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“You’re going to miss your pizza and your vanilla Frappuccinos.” He had a terrible sweet tooth. How he kept in such good shape with his appalling diet was wizardry.
He groaned. “Don’t remind me. What are you going to miss?”
The cozy reading nook in her apartment. Her favorite book and coffee shop. Her tech. The settlement was dry on alcohol, drugs and Google, and a desert when it came to shopping, social media and contact with the outside world. She’d be detoxing consciously, literarily and digitally. And not the least bit happy about it.
“I’ll miss my Dropbox little black book backup.”
He gave her a lopsided grin. “Okay. Focus. We’ve got a month to get our heads into this and to find that cell-signal jammer, turn it off and check in with Tres. She will land a goddam helicopter with an extraction team in the vegetable garden if we go radio silent longer than that.”
That made Rory smile. Zeke might’ve been mayhem central as a kid, but Tresna, the youngest Sherwood, was a purple-haired warrior. A suicide-courting Jack Russell terrier who habitually put its head in the mouth of a mastiff. When Tres said you had thirty days to find the cell-signal jammer and check in, she wasn’t messing around. She was their eyes and ears to the outside world for as long as they were Abundance residents and Rory trusted her to get them out safely if everything went bad.
If everything went according to plan, they’d all walk out, and the Continuers would go straight into the care of psychologists and counselors before Sherwoods helped them put their lives back together. And Rory will have gone some way to learning how to trust herself again.
She watched the landscape, sipped from a bottle of coconut water and tried to will her headache away. In another hour, it would be game on, they’d be in sight of the electric fence that walled off the 88,000-acre settlement.
Epcot bought the initial parcel of land ten years ago and he’d expanded the territory between the valleys, buying up ranchers who’d gone broke every year since. It was all legal, he paid his taxes, he didn’t break any obvious laws. Before the sun set they’d be inside to start working out what less obvious ones he’d broken.
“We need to find out what they’re growing in those greenhouses,” she said.
“And storing in those barns. Has to be the stuff delivered in unmarked trucks in the dead of night we weren’t able to trace.”
Drugs, explosives, maybe both. Despite two years of surveillance, there were large gaps in their knowledge of how the community operated.
“We really needed a runaway to talk to.” The fact they’d been unable to find anyone who’d left the Continuance in five years wasn’t comforting.
Zeke took his sunglasses off and hooked them in the neck of his T-shirt. “We know they recruit cleverly. Loners, misfits, people searching for meaning, refugees from harsh religions. Anyone who is weighed down by grief or addiction or struggling to make sense of the world is a candidate. So long as they’re short on troublesome loving relatives and have money to buy their way in.”
He pointed at her and then himself. “Look at Zack and Rosie. Poor little rich kids. Nobody loves them. Everyone wonders if they knocked off both their parents.”
She pulled her bare feet up onto the seat and hugged her knees. “That’s not our story.”
“No, but it’s a good one.” Zeke reached over and cupped her kneecap. “I told Spencer I felt responsible for you becoming a coke addict.”
“I love it when you take the blame.”
He squeezed her knee hard enough to make her bat his hand away. “If I remember rightly, the first time I took serious heat for you was because you hotwired Principal Beard’s old Beetle,” he said.
She laughed, remembering. “It was such a cute car. It was only a joyride.”
“I got to do cute chores every day for a cute month.”
Damn right. He’d been grounded. Missed a Foo Fighters concert. And they were his favorite band. Not because he’d taken the blame for stealing the car but because the mark selection was wrong. Principal Beard was a good man and Sherwoods and Archers didn’t fuck with good people.
It was such a joyous memory, she scrambled onto her shins, leaned across the seats and kissed his cheek. “My hero.” And then so he didn’t get a swollen head and she didn’t strangle herself with the belt, she sat back and said, “Who is totally responsible for my hangover.”
“You’re not going to puke, are you?”
“I’m going to suffer in silence.” For about three minutes. She was starting to get keyed up. “Signs you’re in a destructive cult, final refresher, go.”
“You’re isolated from general society.”
She nodded. Abundance was hours from the nearest town center. If you needed medical care you were the best part of two-day’s journey to get it, but no Continuer other than Spencer had ever been seen outside the settlement.
“You follow a charismatic leader.” Everything they’d learned about Epcot suggested he was Cal but cutthroat, Zeke but lacking in basic humanity, Tres but he’d bite without provocation.
“You believe your leader has a divine right, is appointed by God, or in this case, thinks he’s smarter than God,” Zeke added.
They’d both been relieved to learn the Continuance wasn’t organized along religious belief lines. They didn’t have to come up against God, just a man who acted like a god. “You have blind loyalty to the leader. He’s infallible. He tells you to dance naked in the rain, you dance naked in the rain.”
