Point of No Return (23 page)

At that same moment, Matt was on the back of a wagon trying to comfort Eveline. She hadn't stopped crying since they had left the slave auction and drove away toward the colonel's plantation.

“They took my daddy, they took my daddy,” she wept again and again.

His sides still hurting, Matt winced as he leaned close to her. “Don't worry. We'll find him.”

“How?” Eveline sniffed.

“I don't know,” Matt said. “But we will. I promise.”

She put her head against his arm. “Promise?”

“Yeah,” Matt replied and leaned his head against the coarse siding on the wagon. He closed his eyes wearily. His stomach lurched as if the wagon had suddenly slipped into a dip in the road. And that's when he heard the voice.

“What's going on here?” it asked.

It was so present that Matt thought someone had whispered in his ear. He opened his eyes while his stomach continued to do flips. Of course, he expected to see Eveline and the back of the wagon they'd been riding on. Instead, he found himself looking at a flashing red light.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“W
ELL?” THE VOICE
asked again.

“Who's there? Where are you?” Jack asked, still not able to see anyone. He was aware that his right arm felt prickly, as if it had fallen asleep. He pushed out with it and hit someone.

“Ouch. Cut it out.”

Jack turned a little, and in the glow of a flashing red light he saw the outline of a face. “Matt?”

“Yeah, it's me,” Matt answered. “I'm waiting for my stomach to settle down.”

“Me, too. And I'm
really
confused,” Jack said.

“So am I. How did we get here?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure where
here
is. Did you hear that voice?” Jack asked.

“Uh huh. Are we home?”

The voice bounced around them again. “Jack? Matt? Are you in there?”

“It's Mr. Whittaker,” Jack said, elated. “We're here!”

With a
whoosh
, the door to the Imagination Station slid open. Light assaulted Jack and Matt so that they winced and had to lean back and cover their eyes.

Whit stood with his hands on his hips and a disapproving look on his normally friendly face. “Come out of there. I want to know what the two of you are doing in my machine without permission. Don't you realize how dangerous it is—messing around with something you don't understand? What if it locked you in and I didn't come back down as soon as I did?”

Jack sheepishly crawled out, explaining as he did, “We didn't know what it was. See, we were playing behind Whit's End and found the tunnel, and it led to here and we saw the machine and…” Jack's voice trailed off as he realized Whit was looking beyond him.

“Matt?” Whit called out.

Jack turned around to see that Matt was still inside the Imagination Station. “Come on, Matt,” Jack insisted.

“No,” Matt said in a small voice. “I can't.”

Whit cocked one of his bushy white eyebrows. “You can't?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because I promised,” Matt said with a sniffle from the shadow of the machine.

Jack was surprised to realize that Matt had a choked crying sound in his voice.

“
What
did you promise?” Whit asked.

“I promised Eveline that I would help her find her father.”

“Eveline?”

“The slave girl,” Jack explained. “She and Clarence were captured by the slave hunters and taken to Alabama. They took Matt, too. Reverend Andrew and I followed them.”

Matt continued from inside the machine, “They sold Clarence to another plantation, then they sold me and Eveline to some colonel. She was crying, Mr. Whittaker, and I promised. Please don't make me leave them there.”

Whit stroked his mustache for a moment, then strolled over to his workbench. “That's not how the story went,” he said as he picked up one of the books lying there.

“Story?” Jack asked.

“I've been programming the Imagination Station to play out different kinds of stories—from the Bible and from history.” He flipped a few pages in the book, then turned to Jack. “I had set the Imagination Station in its program mode to input all kinds of information, including Clarence's and Eveline's story. They had been caught by the slave hunters here at Whit's End and taken south—”

“Just like we said!”

“Yes, but they weren't sold to separate slave owners in the original story. They were both sold to Colonel Alexander Ross. Later, Reverend Andrew showed up posing as an ornithologist—”

“Yeah! I was with Reverend Andrew!” Jack said excitedly. “I was his assistant!”

Whit shook his head. “It's very strange. You must have come in right after I went upstairs. I've only been gone for 15 minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes!” Jack cried out. “We've been in there for almost two weeks!”

Whit scrubbed his chin. “The adventures work at an accelerated pace.”

Jack couldn't believe it. “Wow,” was all he could figure to say.

Whit continued, “But what doesn't make sense to me is why the story has changed.” He fell silent for a moment, then suddenly snapped his fingers. “You two must have gotten into the Imagination Station while it was in the
middle
of inputting the program! Your interference changed the story.”

Jack felt like Whit was blaming them for something, but he didn't understand enough of what he just said to know for sure.

“You mean we messed it up?” Matt asked.

Whit leaned against the door to the Imagination Station and peered in at Matt. “It looks that way.”

That's what happens when you do things you're not supposed to do.

Though Whit didn't say those actual words, Jack and Matt both felt the sting as if he had.

Matt got that choked sound in his voice again. “But what's it mean? Are Clarence and Eveline in trouble because of us?”

Whit shrugged. “By getting into the machine when you did, you changed the program—and must have changed the story.”

“Then we have to go back and fix it,” Matt said urgently.

“It's only a story, Matt,” Whit said.

“No, it isn't! It was real!
They
were real. You have to let me go back. I promised I'd help!” Matt's voice was high-pitched and panicked.

Whit gazed at Matt warmly, his eyes soft with understanding. “You're taking this pretty seriously.”

