The Captive Read online

  The night inched forward. Brooke heard each whisper of sound, each snap in the darkness. The calls of night birds. Rodent feet. Something larger in the woods, a coyote or raccoon.

  Every few minutes, Brooke checked the dark shapes of Milo and the girls, burrowed deep in their sleeping bags. They slept on, unaware.

  5

  Brooke’s parents had been pipeline workers. They lost their jobs in a downturn, years before secession, and after that they turned to biodiesel. They brewed fuel from canola bought cheap off the prairies and turned an extra profit demethylating the glycerin layer for soap works. It was hard, dirty work, but they did well by it. Gas prices were set in the city, where people made city wages.

  “Never mind they don’t even need to fucking drive because our taxes paid for their fucking electric subway,” Edmund said, as if he hadn’t been evading his own taxes for years.

  When the Federal Revenue Services finally came after the refinery, the unsuspecting auditors arrived at the Hollands’ property high in the Shaw County hills only to be turned back at the fence line by Edmund, Emily, and a dozen of their friends, all armed. Later, people would call it the spark that lit the rural resistance.

  The Hollands were natural leaders in the growing movement to secede. Edmund was smart, well spoken, uncowed by dire reports of their disappearing rural way of life. If he was a purist, if he could also be cold and forbidding, he was made more likeable by Emily, whose fiery, militant joy in the cause was infectious. Jobs in the refinery saved a number of local families from going broke, and the H scored into the Hollands’ diesel drums became a symbol almost as powerful as the sovereign flag.

  The independence movement gained strength with every wave of layoffs and foreclosures. Edmund and Emily complained of Lands and Resources setting quotas on deer when families couldn’t afford groceries; they lamented farms gutted by free trade, foreigners pouring in from every corner of the globe. Rural communities were shrinking, their schools were half empty, and the feds seemed not to know or care. In the city, civil servants were striking for pensions like they were a god-given right.

  The Hollands weren’t alone in their opinions. Associations were formed. Votes were held. After the referendum to secede, commentators declared that rural voters had been fooled into going against their own interests, that the countryside received more tax aid per capita than anyone, and that smaller government could only hurt them.

  “Missing the point, as usual,” Edmund laughed, relishing their indignation.

  The federal government refused to accept the results of the referendum, and the standoffs began. One, then four, then ten resistance members were killed in the conflict. The name of each was memorialized in black above the broad open doors of the drive shed that housed the Hollands’ fleet of vehicles. Meanwhile, the feds sent in soldiers and sustained nothing worse than a few burned blockades. There was a second referendum, even more overwhelming than the first, and the federal government had to concede. They let the sovereign territories go, though they cut a deal for 50 percent ownership of the tar sands, which lay deep in ceded territory, on the basis that the government had built the pipeline in the first place.

  “With public dollars and my fucking labor,” Edmund grumbled.

  Brooke started first grade under the newly minted sovereign state: a different anthem, a different flag. With her elder siblings, Callum and Anita, she waited at the end of the driveway for the yellow school bus to gather them up on its long, winding route though the hills to Shaw Station. Their textbooks had been outdated even before secession. The students drew in the new border by hand every time there was a map exercise, and the teachers were sometimes unsure about whether the book agreed with their rewritten curriculum.

  “No, that’s wrong,” Brooke interrupted her teacher’s explanation of the thinning ozone layer. “Fake science. Daddy says so.”

  Edmund Holland was six foot five and nearly three hundred pounds, with a temper to match. There was a joke around the county that the strong spirits in his blood had thinned like whisky down through his children, from hot-headed Callum to Robin, Brooke’s little brother, as close as any Holland ever came to gentle. Edmund and Emily did nothing to discourage this mythology. Of Callum, they said: “You know a fire hose, with no one holding it?” Callum’s aggressiveness got him into trouble from the beginning. When Emily was called in to school after Callum had slashed a teacher’s tires because she was what he called an “uppity city bitch,” Emily accepted her son’s suspension as his due, but she was smiling when they left the principal’s office, and Callum knew it.

