Thunder by Bonnie S. Calhoun

hand flew to her chest. Not sure why, maybe to see if her heartbeat was still there. He smiled again.
    Selah squinted. It was as though he could read her thoughts and was responding.
    Raza came around the side of the wagon carrying more supplies. He turned back to the barn and glanced up at Bodhi. “What’re you grinning about?”
    Bodhi shut his eyes and hung his head without answering. He seemed calm, almost too calm. She would have been rabid with rage at being trussed, but he seemed to have moved beyond his physical state. He sat erect, eyes closed most of the time. It unnerved her that every once in a while his eyes opened and he would calmly look in her direction.
    Even though she sat still, sweat dripped from her temples and slid down her chest. The sun crept toward its noondayhigh. Raza and Cleon were beginning to show large wet spots under their arms and down the backs of their shirts as they loaded the wagon.
    Selah remembered shorter trips than the normal several days’ ride because they were afforded the opportunity to hop a Company AirStream at one of the stations. Those jet-propelled hovercrafts traveled near the ground but averaged fifty miles an hour.
    A thought slapped her. If they arrived at a station at the right time and hopped a Company AirStream before she could rescue Bodhi, what was she going to do? She would have no recourse left to stop them or catch up.
    Having no recourse was not an option. She’d not thought that far ahead. Maybe the sun was getting hotter, but she felt a sudden flush to her skin. Was it fear?
    It took another half hour for her brothers to hitch up the spare team and head out. The dust had barely settled back to the road when Selah grabbed her backpack. She tiptoed to the barn and peeked inside, hoping her father had already left through the back door. He had.
    She grabbed the keys from the nail inside the door and scraped the soft flesh of her thumb on a jagged piece of timber. She yelped. A trickle of blood oozed from the slice. She brought her thumb to her mouth to clean away the blood. Great. First blood and she wasn’t even out of the barnyard.
    She trotted across the tall-grassed hayfield to the left of the barn and disappeared into the tree line at the break in the encroaching kudzu where the animals normally grazed. For her, it would be about a two-hour journey to the first travel station, where her brothers would bed down for thenight. The wagon and team would take the better part of the afternoon to get there.
    It felt good to trot. For most of her life, Selah had enjoyed running. Mother had encouraged her to depend on her feet instead of mechanical forms of travel. She felt they made people lazy and fat. Seemed another one of Mother’s lessons was proving fruitful.
    Selah’s backpack hung firmly cinched to her body, offering no resistance to her movements. She’d keep up this pace until she got tired and then stop at her favorite stream for water and a short break.
    She used the compass Mother had given her for the tenth Birth Remembrance. Funny how so many things she’d learned now seemed important when at the time they’d felt useless and so out of place. The emerging culture of most Boroughs grew dependent on Mountain technology, and the old ways were slowly disappearing. She remembered scowling and tossing the compass into her box of dolls, which were much more important to her at the time. Now she silently thanked Mother and headed due north.
    Normally she’d have to be right on top of the pig farm before she knew to veer off to the right to find the stream, but the stench reached her nose long before the large oaks, apple orchard, and curing sheds told her to turn.
    There were several Boroughs raising and eating pigs. Pork was one meat that Mother would not let her eat. She said pigs didn’t sweat, so any impurities they ate were kept in their meat. But Selah loved the smell of cooking slab bacon. The heavenly