The Never List

themselves out of their sleep. Tracy grabbed the stragglers by the arms, throwing them into the breaking daylight. Some were dumbfounded and couldn’t process what was happening. I couldn’t process what was happening. What was Christine doing here?
    But there was no time for questions.
    Once we were out, Tracy jumped down and looked the girls over as they stood there, dazed. “Girls, don’t be idiots. RUN!!!”
    I glanced around quickly. The van was parked behind a barn, half-collapsed into an overgrown rye field, across from an equally decrepit farmhouse, dark except for a single lit window. I wasted no more time following Christine’s lead but sprinted down the hill, away from the house into the woods. Running like hell.
    It must have been a beautiful and ethereal sight in some ways. All those girls, barefoot in flowing white robes, running downhill at top speed between the trees of a wild rural paradise. Like nymphs. Like seraphim.
    Time was unrolling in slow motion as if in some fluid, hypervividdream. The girls’ faces reflected their shock, their terror, their total disorientation. I could see flashes of white robes flitting in and out between the branches. Tracy, Christine, and I could easily spot one another as the group fanned out, the only black spots in the pure flow of white streaming down the hill.
    All of a sudden I felt elated. I laughed out loud. Loud into the dawning sunlight glinting through the green of the trees. I looked over at Tracy and Christine. They heard me, and somehow my joy, my joy at being free, at having such a close call, of having Christine show up as a savior in the early morning, sent my spirits soaring, and I couldn’t stop laughing. They joined me, and soon we were running and stumbling and tripping over ourselves, laughing hysterically, maniacally, desperately, as we moved through those woods.
    Eventually we came to a clearing. Christine slowed down to check her phone, then stopped, texting like mad. Several of the girls had stopped running from sheer exhaustion, many of them holding their sides to ease the cramps. We gathered in the clearing and tried to catch our breath, listening to hear whether anyone was chasing us. The woods were completely silent. No dogs, no men, no gunshots. It was eerily quiet.
    Christine was smiling through tears. Just as I was about to ask her what we should do, I heard the sound of helicopters. There must have been four or five of them hovering overhead, the collective sound of their spinning blades combining into a single roar in my ears. Christine ran over to us, her arms wide, gesturing for us to get down. The girls in white stared up in awe as one helicopter lowered itself down into the clearing.
    As the first one landed, a tall man in a black bulletproof vest and black flight suit jumped to the ground and started walking toward us as he spoke into the microphone pinned to his shoulder.
    “Jim!” I said. I almost started to run toward him but slowed up as I realized Tracy and Christine were falling in line beside me.
    Jim looked at us and shook his head. Then he smiled.
    “Sarah, remember—all I asked you to do was testify at the hearing? And now look what you’ve gotten yourself into.” He almost reached out to hug me but pulled back at the last minute, remembering himself. Tracy fell into his arms instead, and then Christine. They were delirious, thanking him over and over again for coming.
    Jim looked out at me from their arms. I could only smile weakly at him. He smiled back, holding my gaze with his eyes, which were filled with pity and a tenderness that caught me by surprise. He is pretty human, I thought to myself as I looked away, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Especially for an FBI agent.
    Slowly they got us all boarded onto the helicopters, and an hour or so later we touched down in the parking lot of a local police station, which I would soon discover was in a small town just outside Portland. The squat brick building had been built in the fifties, and it didn’t look like anyone had done any maintenance on it since. Inside, the linoleum tiles on the floor had curled up at the corners, and the paint on the walls was chipped and faded, stained with the dull black sheen that inevitably develops from decade after decade of brushes with human flesh.
    It seemed every law enforcement officer from the county had gathered in the building, and every journalist and camera crew in the state was camped outside. Three ambulances,