  Anita, their elder daughter, was queenly, menacing, relentless as a viper. She ran the schoolyard like a fiefdom, enforcing fealty, issuing decrees. Any perceived slight was a travesty to be met with swift, outsized revenge. “Watch your back,” Callum told his friends, not without pride.

  Brooke, third in line, was steadier and more disciplined than her older siblings, a natural problem-solver. She did fine at school, but it was the applied lessons described in their books that she was interested in, and the school didn’t have the budget for chemistry, or robotics, or engineering. So it was at home that she learned. Her parents showed her how the demethylation condensers in the refinery worked, gave her old appliances to take apart and reassemble, and as she got older, she became their fixer, their eraser: no seeping hole she couldn’t mend, no knotted wire she couldn’t undo. She could make a wrench out of a T-shirt, a bullet from a dime. “Get Brooke,” became the family refrain. “She’ll do it.”

  Robin, the baby, was curious, affectionate, more sensitive than Edmund could abide. “You know bread dough before you punch it down?” Edmund scoffed. “You know a fucking marshmallow?”

  Robin didn’t want to build or make or fix; he wanted to talk. He wanted to know how people felt and why. Edmund scowled at the incessant flow of questions, and Robin studied his expression, asking, “What is that face called?”

  At school, where they expected another Callum, Robin provoked confusion and scorn. His teacher gave him extra computer time at recess to spare him the other children’s rough taunts, and Robin found a new outlet for his curiosity. There was still broadband in town, and Robin ranged as far online as he could, coming home with ever-expanding knowledge of the world outside Shaw County, celebrity news and pop culture trends that had nothing whatsoever to do with their lives.

  The rest of the family was quick to point out that Robin would never survive in Shaw County on his own, and Brooke as quick to answer that he’d never have to. She treasured her little brother. He was miraculous to her, something that shouldn’t have been able to exist in their world, and yet did.

  Shaw County had never been an easy place. The hills were solid rock, unfarmable, the mines tapped out decades before. Its sharp beauty, and its closeness to the city, had once made the area popular with cottagers, who supported a meager tourism industry, but they had almost all sold after the vote to secede, taking their non-resident taxes with them.

  Three years into the sovereign state, crude bottomed out. The state defaulted on their co-share payments for the pipeline and began to go bankrupt on foreign borrowing. There were new layoffs in the tar sands and another round of foreclosures. Chalk was new then—an experimental compound, potent and dangerous—and soon it was everywhere.

  Brooke was nine when the state dissolved. The news came over the truck radio when Emily was taking them to town for groceries. “It’s okay, Mama,” Robin said earnestly when their mother ripped the radio out barehanded and flung it from the window in disgust. “It’s not your fault.”

  Half the population of Shaw County left in the first exodus. Then the border closed in response to what the TV called a refugee crisis. (“Vultures,” Emily spat. “You hear how much they’re enjoying this?”) All around them, families were pulling up stakes and seeking asylum at the border, something the Hollands would never do. Shaw County was hard, but it was home. They kept the refinery open, though they lost most
of their workers to the border. When the school year was suspended, Brooke and her siblings filled the empty spots in the production line.

  Robin was six. The loud machinery frightened him, and the smell gave him a headache. Edmund told him to toughen up; they had no use for a marshmallow. “Survival of the fittest,” he said, shoving a siphon pump into Robin’s hand. “That’s the law of nature.”

  Edmund called the fallen sovereign state a failure of imagination, the same shit in a new can. If the resistance had held the pipeline by force instead of capitulating, things would have gone differently. But it was over now. The old world was gone, Edmund declared, the new one unknown. From now on, the Hollands’ only sovereignty would be their own, their only loyalty to each other. The public school, which remained on indefinite hiatus, had been a waste of time anyway, Edmund said; they’d learn more at home. Shouting over the steam and clank of the diesel silos, Edmund lectured his children on natural law, the principles of evolution, the value of labor, the individual’s right to self-defense. Brooke listened avidly.

