The Maze (2 page)

In the cafeteria line for the evening meal, Killian ghosted up to him and whispered, “Your name is on the cigarettes.”

Rick had just reached for a fork and a spoon—there weren't knives—and placed them on his tray. He turned toward the voice. Killian was scuttling away like a crab. Rick looked around quickly, his heart in his throat.

A tray bumped him in the small of his back. “Keep moving, Tomatohead.”

He didn't think anyone around him had heard what Killian had whispered. But what did that matter? There were others in this cafeteria, right now, who were eyeing him like hyenas. He would never know who they were.

Your name is on the cigarettes
.

Killian wasn't one of them, he knew. Killian was just a fly on the wall.

Your name is on the cigarettes
. Everybody knew what that meant. One of the guards was offering two or three kids—seventeen-year-olds, probably—a pack of cigarettes each to beat him to within an inch of his life.

Officially the guards couldn't lay a hand on kids unless it was to restrain them. But when they wanted to hurt somebody it was easily done. Cigarettes were outlawed at Blue Canyon. When kids said, “I'd kill for a cigarette,” some of them weren't using a figure of speech.

Rick proceeded mechanically down the cafeteria line, not seeing, not hearing. Floyd, one of the kids working behind the counter, speared a slab of roast beef and made a joke about it being a piece of retread, but Rick didn't hear. He steered toward the table that looked the most open.

When would it come? He hunched over his food, put his hands up to the sides of his head as if he were already warding off the blows.

They wouldn't risk injuring themselves or leaving incriminating marks on their hands. They would use chair legs. All his weight training wouldn't help him, not in a situation like this.

It was only a matter of time until they caught him alone. He'd have to go to the bathroom. He might be sent to the basement to fetch something for someone. There were plenty of ways it could happen, plenty of places.

The guard in that area would take a walk. “Never heard a thing,” he'd insist afterward.

Run, he told himself. That's all you can do now. You can't make it to the end of your sentence. Six weeks is forever. The first beating won't be the last. They'll kill you dead.

Run
.

He hadn't eaten a bit. He slipped the fork and the spoon into the pocket of his jeans. Bent at right angles, he'd heard, they made hooks that made it easier to pull yourself over the fence.

Everybody knew how high the fence was. People took its measure every day: sixteen feet, counting three parallel strands of barbed wire on top that leaned in toward the compound.

Kids had escaped while he'd been there, one over the fence and three through the gate. One pretended he was a visitor walking out after lunch. The kid simply waved with supreme confidence and walked on through. Two others, a month apart, rushed the gate while it was open. The gate closed electronically and not very fast.

It was rare, though, for kids ever to get close enough to the gate to rush it. That wasn't going to happen anytime soon. It had to be the fence. People said that you used your jacket to cover the barbed wire, to help you get over the top.

It had to be tonight. The beating would probably come tomorrow.

It was deadly ironic, his name being on the cigarettes. Cigarettes had killed his grandmother. She'd told him when she was dying that it was the cigarettes.

Now it was safest to sit in the TV room, in the very middle of the pack. He was afraid of the edges. Hours went by, and he never got up to go to the bathroom. What programs came on, he couldn't have said.

Through a haze of fear and paranoia, he was trying to think. He was clutching at straws. Some of the kids in his unit had messed with the metal grate over the slot where the air conditioner was missing. Within the last few days they'd loosened the masonry screws from the outside. “Keeping their options open,” as they'd put it. Rick himself had never thought about escaping. Now he had to hope that the maintenance men hadn't discovered that the grate was loose and reattached it.

At 9:30
P.M.
the TV was killed as usual. Hyperalert, he filed into his unit with the others. At 10:30 Northcut called roll. Then lights out. He got under the sheet with his clothes on, tennis shoes too. It didn't seem as though Northcut had been watching him especially. Did Northcut know that the name of one of his kids was on the cigarettes? Maybe, maybe not.

Rick lay on his back with one hand up to his face as if to ward off a blow. He could hear the second hand on his watch ticking, ticking. Every few minutes he looked at the time. He was wishing that he'd played it all differently. Now was when he needed the protection
of a great big kid, an older kid, a mean, crazy guy that nobody would mess with even for cigarettes.

Half an hour after midnight it was deathly quiet at last. Though the night was warm, he slipped on his heavy flannel shirt. He reached under the bed for his red jacket. From under his pillow he took out the fork and the spoon. He bent them carefully at right angles to make grips the width of his hand.

