CHAPTER 27
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The Chase
As fast as she could, in a few short sentences, Nickie told Crystal everything.
Crystal kept interrupting, turning to Nickie with wide eyes and a dropped jaw.
“You mean you’ve had a dog up there all this time?”
“There was a girl in the closet?”
“You’ve been battling the forces of evil?”
“She says dogs are doing what?”
But all Nickie wanted was to find out where the buses had gone. “Never mind, never mind,” she said. She was still having trouble talking because of breathing so hard and shaking. “I’ll tell you later. Go that way.” She pointed down Cloud Street. “That’s where Amanda gave—But then it turned the corner, I think onto Birch Street—and that was maybe five minutes ago, or ten, so I don’t know where the bus is now.”
Crystal headed down Cloud Street. “Where did this Prophet woman say they were going to take the dogs?”
“Into the woods, she said. Far away, into the woods where they belong, and then let them go so they can be wild the way they’re supposed to be.”
“Odd,” said Crystal, driving through the neighborhood as fast as possible without actually squealing the tires. “Dogs haven’t been wild for several hundred thousand years. Not most dogs, anyway. They need us.”
“And we need them!” Nickie wailed. “I need Otis!”
They curved up onto Spruce Street but saw nothing. No one was in the street. A few snowflakes sifted down from the sky and landed on the car’s windshield. Crystal put on the wipers. She headed down Grackle Street and turned onto Main Street.
Nickie shouted, “Look!” and pointed ahead. Far down at the other end of Main Street was a patch of bright yellow. “The bus!”
But a moment later it turned off Main Street and was gone.
“It went to the right,” said Nickie. “That’s High Peak Road; it goes up the mountain. So that means they’ve finished collecting the dogs, and they’re taking them away. Can we go faster?”
Crystal stepped on the gas. “If we do catch up to the buses,” she said, “what happens next?”
“We just follow them till they stop.” Nickie was leaning forward, both hands gripping the dashboard. “Then when they let the dogs out, we grab Otis.”
“What about everybody else’s dogs?”
“I don’t know. I wish we could save them, too.”
“What if the people on the bus refuse to let us have Otis?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Nickie. “Let’s just go really fast.”
They turned up High Peak Road. It was a narrow, winding road, with the ranks of trees standing close on either side. The snow was falling faster now, whirling toward them, making it hard to see. Crystal slowed down. There was no sign of the buses.
“I don’t know,” said Crystal. “This might not be a good idea.”
Nickie said nothing. She kept her eyes glued forward, staring through the spinning whiteness. How would Otis survive in a snowstorm? He was little. He didn’t know how to get his own food.
Crystal glanced over at her. “Why didn’t you tell me about this dog before?”
“I thought you’d take him to the pound. You said you would.”
“I did?” Crystal shook her head. “So you’ve been getting fond of him all this time, haven’t you?”
Nickie nodded. Tears came to her eyes again, and she couldn’t speak.
“I don’t get it,” Crystal said. “This Prophet woman says the love you give a dog is subtracted from the love you give God. Have I got that right?”
Nickie nodded. The sky was growing darker as afternoon turned to evening. The shadows in the woods were so thick she could no longer see between the trees.
“So would that apply to cats, too, I wonder? Parakeets? Hamsters? Undeserving people? How do you decide what’s okay to love, according to the Prophet?”
“I don’t know,” said Nickie. She didn’t want to talk about this now. She just wanted Crystal to hurry up. The car was going slowly around the curves. Crystal had turned on the headlights, but they brightened the spiraling snow more than the road ahead. Nickie’s neck hurt from craning forward, trying to see.
“Love is love, seems to me,” said Crystal. “As long as what you love isn’t armed robbery, or bombing airplanes, or kidnapping little children.”
“Can we go faster?” Nickie asked.
“Not without sliding off the road.” Crystal shook her head. “We’re going to have to give this up, I think. It’s dangerous.” She slowed down even more to go around a bend in the road, and then suddenly she stamped on the brakes and the car slid sideways. Careening toward them out of the blinding whiteness was something big and yellow.
“The bus!” screamed Nickie. “It’s coming down!”
Crystal pulled over and stopped. Behind the first bus was another one, and another, each one furred with white on top. They passed by and trundled on downhill.
“But are the dogs still in there?” Nickie said. “Or did they let them out?”
Crystal pulled the car back out onto the road. “My guess is that those bus drivers didn’t want to drive in this weather any more than I do. I bet they just dumped the dogs and turned around.”
“Then let’s keep going!” Nickie cried, bouncing frantically in her seat. “We can find them!”
Crystal drove on, but she was frowning at the road and going slower than ever. After about ten minutes, they came to a place where the trees thinned out, and on the right was an open field, lightly dusted with snow. Nickie could see a dark mush of tire tracks here. “Stop!” she cried. “I think this is where the buses turned around. Can we get out and see?”
“We’re turning around, too,” said Crystal, but she stopped the car. Nickie flung the door open and jumped out. She ran toward the tire tracks and scanned the field. At the far edge, where the forest resumed, she saw something moving. A dog—no, two dogs, or three—leaping across the snow-dusted ground, heading for the trees.
“Otis!” Nickie shouted, though the dogs she saw were too big to be Otis. “Otis, Otis, come! Come back!”
But the dogs disappeared into the woods. If they heard her at all, they paid no attention. It was just an adventure to them, a thrilling freedom—at least at first. They didn’t understand yet that there were no food bowls in the woods, no warm fires, no people.
Crystal came up and stood beside her.
“I want to go after them,” Nickie said. “Will you wait for me? I’ll just run across there and call Otis again from where he can hear me—”
“We’ve got a snowstorm starting up,” Crystal said, “and it’s almost dark. I can’t let you go plunging around in the woods. I’m afraid we’re too late.”
“No!” cried Nickie. “It’s just over there,” she said, pointing across the wide field to where the trees made a dark line in the distance. “Otis!” she screamed again.
But nothing moved out in the field, and the snow whirled faster, filling the air, until the trees had vanished behind a blur of white.
“We have to go,” said Crystal. Her voice was sad and kind.
All the way back down the mountain, Nickie said hardly a word. She sat staring through the passenger-side window at the tree trunks ghostly in the snow, knowing it was too dark to see anything moving among them, but unable to make her eyes look anywhere else. She felt as if a hundred stones had collected inside her.
Crystal pulled up outside Greenhaven. “I’m sorry about this, sweetie,” she said. “I just had no idea any of this was going on. How could I not have known it?”
“You were busy,” said Nickie. “With other things.” She was so tired all of a sudden. She barely had the strength to open the car door.
But even after they got inside, Crystal kept asking questions, and Nickie kept having to explain things, and then they had to have something to eat, which Nickie wasn’t hungry for at all, and Crystal had to talk about how strange it was that no word had come from the president about whether there was going to be war. It seemed like forever before Nickie could get into bed and close her eyes. And of course by then she wasn’t sleepy anymore. She lay there thinking about Otis out in the snowstorm, cold and hungry and alone. She thought about the white bear, which might eat small dogs. She thought about Mrs. Beeson, who was trying to do good and was causing so much pain, and about Althea Tower, the Prophet, whose vision had started everything. And she thought about what she herself had done, and at that she buried her face in the pillow and tried not to think at all. “I want my mother,” she whispered, “and my father. I want to go home.”