The voice on the other end was male and loud enough for all of us to hear through the tiny speaker. “I just took reservations for twelve here on the north end. They’re driving down from the Pass in four…scratch that, six vans. ETA approximately one hour.”
A click then, as he hung up.
My father replaced the handset. “That was Lloyd. He’s got a little place just this side of Deception Pass. He would have spotted them crossing the bridge. Barring some kind of delay or road hazard, the pass is fifty-eight minutes away.”
Preacher wasn’t about to wait. He scooped Darby up off the floor and grabbed Cammie by the hand and headed for the door. “We’re taking the ferry out. We can be there in half the time. You’re welcome to follow, if you want. We can regroup on the mainland. We get separated, meet in one week at the Crater Lake welcome center in Oregon.”
“That’s a bad idea,” my father said. “The next ferry is at noon. I’d be willing to bet they’re on it. If they’re not on that ferry, you can be sure they’ll be on the mainland waiting to board the next one. Probably watching every car leaving Whidbey. You don’t exactly blend in with that Pontiac.”
“We get to the mainland, we’ve got a shot at outrunning them,” Cammie said. “Or we can take one of the other cars and try and slip past them. We can’t wait for them to get here.”
“Why not? This place is defendable. Why do you think I’m here?” He motioned out toward the water. “We’ve got a sheer cliff behind us, with only one set of stairs to get up and down, and nearly four acres of open space in the front between the main house and the only road in or out. They can’t get close to us. We won’t let them.” My father crossed over to the kitchen and opened three of the upper cabinet doors. Rather than plates, glasses, pots, or pans, we found ourselves staring at an arsenal. Dozens of weapons, freshly oiled, gleaming. Handguns, rifles, shotguns—several appeared to be military grade. M-16s or AK-47s, I had no idea. “I stopped running twenty years ago. I’m not starting again today. We need to end this.”
Cammie looked defeated. “They want us all dead, Eddie.”
“They may want us out of the way, but we’ve got three of the children here with us. They won’t do anything to risk their lives. They want them alive.”
“Why?” I broke in.
The room went silent. They all turned to me. “Why do they want you dead but not us? Why are they chasing us in the first place?”
My father appeared puzzled by this, as if he expected me to already know. He glanced at Preacher and Cammie, but neither said anything. He turned back to me, truly surprised. “You don’t know? Your aunt didn’t tell you? The guidance counselor, Elfrieda Leech—she didn’t give you my letters? I’ve been writing you for years.”
“I’ve never gotten a letter from you. All she gave me was this.” I took out the letter Stella’s father had written and handed it to him. He looked over it, then handed it to Cammie. “Your aunt must have told her not to say anything. Fucking Jo. Always insisting you live out a normal life. She never grasped…” His voice trailed off as he thought about this. He went over to the dining room table and started sifting through the various documents and folders.
“We don’t have time for this,” Preacher said.
“We’re making time,” my father told him. He found what he was looking for and handed it to me. An old flyer, the kind with tearaway phone numbers printed at the bottom. About half were missing. The headline read:
EARN $1000!
CHARTER PHARMACEUTICALS NEEDS VOLUNTEERS FOR THE FINAL STAGE (STAGE FOUR) OF TESTING FOR THEIR NEW VACCINATION PROTOCOL. ONE SHOT TO YOU MEANS YOUR FUTURE CHILDREN WILL NOT NEED TO RECEIVE ANY VACCINATIONS!
CALL FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.
“They told all of us that as long as both parents received the shot, you’d be protected from dozens of ailments. Everything from polio to diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus—even chicken pox, small pox, and measles. Your mother and I were already dating. We had talked about kids, and frankly, we needed the money. We went. We all went. Back then, students were making money hand over fist participating in trials like this. Some were scary—LSD and hallucinogenics. This was the seventies. We were all doing that stuff anyway. Why not get paid?”
“The government always had the best LSD,” Cammie muttered. “I should have stuck with that instead of getting wrapped up in this bullshit. $1000 was nearly twice what the other studies paid, and who wants their future kid to be subjected to dozens of vaccinations? Seemed like a no-brainer at the time.”
