As they positioned a sheet of scrap cardboard over the two rows of gas cans, Malorie rattled off a report on her inspection of the pickup. “There’s no time to drop the transmission pan, but the color of the transmission fluid on the dipstick looks decent, and it shifts smoothly. The oil was one quart low, and with a hundred and ninety-two thousand miles on the clock, I suspect that it’s starting to burn some oil. The oil didn’t look dark. The tires are in fair shape and their pressure was fine except the left rear, which I brought up with the hand pump. The engine compression seems decent, and the serpentine belt should be good for several thousand more miles. The body is in fair shape but the rear wheel wells are rusted out. The shocks are iffy, but with the load we’ll be carrying, they should suffice. The gas gauge reads seven-eighths full, if that can be trusted. I checked the owner’s manual, and that shows this rig has a twenty-eight-gallon tank. Conservatively assuming fifteen miles per gallon on the highway, that gives us a four-hundred-twenty-mile range. Those five-gallon cans will provide another seven hundred fifty miles. Not bad. The power steering fluid is a bit on the dark side, but the power-steering pump itself doesn’t sound noisy. No noise from the water pump, either. There is a little slop in the steering wheel, but it’ll do. The brakes seem firm, and while I’d prefer to pull the hubs to do an inspection, there’s not enough time. The battery has full cells, but the terminals look a little snowy. Hoses look good and feel supple, but you never know with a vehicle that’s been parked for a long time. In summary, I’d say that whoever owned this pickup must’ve taken pretty good care of it—at least mechanically. Too bad that it isn’t four-wheel drive, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

Joshua and Malorie took one last look around the house while Megan wrote a note to their landlord. At the last minute, Malorie tossed in the tire pump, alongside the deer carts. They left at 11:30 P.M., just after saying prayers and bedding down Jean and Leo in sleeping bags in the back of the crew cab. Leo asked, “We’re going on an adventure, aren’t we, Mommy?”

Megan stroked his hair and answered, “Yes, we are. It’s time to go to sleep now.”

Picking a route that would avoid UNPROFOR checkpoints, they headed west on Highway 733 to Elizabethtown. As he drove, Joshua started simulating interrogations of Megan and Malorie on the details of their Georgia driver’s licenses, to be sure that they still had the details memorized. They did the same for him. Joshua cut north to Owensboro. From there, they took a succession of small highways through Henderson, Waverly, and Morganfield. Since they had mainly been walking for the past six months, their progress seemed lightning fast. Near 3:30 A.M., they crossed the Ohio River into Indiana. They stopped on a side road to refuel. Six hours and another refueling later, they were in Havana, Illinois. There, they found one gas station that was open. Spending almost all of their ProvGov Blue Bucks, they refilled the tank and all of the gas cans.

Leaving Havana, they ran into a UNPROFOR roadblock. There was just a cursory ID check, where they handed the bored MPs their “inherited” Georgia driver’s licenses. Megan offered a story about how they had been promised work at a food-processing plant in western Illinois. There were lots of people moving long distances within UNPROFOR territory to find work, so this sounded plausible to the sentry. They were greatly relieved that they weren’t searched (since their guns were hard to hide), and that their IDs were not scanned—as UNPROFOR had started to do in Kentucky. (They didn’t want to end up in a database.)

It took all of them a couple of hours to calm down from the tension of the roadblock stop. Megan later asked Joshua about his impressions of the incident. He said, “My mind was mainly on reminding myself not to take chest shots, since they were wearing Interceptor Body Armor. My mind got caught in a loop: ‘They’re wearing IBA, so aim for the ocular window . . .’”

•   •   •

At the same time that they were pulling away from that checkpoint, an MRAP pulled up in front of their former house in Bradfordsville, Kentucky. A team of German Bundeswehr soldiers armed with G36 rifles and carrying a battering ram trotted to the door. Finding the door unlocked, they rushed in to find the house deserted. The officer in charge called in the two Soldats who had been covering the rear of the house. Disgusted with finding their prey missing, the officer snorted, “Ekelhaft.”

They found an envelope on the kitchen table, addressed to the landlord. Inside was four dollars in pre-1965 half dollars and a handwritten note that read:

Dear Mr. Combs,

We were called away on short notice to attend to my grandmother in South Carolina, who is ill. Enclosed you will find our house lease money for October and November. If we have not returned by November 30, then you can assume that we will not be returning and you can rent the house to someone else.

Thanks, and God Bless, Megan Kim

•   •   •

Joshua’s party continued to switch drivers once every two or three hours as they zigzagged west and slightly north, on smaller highways. At 1:15 P.M. in Osceola, Iowa, they made inquiries about how to avoid UNPROFOR checkpoints around Omaha, doing their best to sound casual. They were told to cross into Nebraska on Highway 138.

There was gas available in Osceola, but the station took only silver in payment. They again completely refueled and also bought two quarts of oil, since the engine was obviously burning some. They crossed into Nebraska at 4:30 P. M., feeling exhausted. Even sleeping in shifts, fatigue was catching up to them. They stopped at the parking lot of the abandoned Tecumseh Country Club to make sandwiches and to get some sleep.

Megan, Malorie, and the boys squeezed into the back of the pickup after pulling out the deer carts and the tent bags so that there’d be room to sleep in the camper shell. The Scepter cans sealed exceptionally well, so there was just a faint aroma of gasoline. Joshua did his best to sleep in the pickup’s rear seat, but it was too short for him and had some uncomfortable bumps. He awoke at 3:00 A.M. with a backache. He spent some time stretching his back before waking the others. Using his flashlight, Joshua checked the radiator, the radiator hoses, and the serpentine belt. Then he checked the tires with a pressure gauge. They had everything reloaded and were back on the road within ten minutes.

Eight hours later, with Malorie doing most of the driving across the broad prairie expanses of Nebraska, they arrived in the town of Gering, just south of Scottsbluff, across the river. There was gas available at a station in Gering, but the price there was forty cents in silver per gallon—twice as much as they had paid farther east.

In Gering, they got confirmation that a point twenty miles west of Scottsbluff was still the farthest western outpost of UN troops. Beyond the Wyoming state line, they would be outside UNPROFOR-controlled territory. It would also mean that they probably wouldn’t be able to buy gasoline. They were warned of a large UNPROFOR contingent in Scottsbluff and at the state line on Highway 26. However, a state line crossing point on the much smaller Highway 88—only a dozen miles south—was said to be unguarded.

They said some prayers asking for protection before turning west on Highway 88. The crossing was indeed unguarded, and Joshua breathed a sigh of relief. They stopped short of La Grange, Wyoming, to make sandwiches, using the last of their bread and some peanut butter that was made in Oklahoma under the post-Crunch trade name of “Glop.” Over lunch, they scrutinized the Rand McNally road atlas and did some mileage calculations.