He felt the slow rise and fall of her chest against his. She was alive but unconscious.
Their transport creaked and rocked. He heard the clop of hooves against dirt. He realized they had been placed in the wagon and were being taken . . . somewhere.
His head ached terribly. He couldn’t remember much of what had happened, but he thought someone had smacked him hard with a blunt object. He felt a painful knot throbbing on his skull.
He tried to sit up. Although Amiya lay atop him, he felt restraints on his limbs: cold metal on his wrists, and something binding his legs at the ankles, too. Chains?
As he attempted to move, Amiya stirred, too. She lifted her head. Her gaze found his. A fearful confusion shone in her eyes.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Nick?” Her breath was hot against his cheek. “What happened?”
“We were ambushed, I think. Must’ve been that guy we saw, and someone else.”
“Are these . . . chains?” She looked downward at her hands. “Oh my God.”
“We’re in the wagon, with the wood. Let’s try to sit up.”
She adjusted her body to give him space to maneuver and winced. “My head . . . it’s killing me.”
“We both took blows.” Straining, fresh sweat popping out of his face, he forced himself upright into a sitting position.
Stacked lengths of chopped wood surrounded them. Heavy wrought iron shackles bound both of them at their wrists and ankles. The restraints were designed in a fashion that was popular a long time ago; he recognized the style from touring a museum.
During antebellum slavery times, he thought and felt a chill settle over him despite the day’s warmth.
He swung around. Two people sat on the wagon’s bench: the man in the red-checkered shirt, who held the reins of the horse, and who now happened to be strapped with Nick’s rifle, the gun angled across his back; and a woman wearing a dusty, navy-blue dress, her steel-gray hair gathered in a bonnet.
As if she sensed his attention, the woman turned and looked at them. She had the weathered complexion of one who had done difficult, manual labor for a living. Her dark eyes were hard as stones. Wrinkles were etched deep into her sunbaked face.
A faded “W” was imprinted high on her forehead, like a birthmark.
“Settle down back there, y’all,” she said, her words inflected with a thick South Georgia accent. She lifted a walking cane and shook it once at them. “Or I’ll settle ya down again.”
“My family owns this property!” Nick said.
“His grandfather is the Caretaker,” Amiya added. “You shouldn’t be doing this.”
“That so?” The woman grinned, showing a mouthful of darkened, ruined teeth. “Oh, the Overseer’s gonna be tickled by that, y’all being ’ssociated with the Caretaker. Indeed, he will.”
Nick glanced at Amiya, and the fear in her eyes mirrored his own.
He tugged at the shackles, but it was pointless. The restraints were old, but held firm.
“I’m so thirsty,” Amiya said, and he noticed that her lips were chapped. “They took my purse, all of our stuff.”
“I can feel my wallet in my front pocket,” Nick said. “Not that there’s anything in there that’ll do us any good.”
“Like the man we found in the shed,” Amiya said. “He had his, too.”
“They take only useful items.” Nick stared at the shackles on his wrists. “This morning I woke up in my house in Buckhead. Now I’m chained up like a slave riding in a wagon. Is this really happening? Is this not some elaborate hoax?”
“I don’t think so, Nick,” Amiya said. “Look up. We’re going to the plantation.”
20
Amiya shared Nick’s sense of displacement, that surreal feeling that they had fallen through a crack in their world and landed in a terrifying, alternate reality.
