One day the master arrives while Javier is out by the pool. He is a tall white man with silver hair and two young women that look like his daughters. Javier waves. He is a people person, that boy, always talking. The master frowns and says something to a man in a suit with a pistol on his hip. That night Javier’s mother is fired. A friend gets her a job at Walmart, working from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m., but three nights later sheriff’s deputies raid the store and take his mother to jail. At 5:00 a.m. deputies kick down the door to Javier’s apartment. His eldest brother, Ramon, manages to escape out a bedroom window, but Javier and Lupo are pulled screaming from their beds.
*
The next thing Simon knows they’re in the van. Somehow Flagg has found three bread trucks for the other children. They pull out in a cloud of dust, aware that reinforcements may be on their way. At the interstate they split up, the fantasy van heading west, the bread trucks going east, then splitting further. Flagg and Katniss ride ahead of Simon and the others, dirt bike engines throttled to three thousand RPM. Katniss rides one-handed, her injured arm dangling. They will have to see to her shoulder soon, before she bleeds to death, but if she’s weak or struggling, she doesn’t show it.
Simon sits in the back of the van, his eyes open but not really seeing. Louise holds a cold compress to his face, dabbing his brow. She sings to him in a low voice, as the Prophet sits on the cooler talking to Javier in Spanish. The words flow over Simon, because he is a submarine sinking down, impervious to the drama of the moment.
Later, Flagg will recount their victory in minute detail, how he flanked the surviving agents at the gate, while Cyclops laid down covering fire. After the men surrendered their weapons, Randall hog-tied them. In the main office he pulled the hard drives from the surveillance system while Cyclops threw open the cage doors. Parents were reunited with children. Most of you will have to set off on foot, Flagg told them. Hoof it. But if they spread out, slept during the day, and traveled at night, they should be able to avoid ICE patrols. There was no guarantee that they would make it, he said, but it was a shot. But if they trusted their children to him, he would make sure they all got out. That they got somewhere safe. Unbeknownst to Simon, calls had been made over the previous twelve hours. Trucks and drivers rallied. Safe houses arranged.
Outside the detention center, mothers hugged their sons. Fathers hugged their daughters. For better or worse, decisions were made. Crying children were put in vans, reaching for Mommy or Daddy. What impossible choices the people of this Earth are forced to make.
For Simon it was a waking dream.
They drive back roads to Marfa, elevation rising. The old Simon is dead. That coddled, innocent lamb obsessed with his own navel. Blood has been spilled. He has pulled the holy trigger, has shocked the foul ogre. There is no turning back. The war is on, and, as the Prophet tells him over Cracker Jacks and cheese, No one has ever won a war with words.
One day when humanity is extinct or reduced to feral tribes living in cave-side retreats, they will sing songs of everything we took for granted. Of mystical signals that flew by wind and burrowed under the ground, lighting up the darkness and cooling the air. Of filthy liquids pumped from the earth, heating the indoors and fueling our metal horses. Of humans traveling at unimaginable speeds over unthinkable distances. How we flew through the troposphere and spoke to people in far-off lands, as if by sorcery. Sweet waters could be chilled and turned into solids and eaten from sticks. Popsicles, they called them. Oh, the wonders of the Before Time, in which women on tropical continents sewed clothes that were then loaded on boats and shipped across oceans. So many riches. So much power. And all we had to do was decide.
Would we cleave together or cleave apart?
At a stoplight in Alpine, they wait with the engine idling. Outside the window a red tallboy dances in the breeze. GRAND REOPENING reads the sign. The plastic tube man curtsies and bows, throwing his arms in the air with rabid, Pentecostal fervor. Rationally, Simon knows its movement is driven by an electrical fan based at his feet, but viewed through the window of the van from a prone position, all Simon can see is the miracle of dance. A creature of pure movement, joyous, thin skinned, first ducking from sight, then springing into view.
It is 106 in the shade.
At some point, Louise returns to the front seat. She and Duane are inseparable now, it seems. The new Simon watches them idly, a thousand miles from his emotions. The combat adrenaline has worn off, bringing with it a crash of memories—Katniss shooting, the deputies dropping, and even though he himself used Taser rounds, the blast of the shotgun, the sight of the deputy flying backward, the act of shooting him, plays on an endless loop in his head. Somewhere nearby Jesus reveals himself to the faithful in a piece of toast. The sun outside is impossibly bright. Simon feels every rattle of the van in his soul. The wind whistles through him. That’s the thing about death that no one ever tells you. How alive it makes you feel when it happens to other people.