My father said, “After the shot, we had to report back for regular blood tests and monitoring. The eighth of every month. Nothing crazy, and they paid us for that, too. There were no side effects, not for any of us. Not at first, anyway. But then, your mother got pregnant. Don’t get me wrong—like I said, we talked about having kids, but the plan was to finish college, get married, get jobs, establish ourselves, then have children when we were ready. Your mother and I were careful, but somehow she got pregnant anyway. Same with Richard Nettleton and Emma, Keith Pickford and Jaquelyn Breece. All of us got pregnant around the same time. We halfheartedly joked the shot boosted our hormones. Richard and Emma dropped out of school and broke ties with Charter. The rest of us continued to go into our scheduled appointments. When you and David were born, they paid us all even more to monitor you—routine blood work, vitals, the same they were doing for us. Everything seemed okay, seemednormal. Then I started to hear from the Nettletons. What happened every time their daughter, Stella, touched something that was alive. They didn’t know what to do. They went into hiding, off the grid. Keep in mind, this was the late seventies, early eighties. Much easier back then than it is today. Richard was convinced whatever was happening to his daughter was related to that shot, whatever Charter had given us. I thought he was crazy, we all did. But your mother and I watched you close anyway. I kept in touch with Keith and Jackie. They watched David, too. You both seemed okay. Richard got paranoid, said people were chasing him, these people dressed in white, just like the people from Charter. I began to wonder if maybe the shot had just triggered some kind of mental breakdown in him, like an allergic reaction. That kind of thing happened, too. Safety protocols were so lax.” He paused for a second, dusting off the information in his head. “Keith Pickford and Jackie stopped showing up at their appointments in mid ’78. Your mom and I didn’t really get all the facts until about a year later, but it was bad. Keith lost it. He threw a pot of boiling oil at his little boy’s face, burned him horribly, then he stabbed Jackie to death before turning the knife on himself. Neighbors found David on the kitchen floor, screaming at the top of his lungs, in terrible pain, both parents dead, blood everywhere. David was talking back then, but not much. Only two years old. He couldn’t really tell anyone what happened, and they didn’t press him. I thought about the shot. If that shot somehow drove Rich Nettleton crazy, maybe it had done the same with Keith. I heard David went to live with relatives. That’s what the staff at Charter told us, and we had no reason to question them, not at that point. Rich and Emma Nettleton, Stella’s parents, that’s about the time they came back to Pittsburgh. They were both dead less than a week later. Murdered in some kind of home invasion. Stella was gone. I heard about the bodies they found there, grown men who looked like they’d been burnt, and I realized that Stella might have actually done it. What Richard had been raving about, what she could do, might actually be true.
“In May of ’79 we heard about Perla Beyham, how she drowned in her bathtub. I barely knew her, only from her participation with the Charter study. It sounded like an accident. They said she fell asleep. It happened. But again, I thought about the shot. Was it really an accident? When your mother and I heard Garret Dotts hung himself in 1980, we again thought about the shot. We decided to stop going to the Charter follow-up appointments, we stopped taking you. That’s when we noticed them watching us. People in white, white vehicles parked outside our apartment all the time. When we started looking for them, we realized they were everywhere, just like Richard said. I went to one last appointment, only me. I didn’t bring you or your mother, and while I was in that room, I stole everything you see here—your mother was home packing our lives into our SUV. We planned to run.”
“But they caught up with you,” I said softly.
“I figured you’d remember. Something that traumatic gets etched into your brain, it never leaves. I had to think fast, I still didn’t really know what we were up against. I left you with Jo, hoping they’d chase after me. And they did, but I eventually lost them. Elfrieda Leech, our guidance counselor, she had first told us about the study, said it was an easy way to make money. At the time, she had no idea what we were all getting into, but once that became clear, she helped me broker a deal—they leave you alone, and I don’t go public. I drop off the edge of the earth. You would stay with your Auntie Jo, and she would watch you for them, report back. Unlike Stella and David, you hadn’t shown any kind of special ability, nothing useful to them. They had no need for you, so they let you be.”
I said, “They kept Stella in that house and locked David up.”
My father whistled. “Those two were a completely different story. They locked David down tight once they figured out what he could do. He was the perfect little killing machine. At that point, the rest of the people involved in the study—Penelope Maudlin, Lester Woolford, Dewey Hobson, Cammie, Dalton over there, everyone ran, scattered. We think they used David to pick us off, one by one. That’s probably how they they got Perla to drown herself and Garret Dotts to hang himself. Not accidents or suicides at all, but suggestions by David, which they had no choice but to carry out,his abilityin full use. He was young, probably didn’t understand what he was doing. Not in the beginning, anyway. But I think he grew to like it. Charter had what they wanted. They didn’t need us adults anymore to create more children for them. We became liabilities.”
My eyes drifted across the room to Darby, still clutching her mother’s leg.
Cammie said, “They don’t know about her. I was off their radar when she was born, and I plan to keep it that way.”
“Can she do…something?” I asked.
“Can you?” Cammie retorted.