  “The role of government is to what?” Edmund quizzed her.

  “Protect the people’s rights.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “The people can dissolve it.”

  “Because why?”

  “Its existence isn’t justified.”

  “That’s my girl,” he smiled.

  As Brooke grew up, she navigated her father’s expectations with eager dread. When his attention fell on her, she braced herself as for a spring swim; when she withstood his judgment, she sported and shivered, exuberant.

  IT WAS CALLUM who started them running chalk. After five stateless years, the diesel market had shrunk with the population, and then further as fewer people could afford to maintain engines.

  Edmund laughed the first time they saw someone riding horseback on the highway. “Check out Johnny Guitar,” he said, gunning his engine to pass.

  But the sight grew more common. And as the diesel business contracted, it also got more dangerous. Suppliers of federal-controlled gas didn’t bother with the ceded territories anymore, leaving the Hollands one of the last fuel sellers in the area. This made them targets. Twice, Edmund was jacked on deliveries; the second time, he lost truck and cargo both. The pirates had been masked and heavily armed; nonetheless, Edmund insisted they were foreign. “Dark as sin,” he claimed of the bits of skin that had showed through the holes in their masks. Brooke wondered passingly how likely that was—Shaw Station had only gotten whiter since secession, and a truckload of diesel hardly seemed worth an outsider’s time. But if her father said it, it must be true. Edmund was convinced that no one local would steal from a Holland. Their mark—the single, stylized H—was scored into the stolen drums, plain as day.

  Edmund started bringing Anita on armed guard when he rode out on deliveries. Brooke watched jealously as her sister climbed into the truck with a handgun strapped to her thigh.

  “What about me?” she asked.

  “You’re fourteen,” Edmund said.

  “So? Anita’s only sixteen.”

  “Yeah, but she’s a stone-cold killer at heart. Aren’t you, love?”

  Anita rolled her eyes.

  “Let those black bastards try me now,” Edmund grinned.

  Callum argued that no matter how well Edmund defended the diesel, there would soon be nowhere to sell it. People were starving out there, he said, but they would always find money to get high.

  He had it all figured out. The main chalk suppliers in the county were distant cousins of Edmund’s: Frank Cawley Jr. and his sister Delia. Brooke had a vague image of Frank Jr. as a blond, tattooed man her parents’ age, with a wispy wife—townies whose sons had been in school with Callum and Anita. Delia was easier to picture, though Brooke had seen her only a handful of times, at political events; she was fair like her brother, but with a striking, disquieting beauty and pale, shrewd eyes.

  The Cawleys’ dealers were pathetic, Callum said, small-time, mostly junkies themselves. He was convinced the Hollands could push them out of the market in six months.

  Edmund refused at first. He didn’t like Frank Jr. and Delia, didn’t even like the fact—debatable, according to him—of their common ancestry, and he liked chalk even less. If half the county hadn’t been functionally disabled by that stuff, Edmund said, sovereignty might have had a chance.

  “More than half,” Callum said eagerly. “This is what I’m telling you.”

  Brooke expected her parents to shun this callousness, but Emily surprised her by siding with Callum. She was the one who kept their accounts, and she said they had to do something soon or they’d be going horseback themselves.

  “What are you always telling the kids?” she teased her husband with a sad smile. “It’s the law of nature. Adapt or die, Edmund.”

  After that, it was inevitable. Edmund abhorred chalk, and the weakness it represented, but he trusted Emily’s judgment, if anything, more than his own.

  “All right,” he glared. “I’ll be damned if we’re going extinct.”

  Having agreed, Edmund set himself to the chalk trade with the same force he brought to everything else. Chalk was an easy sell, as the first stable pre-blend of an accelerant and a tranquilizer—a poor man’s speedball. Though it was known to be difficult and dangerous to prepare, Edmund successfully taught himself the chemistry in a matter of weeks. Callum sourced the supplies, and soon they had laid in a store of product, ready to go.

