In Quaking Hills

by Kate MacLeod

  “It’s just Tucker and Ken,” Joelle said.

  “How did they get out if your father locked the gate?” Scout asked.

  “He has remote access,” Joelle said. “When he called to send them out he remotely opened the gate. They’ll have to call him on comms before they get back in.”

  Indeed, the engines settled into a throbbing rhythm as the bikes stopped outside the gate, waiting. The dogs were going nuts with anticipation.

  Scout turned back to Joelle. Either she was being sincere or she was very good at acting sincere. Scout didn’t see a way to tell one from the other, but perhaps it didn’t matter. She would act like she believed Joelle wanted what was best for Scout and see where things fell.

  She leaned in to speak closer to Joelle’s ear. “If neither of you took my belt, and I’m guessing Reggie being in virtual school all day rules him out as well, then one of them must have taken it. It was still there when your dad and uncle left this morning, I know it was.”

  “They wouldn’t do it without orders, and if they had orders, I would know,” Joelle said. There was a loud buzz and then the grinding sound of the gate opening. The dogs started to run toward it to investigate but changed their minds as the drone of the bike motors grew louder. Shadow ran to hide under the rover, but Gert sat down in the middle of the canyon nook to wait and see what would happen next.

  Scout doubted very much that she was ever going to have anything like this opportunity again. She whistled for the dogs as she ran for the open rover door. The gate was still slowly grinding open, the motorcycle engines revving as they waited for the gap to grow large enough to enter. Joelle was shouting but Scout couldn’t make out the words. She scooped Gert up in her arms and tossed her inside the rover, then pulled herself up as Shadow leapt up beside her.

  Joelle was racing to the rover, still shouting words lost to the chopping echoes from the motorcycles. They must be coming inside the gate now, the sound was so loud. Joelle was waving her hands for Scout to wait but Scout just slammed the door shut and hurled across the room and up the steps to the cockpit.

  The motorcycles had slipped in the narrowest possible gap between the doors. Joelle’s father had opened it remotely and no one was wasting any time. Scout was certain the moment the doors fully opened they would start closing again.

  If she didn’t get out now, she likely never would.

  Scout fired up the engine and gunned the controls into full-speed reverse without even looking behind her. The motorcycles were maneuverable, Ken and Tucker could get out of the way in time.

  She hoped. The cameras were still broken; she was driving blind. She locked down the controls so she could stand up and look through the narrow window.

  Someone must have raised a warning, or perhaps Joelle’s father was even more cautious than she thought, but the doors were already closing. If they latched together and that enormous wheel lock engaged, she would be trapped here.

  Trapped with a bunch of people she had just royally pissed off.

  Scout braced herself, gripping the backs of both of the seats in the cockpit as the back end of the rover impacted with the closing doors. The dogs yelped in alarm as the rover’s growing velocity came to a very sudden halt. But the engines were still going full out, the treads kicking up a cyclone of dust until they had worn their way down to bare rock.

  The whine from the gate motor was climbing to sounds she could barely hear but were a torment to the dogs below. Scout felt herself gritting her teeth, gripping the seat backs with her hands as if anything she could physically do would have any effect on the outcome of rover motor versus gateway.

  She was nearly pitched down the steep stairway when the rover won. One of the doors had snapped clean away from the canyon wall and gone spinning off to the left, glinting again and again in the afternoon sun before crashing to the canyon floor, disappearing in yet another cloud of dust.

  The other door was holding firm, twisting the rover’s trajectory. Scout dropped back into the driver’s seat to take manual control, keeping the rover between the narrowing walls of the canyon. The low-level cameras were all gone, but she still had two high-top cameras both facing forward. Not ideal, but it would have to be good enough. She didn’t have time to stop the rover and bring one of the crates up to sit on like a booster seat so she could see through the window.

  How tall had the original settlers been anyway? They always looked so tiny on the vids in school.

  Scout’s chuckle had an edge of madness to it. She bit down hard on her lip and forced herself to focus on getting out of the canyon alive.

