“You are totally in your rights to leave at any time and do your parole a different way, but I think you’ll find that while Farthingdale Valley is going to require hard work from all of us, me included—”
Gabe stopped, wishing he didn’t sound so much like an out-of-touch CEO or a commanding officer of a battalion who simply had no idea what it was like to be in the trenches.
“It’s a good program,” he said simply, now. “And I know you won’t regret having signed up for it. Now, shall we go over the rules?”
The four men nodded at him and Gabe did his best to keep it short, as the men were already starting to fidget. That is, except for Blaze, who was staring over Gabe’s shoulder into the middle distance, as if he was really, really puzzled to find himself where he was.
Chapter3
Blaze
The drive in the white van from Wyoming Correctional to Farthingdale Valley took about two hours, though, it must be admitted, the driver took his sweet time, and used his turn signal obsessively until the constant click-click-click noise pounded its way into Blaze’s head. He didn’t usually get headaches, but he had one now and it was a doozy, a needle going right through the center of his forehead.
There was no sense asking the driver or the guard if they could pull over and fetch Blaze an aspirin or two, because he’d get the same response if he’d still been in prison. Headache?Suffer.Splinter?Pull it out with your teeth. Gouge in your thigh from a badly sharpened shiv?Walk it off.
Prison was that way and though, through the process of applying for the program, Blaze was led to believe that he was stepping into a glorious opportunity, his almost two years in prison had taught him that any glow of goodness was a false, tin-edged one, and even if the whole world proclaimed that ex-cons—or ratherparolees, as they were supposed to call themselves—might deserve a break, in truth, it was agreed that they didn’t deserve very good ones.
Blaze knew he was headed for bad things, his former optimism fading under the reality of being in a van headed to a future that felt completely out of his control. He still had a split lip and half a black eye, and his ribs hurt like hell, so he knew about bad things.
The van trundled through a small town, which in the middle of the afternoon, looked sleepy and quiet, but he and his fellow parolees looked through the rectangular windows, trying to catch glimpses of what was there. The rumor was thattrips into townwere on the agenda if they got their work done. If they behaved themselves. If.
A lot of how well the summer would go probably depended on how well they all got along. He’d not met Tom, Wayne, or Kurt before they’d all boarded the van, so while they seemed like regular guys, he really had no idea.
Kurt kind of looked like a skinhead, though if he had been, Leland Tate probably wouldn’t have accepted him into the program. Wayne was a short, stocky guy, a little red in the face, who was biting on a hangnail and looking out the window as though he wished he was miles away. Tom was tall and quiet, and rubbed his wrists for the entire drive, as if trying to shake off the ghosts of handcuffs past.
“Another mile to the ranch and then a mile after that to the compound,” announced the prison guard, who was sitting up front in the passenger seat as if he’d not a care in the world, though he had his hand on his side-arm, due to the fact that not one of the parolees was wearing handcuffs.
At any moment, they could leap and attack and stop the van and make brave escapes. But why? They all knew better, at least Blaze did, because the work camp was unguarded. Why hijack a prison van when, once they reached their destination, they could just leave whenever they liked?
There had to be a trick to this because it didn’t sound right. Most chain gangs and work programs he’d ever heard of were highly guarded to make sure the cons did what they were told to, and at night, they were taken back by van or bus to the prison.
The situation he was headed to, currently, was described so much differently, he was sure the whole thing was a lie. A big, fat, greasy lie that he would have to stomach, just like he’d stomached the last two years of badly cooked, greasy, stringy, expired food in the prison cafeteria. Nastiness went with the territory, and when you had the ex-con label, you had it for life, so sure as heck nothing was going to change, no matter what the paperwork said. No matter what Mr. Tate had told him.
You’ll be working in a peaceful, green valley, Mr. Tate had said.You’ll be given honest work to do and get three squares a day. You’ll be able to start a new life.
Lie upon lie, obviously.
When the van pulled up to a metal, green-painted gate, with an arched sign above that saidFarthingdale Ranch,the guard got out, unlatched it, and stayed out while the van pulled through. Then he latched the gate and hopped back in the van.
They continued rolling along the curving dirt road for another mile that took them over a little hillock, dappled with trees, then over a stone bridge that arched over a wide, rushing stream. The driver took a left onto a dirt track that led the van up the slope to a wide grassy area where a new-looking wood cabin stood, all by its lonesome.
The van seemed to pause on the top of the hill. There was no one and nothing for miles, it seemed, just the waving summer-green grasses that were about hip high, beyond which there was a line of thick trees, mostly pine, that stretched all the way to the foothills. They were in the middle of nowhere, and still the van kept going. That was, until the driver steered to the left around a clump of tall green pine trees, and then to the right, and suddenly the nose of the van was headed downward.
“Keep it slow,” said the guard. “Tate said it’s almost a five percent grade here for a bit.”
“Got it,” said the driver.
The road was dirt and gravel, not paved, which meant that the van’s wheels slid and skidded with stomach-churning suddenness whenever the driver put on the brakes. The road went for a long loop to the east, the trees thick on either side, still mostly pine, green and dark, keeping the van in cool shadow.
At the first turning, Blaze looked up and spotted a long valley, lush and wide and sloped at the sides, with green pine trees, and crisp-leaved cottonwoods leading down to a silky green, grassy valley bottom. He had a glimpse of a slice of shining blue that must be a river and then the trees closed in again, just as he gasped in a breath.
Beautiful was the only way to describe it, but he could not believe that it wouldn’t get scary and rough and mean the second the van stopped and the driver told themthis is it.
After a good ten minutes of consistently going downhill through the trees, the van broke out from the shadows into a sunlit area that turned out to be the only wide, clear space that Blaze could see through the van’s windows. Everywhere he looked, he saw more trees, and more after that, until he was almost dizzy with it.
Wyoming Correctional was set on a flat area, surrounded by bare ground for miles around, it seemed, devoid of trees and any green thing, perhaps designed as a means of control, to leave the eyes hungry, for who would want to step into all the nothingness that surrounded the prison? Not him, that’s who.
Someone touched his shoulder, and Blaze turned to look the other way and found himself staring at a large green canvas tent among the trees and realized thatthis was it. They’d arrived, and now his nightmares could all come true.
