Will put on active duty. ATL.
“Daddy!” a little girl screamed with excitement. “Daddy!”
Sara watched a child running across a clearing. She guessed by the girl’s wriggling movements that she was around five, possibly six years old. Her fine motor skill hadn’t yet gotten the hang of running at speed. She fell, but quickly pushed herself up again, giggling. The child was wearing a plain white dress that swept down to the ground. The collar was buttoned to her neck. The sleeves stopped just below her elbows. Her blonde hair was down to her waist. Sara did not feel so much like she was stepping back in time as walking onto the set of a Laura Ingalls Wilder adaptation.
She glanced around the clearing, which was roughly the size of a basketball court. There were eight more one-room cabins tucked into the trees. These were larger than her nighttime cell, with windows and Dutch doors, stone chimneys. They felt permanent, but impermanent at the same time. Women sat in chairs peeling corn and snapping beans. Some were sweeping the dirt patches in front of their cabins. Others were cooking in large pots or boiling laundry over open fires. All of them had long hair piled onto the tops of their heads. No highlights or color in sight. No make-up. They wore simple, white, long-sleeved dresses with high collars. No jewelry except for gold wedding bands.
No faces that were not white.
“Sweetpea!” Dash scooped up the little girl with his good arm. He held her on his hip as he walked ahead of Sara. “Where is my kiss?”
The girl pecked him on the cheek like a bird.
“Daddy!” another little girl screamed. Then another. In all, five more girls ran toward Dash and threw their arms around his waist. Their ages ranged from the five-year-old in his arms to a teen who couldn’t be more than fifteen. They wore the same long, white dresses. The younger girls kept their hair down, but the fifteen-year-old wore hers in a bun like the older women. She gave Sara a wary glance as she wrapped her arms around Dash’s waist.
Six children in total, all calling him father. Two were clearly twins, but the rest either belonged to different women or to a single mother who had been pregnant or nursing for sixteen of the last twenty years of her life.
“Sir?” a young, clean-cut man called from the other side of the clearing. The juxtaposition was jarring. Like the sentry, he was dressed in all black, a rifle over his shoulder. Unlike the sentry, he was barely out of his teens. He could’ve been a Boy Scout or a school shooter. He told Dash, “The team is back from the mission, brother.”
Mission?
“All right, my little ladies.” Dash extricated himself from his children. They all dutifully lined up to give him a kiss on the cheek. The older girl was the only one who didn’t seem happy about it. She gave Sara another wary glance. It was hard to tell whether she was being protective of her father or just embarrassed the way teenage girls were always embarrassed.
Dash told Sara, “Dr. Earnshaw, please excuse me. My wife will be with you momentarily.”
Her eyes followed him as he walked up a steep hill. In the light of day, she thought Dash was older than she’d initially guessed, probably mid-forties. He had one of those baby-faces that made his age hard to pin down. Actually, everything about him was hard to pin down. His relentless pleasantness made him inscrutable. Of all human emotions, anger was the fastest and most direct way to communicate emotion. Sara did not want to be on the receiving end of Dash’s true feelings if he ever exploded.
“I’m hungry!” one of the little girls announced. There was much giggling as the children trundled off like kittens, falling over themselves, tripping, pushing and pawing—except for the oldest one, who offered another wary glance as she stomped off toward the cooking area.
Sara tried to catch her eye, but the teenager was having none of it. She watched the little girls instead. They were spinning in circles, trying to make themselves dizzy. They made Sara think of her niece, which made her think of her sister, which made her consider the dominoes that had probably started to fall since she’d last seen her mother standing in the street holding Bella’s shotgun. Tessa would be flying in from South Africa. Eddie would’ve immediately driven up from Grant County. Bella would be too high-strung to host them at her house. They would all end up at Sara’s apartment, which meant that Will would become displaced.
Sara felt her earlier weepiness return.
Her parents would overwhelm him. He would worry about saying the wrong thing, which would make him say even more wrong things, then Cathy would snap at him and Eddie would try to smooth it over with a bad pun, but Will didn’t understand puns because dyslexia was a language-processing disorder, so instead of smiling or even laughing to break the tension, Will would tilt his head to the side and give that puzzled look, which would make her father wonder what was wrong with him, and Sara’s only hope was that Tessa’s flights wouldn’t take more than twenty-four hours because her sister was the only person on earth who could rescue Will from their parents.
Sara blinked away tears. She tried to fill her brain with practical information. Will would come for her. She knew that as a fact. He would need to know what he was dealing with in order to work out a plan.
She scanned the woods. Sara hadn’t noticed before, but there were at least six armed men sitting in deer stands up in the trees. What were they guarding? Surely not Sara. Were they trying to keep people out or hold them in? Inside the clearing, Sara counted eight adult women and thirteen children from the ages of three to fifteen. There were eight cabins and a long, low bunkhouse that sat at twelve o’clock. Dash had disappeared over the top of the hill. She assumed there were more cabins, more men, women and children, and likely even more guards.
Why?
Her attention was pulled away from the question by a child screeching in delight. They were playing hide-and-seek. Dash’s youngest girl covered her eyes and started counting. The rest of the girls scattered off into the forest or down cleared paths. Five meandering lanes spoked off the clearing. The tree canopy was thick, shadowing the cabins. A helicopter or plane might fly overhead without noticing the Camp. Sara wondered if the buildings were part of a former homesteader settlement. The area looked untouched. Many of the trees had thick trunks, indicating old growth.
Based on her time in the van, Sara made the educated guess that she was still in Georgia. Eddie Linton had dragged his family on many camping trips into the mountains, but that didn’t help narrow down her location. If anything, it expanded Sara’s sense of isolation. The Chattahoochee National Forest was comprised of almost 800,000 acres and spanned eighteen counties. Two thousand miles of roads and trails. Ten wilderness areas. Springer Mountain in Blue Ridge was the starting point for the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, which ended at the tip of the country in Maine.
Coyotes and foxes roamed the area. Venomous snakes hid under rocks and alongside the water. Black bears moved higher into the range during the summer months, foraging for fruits and berries.
Sara watched two children picking apples from a tree.
“I’m Gwen.” The woman who walked up to Sara was probably in her early thirties, but she looked worn past her years. Her face was drawn. There was no color in her skin. Even her eyes had taken on a depleted dullness. “I’ve been told you’re a doctor.”
“Sara.” Sara offered her hand.
Gwen looked confused, as if she’d forgotten how to meet another person. She reached out tentatively. Like Sara, she was sweating. Her palms were calloused from work.
Sara asked, “You’ve had a measles outbreak?”
“Yes.” She wiped her hands on her apron as she started to walk. She was leading Sara toward the long bunkhouse in the distance. As they got closer, Sara could see that solar panels were on the roof. There was an outdoor shower, a sink basin.
Gwen said, “The outbreak started six weeks ago. We tried to quarantine, but it kept getting worse.”
Sara was not surprised. Measles was one of the most contagious diseases known to man, carried on sneezes, coughs, breaths. Simply being in a room for up to two hours after an infected person had left still put you at risk of catching the disease. Which was why it was critically important to vaccinate as many healthy children as possible.
Sara asked, “How many were infected?”
Gwen’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Two adults. Nineteen children. Eleven are still quarantined. We lost—we lost two of our little angels.”
Sara tried to tamp down her anger. Two children dead by a disease that had been successfully eradicated from the United States almost two decades ago. “You’re sure it’s measles and not German measles?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m a nurse. I know the difference between rubeola and rubella.”