  At least Ken and Bente had repaired the treads. The rover was running as fast and smooth as ever.

  Unfortunately, that was nowhere near as fast as Ken and Tucker could manage on their motorcycles. She could hear their engines as they came after her. They were faster, and they also had weapons. Scout wasn’t sure if those guns were capable of piercing the rover’s armored hull, but she already knew they didn’t need those guns to disable her.

  Scout bit down on her lip even harder, the coppery taste of blood filling her mouth. She really had only one option. She gripped the yoke more tightly and brought the rover close to the canyon wall on her left. There was a screech and a change in the drone of one of the engines. Either Ken or Tucker had been moving up on her on the left but had changed their mind and fallen back.

  She jerked the yoke the other way, bringing the rover up to the wall on the right side. She got a bit closer than she had intended, snapping away a rocky outcrop. She could hear the fragments raining down on the roof of the rover after arcing far up into the air. Now both of the motorcycles had fallen back, but not far enough. They were just pacing along behind her, waiting for their moment.

  And it would come soon enough. She was running out of canyon. Soon she would be back out in the open valley between the hill ridges. She could continue to swerve erratically, but would that be enough to keep them away from her long enough to reach Flat Valley?

  Scout looked around at everything on the control panel in front of her and in front of the passenger seat, but there didn’t seem to be anything remotely like a weapon anywhere. What could she do?

  Then she heard one of the motorcycles kick up its speed. She sat as high as she could in the seat, but she still couldn’t even see the horizon through the window, only the overly bright sky around her.

  Then a blur of motion crossed into one of the camera’s views. One of the bikes was roaring past her, turning and then skidding to a halt to face her. The rider pulled off his goggles and tossed his helmet aside.

  Tucker. He was daring her to run him over.

  For a moment, she wished she was okay with that. But she wasn’t. She grabbed the yoke and swerved away. She straightened back out as quickly as she could. The canyon was wider here than before, but she still wasn’t out in the open.

  There was another roar of a motorcycle speeding past her and then Ken was whipping around in front of her, blocking her path. She started to swerve around him as well but Tucker was already back, dark hair rippling in the wind as he rushed to get in front of the rover. Scout pulled on the yoke, turning back the other way.

  Ken had something in his hands, something he fiddled with briefly before throwing it at the rover. It clanged against the hull, but nothing exploded or caught fire. What was it? A tracker?

  There was a soft whuffing sound, almost lost under the cacophony of the rover engine running as hot as it could and the two motorcycles accelerating as they circled around her somewhere she couldn’t see.

  Then all of the monitors winked out and the controls turned to stone in her hands. Scout swore out loud as everything fought her. The yoke refused to turn no matter how she strained at it, and the pedals on the floor were locked, immovable. She couldn’t slow down, she couldn’t stop.

  She couldn’t even see.

  Scout climbed up on the seat to look through the window. She had a momentary view of the world before her, on
e of those moments that is over in a fraction of a heartbeat and yet stretches on for eternity, a frozen moment like a painting of infinite detail you could fall into forever. The red and yellow dust whirling in delicate eddies through the air, the perfect blue of the sky somehow feeling cold despite the stifling heat of the afternoon.

  The canyon wall rushing to meet her. The bands of color were so beautiful. There were so many, such subtle gradations in color from one to the next. The closer she got, the more details she could discern.

  She realized she was going to crash into it and felt sad, so sorry that she was going to mar what should be timeless beauty.

  Then she did hit it, and her head hit the unbreakable glass she was peering through, and she felt no more.

  17

  Through the haze of darkness and pain, Scout’s awareness sort of pulsed in and out. She knew her dogs were upset; they both seemed to be all over her, nosing and licking and whining. She tried to push herself up from the rover floor but her arms wouldn’t work.

  Then the dogs were barking and voices were arguing, so angry. She tried to speak, to tell them to leave her dogs be, but the few sounds that squeaked out of her throat weren’t speech and went unnoticed by whomever the hands belonged to that lifted her up from the floor.

