Now that Chris had actually injected the driver, I expected Jimbo to immediately start pounding Chris's face, at the very least. But the driver just slumped forward. A string of drool crept away from his lip. He mumbled something incoherently.
"It's okay, Ash." Chris smiled at me, once again proud of himself. "It's not really TGV. Don't worry. I was totally bluffing him about that."
"What did you just give him then?" I asked. "Is he even conscious?"
"Yeah, he's conscious. And don't worry about Jimbo. He's feeling way better right now than either of us." Chris held up the syringe. "Lorazepam. I raided a dentist office today and found all kinds of goodies in oral surgery. Old Jimbo here"—he slapped the driver's leg—"isn't going to remember any of this. One side-effect of Lorazepam is amnesia, and I've been juicing him with a couple drops every fifteen minutes or so all day." Chris put his mouth close to the driver's ear. "Jimbo, you can just drive on home from wherever you came from now! It's been a real pleasure!"
Chris hurried me out of the cab and slammed the door. The driver began very slowly maneuvering the now-empty semi down Ed's driveway.
"You're going to let him drive like that?"
"He'll be fine," Chris said. "He thinks he's going about fifty miles an hour right now. The important thing is that I just shot him full of enough Lorazepam not to remember a thing."
The driver weaved left, then right, but he seemed capable of keeping the semi on the road. It rumbled away at a snail's pace and disappeared into the darkness.
Herding thirty-seven laden cattle is next to impossible in the dark.
At first, Chris and I couldn't even keep half of them on the trail. Once we got the hang of looping around them on the horses, though, the cattle started to sense the trailway and our whole lowing entourage moved more or less forward. Still, it was close to midnight by the time we reached the same ridge where we'd stopped that morning.
The snowfall had ceased, and moonlight illuminated the clouds, but the barn and the field below were invisible in darkness.
There was just enough pale light to see, though, as we rounded the bend, a figure standing on the trail.
Chris and I both turned on our flashlights. Our dual beams illuminated a man, shielding his eyes from the glare, wearing a black parka and the same public-issue boots I'd seen the Home Guard distributing that morning.
We'd been caught. The Home Guard had tracked us down and had cut us off. We were totally screwed.
"Who's there?" Chris called out.
Kaypay sauntered further along the trail, drawing me closer to the figure. Still shielding his eyes, the man waved his free arm calmly, indicating that he didn't mean us any harm.
Wait. Who was this? Maybe it wasn't the Home Guard after all.
The man waved again, and I saw now that one of his parka's sleeves had been torn off.
It was him.
Whoever had been hard at work all that day mercy-killing burning prisoners, freeing captives, and—it had to have been the same person—unburying positives that morning, was now standing on the trail right in front of us. . .
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