“I promised,” Matt said quietly.

Whit turned to Jack. “You, too?”

Jack nibbled on his lower lip, then nodded. “Yeah. Reverend Andrew was counting on me to help,” he said with more confidence than he felt.

“Reverend Andrew's mission—and what happened to Clarence and Eveline—took a lot of courage. It won't be easy,” Whit told them.

“It wasn't easy before,” Matt said.

Whit glanced at his watch as if to confirm that they still had time enough to do it. He then waved his hand for Jack to get back into the machine. “Go on. But I'll be watching you closely this time. And when you're finished, we're going to have a talk about you sneaking in here in the first place.”

Jack settled into the seat next to Matt again. Matt turned his face away, embarrassed that he had become so emotional.

“Just push the red button when you're ready,” Whit said as the door closed.

“We have to be out of our minds to go back,” Jack said in the darkness.

“Yeah. We probably are,” Matt agreed.

Then Matt reached forward and pushed down on the flashing red button.

(To be continued)

INTRODUCTION

A
S PART OF THE BOYS
' “punishment” for getting into my workroom (and the Imagination Station) without permission, I made them write down the rest of their adventure. I polished it up a little, fixed the spelling, and edited it so readers can follow who is telling what part of the story where and…well, you'll see.

They wanted to call it
Jack's and Matt's Big Adventure
, but they got in a loud argument over whose name should go first. So I suggested we call it
Freedom Run
as a follow-up to
Dark Passage
. I'll stop taking up your time now and let the boys tell their own stories.

—John Avery Whittaker

CHAPTER ONE

Matt tells about the plantation.

I
SCOOTED OVER IN
the seat as Jack squeezed next to me in the Imagination Station. He didn't say anything. I was glad. Nothing a guy hates worse than to have his best friend make a fuss about the fact that he was crying. I turned away and rubbed my eyes. I hoped my nose wouldn't run. It always runs when I cry, and I didn't have a tissue.

It was kind of dumb to get so upset, I know. But I felt bad about promising to help Eveline find her father and then—
zing
—all of a sudden being yanked out of the slave wagon and brought back to my time. Don't get me wrong; I was happy to be home. I didn't think we'd
ever
get back. I hated being a black kid in a world where everyone thought blacks were good only for being slaves. I hated being treated worse than an animal. I wanted to get back to
my
Odyssey, where people treated me like…well,
me.

But poor Eveline was stuck back there on that wagon without her father, and it was
my
fault in a way. If Jack and I hadn't gotten into the Imagination Station in the first place, things would've turned out the way they were supposed to. I mean, what could I do except go back and try to fix everything? What would
you
do?

“Just push the red button when you're ready,” Mr. Whittaker said as the door to the Imagination Station
whooshed
shut. The lights on the panel blinked at us like a Christmas tree.

“We have to be out of our minds to go back,” Jack said.

“Yeah, we probably are,” I answered.

Jack reached over and pushed down on the flashing red button.

The machine hummed louder and louder until it felt like it had suddenly jumped forward. I had the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get on a roller-coaster ride. Or in the car when my dad hits a dip in the road too fast. It turned my stomach upside down and sucked the breath out of me. Everything went dark. For a minute, I wasn't sure where I was. Then I smelled old straw and heard the clip-clop of horses' hooves and the slow creaking of a wooden wagon. I guessed that somehow the Imagination Station had put me right back where I was before. Only now I was half-buried in a pile of straw. I sat up and my body ached all over. I forgot about being knocked around by Mr. Ramsay's overseer and kicked by the man at the slave auction.

“Are you all right?” Eveline asked. The tears were still in her eyes, but now they were wide like she'd just seen a ghost.

“I'm all right,” I said. I had no idea what had happened—if I suddenly disappeared right in front of her when the Imagination Station took me back to my time, or if I just reappeared, or what. “Why?”

She watched me carefully. “You rolled under the hay all of a sudden. Were you afraid of something?”

“I…I…” I couldn't think of an answer that would make sense. “Never mind.”

“You were crying, weren't you?” Eveline said softly.

Oh, brother
, I thought.

“You two better shut your traps!” the wagon driver growled. He was a heavyset man named Master Kinsey. He was the overseer, the man in charge of the slaves, at Colonel Ross's plantation. “A few days in the field will take the spunk out of you,” he threatened.

I believed him. But Colonel Ross was the owner of the plantation, and he had other ideas.

My mother once made me watch a movie called
Gone with the Wind.
I didn't like it much, because it was long and boring and all about a woman who didn't care who she hurt as long as she got what she wanted. There was a big fire in it, which I thought was okay, but other than that, the adults can have it. Anyway, Colonel Ross lived in a house like the one in the movie. It was real big, with large windows and giant pillars along the front. Master Kinsey pulled the wagon around the back where the sheds and barns were. Beyond them was a “compound” of shacks where the slaves lived. And beyond that was a field that went way out to the horizon.

The place was so pretty that I was beginning to think that it might not be so bad there after all. Then I remembered that I wasn't here as a visitor; I was a
slave
. How could I ever forget it?

A wiry man in a dark butler-type suit hustled down the stairs from the back door and raced to the wagon. He was out of breath with excitement. “Saints be blessed, they're here,” he said.

I looked around to see who he was talking about and was surprised to realize that it was me and Eveline.

“You can just forget about it, Jonah,” Master Kinsey said. “I'm putting them in the fields.”