“Is that a ray gun?” Luke asked.
“I don’t know. Don’t mess with it.”
“Phasers on stun.”
“Always.”
Mounted on the wall above the makeshift desk was a section of corkboard, though whatever was once pinned there had been removed. Only thumbtacks remained. Gabe assumed that the rifleman had stripped the board before hightailing it out of Dodge. A single newspaper clipping lay on the desk, each of its four corners pierced by a tiny hole. Unlike the yellowing papers on the bookshelf, this one looked much more recent, and it happened to be in English. The headline read: CIA ADMITS TIES TO PINOCHET REGIME.
Though Gabe was distantly familiar with the name Pinochet, he couldn’t recall many details. He folded the clipping and tucked it away, knowing that Fontecilla would certainly not approve.
Expecting the worst, he peered into the tub.
It was surprisingly clean. Two wide drains were ringed with water, suggesting that the container had recently been washed out and wiped down. At five feet long and half as wide, the tub was large enough to accommodate a man, but now it held only steel tools, their metal gleaming from a recent bath. Gabe noted two pairs of handcuffs, a section of heavy-gauge chain, and a carving knife with a polished bone handle and serrated blade.
And was there something else?
Careful not to touch the tub itself, Gabe bent over until he was sure he was looking at a pair of military dog tags.
This stranger of yours, Fontecilla had said, he had boots on. Boots with a very distinctive sole.
“Boots like a soldier.”
“What did you say?” Luke asked.
“These are his dog tags.”
“Who?”
“The ghost I’ve been chasing.” He reached down and carefully extracted the necklace. The time had come for him to put a name to the Midnight Messenger, since he would never put a face.
“Gabe?”
“Yeah?”
“Something in the wagon is breathing.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“There it is,” Ben said. They had reached Mentiras. The buildings appeared out of the darkness like sunken things floating to the surface of a swamp.
“What is this place?” Mira asked. “Who lives out here?”
“Nothing and nobody,” Ben told her. “As far as I know, these towns were abandoned many moons ago, as the Indians in the movies say.”
“That’s correct,” Jonah confirmed as he guided them closer. “At one point, settlements such as this supported a robust mining industry. Saloons, supply stores, and brothels thrived. But like the railroads of American history, the mines made a few men wealthy and then left the rest for dead.”
Ben smiled secretly to himself, despite everything. He’d always enjoyed listening to his brother talk. There was a time when Jonah had told stories from the bottom bunk, so that Ben fell asleep in the sky, listening to tales of bootleggers and banditos, pirates and princes. When they were kids, a random Chevy Malibu had changed their lives moments after they’d watched John Wayne himself being put into the ground. Their father had worked as a groundskeeper for the Duke, and he’d brought his two sons to the great man’s funeral in the summer of ’79. The careening car killed him instantly. Jonah’s spine cracked in two places. After the accident, the brothers had moved into their uncle’s house, which was large enough for them each to have his own room. No more stories after that, no more nights of derring-do. Not until Ben himself had resurrected them in This Mayflower Mars. He’d dedicated the book to Jonah and pretended not to see when his big brother wiped away a quick tear upon reading the inscription.
Jonah slowed the vehicle. The knobby tires eased to a stop, their treads clogged with the Atacama’s skin. The electric motors—one per wheel—hummed softly.
Ben saw no sign of human passing. The few structures still standing were as quiet as mausoleums. The fact that Luke had come here with a stranger wasn’t so odd, really, as the excitement of Mars exploration was bound to get the better of someone of Luke’s particular disposition. What worried Ben was the stranger himself. He claimed to be searching for someone who might have done bad things. Just how bad, however, Ben couldn’t say.
“I don’t see his truck,” Mira said. “They came in a truck, right? Are you sure this is the town he was talking about?”
“They could’ve parked anywhere out here,” Ben said, “and we’d never know it in the dark. We should drive around, check the perimeter, get a feel for things.”
