Chapter 17

Rose

It was fully dark when the church bus finally stopped. The children had fallen asleep. Rose had not. She was worried about what awaited them at their destination.

“Wake up, you lot,” the Preacher Man called out. “This is the last stop, so gather your things. Hurry now. You, girl,” he pointed to Rose, “follow that woman; she’ll show you a place where you all can sleep.”

Rose shook Junie and Izzy awake. Sam had grabbed all of the remaining bottles of water and stuffed those, along with the blankets, into the big black plastic garbage bags that contained their things. The children stumbled sleepily off the bus. A scowling woman with weird yellow eyes silently led them to a big red barn. She slid open a big door and motioned them in.

Inside, Rose smelled the scent of horses and the sweet smell of hay and molasses. The woman separated them into groups of four and wordlessly pointed them to bed down in the stalls. The floor was covered with mounds of straw.

Sam looked around appraisingly, then went to a corner, pulled some hay out of the manger onto the floor, and spread out two blankets he had stolen from the bus on top of the pile. Rose and the girls immediately cuddled under the blankets. Sam passed water bottles to the girls and waited in front of them, knife in hand, to see what happened next.

The woman left. The barn was plunged into darkness. The only sound was the whimpering of someone in the next stall. It was a long while before exhaustion finally claimed Rose, and she drifted off to sleep.

A squeal of delight from Junie woke her up. Creatures out of a book of fairy tales stood at the stall’s entrance, staring at them.

Junie immediately broke the ice between the two groups. She walked over and offered a drink from her water bottle to the three creatures.

They excitedly whistled and clicked at her. They sounded like a flock of tweeting birds.

The biggest one was stocky and had reddish-brown skin and big amber eyes. His mouth had two baby tusks growing out of the lower jaw. The other, slightly smaller, was also stocky, with long peaked hairy ears and a fat bulbous nose. The third was a very slender girl with pale green skin and violet eyes.