CHAPTER THREE

A Moment Later

Ganet scanned the gas station. Raising her chin, she walked toward the mechanic then noticed the older of the two chatterers, the one with the mountain man beard, waving her over.

"Hey little lady, your horse needs to hitch up to the trough?"

Ganet put on her most ingratiating smile. "Yeah, thirsty little sucker, especially on these mountain roads. Do you—do you take credit cards?"

The old man made a big deal of flicking his gaze up then over at his friend. "Credit cards, Tim? Aren't those them newfangled pieces of plastic them thar big city folk think can be used for money?"

Tim punched his arm. "Stop messing around. Can't you see she's far from home?" He ambled over to Ganet's car. "You already have the gas cap off. Let me fill 'er up. Roger'll run your card."

Ganet felt her cheeks warming. Stupid. Of course they take credit cards."Sorry. It's just I—"

"Long day?" Roger strode toward the gas station office.

Ganet hurried to keep pace. "I flew out of Los Angeles at nine, and I still have a few hours of driving to go."

"A few hours?" Roger walked in and slipped behind the counter. "So, where you headed?"

"Wayward Pines." Ganet was about to ask if he'd heard of it, when his frown told her he had.

"That's more than a few hours, little lady. That's at least as far as you drove getting here from Boise. Do you have friends there? Someone you know?"

"Just a client I'm supposed to meet. This is a business trip."

"What kind of business you in that they'd send you to a place like Wayward Pines? That town—it kind of has a reputation."

Reputation? "I'm in social work. Family mediation, things like that. I'm supposed to interview a man who separated from his wife and took their child. His brother thinks I can straighten things out so that he'd consider coming back home." Ganet paused, reluctant to ask her next question but even more reluctant not to know. "This reputation—is it for cults, militias, survivalists?"

Roger cocked his head to the wall behind the counter—to the mounted moose head and the two rifles displayed on a rack. "You mean people who love guns?"

Awkward! Before Ganet could think of a proper, backtracking reply, she heard Tim walking up behind her. "He's teasing you again. We're hunters, like most of the folk around here, but were not the sort that stockpile AK-47s and anti-personnel ordinance. And neither are the people up at Wayward Pines. They're a bit… stranger."

Stranger?

Nodding, Roger rang up the amount Tim told him. He kept talking while Ganet slid her card and punched in her information. "They were working on some big project up there—working on it for years. Top-secret. The kind of thing not too popular in Idaho, especially when all the jobs went to out-of-state workers, no offense. Whatever it was, it must've gone bust. Wayward Pines was dying before the project started. Now it's taken up dying again. I haven't ventured up there in a while. Not much reason to."

"Last November, Ed Mustin was up that way elk hunting. He says most of the businesses have shut down."

"At least the inn hasn't," Ganet said. "I have a reservation."

"Reservation?" Roger chuckled. "What'll you bet you're the only guest this month?"

"Best get on your way," Tim said. "The road to Wayward Pines is not one you'll be wanting to drive after dark."

An Hour Later

As the highway started to climb again, weaving through the evergreens, Ganet kept glancing at the sun. It seemed to hang above the horizon a little longer than it did in LA. The uneasiness she'd felt at being out of her comfort zone kept growing. So she did what she always did in situations of uncertainty: she called her baby sister.

"You set up that Bluetooth I got you for graduation?" Rahel asked.

"Yes," Ganet lied. At least she had her phone on speaker mode. Holding the steering wheel with both hands was a necessity on this twisty mountain road.

"I'm glad you called. Yonas has been acting like a crazy man. He's been phoning around, claiming you're missing. Why else wouldn't you be in your condo when he showed up to drive you to the airport?" Rahel's laughter was crisp and clear in the car. "I told him you're fine, that you can take care of business without him. I don't think he liked hearing that."

"Hah. He'd've liked the real reason even less: I wanted to start my day without him." Ganet saw a hairpin curve coming up and began riding the brake.

"I take it visiting his folks didn't go well."

Even eight hundred miles away, Ganet's sister could read her. "It would've helped if he'd warned me his mother is the type of Amhara that cares whether other people are Amhara." Ganet paused as she swung the wheel for the turn. "It would've helped even more if he'd warned her I'm Eritrean."

"Bad?"

"My gift to the hostess went well. The meal was lovely. I picked up that the kitfo mitmita was his mother's pride and joy, so I ate three servings."

"Wow. I thought you couldn't stand raw beef."

"You'd've been proud." Ganet hauled the wheel around for another switchback. "But as she was roasting the coffee, she began talking about things back home. Seems the Eritreans are ruining Addis. They're speculators, usurers, and don't know how to drive. I listened to her until I felt steam coming out of my ears. Yonas didn't say a word."