“I’m really trying to keep the faith here, Ben.”
“I know you are. And you’re doing fine.”
“Tell that to my heart.”
“I could try, but I suspect it would only ignore me.”
“Let’s just find him, okay?”
Jonah took that as his cue. Though he had no use of his legs, the rover’s controls were mounted on the wheel, so he got them moving with only a light touch of his fingers. The big tires rolled.
Ben played a hunch and reached for Mira’s hand. He was not surprised when she squeezed tight.
* * *
Gabe walked slowly toward the wagon. The iron stove filled this side of the room with heat. A pile of broken boards was evidence of the oven’s fuel supply, while a single pipe pushed through the earthen ceiling to vent the smoke. The rifleman hadn’t feared being discovered by this discharged vapor. He could’ve lit a bonfire out here and no one would have known.
The form hidden under the towel rose slightly, then subsided. Then rose again.
After his experience with the boy in the backpack, Gabe shrank back from the thought of removing that covering. He could not imagine what could be worse than what he’d already seen.
The exit near the wagon gave him an excuse to delay things a moment longer. He put his head through the low opening and found nothing but a closet-sized space similar to what he’d found at the bottom of the well. A wooden ladder climbed up to what he assumed was another of the rifleman’s escape hatches, the wormhole through which he passed when he needed access to the world.
His reconnaissance complete, Gabe turned reluctantly back to the wagon.
Luke stared down at it. He seemed hypnotized by the gentle tidal movement of what lay beneath the towel.
“Back up a bit,” Gabe suggested.
Luke took two steps in retreat, arms hanging at his sides. “Is that a person in there?”
Gabe crouched beside the wagon, which, like the backpack, wasn’t large enough to contain anyone who hadn’t been … modified.
He pinched the corner of the towel. Part of him became unwired and refused to function, and he lacked the willpower to override it and initiate manual control. He knew that he should tell Luke to turn away or cover his eyes, but he found it difficult to breathe, much less to frame an intelligible command. The kid was on his own. When dread came on you like this, throwing your breaker switches, it was every man for himself.
From beneath the towel came a small and very human sound.
That did it. Strength surged into his arm, and he tugged the covering away.
What had once been a woman lay in the wagon on her back. Her legs and arms had been sheared away, replaced by scarred stumps. She was naked. Both breasts were gone, cut off like warts. Her lips were sewn shut with black thread.
Luke didn’t scream. He put both hands over his mouth and dropped to his knees.
The woman’s eyes were open, and she stared at Gabe with a look that both revolted him and filled him with grief. Tears trailed down his cheeks.
She made another sound.
Gabe had heard nothing more terrible than that. It reached through his conscious self to the mud pits, a feral noise of such misery that it was no longer human but elemental.
He staggered to the tub and clutched at the bone-handled knife. It took him three times to get his hand to work, but finally he had it, and then he fell beside her while Luke looked on, hands held over his face in revulsion.
Gabe
cut the stitches away.
Her mouth opened like a boil being lanced. Saliva and blood oozed over her lips. Her eyes swam wildly. “Corra.”
Gabe knew what she wanted. She needed to die, perhaps more than any person had ever needed it. She needed mercy. But that wasn’t what she said.
He leaned down, so that he was only centimeters from her. “I don’t understand.”
The woman coughed once. “Run.”
A shadow fell across them.
Gabe looked up. The rifleman stood in the doorway.
He wore soiled dungarees and a belt festooned with pouches. Apparently he’d climbed down the ladder in the well, as his body blocked the opening that led to the chamber with the newspaper and waiting piñata. His feet were bare, the toenails orange with desert dust. His hands were protected by latex gloves, and his face, his goddamn face, was inscrutable as the moon.
Gabe was halfway to his feet when the man rushed him.
The woman in the wagon screamed, an animal sound of fear and despair.