He couldn't stand the tension any longer.
Go!

Northcut was dozing at his desk as usual. Rick went past the bathroom to the far end of the unit. Gently, he tried the bottom of the grate. It gave. Tentatively, he pushed it out. The top held but the bottom was free.

Inch by inch, feet first, he climbed out and dropped to the ground. He paused to tie the jacket loosely at his neck.

Looking all around, he crossed the bare patch where the garden used to be, then the threadbare lawn all the way to the fence. With his hooks, he began to pull himself up.

In half a minute he was high on the fence. He dropped the fork and the spoon. Now came the most difficult part, dealing with the wire. With his heart thundering, he hung on with his left hand while he loosened the jacket and placed it as best he could over the barbed wire.

Right leg up, right hand up. He took a deep breath, then made his move, kicking out from the fence and
swinging his right leg higher still while clawing with his hands.

Push down, vault the rest of the way up and over.

He felt a sudden pain at his cheekbone as he clawed for a grip in the chain links on the opposite side. He'd snagged his cheek on the wire, but he was over. That was the main thing. He tore his jacket free and lowered himself quickly down the other side. At last he felt the ground under his feet. Now what?

Run
.

Run where?

He had no idea.

He ran stumbling toward the lights of the interstate. The night was dark, lit only occasionally by the sweep of distant headlights. Behind him the horizon glowed with the greens, yellows, and reds of the neon aurora of Las Vegas.

He reached the on-ramp where a frontage road joined the highway, and he waited. Only three cars in twenty minutes, and they passed him by. Then he heard the chopping of the police helicopter from the direction of Blue Canyon. Northcut had made his middle-of-the-night bed check.

Now Rick could see the helicopter's beam swathing the flats and the arroyos he'd crossed. Just as he was about to bolt for the culvert that ran under the highway, a Nissan Pathfinder with Utah plates stopped for him.

Finally some luck.

The driver seemed very melancholy and possibly drunk. He accepted “up the road” as Rick's destination.

Rick kept his fingers pressed to his wound. It had bled only a little, and he'd blotted it with his red jacket as he ran. The man had seen the wound but hadn't asked about it.

In an hour or so Rick saw the
WELCOME TO UTAH
sign. The next sign posted the distance to Salt Lake City, 304 miles. He didn't know a thing about Utah, but he had the sudden premonition that he'd better get off the main highway at the next exit.

He walked miles in the dark down the side road. In the middle of the night there was virtually no traffic. Finally a shiny new Dodge Ram pickup with Colorado plates slowed to take a look at him.

The driver was around fifty, with a gray felt cowboy hat and a silver mustache. Rick guessed the man was returning home to Colorado. He was distinguished-looking, like Rick's image of a cattle rancher. The man asked where he was going. Rick's old smile came back to him—“a golden piece of the sun,” his grandmother used to call it. “Denver,” he answered, because it was the only place in Colorado he could think of. “My mother lives in Denver,” he added, because he could see this man expected a story.

“No bag?” the man asked a little suspiciously.

As convincingly as possible Rick replied, “Had it stolen.”

“Sorry to hear that,” the driver said as he leaned across and opened the passenger door.

The driver shifted quickly through the gears, up to the speed limit. “How'd you get the cut?”

“The guy who stole my bag did it.”

“Better get that sewed up…. I heard that if you wait past twenty-four hours you'll have a scar for life.”

“Well, I have to get to my mother's.”

“Does she know you're hitchhiking?”

“She doesn't even know I'm coming. I haven't seen her in a long time.”

Whenever he had to invent parent stories, it hurt. Rick turned his head away from the driver, pretended to sleep. Panic rolled over him like a tidal wave. He'd done it now. What would they do to him when they caught him? What would Judge Bendix do? Double his time? What would the guards and the kids do to him when they put him back in Blue Canyon? Why hadn't he been smart enough or brave enough to stay put and take his beating?

At last his weariness overcame his dread, and he drifted into a half sleep. He was vaguely aware of a stop for gas, of the man setting a box of chocolate donuts between them, and the sun coming up. His cheek throbbed all the while. He fell into a deeper sleep and didn't wake for hours. When he woke finally and checked his watch it was one in the afternoon.

“You slept like a mummy,” the driver told him.

Rick took a donut. “I felt like one.”

