Free The Five by Robert McCammon

the night of August 10th, 1991, when John Charles had seen him shot to death outside the Shenanigans Club in Louisville, Kentucky. And so rest in peace, Dean Charles and the Roadmen.
    Know your role .
    Someone tell me what that is, he thought. Someone. Please. Someone please please tell me where I fit, and where I am going.
    Because I am lost.
    “John?”
    The voice had startled him. He hadn’t heard her get out of the van, but Ariel was walking at his side. He kept his face averted from her.
    “It’s okay,” she told him. She tried to take his hand.
    “I don’t need you,” he said, and he pulled away.
    She blinked back her hurt. She knew from experience that sometimes pain must suffer alone, but she kept walking beside him.
    A bell began to ring.
    It was a crisp sound, the ringing of bright metal. Not the low, sad tolling of a funeral bell, but a calling.
    Nomad and Ariel came out along the road through the pines, and there before them was a wide field that held some kind of shoulder-high plants. Not a pot field, as was Nomad’s first thought. It was more of an arrangement of thickets. And from among them people were emerging, as if answering the call of the bell. Nomad saw that all of them wore hats, some wore netting around their faces to keep away the bugs, and all wore gloves and carried baskets. A berry field, Nomad decided. He could see the dark berries in the baskets. Blackberries, most likely. Patches of the field were brown, but most of it thrived even in this ungodly furnace.
    It was a small farm community, tucked away back here behind the trees about a hundred yards off the main road. Not so much a town as a Joadville, Nomad thought. Something straight out of The Grapes Of Wrath . Maybe fifteen yards from where he and Ariel stood the dirt road curved toward a building that looked to be made out of tarpaper and green plastic siding, with a wooden cross painted gold up over the arched doorway. In front of this building a large-hipped Hispanic woman with gray hair bound by a red bandana was holding a bell and methodically swinging it back and forth. Around her, other women were setting out platters of tortillas, beans and enchiladas onto a table under the shade of a huge oak tree. Before the church, on the sparse grass, stood a well made of brown stones.
    It was lunch time, Nomad realized. They were calling the workers in from the field.
    He saw on the far side of the church a dozen more tarpaper shacks and structures protected by the shade of other oak trees. The buildings were made of what looked like things wealthier people had cast aside: patio tiles, water-stained awnings, sheets of corrugated metal and plasterboard, multicolored chunks of glass melted together to make windows. Little concrete statues that maybe had once been lawn ornaments in some other world decorated the plots of dirt: a rabbit with one ear cracked off, a greyhound looking around as if in search of its lost hind leg, a cherub with arms ready to fire the arrow but for the missing bow and hand that had gone with it. Nomad wondered if there wasn’t a dump somewhere nearby, where the people here found what they needed. A few old pickup trucks and cars stood about, sharing the indignity of rusted fenders and sun-cracked skins like the rough hides of alligators.
    Nomad watched the figures in sweat-soaked hats and clothes coming out of the blackberry brambles. Even in this heat, most of them wore long-sleeved work shirts to ward off the thorns. He didn’t know how they could bear it. He would’ve been crawling out on his knees. A chocolate-colored dog came trotting closer to Nomad and Ariel, followed at a distance by two other mutts. It stopped short, splayed its legs and greeted them with a series of ear-splitting barks that went on until one of the women spoke to it chidingly and threw out a tortilla for the dogs to tussel over.
    Other than that, no one seemed to pay the two intruders much attention except for a passing glance, followed