Gabe brought the knife to bear as he stumbled backward. He lost the ability to think, his conscious mind eclipsed by the darkness of survival. He swung the knife twice in a frantic arc, but he overextended and paid for it. The rifleman pushed Luke out of the way and struck Gabe in the throat.
His air stopped flowing.
Gabe gagged, tripped, and fell down coughing, one hand clutching his neck as the other waved the blade stupidly in front of him. His oxygen was clogged, unable to go down to his lungs or up to his mouth; the feeling was like being hanged.
The woman’s cry warbled on, changing pitch as she clawed for the world with her voice, the only thing she had left.
The rifleman kicked Gabe in the hand. A cherry bomb exploded in his fingers, the pain vibrating in his wrist. He lost control of the knife. It flew beyond his reach.
He was no warrior. Fifteen years had passed since his last fight, and that had been nothing but a couple of teenagers scrapping over a girl or a sports team or some other trivial Maginot line that had since been forgotten. The sudden brutality stunned him, so that he could only scramble across the dirt floor and paw for the knife that remained just out of reach.
The rifleman towered over him. From his belt he extracted a carpet cutter with a hooked blade.
Gabe knew he was going to be gutted. As the rifleman stepped in the direction of the fallen knife, Gabe rolled to the wall and flattened his back against it, intending to kick outward with both of his legs and perhaps buy himself a few seconds.
The rifleman swiped the knife from the floor and switched it from his left hand to his right.
Luke shot him in the back.
The man’s arms jerked and the muscles in his neck pulled taut. The carpet cutter slipped from his strengthless fingers. Behind him, Luke held the gun in both hands. Extending from its barrel was a metal filament no thicker than a spider’s strand, ending in a pair of electrodes that were lodged in the rifleman’s shirt.
The man’s arms leaped outward as the electricity bombarded him. He stood there in cruciform, the voltage clamping his teeth together with such force that Gabe clearly heard the snap. He rose onto his bare toes, his body undulating, and then he dropped. He landed on his knees and toppled, unable to break his fall. His limbs spasmed as the pulleys of his tendons jerked up and down inside him.
Gabe braced himself on the wall and got to his feet.
Luke released his weapon. It struck the floor, flipped, and landed near the convulsing man. “Ray gun,” he said.
Gabe ran a hand over his sweaty face and swallowed. “Fuckin’ A it is.”
How long would the bastard be down? Ten minutes? Ten seconds? Gabe lurched across the room and bent over the tub, his chest aching from the intensity of his heartbeat. He grabbed a pair of handcuffs and then returned to the rifleman, who was drooling onto the floor, knees against his chest.
The woman in the wagon took a noisy breath but didn’t exhale. Her chest no longer moved.
Gabe took that as a sign. He’d hoped to be able to save her—some small part of him had argued it was possible despite everything—but with her passing, nothing remained here worth fighting for. Though he was afraid the man might break free of his neuromuscular paralysis at any moment, he dared to grab an ankle. With a quick ratcheting sound, he locked the cuff in place.
“I think she died,” Luke said.
“Yeah.”
“We should leave.”
“Working on it.” He’d never handcuffed anybody. Maybe he’d been wrong earlier: This was surreal. Though his hands were nearly shaking too badly to function, he managed to take the man by the wrist and join it to his ankle. He expected the skin to be inhumanly hot or cold, or perhaps poisonous to touch or covered in scales, but he noticed nothing of the kind. The man was of average dimensions. He’d left no tracks in the desert because he’d worn no shoes. He opened his mouth to try to speak, but nothing came out save the static of someone with no control over his vocal cords.
“Look at him, Luke.” Gabe pointed at the man’s face. “Remember what he looks like, okay? Do you understand?”
“I think we should really, really leave.”
“You need to remember him.”
“Really, really leave!” Luke ran around the fallen man and attacked the ladder in the little cubicle beyond. “Leaving now! Leaving now!”
