patch on the side of their neck. Some kind of short term tranquilizer patch for the ride over to the camp? That must be how they kept the outcasts from using their abilities to get free before reaching the camp.
They were holding each new prisoner still on the ground while the guy in the lab coat gave the prisoner an injection of something in his or her upper left shoulder.
“Tarah, I think I found your dad.” Dr. Williams was on his knees on the ground and clearly struggling to talk to one of the soldiers. After a minute, the soldier pressed a black band around his neck, and another soldier came out of the tent to join them. The new guy spoke to Dr. Williams, reached into his coat, pulled out what looked like a wallet and studied something inside it.
“What’s happening? Is he okay?” Tarah asked.
“Yeah, I think so. They’re talking to him.” I froze. “Wait, they’re standing him up.”
Were they about to execute her father?
I held my breath as they steadied Dr. Williams on his feet.
Then they cut his zip ties, releasing his wrists, and led him over to one of the long metal buildings, where all three disappeared inside.
I told her what I saw. Her eyes widened with renewed terror.
“Relax,” I muttered, hoping I wasn’t about to lie to her. “If they’d wanted to hurt him, they wouldn’t have bothered to take him away first.”
Still, I kept my ears trained for any gunshots in the distance. Other than the occassional howling of the wind, it was so quiet out here I was pretty sure we’d hear if a gun was fired.
I checked the gated entrance more closely. “Looks like only one way in and out, through a front double gate system.” The place looked impenetrable. Even if someone managed to tunnel in through the sandy soil, guards would spot them in no time.