The man heard the news coming on and turned the radio up. It was a Las Vegas station, which made Rick nervous. The news was fading in and out; the truck was nearly out of range. At the end of the news it said that a fourteen-year-old male had escaped from the Blue Canyon Youth Detention Center. Rick's name was too garbled to hear, but you could make out some of his description: “…brown eyes, dark hair, five foot eight, one hundred and forty-five pounds…not considered dangerous…don't take any chances—notify the police.”

The man with the cowboy hat looked over at Rick, especially at the cut. A little nervously he joked, “That you?”

“Nope,” Rick told him.

For fifty miles or so, Rick thought the driver had believed him. But then, with his tank still half full, the man made a gas stop at a tiny desert town called Hanksville, Utah. Without anything being said, Rick had the feeling that the ride was over.

The man from Colorado was apologetic. “I don't know if that's you they're looking for, but I can't take the chance. You seem like a nice enough kid to me. If what you told me was true—about having your stuff stolen—you should call the police. They'll see you get to your mom's.”

Rick went around the side of the station to the men's
room. The knob turned, but the door wouldn't open, even with a push. As he turned away, he caught a glimpse of the front end of a Humvee sticking out from behind the station.

He'd read all about them in magazines, these overbuilt all-terrain vehicles. They were originally developed for the military, and they could rumble over anything in their way. This one, painted in camouflage grays, yellows, and reds like the colors of the surrounding hills, looked old enough and beat up enough to be actual military surplus. Now and then he'd seen newer models on the highway, though he'd never had the chance to inspect one up close.

As he turned the corner to take a look, there was a quick movement in the shade under the Humvee. A dog, suddenly aware of him, lifted its large head and jowls, bared its teeth, and growled horribly—a rust-colored pit bull. Rick took a step back.

In an instant the dog exploded snarling and barking from under the vehicle and raced at him.

Rick crouched and raised his hands to protect his throat; that's all he was going to be able to do. At the last second the pit bull pulled up short, yet it kept lunging at him while bristling, snapping, growling.

“Jasper!” a voice rasped. “Hold, hold!”

Fingers like claws at the back of Rick's neck dragged him backward. Over his shoulder he saw the grease-stained hand and the angry, angular face of the man in
coveralls who ran the gas station. He looked near sixty, with close-cropped gray hair and a chin sharp as a shovel. His face was tinged red by spidery blood vessels just below the surface.

“Git back under the Hummer!” commanded the man with a voice as harsh as a buzz saw.

Curling its lip at Rick, the pit bull slunk back under the vehicle, snarling all the while.

“What are you doing back here?” the man exploded.

“I—I just need the bathroom key.”

The gas station man jiggled the knob, then bumped the door open with his shoulder. “Was never locked,” he growled.

Nice guy, Rick thought. There was no doubt where the dog had come by its charming personality.

The man from Colorado was standing at the front corner of the building, flashing his credit card at the gas station man. Rick went inside the rest room. Someone had scratched in the mirror,
CLEAN YOUR REST ROOM, NUKE
.

He guessed that he'd just met Nuke. He was surprised someone hadn't added a comment about the dog.

The sink was filthy, but at least there was hot water and soap. The cut over his cheekbone looked red-raw, with swelling around the sides. He knew he had to clean it out thoroughly. He splashed warm water on his face, then made a paste in the palm of his hand with the dry
soap from the dispenser. On the wound it felt harsh, like gasoline.

Rick stepped outside hoping that his driver had changed his mind, but the Dodge pickup was gone. How was he going to get another ride? There was virtually no traffic here. He looked up and down the road, half expecting to see a patrol car pull into the station with lights flashing.

There was a new vehicle at the pump, a Ford pickup with a camper shell on the back and Arizona plates. The driver, a young, clean-shaven man wearing a Grand Canyon T-shirt, was putting the gas caps back on his dual tanks.

Rick paused at the front corner of the station, waited until the driver went inside to the counter. Neither of the men inside was aware of him. Rick had a desperate idea. There wasn't time to think about it. There was only time to act. Arizona sounded as good as the next place.

He darted to the back of the pickup and tried the camper shell's latch. It turned in his hand. Without hesitating he stepped to the bumper, climbed in the back, and closed the window behind him. The bed of the truck was crammed with coolers, milk crates full of groceries, propane bottles, all sorts of odds and ends.

