The Stone Monkey

where he was less visible, and started forward as fast as his cramped and exhausted legs could carry him.
    •   •   •
    At the sound the families paused.
    “It was—” Wu Qichen began.
    “Yes,” Sam Chang muttered. “A gunshot.”
    “He’s killing us. He’s tracking us down and killing us.”
    “I know,” Chang snapped back. His heart cried for them—for Dr. Sung, for Sonny Li, for the couple—whoever among them had just died. But what could he do?
    Chang looked at his father and observed that Chang Jiechi was breathing hard but, despite the battering in the raft and the swim to shore, the old man didn’t seem to be in great pain. He nodded to his son, meaning it was all right to continue. The cluster of people started walking once again through the rain and wind.
    Their concerns about begging or coercing the drivers to take them to Chinatown were unfounded; there’d been no trucks waiting for them. Chang supposed that the vehicles were at a different location altogether, or perhaps as soon as the Ghost decided to scuttle the ship he’d called and had them return. He and Wu had spent several minutes calling for Sung and Li and the others who’d been washed overboard. But then Chang had seen the orange raft of the snakehead approaching and he’d led the two families off the road into the grass and bushes, where they’d be out of sight, and they made their way toward the lights, where he hoped to find a truck.
    The beacons that drew them turned out to be a line of restaurants, a petrol station, several stores selling souvenirs like on the waterfront at Xiamen, ten or twelve houses, a church.
    The hour was just around dawn—perhaps 5:30 or 6—but there were signs of life: a dozen cars were parked in front of the two restaurants, including a driverless one with the motor running. But it was a small sedan and Chang needed a vehicle with room for ten. And he needed one whose theft wouldn’t be noticed for at least two or three hours—the length of time he’d been told it would take them to get to Chinatown in New York City.
    He told the others to wait behind a tall hedge of bushes and motioned his son William and Wu to follow him. Crouching, they moved behind the buildings. There were two large trucks behind the petrol station but they were both well in view of a young attendant in the garage. Rain pelted the glass, making visibility poor, but he would have noticed immediately if they’d started to drive a truck away.
    Twenty meters farther on was a darkened house and behind it was a pickup truck. But Chang didn’t want to exposehis father or the children to the rain and weather. Also, ten shipwrecked Chinese would be easily spotted in a rickety old vehicle of this sort, driving toward New York City like a band of the “floating population”—itinerant laborers who travel from town to town in China looking for work.
    “Stay out of the mud,” Chang ordered his son and Wu. “Walk only on the grass or branches or stones. I don’t want to leave footprints.” Caution was instinctive for Chang; with both public security bureau and People’s Liberation Army agents constantly following them, dissidents in China learn quickly to obscure their movements.
    They moved on, through brush and trees whipped by the ferocious wind, past more houses, some dark, some showing signs of families waking: televisions flickering, breakfasts being prepared. Seeing this poignant evidence of normal life, Chang was stabbed by the hopelessness of their plight. But, as he’d learned to do in China, where the government had taken so much away from him, he pushed these sentimental feelings aside and urged his son and Wu to move more quickly. Finally they came to the last building on this strip of habitation: a small church, dark and apparently unoccupied.
    Behind the weathered building they found an old white van. From his hours on the Internet and watching TV, Chang knew a little English but these words he didn’t understand. At his urging, though, both of his sons had studied the language, and American culture, for years. William glanced at the van and explained, “It says ‘Pentecostal Baptist Church of Easton.’ ”
    Another soft crack in the distance. Chang froze at the sound. The Ghost had killed another one of them.
    “Let’s go!” an anxious Wu said. “Hurry. See if it’s open.”
    But the van’s door was locked.
    As Chang looked around for something they could use to break the window William