"So you did."

"Right. Things went downhill from there." The sun flashed between the pines as Ganet entered a straightaway. She stepped on the gas.

"Look on the bright side," Rahel said. "At least his parents will never be meeting our parents."

"That's true. Until a year ago, I wouldn't even have known that might be a big deal." Not until she'd hit age twenty-five and was invited to fill out the Habesha Women in America Longitudinal Survey. At first, she'd thought it would be the easiest fifty bucks she'd ever made. The questions had been fun to answer—rather like a dating questionnaire—until she reached the branch out section designed for children of guerrilla fighters. As a social science major, she'd had too much respect for researchers to want to mess up their data. After all, the mama and baba she knew were a waitress and a taxi driver, not some kind of revolutionaries. But when she'd told the study assistant he'd sent her the wrong version, he'd assured her he hadn't. Weren't her parents Fenote Haile and Fekadu Dawit? Didn't she know they'd come to the U.S. on political asylum?

No, she hadn't. And after she'd confronted her parents, it took another week and the intercession of three aunties and two uncles before they'd tell her anything more. Too painful to talk about, Baba had finally said, the loss of a generation. Isn't it better to live in the present?

"What gets me," Rahel said, "is Mama spent five years of her life sleeping on rocks with nothing but a bedroll and a Kalashnikov, yet when we were growing up, she wouldn't go camping."

"She refused to sleep anywhere without clean sheets."

"Seriously!"

Ganet twisted her wheel for another turn. "Actually, the whole freedom fighter thing makes me kind of proud. I just wish I'd heard it first from Mama and Baba."

For a moment, both sisters were silent. Ganet watched the sunlight twinkle across the tops of the pines. Then Rahel said, "I was looking forward to my chance to take that silly survey, I mean, fifty bucks. But this morning I got an email canceling my invitation. Apparently, the researchers collected all the data they need. And I could've really used the money! I blew a tire coming home from work, and now I'm riding on the spare."

Poor Rahel. "Hey," Ganet said, "why don't you go over to my condo and water my plants? And while you're there, you can borrow money from the coffee can in my refrigerator. You can't miss it. My last roommate bought one of those freeze-dried brands. When she moved, I dumped it out. The canister makes a good hiding place. Who but someone who knows it holds money would ever want to open it?"

"You don't have to do that—"

"Yes, I do. I'm your big sister. You'll pay me back." On the next switchback up the mountain, Ganet saw something she wasn't expecting: another car, some prehistoric model not built for climbing steep roads. The hood was up, and the engine was smoking. As she approached, the man leaning against it straightened up and waved.

"You'll never believe what I'm looking at, Rahel. Some guy with a broken down car wants me to pull over. Should I—?"

"Don't you dare. Maybe he's a serial killer. I'll get off the phone so you can call Highway Patrol for him—or whatever it is they have in that backwoodsy state—but don't, whatever you do, stop."

Ganet turned her head to look at the guy as she drove on: young, athletic, wearing overalls but no shirt. He looked okay, but if she was wrong, well, she'd be stupid to risk it. "Okay, Rahel, I'll make a call for him, but I have no idea how to describe where he is."

"Ciao, Abaye. See you when you get back."

Ganet took another turn, and the stranded clunker disappeared from view. She reached out and began tapping numbers on her phone screen one-handed, glancing back and forth between it and the road. She was about to tap the green dial icon when she heard the blast of an eighteen-wheeler's air horn. Glancing up, she gasped. The truck was barreling toward her, the driver riding his horn the whole way.

Every muscle tensed up. Then Ganet jerked her wheel to the left. She was already over the center line, and to the left was a blessedly wide dirt shoulder up against the granite wall of the mountain. On the side of the road she was supposed to be on was a guard rail and a cliff. How deep the drop was, she didn't want to find out.

An instant later, her Subaru's wheels were digging into the dirt shoulder as the Eighteen-wheeler whizzed past. The driver didn't stop. Probably, he couldn't—not without jack-knifing and going over the edge himself.

In a few more yards, the dirt shoulder ended at a boulder, but Ganet's Subaru had already slowed enough for her to come to a complete stop.

When she did, she was shaking. Wow. On a road with almost zero traffic, she'd nearly been in a horrible accident. What were the chances? Her scalp was tingling. Wouldn't it have been ironic if she'd flipped her car and finished her roadside emergency call with a scream?

Ganet pressed back against the headrest and let out a whoop. Right now she felt like the luckiest girl alive.

Grabbing her phone, she pressed the dial icon. She might be fine, but the poor slob with the stalled car still needed help.