FOLLOW THE LEADER - Chapter 12

Chapter 12


It was 9pm when Jason Powers drove his old Rover off the fire trail and onto Highway 101, just south of Petaluma.  Rainbow, the young woman to his right, was wearing her Snoopy cap again. He had asked her not to, but she had forgotten.  It trivialized everything he was doing. He nicknamed her “Rainbow” for good reason, he remembered now. Unlike Peewee and Sheena’s sullen masks, Rainbow’s face was open. In fact she seemed to wear a perpetual smile. Even when things weren’t going well.  He gave a sidelong glance. She caught it and smiled.  He could not see her age lines in the dark.  She was thirty something, by far the oldest of his followers. Looking back now, he had trusted her too much because of that. Big mistake.
He glanced into the mirror and saw Peewee’s small steely eyes. That morning when she had squinted in bright sunlight, they reminded him of a Pit Bull’s.
Peewee wore her Raider’s cap backward whenever she left camp. The other girls did this as well, except for Cocoa, who was Jason’s current concubine.  Cocoa had taken the place of Katherine Rollins, who never spent one night in a tent. She had brought some tasty drugs to the camp, which quickly endeared her to his flock. But as soon as Jason told them she would be allowed to keep her hair and live with him in the cabin, the others became insanely jealous.
That friction resulted in a “pow-wow,” which soon turned into a gripe session. Tempers flared. Eventually Katherine Rollins stood up and denounced Powers and his followers. Then she said something that would seal her fate: “I’m calling my father and telling him to get me out of this rat hole.” As if that were not enough, she shouted “And screw your initiation!”

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