She didn’t want to stare.  She knew it was a bad idea.  She kept her nose in her book and only looked out of the side of her vision as an SUV marked with the local police department cruised slowly through the campground.  They were supposed to be here another week, but was this a sign to move on sooner?

It had been two years of this.  Two years since the government had decided that children and adults with disabilities needed to go to “farms” where they could be “helped.”  She didn’t trust the government; no one did at this point.  They grabbed people off the street and made them disappear all the time.

She hadn’t wanted to believe it was real.  She had been in denial a long time, even though she had opposed everything the government now represented.  Perhaps that was the reason they had targeted her family.  It couldn’t be helped now.  She had to go along with the plan, seeing members of the family every few months and quickly moving far away, in case they were being watched.  The last one had been her daughter in the mid-west.  She had spent nearly a month there before contacting her to come visit the last few days before she left.  That was it; a few brief hours of contact with a family member before moving on.

The money went into an account on the first of the month.  Lydia would go to an ATM and draw out the maximum.  She paid bills with the rest.  The credit cards still worked.  She was sure that was what they wanted.  It was a way of tracking her.  Was she being paranoid?  Maybe.  But so far, it had worked.  While other developmentally disabled adults had disappeared, Johnny was still with her.

They had made their escape one night several weeks before the date on the letter said he would be taken to the “farm.”  They had bought the camper for family vacations.  Now she lived in it with Johnny as they crisscrossed the country, trying to lay low.  John Sr., her husband, still worked and made sure she had funds.  He would take out cash as well and when she was close by to him, he would give her all he had saved before she disappeared again.  It was the only way to keep Johnny alive and free.

This happened occasionally.  She didn’t understand why local police were free to cruise private property like this.  Gated campgrounds were better, but they tended to be more expensive and more likely to ask questions.  Many of the places she stayed knew what she was doing.  Many were helpful.  If she got a bad vibe at check-in, she’d pay for a week and leave after a night.  The owners here had adored Johnny and even paid him to do some easy work for them.

Johnny was an affable adult.   Before this regime had taken over the government, he had worked in a fast-food restaurant and paid taxes like a good citizen.  The rhetoric out of Washington DC made her nervous, but surely someone would stop this from happening.  Didn’t many of the politicians who sat on their hands and do nothing also have relatives who were developmentally disabled?  Then it was, well surely they’ll go after the ones on disability first and Johnny works.

With the migrants gone, too afraid to come into the country to do the field work they normally did, the food chain was in crisis.  Lydia knew that was what it was.  The law of unintended consequences struck, and when push came to shove, they decided to make slaves out of those who couldn’t advocate for themselves.  At least, that was how she saw it.  The television commercials showed children dancing happily in beautiful fields surrounded by flowers and butterflies, saying they were “free to be who they were” with no pressure from society to conform.  Yet no one ever heard from them again.  Those in power blamed their disabilities, but Lydia and other parents were sure there was more to it than that.

Johnny was in the camper, watching television.  She didn’t think there was a threat but decided that tomorrow morning they would leave.  It was better not to second-guess and her first instinct was to run.  She would use the credit cards tomorrow morning to fill the tank and get food, then disappear without using them again.  She always tried to move at least a thousand miles away from their previous location.  The bills went to the house for things like the toll gates and John Sr. paid them.  There was no getting around some of it.  The ability to track people had become all too easy in this technological world, but she did her best.

And it had worked for two years so far.

She had never driven the pickup with the camper on it before she and John Sr. made the decision for her to take Johnny away and hide in plain sight.  There were lots of people now who didn’t have a permanent address.  It was easy to blend in with them.  There were also many people like her, who were trying to keep beloved family members from being kidnapped by the government.  They didn’t trust easily.  Still, she now knew of a number of places that were safe.  There were many people out there who wanted to help.  There were also people who wanted to collect the bounties.

The SUV didn’t make a second pass, which helped her relax a bit.  Still, she decided it was time to move.

Johnny was eating a sandwich and watching Guardians of the Galaxy when she went inside.

“Hey kiddo!” she said to the “kid” who was twenty-five years of age.  He presented as if he were still a teenager in many ways.  It made it easy to see him as still a kid.  “I think we will go on the road tomorrow.  I’m gonna look around a bit and decide where to go.  Don’t go out the rest of tonight, okay?”

They hadn’t been “home” since the previous fall and it was early spring.  She might be able to get close enough to home to have John Sr. come for a visit.  He was always amazed at how well she handled towing the camper now.  Johnny was a big help too.  So much for all the things RFK Jr. had said he would “never be able to do.”

Lydia couldn’t send an email.  Even through proxy servers it was dangerous.  She could send it tomorrow morning, knowing that by the time they traced it back they would be gone.  All she usually said was “on the move.”  Once a month, it let those she cared about know they were still alive and free.

What had gone so wrong in this country that it was down to this now?  As a kid, she had grown up riding bicycles and playing stickball.  She’d worked hard and had her own family, who were all productive members of society, even Johnny.  His diagnoses hadn’t defined him and he was a caring, capable adult with a great sense of humor.  Hearing him laugh was one of her greatest joys in life.

“Hmmm,” she thought, looking at the map.  It wasn’t quite as far away as she would have liked, but there was a campground not far from where her son in the military was stationed.  She decided to head there.  They could stay three weeks before she reached out to him, and then make their escape.  She hadn’t seen her two grandchildren in the two years since this had started.

The routine was easy.  Go into the office, ask them if they had a rate for a month.  Then ask them if they would take cash. Most small campgrounds liked that; so few people used cash nowadays and that meant they could pocket it.

She would also post a warning on the internet bulletin board for others like her.  Everyone used fake names, and with them moving around it was hard to pin down who was who.  They used it, though, to keep track of places to avoid and places that were friendly.  Before they left tomorrow, she would post that this place was “very friendly but police cruise through.”  There were plenty of “friendly” campgrounds to choose from, but Lydia was always hesitant to go to somewhere that there would be so many others like her.  In the first six months on the road, she had heard of two campgrounds that people had said were “friendly” and ended up with roundups by the secret police.  Better to go where there would only be a few other people around.

Lydia went back outside with her book.  She had to look normal.  She had to display a “nothing to see here” attitude.  The owners of the campground would have betrayed her already if they were inclined, but they were kind and liked Johnny.  It was other campers that were her concern at this point.

Lydia hated her life.  She wanted it back the way it had been.  She thought about crossing into Canada, but worried about being stopped at the border.  Some people had successfully relocated to Costa Rica.  That was always a possibility as well.  It used to be that you were stopped entering another country, but now there were ICE agents at the border checking who was leaving as well.

She sighed.  There was nothing to do but keep pushing ahead.