  Callum took it on himself to manage the front end, operating out of his girlfriend Pauline’s place in town. Anita was tasked with enlisting the local dealers, most of whom had until now worked directly or indirectly for Frank Jr. and Delia. The Cawleys had operated unchallenged for years and were said to be stingy with their runners; still, despite nearly universal discontent, Anita found their workforce hard to influence, at first. Delia, as the Cawleys’ enforcer, brutally punished dealers who defected, inspiring a terrified loyalty in those that remained. She was said to have crushed someone’s windpipe with a snow shovel.

  “Fine,” Anita said. “If that’s how it is.” She started coming home with bruised fists and empty cartridges, and soon the Hollands had a dozen new employees.

  Brooke wasn’t needed for the new venture at first. She stayed busy at the refinery, helping Emily keep up minimal production and finding jobs to occupy twelve-year-old Robin. Other than his skill with computers—he was the only one who could fix their old machine when it froze—he was of negligible value to their parents. Brooke knew it was only a matter of time before she herself was called into service with Callum and Anita, and she feared what use her parents would find for Robin when she wasn’t around, so she took up Edmund’s abandoned effort to toughen up the marshmallow.

  “Did you even try?” Brooke asked on a day when she had Robin cleaning equipment. She gestured at the scrub assembly that Robin had worked barely halfway through a length of plastic tube. “You can’t run a diesel processor without clean tubing.”

  “I don’t want to run a diesel processor,” he said petulantly, throwing the tube down.

  “Don’t give up just because it’s hard,” Brooke said. She picked up the tube and began moving the scrub through it correctly.

  “It’s always hard.” Robin folded in on himself, sulking. He was wearing Edmund’s old sovereign flag T-shirt; it hung like a curtain on his slight form. He tried to fit in, dressing like their father, mimicking his gestures and curses, but Brooke could always see the doubt in his eyes. His once talkative nature had lately become muted, wary.

  The perimeter alarm rang. Brooke put aside the tubing and rose, hooking a walkie-talkie to her belt. Robin trailed her out to the yard, where they found a pearly blue SUV parked next to the house. A man leaned against it, silver-haired, lightly tanned, smiling. Brooke was aware of how filthy she and Robin were, reeking of diesel, their eyes red from the fumes.

  “I’m looking for Hollands,” the man said, making it sound like a
store.

  “That’s us,” Robin said, before Brooke could hush him. He was too quick, always, with outsiders, and this man was as glaring an outsider as Brooke had seen in years, from his TV haircut to his toothpaste-colored car.

  “I need to buy gas,” the man said, still smiling. “Is this the right place?”

  This time Brooke caught Robin’s wrist before he could answer.

  “We only do wholesale,” Brooke lied. Emily always blew off city customers on principle. Those people, she said. They’d spread us on their toast.

  “Well, I’m in a bind. I came up to check on the cottage, and it seems that the extra gas cans I was keeping up here have walked off on their own. Along with a few other things. I don’t have enough to drive back to the city.”

  The cottage: a turn of phrase Brooke had always hated. As if everyone owned a second home, as if having a cottage was a foregone conclusion.

  “You can’t put diesel in that.” Brooke nodded at the car. “It’s the wrong kind of engine.”

  “This is a diesel hybrid, actually. Runs on just about anything. Convertible all-wheel drive. You probably haven’t seen this generation of vehicles out here.”

  Brooke lifted her walkie-talkie and pressed the button. “Mama,” she said flatly. “Some cottager wants gas.”

  “Fucking sell him some, then. I don’t care,” came Emily’s tinny response.

  Brooke masked her surprise.

  “I’ll get it,” Robin offered, taking a step back toward the refinery.

  “Get two jerrys,” Brooke said.

  “What do I owe you?” the man asked.

  “One-twenty,” Brooke suggested, randomly.