"Please," I said in a much smaller voice.
He didn't look up when he spoke, his voice soft and worn, like a shoe.
"You're leaving tonight, whether the tracker sees or not. You tell Charlie that you can't stand another minute in Forks. Tell him whatever story works. Pack the first things your hands touch, and then get in your truck, no matter what he says to you. You have fifteen minutes. Do you hear me? Fifteen of them. Not ten, not thirty. Not five. Fifteen minutes from the time you cross the doorstep."
The Jeep rumbled to life and he spun us around, the tires squealing on the asphalt as I squealed inside. The needle on the speedometer started to race up the dial and soon we were traveling European speeds into a future unknown.
"Emmett?" I asked, looking pointedly at my hands.
"Oh gosh," he said. In his rush to pump iron before the fight, he'd put both of them in his giant cave of an armpit and clamped down. He let me loose.
A few minutes passed in silence, other than the roar of the engine. Then Fredward spoke again.
"This is how it's going to happen," he said, retrieving a small whiteboard from his back pocket. "When we get to the house, if the tracker is not there, I will walk her to the door."
Fredward drew a stick-figure girl walking up to a door with a stick-figure tracker hiding in the bushes three miles off.
He glared at me in the rear-view mirror, and when I didn't take him seriously, he wiped the board clean with his thumbs and drew a stick-figure eye glaring at me. I gulped.
"Emmett, you take the outside of the house. Alice, you get the truck."
He drew a stick-figure man outside of a house, and then held the board out in front of him to compare the picture to the reality of Emmett. He shook his head in consternation, and then began nodding wildly as he added some length to Emmett's legs and made his arms bigger. Fredward smirked. Then he drew a truck with a head floating in it, to represent Alice.
"I'll be inside as long as she is. After she's out, you two can take the Jeep home and tell Carbomb."
"No way, bro," Emmett broke in. "I'm with you to the max."
"Think it through, Emmett. I don't know how long I'll be gone."
"Until we know how far this is going to go, I'm with you. To the max." Emmett reached a fist of solidarity forward into the front seat to emphasize his point.

386

Chapter 18

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