  She whimpered at the sound of the motorcycle engine roaring to life. She was lying across the back of the seat, her hat askew and the sun full in her eyes. The roar of the engine, the heat of the motorcycle under her and the sky above her, the stiflingly thick air—it was all too much. Her awareness slipped away.

  She came back when the engine stopped. Someone’s hands were trying roughly to sit her up, but someone else knocked them away and she was lifted easily in a third person’s arms. They were holding her gently like a baby, but although there were other voices around—Joelle’s harsh commanding tones, Tucker’s snappy responses, Ken’s wordier interjections—no voice came from the neck her forehead was pressed against.

  At last she was out of the baking sun. Then she was deeper in the cavernous coolness of the warehouse. The damp, cool air was soothing on her skin.

  A door clanged open and Bente—for it could only be silent Bente carrying her—bent to pass through a small doorway and lay her gently on the floor.

  Then the door clanged shut again and Scout’s eyes at last flew open. She was alone, entirely alone in the dark.

  Scout pressed a hand to her throbbing forehead. The hand came back wet and sticky. Pressing it to the wound nearly made her pass out again, but she took slow breaths and focused on staying in the world. Then she pulled herself across the floor until her outstretched hand found the door.

  She knocked as loudly as she could, pounding until her knuckles bled, then turning her hand to strike with the fleshier side of her fist. She felt like she was going to puke. She really wanted to stop moving, just let her eyes slide back shut and rest.

  But there was one thing in the world she wanted more than that.

  She wanted her dogs.

  “Dogs!” she shouted, not much louder than her ever-quieter pounding, but it was the most she could say. Her thoughts wouldn’t pull together to let her focus on more than that. “Dogs! My dogs!”

  Her energy flagged all too quickly and she slumped to the floor, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes.

  She drifted in and out, the aching in her head the only constant in her lightless world. But eventually the bolt in the door clanged open and Scout pushed herself back up on her extended arms, blinking against the dim light shining in at her.

  There was a scuffle of dog nails, and then her world was all wet noses and almost painfully coarse paw pads that raked at her. She couldn’t summon words, but she managed to put a hand on each of them until they calmed.

  “Food for the dogs,” Reggie said, setting a bowl on the ground against the wall. “Food for you,” he said, putting a wrapped MRE closer to Scout. “And here’s a canteen with water. I’m not supposed to talk.”

  Scout tipped her head back to see him standing at the door. He was alone, and if Scout was capable of getting to her feet she might be able to take advantage of that fact, to bowl the twelve-year-old to the ground and charge past him, to escape.

  But at that moment, all she could do was blink at him over and over, trying and failing to bring his form into clearer focus.

  Then the door clanged shut and he was gone.

  The dogs kept licking at Scout. Her head was still throbbing, as was her bruised chest, but they were finding other little injuries all over her. She had gotten scraped up in the crash or during the motorcycle ride back to the compound. But scrapes didn’t worry her.

  At last the dogs stopped licking her and settled in close at her sides. They had slept this way through many cold nights out in the open, Shadow in her arms and Gert tucked against the backs of her legs. Their warmth was such a comfort that Scout felt her cheeks getting wet with tears again.

  The door clanged open again some time later. Scout opened her eyes, letting Shadow go as he lunged forward to stand between her and the new intruder. Gert stayed close to Scout and Scout used her for support to pull herself up to a facsimile of a sitting position.

  “Hey.” It was Ken. “How’s your head?”

  Scout said not a word.

  “One of us should probably bandage that up for you, I guess,” he said. “Listen, Malcolm is going to be back here real soon, and it would be really helpful if I could distract him by showing him anything on that belt of yours. It’s fantastic tech, right? Only I can’t get any of it to do a damn thing. The gun won’t even shoot. It can’t all be broken, why would you carry it around if it was all broken? But I’ve never seen anything like it, any of it. I can’t even find the on switches or anything? Can you help me out?”