He worked fast to move forward in the bed of the pickup. Rearranging milk crates, he managed to wedge himself between two large white coolers. The see-through from the cab into the bed was blocked by equip
ment. With any luck the driver would return to the truck without looking in the back or through the tinted windows along the sides of the shell.

It worked. For twenty or thirty minutes the pickup sped along the highway. Then it turned onto badly wash-boarded gravel. Rick kept peeking out the sides, trying to figure out where he was going. The truck was crossing flat mesas, crawling in and out of canyons. Had he just made another mistake? He had a bad feeling this wasn't going to get him anywhere that was going to help him. After several hours the road got so bad that he reached for a twelve-pack of toilet paper to sit on.

Five hours since the gas station, and still he hadn't seen a single indication of civilization. He wondered if he was in Arizona now. He thought of one of the kids in his unit, Manuel Garcia. A month before, Manny had left on a bus for Phoenix, Arizona. His aunt had a cafe there called Penny's Place, and Manny was going to work for her there, live with her family. Rick wondered what Manny and his aunt would say if he showed up at Penny's Place in Phoenix, Arizona. Would they take him in?

Why should they?

Southern California was right next to Arizona. Southern California was where his best foster family had moved to. He'd been close to going with them, being adopted too, and he knew it. He'd even been on their scouting trip to the southern part of the state. “Sure I'd
like to,” he'd overheard Mrs. Clark telling her husband that day at Disneyland. “Four of our own, and four adopted already. You know I'd like to, but it's a question of the straw breaking the camel's back.”

Would they be glad to see him?

Yes, sort of.

Would they keep him?

No.

Would they hide him?

No.

His life was a mountain to climb, and it didn't have handholds.

The pickup stopped. The driver got out of the cab, left the engine running. Rick was afraid the man was about to lift the back of the camper shell.

Instead he heard a click, then ten seconds later a second, identical click. He's locking the hubs, Rick realized, for four-wheel drive.

Half a minute later, with the lights on, the truck started down an incline so steep that everything in the back slid hard toward the front. This was steep, unbelievably steep. The driver was easing the truck down over sudden drops almost like stairs, creeping down the grade in the lowest of his gears.

When the pounding let up for a few seconds, Rick managed to peek out the side. It seemed like the truck was going over the edge of the world. As they passed through a slot in the rim of a cliff, the landscape far
below looked like nothing Rick had seen before in his life—a world of fantastically sculpted stone palely lit by the last daylight and strange beyond imagining. It looked like an alien planet.

He wedged himself back into his slot, fought off the crush of a cooler. It took ten minutes for the driver to crawl down the switchbacks to the bottom of the grade. On the flats the driver shifted gears and picked up a little speed. It was getting dark. They were approaching the first of a string of tall buttes, lined up straight as office buildings on a street and silhouetted against the first stars. Where on earth was this?

He was hungry, so hungry. Lifting the lid of the nearest cooler, one of the large white ones, he lurched back in surprise. He was looking into the glazed dead eyes of a baby cow—a half-frozen black-and-white little calf, not gutted or anything. The calf had just been thrown whole into this cooler with some dry ice.

His mind reached for rational explanations but couldn't find any. His heart was hammering out of control like the valves were going to burst. He tried another of the big white coolers. Another dead calf. “Weirdness,” he whispered, trying to hold back a cold flash of terror.

The truck stopped. The driver killed the engine and got out.

Rick knew he was going to have to run for it now. His eyes landed on a pack of hot dogs on top of a grocery bag. Grab them, he told himself. You're going
to need food. Then he saw that the whole bag was filled with hot dogs. What would anyone want with this many hot dogs?

He took just one pack. Through the window now he could see two men talking, the driver and a slim man with a full beard.

Rick eased the rear window of the camper shell up, slid over the tailgate, crouched, and peeked at the silhouettes of the two men. They were standing in front of three canvas wall tents erected in a row on wood platforms. A large tarp had been pitched across from the tents over an area Rick couldn't see. He saw a white fiberglass kennel cage, but he didn't see a dog. He'd had enough of dogs for one day. A second Ford pickup with a camper shell was parked next to a large fuel drum on a metal stand. This was quite an encampment.

The two men, Rick realized, must be about to unload the groceries and the dead calves. He had to make his move now.

Keeping the truck between him and them, Rick stepped softly into the darkness on the pavementlike natural surface of sandstone. A gigantic rock formation nearby, like a petrified ship in a petrified sea, promised cover.