Gabe followed. Though his legs were unsteady, he had no choice but to trust them to get him to the surface. Already the rifleman was regaining some power, curling his fingers into fists. Gabe passed the wagon without another glance at the dead woman, though he couldn’t help but wonder about her name and how she’d come to be here. Had her abduction been coincidental? Or had she played a role of significance in these events? He sensed the truth of the latter but spent no time in contemplation. He jumped onto the rungs and climbed with abandon, hoping the wood wouldn’t crack beneath his weight.
As he passed through a square opening at the summit, the rifleman groaned.
The room at the top looked to be the interior of the one of Mentiras’s few remaining buildings. A lantern burned in the corner, near a neat stack of what appeared to be getaway gear. Satchels and duffel bags awaited departure, along with a pair of small ten-liter fuel cans. Gabe figured that he and Luke had interrupted the man in the midst of packing up what evidence he could and setting fire to the rest. The structure itself was hollow, the components of its interior walls now structural supports in the lair below. Luke found the only door and pulled it open, still repeating, “Reallyreallyleave, reallyreallyleave.”
Gabe thought it was a helluvan idea, the best he’d heard in ages, just reallyreallyleave as fast as he could goddamn run. He caught up with Luke as the boy cleared the doorway, and the two of them ran down what had once been the town’s central street but was now only a serpent’s tongue of dust.
A white light impaled them.
“Hansel!”
Gabe heard the woman’s voice but saw nothing except the solar flare of headlights and the wall of dirt kicked up by the tires of an onrushing car.
Luke grabbed him by the shirtsleeve. “My sister!”
Gabe needed no further encouragement. He and Luke ran like detention-camp escapees, the dust stinging their eyes.
The rifleman’s scream chased after them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mira threw her arms around her brother.
“Gotta leave!” Luke said, trying to wiggle free. “Gotta leave pronto, vamoose, skedaddle.”
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“Better listen to him,” Traylin said, bounding into the rover as if he’d expected to find it here waiting. “The cuffs won’t hold forever.”
“What are you talking about?” Her joy at seeing Luke again was welded to her fear of what was spooking him. “What happened?”
“Ma’am, I swear on Kepler’s soul to explain, but right now we need to put as much distance between us and him as possible.”
> Ben looked in the direction of the scream they’d heard. “Who’s him?”
Luke cried. The tears came without warning. “Gretel, he cut her up, cut her up really bad.”
“What?” Mira pulled him against her. “Baby, what are you talking about?”
“Cut her up into a rectangle.”
Traylin leaned over the seat and grabbed Jonah’s shoulder. “My man, we need to haul serious ass. Now.”
“Do it,” Ben said, and suddenly they were moving. Though the rover was built for durability rather than speed, Jonah edged it to its limit.
“I left the truck over there,” Traylin said, pointing into the night. “You happen to bring that satellite phone with you?”
Jonah shook his head as he guided the rover in the direction Traylin indicated. “I’m afraid not.”
“No radio in this thing?”
“Not one of sufficient range, no.”
Mira rocked Luke in her arms, pained by the sound of his tears. Sadness was generally a stranger to him. Mira could count on one hand the number of times she’d heard him cry since their mother died. Luke was the more buoyant of the Westbrook twins. What had happened to him? What had he seen?
Mira looked over her brother’s shoulder at the man who shared the backseat with them. Though she could see little of Traylin in the dark, she could tell he was leaning forward, staring at that small section of desert illuminated by the rover’s powerful headlamps. He was but one more spontaneous human combustion in a day so full of them that Mira could hardly imagine it was a real component of her life. First she’d met Ben, and then she’d realized that his writing somehow connected him to Luke. After that, she boarded a plane for a field trip to a simulated Mars, and now she was running from a man who’d apparently cut a woman into a rectangle.
“Hey,” she said.
Traylin looked over. She guessed that he was about her age. His hair was a little long, his eyes intelligent and alert.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“I wish I knew.”
“You know more than I do.”
“Then consider yourself fortunate you didn’t have to see it.”
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