  Scout still didn’t speak.

  “Yeah, I get it,” Ken said. “I guess you were pretty mad that I took it. Malcolm wanted me to take a look at your stuff when you weren’t around and grab anything that looked useful. I couldn’t exactly ask you first or anything. I know you hate it here, I get it, but you don’t know what it was like out there. I mean, I guess you think you do? Because you heard stories? But you don’t really know. And yeah, it’s getting kinda scary in here too, but it’s still better than out there. So if I say I’d do anything Malcolm asks me, don’t give me that look like I joined some sort of cult or whatever, because it’s not like that. I know what he’s asking and why. War is coming, and anything we can do to fight that, it’s got to be a good thing, right?”

  Scout rested her chin on Gert’s head. This conversation was exhausting.

  “I guess you don’t see it that way. Fine. I’m sure I can figure something out. It’s just, if you helped out before Malcolm came back, he’s more likely to put you in the friend than foe category. And you really don’t want to be in his foe category. We’re all trying to keep you out of that, if you would just cooperate?”

  Scout was finding it harder to stay sitting. At least Gert didn’t mind Scout slumping over her. She was a strong dog.

  “I’ll see about that bandage,” Ken said, getting to his feet. He noticed the untouched food and lifted the canteen to feel the weight of the untouched water inside. Then he went back out the door.

  Shadow came back to her and Scout was sorely tempted to lie down and go back to sleep, but she couldn’t.

  She had to get out of this place. The day must be gone now, or nearly so. Which meant this was her last night. She had to get to the rendezvous before morning. She had to get moving.

  Scout reached for the canteen and took a few cautious sips. The pukey feeling was gone anyway. She wet the corner of her shirt and cleaned her face as well as she could in the dark with no mirror. Then she opened the MRE and ate whatever was inside. Synthesized meat of some sort in a tomato sauce. Not remotely like her last dinner or even the breakfast she had only picked at.

  The food gone, she felt a touch better. She felt around the room, but the only other object besides
the canteen was the bowl of food the dogs had consumed while she had slept. She took an inventory of what she had on her.

  Her hat was gone. That started a flame of anger in her heart. Her father had given her that hat.

  She still had her sun-protective shirt on over her tank top. That was good. She might still need that.

  Cargo shorts, socks, and boots all accounted for. The belt, of course, was gone.

  Scout got up on her knees and thrust her hands into her various pockets. The thigh pocket on the right was still filled with round stones, the slingshot in her left hip pocket although the utility knife was gone. The other hip and thigh pockets were empty. She tried the front pocket.

  The data disks were nestled still against her left hip. That was good. She withdrew her hand without them. She didn’t know if anyone was watching her, but better safe than sorry.

  Then her fingertips brushed against something in her right front pocket and she froze, not wanting to pull it out either, not wanting to risk it being seen.

  Gertrude’s lens. No wonder Ken couldn’t make heads or tails of the equipment on the belt. None of it worked at all without the lens. The lens made the controls visible, allowed them to function. The right lens had been shattered when Gertrude had died, but Scout had managed to operate what she needed with just the left lens.

  The door opened again. Scout sat back on her heels just before Joelle came into view, holding a first aid kit in one hand and with an electric lantern dangling from its handle between her teeth as she used her other hand to close the door behind her.

  “How’s your head?” Joelle asked as she leaned in with the lantern now in her hand to look. Scout flinched away from the too-bright light. Joelle changed the angle of the light, still examining the wound. Then she set the lantern down and opened the first aid kit, digging through it until she found a tube of cream.

  “It looks like you cleaned it up all right,” Joelle said as she squeezed a line of white cream across her fingertips. “This is antibacterial. It doesn’t really sting.” She grabbed Scout’s arm anyway as if she might pull away, then gently spread the cream over the split lump above Scout’s right eyebrow. “I see your food’s gone,” she said as she dug through the kit again for a bandage. “Are you still hungry?”