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7.

I woke up at some nameless hour of the night, roughly shaken into consciousness by a hand on my shoulder. Blinded by the dark, at first I wasn’t sure if I’d crossed back over the threshold into reality or if this was just part of my dream. But then I registered my father’s presence leaning over me, felt the heat of his nighttime breath against my cheek.

“It’s time,” he whispered in my ear. “They came for us.”

I bolted upright, instantly wide-awake. “The feds? Is this because of what you did to the bulldozers?”

My father held a finger to my lips, silencing me. He was already moving toward the door, his stocking feet silent against the wooden floorboards. I slid out of bed and followed him.

We slept in our clothes for just this reason. The day may come when we will need to flee without warning. I had permanent rough patches on my belly where the buttons and zippers of my jeans rubbed my tender skin all night long.

There was almost no moon and our curtains were drawn for privacy, so I couldn’t see what was happening outside our cabin. I couldn’t hear footsteps on the porch, so the feds had to be farther down the lane or hidden in the tree line with their guns trained on our door. I wondered how my father had known that the feds were on their way: if he’d been up late, listening to the sounds of the night, or if he’d somehow been tipped off.

I grabbed my go bag from the hook where it hung outside my bedroom door; and then the rifle that hung on the wall beside that. These were my jobs. My father was already working at his, pushing aside the table in the living room, flipping back the threadbare rug to reveal the trapdoor beneathit.

I handed him the rifle and he moved aside so that I could climb in first.

The air in our secret tunnel was cold and smelled so strongly of earth that it made my nose sting. I got to the bottom of the ladder and crouched there, waiting as my father climbed down beside me and then pulled the trapdoor shut above us. He’d rigged up a clever little pulley to flip the rug back into place. Once it was closed, the tunnel was a black pit of darkness, devoid of light so completely that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

“Dad? Is this really it? Or is it just a drill?”

“It’s real,” he said tersely.

I fumbled in the pocket of my backpack, trying to locate the Zippo that was stashed there, my shaking fingers doing an inventory of the bag’s familiar contents: Flint. Box of bullets. Extra batteries. Altoids tin with two hundred dollars in cash stashed inside. Pocketknife.

My father’s flashlight clicked on next to me, just as I grasped the smooth metal of the Zippo. I recoiled from the sudden wash of light and flung out my hand to reveal the lighter in my palm.

“You want me to do it?” I whispered.

My father shook his head. “You go ahead. I’ll set it and catch up with you.” He pointed the flashlight down the tunnel. “Run.”

Relieved, I turned and ran.

Not that running was really possible, of course. The tunnel was only four feet high and three feet wide, braced with two-by-fours, and only a hundred yards long, the distance to our shed. My father had spent more than two years digging it out with a pickaxe and explosives that he designed himself, starting not long after my thirteenth birthday and ending after I’d turned fifteen. My task had been to shuttle the dirt to the far edges of our property, using a rusty old wheelbarrow that rubbed my palms raw. The blisters had eventually popped and bled before turning into permanent calluses that I liked to rub with my thumb when I was reading.

I squatted and waddled as fast as I could toward the darkness that lay beyond my father’s flashlight beam. The first time I’d been down here I’d been terrified of seeing spiders or rats or sightless moles; but the truth was that nothing lived down in this gravelike dark. Behind me, I could hear the pop and sizzle of my father’s matches. I braced myself for the flare of light that would come when the ignition pile lit; I wondered how long it would take for the cabin to go up in flames. What if my father hadn’t calculated it properly? What if the flames shot down the tunnel instead of exploding up through the vents that he’d designed? What if he set us on fire by mistake?

By the time I made it to the door beneath our garden shed, my father had almost caught up withme.

“Faster.”

I was sweating through my T-shirt. Even through the dust in my nose I could smell the sharp tang of panic as I pushed against the door, trying to get the leverage to fling it open. It seemed to be stuck. I waited for my father to reach across and help me but he just crouched behind me, his arms braced against the dirt walls of the tunnel, waiting. The explosion kept not coming. Maybe it wouldn’t come. Maybe we were seconds away from dying. Maybe the feds were already sitting on the other side of the trapdoor, guns pointed atus.

The trapdoor wouldn’t budge.

Finally, I heaved my shoulder into it, jamming it so hard that I thought my collarbone had surely snapped. The door dislodged itself from the frame, and I managed to push it open and climb out into the cool silence of the garden shed.

My breath came shallow and fast. I retrieved tennis shoes from my go bag and pulled them on, tying the laces with fingers that remained stubbornly disobedient. My father materialized from the tunnel and slammed the door shut behind him. He went to peer through the dusty window of the shed back toward the cabin.

“Can you see anything?” I whispered. “Is it on fire?”

The shed had two doors: one in front that faced the cabin and a second that opened directly into the forest, shielded from view. Out the back door, then, and into the woods: There was a path there, just steps from the shed, that led for a mile through the trees. Eventually it would take us to an old logging road, rarely used, where my father sometimes hid his truck.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s go.”

I opened the back door of the shed and began to run.

Shrubs whipped at my calves. My feet fumbled over rocks and roots. Tree limbs reached sharp fingers out to grab at my shirtsleeves. The go bag thumped against my back, soaked with sweat. I ran as fast as I could, with every step sure that I would hear the crack of a gun, the whoosh of an explosion, the shouts of the men who were huntingus.

“STOP.”

I stumbled, nearly falling over, my body in such instinctual flight that it couldn’t keep up with my mind’s obedient response to my father’s command. I slowed, turned, braced myself against a pine as my lungs pulled in ragged gulps of freezing night air. My father stood silhouetted in the trees, in no hurry at all. He was smiling, pointing to his wristwatch.

“Four minutes fifty-eight seconds,” he said. “That’s a record.”

I could feel my heart pounding so fast that I thought it might come right up through my throat. The sweat was already cooling against my skin, bringing up goosebumps.

“So it was just a drill?” I was still tense, ready to bolt.

“Just a drill. You did fine. A little slow on getting that lighter out. If you were on your own, you’d need to be quicker on the draw with that fire. But overall, not bad.”

My heart was slowing to a dull, leaden thump. Why was I always so surprised by this? Twice a year he’d done this, since the tunnel had been completed; this had to be the fifth time, or maybe it was the sixth. And every time, I believedit.

“Seriously, Dad?” I said, suddenly furious. “It’s my birthday. ”

“When the feds come, they won’t care if it’s your birthday or not,” he said. “I don’t care if you like these drills. This is for us. You know that if they come for me, they’ll put you in foster care. One of those horrible group homes where kids get shanked or end up addicted to crack. We do these drills so that we can both survive.”

My mouth was full of gritty saliva, thick with dust from the tunnel. I spat on the ground, trying to wrap my head around the word survive .

My father had an answer to everything. He’d made sure I’d always known that. But that night, for the first time, I realized that the one answer he’d never given me was the answer to the most pivotal question of all: What happens after survival? What does it mean to survive, when you’re not quite sure what you’re living for?

What do you do when you start to realize that you want more than just…existence?