Gone (Gone 1)

Quinn shot a hard look at Edilio. “So why are you here?” he asked.

Edilio sighed and propped his shovel against the barrier. He wiped sweat from his face and looked around at the well-tended grounds. “My mom works here,” Edilio said.

Quinn smirked a little. “Is she, like, the manager?”

“She’s in housekeeping,” Edilio said evenly.

“Yeah? Where do you live?” Quinn asked.

Edilio pointed at the barrier. “Over there. About two miles down the highway. We have a trailer. My dad, my two little brothers. They had a bug, so my mom kept them home. Alvaro, my big brother, he’s in Afghanistan.”

“He’s in the army?”

“Special Forces,” Edilio grinned. “The elite.”

He wasn’t a big kid, but he stood so straight, he didn’t seem short. His eyes were dark, seeming almost without whites, gentle but not fearful. He had rough, scarred hands that looked like they belonged on another body. He held his arms slightly out from his trunk, hands turned palm forward just a bit, like he was getting ready to catch something. He seemed both completely still and yet ready to jump into action.

“This is stupid when you think about it. People on the other side of the barrier, they know what’s happened,” Quinn said. “I mean, it’s not like they haven’t noticed that we’re behind this wall all of a sudden.”

“So?” Sam asked.

“So they have better equipment and stuff than we do, right? They can dig a lot deeper, get under the barrier. Or go around it. Or fly over it. This is a waste of time here.”

“We don’t know how far down or high up the barrier extends,” Astrid said. “It looks like it stops a couple hundred feet up, but maybe that’s an optical illusion.”

“Over, under, around, or through,” Edilio said. “There’s got to be a way.”

“Kind of like when your folks came over the border from Mexico, huh?” Quinn said.

Sam and Astrid both aimed shocked looks at Quinn.

Edilio stood even straighter and, despite being six inches shorter than Quinn, seemed to be looking down at him. In a calm, quiet voice Edilio said, “Honduras is where my folks are from. They had to come all the way through Mexico before they even reached the border. My mom works as a maid. My father is a farmhand. We live in a trailer and drive an old beater. I still have a little accent because I learned Spanish before I learned English. Anything else you need to know, man?”

Quinn said, “I wasn’t trying to start anything, amigo.”

“That’s good,” Edilio said.

It wasn’t a threat, not really. And in any case, Quinn had twenty pounds on Edilio. But it was Quinn who took a step back.

“We have to go,” Sam said. To Edilio, he explained, “We’re looking for Astrid’s little brother. He’s…he needs someone to look after him. Astrid thinks he may be up at the power plant.”

“My father’s an engineer there,” Astrid explained. “But it’s about ten miles from here.”

Sam hesitated before asking Edilio to join them. It would annoy Quinn. Quinn wasn’t acting like himself, which wasn’t really strang

e, given what was going on, but Sam found it unsettling. Edilio, on the other hand, had kept his head together at the fire. He’d stepped up.

Astrid made the decision for him. “Edilio? Would you like to come with us?”

Now Sam was a little peeved. Did Astrid think Sam couldn’t take care of things? She needed Edilio?

Astrid rolled her eyes at Sam. “I thought I would cut to the chase and avoid more male posturing.”

“I wasn’t posturing,” Sam grumbled.

“How are you going to travel?” Edilio asked.

“I don’t think we should try to drive a car, if that’s what you mean,” Sam said.