I open my mouth to ask him what he sees, what he hears. But then I hear it for myself.
Voices.
Someone is out on the road, beyond the boundary. I move closer to my husband, both of us squinting into the dark.
There are two people, two shadows on the road, and one of them is limping.
But they aren’t moving toward us, toward the gate. They’re moving away.
They’re trying to flee Pastoral.
THEO
Two people are shuffling through the dark along the edge of the road, where the tall cattail reeds creep up from the ditch.
I inch closer, trying to make them out, but my wife touches my arm—a firm, abrupt grip, stopping me. My feet have reached the very edge of the boundary and she doesn’t want me to go any farther. She shakes her head at me. Don’t go past the border, she says with her soft blue eyes. Even though I’ve done it many times before.
One of the men is dragging his left foot, a grating sound with each step as he pulls it behind him. And the other man has an arm wrapped around the injured one, helping him along.
These aren’t outsiders looking for a way into Pastoral.
These are men from our community, looking for a way out.
“Hey!” I call into the dark.
The two men stop—a quick shuddering halt—and both their heads swivel around, looking back up the road at Calla and me. They had probably thought they were far enough past the perimeter that they wouldn’t be seen—they must have crept through the trees on the far side of the boundary, the storm clouds blotting out the bright moonlight, then looped back to the road so they could follow it out of the mountains.
Maybe if I hadn’t heard them talking, whispering, I wouldn’t have noticed them. But now they stand like two cornstalks, afraid to move.
“Theo?” One of them calls back, voice deep, and I recognize it.
It’s Ash—Colette’s husband, and the father of the baby who clings to life in the birthing hut.
“Where you headed?” I ask, as if I didn’t already know. As if they weren’t dangerously far beyond the safety of our borders—although not nearly as far as I’ve walked. Not by a mile.
The leaves on the trees along the road seem to shiver in reply, bending this way and that in a sudden wind that dies just as quickly.
“We’re going to get help for my wife,” Ash answers. “For my child.”
At the gathering, Ash had spoken up, suggested that perhaps the road was safe and that someone might be able to make it to town. Levi had denied this request, but it seems Ash has no intention of sitting around and waiting for his child to drift away. He plans to do something about it.
“Who’s with you?” I ask.
I feel Calla tense her shoulders beside me—she doesn’t like this. Doesn’t like staring down the road at two people from our community who have broken the one unbreakable rule, the one I myself broke only days earlier. Her eyes dart to the trees, as if she could see the illness moving among the pines and settling like yellow, sticky pollen on the men’s skin.
“Turk is with me,” Ash answers back. “But he’s hurt. Fell over a log up in the trees. Twisted his ankle pretty good, could be broken.”
“You won’t make it down the road with a broken ankle,” I call back to the two men.
They are quiet, faces tilted to one another, speaking in low tones I can’t make out. “We can’t turn back now,” Ash answers finally. “Everyone will think we’re sick.”
Ash is a large man, broad shouldered and tall—he is the foreman for all construction projects within the community—but even at his size, he can’t drag another man through the woods in search of the nearest town. I’m not certain of the distance they’ll need to travel, but anything past the abandoned truck will be too far with an injured man. They’ll never make it.
“The others will think you’re sick even if you come back with medicine or a doctor,” I argue. “And they’d be right to think it.”
Turk adjusts his balance against Ash, trying to shift his feet but wincing at the movement. “But at least we’ll have brought back help for Colette,” Turk says, speaking for the first time.
I shake my head. “There might be nothing out there,” I say, remembering what Levi told me: that the world beyond our small forest might only be a husk of what it once was. No doctors, no medicine, no help to be found. The illness might have spread until it decimated everything—we might be all that’s left. “And even if there is,” I say. “You might die before you reach anything.”