“I can imagine,” Mary Catherine said.
“Wanna bet?” McMurphy said, winking at her. “Anyway, one day in late ’sixty-eight, instead of relaxing and just having some innocent fun, these new people came to the house and started talking about the masses and the classes and starting a political movement, and I got straight right the heck out of there. I eventually ended up here with some friends, living off the grid, off the land.”
“Who’s the pretty lady with the flute?”
“She was my woman for a while. We had three kids. They’re gone now, obviously. Took off in the early eighties, when I started building this bomb shelter. Everybody’s gone. Just me now. The last of the Mohicans. Bilbo McMurphy, the last hobbit, at your service.”
He looked around the room, wincing.
“I know how I must look to you. Like some weird old hippie survivalist, right? You’re thinking this mole-like freak is off his rocker to be living in a hole in the ground.”
“You saved all our lives, Mr. McMurphy,” Mary Catherine said. “What I think of you is that your home is incredible, and that you’re a very good man.”
McMurphy smiled, genuinely surprised.
“You do? Really?”
“Yes, of course,” Mary Catherine said.
“In that case,” McMurphy said, retrieving a Zippo and a pot pipe from his pocket, “do you want to smoke some dope with me?”
Mary Catherine shook her head, disappointed.
“No, Mr. McMurphy,” she said. “Remember our deal with the children here. Unfortunately, your home will have to remain a dope-free zone until we leave.”
McMurphy sighed as he put the pipe away.
“Oh, well. Different strokes and all that,” he said, standing and yawning. “Good night, now. Get the kiddies up early, and we’ll leave at first light.”
CHAPTER 101
MARY CATHERINE HAD JUST laid her head down on one of the bomb shelter’s bunk beds when the beeping sound started.
She went out into the hall area to find McMurphy running like mad toward the front of the compound.
“What is it?”
“Motion detector!” he yelled, more animated than Mary Catherine had ever seen him. “Outside perimeter’s been breached! I knew it. Sector B. It was the CB. They must have picked it up. Dammit! Just like the damn cops. These freaks must have ways of scanning for radio signals.”
She followed him as he ran into the gun room and spun the combo on the green locker’s Master lock. Inside, shining with gun oil, was an arsenal. Tactical shotguns, scoped hunting rifles, several M-16s. McMurphy pulled out one of the automatic rifles and slipped in a magazine with a loud clacking sound. He threw ten or so other magazines into a bag and tossed the bag and rifle over his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Mary Catherine asked.
“If they find one of the ventilation shafts, they could do anything. Plug it up, smoke us out. Didn’t I see on the news that they’re using some sort of poison-gas chemical weapon? They’ll kill us in a heartbeat. I’m going outside to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
McMurphy started going toward the back of the bus complex.
“Isn’t the front door the other way?” Mary Catherine said.
“I can’t go out the front. Are you crazy? I need to go out through the tunnels.”
“The tunnels?”
“I forgot to tell you about them,” he said as he pulled up the handle of a door at the rear of the main corridor. On its other side was a dirt tunnel about four feet tall, strung with lightbulbs.
“I’ve been digging tunnels for years and years. Out the back of the complex, all through this hill. It’s actually what I did in Vietnam. Cleared the tunnels. They called us tunnel rats. The ones I built are just like the ones I saw in Cu Chi. Hell, better. Just shut the back door behind me. No, wait. Dammit, almost forgot.”
He suddenly ran back toward the gun room, where he began flipping through a CD-filled shoe box.
“Give me five,” he said, suddenly handing Mary Catherine a disk, “and then put this on the CD setup there and crank it!”
“What? Why?”
“I got speakers strung up in the trees all along the slope, strobe lights. We used to use it for parties, drop a couple of tabs and go on nature walks. We were really into mind expansion for a few years. Anyway, we can use it now. It’ll wake these murdering bastards right up! Ha, damn right this’ll teach them!
“Remember, lock the door behind me, now,” the merry prankster called as he ran off and disappeared around a corner of the tunnel.
Mary Catherine closed the bus door behind him before she looked at the CD case.
AC/DC.
Highway to Hell.
CHAPTER 102
IT TOOK THEM TWENTY minutes to find the clearing with the double-wide trailer. Looking down at it from the rim of a ridge, Vida found the pale, low structure, sitting there all by itself in the center of the flattened hillside clearing, strangely iconic. Like a temple. Like a tomb.
It’s a tomb, all right, she thought, going down the pitch-black slope on the rocky, narrow trail behind Eduardo, Estefan, and Jorge. The Bennett Tomb.
It was when they neared the bottom of the trail that she felt it. There was something subtle and subliminal, like a kind of ground hum in the air. Or is it me? she thought. Some kind of pressure change on her eardrum from the altitude?
When the sound came a moment later out of the dead silence, she fell immediately to her knees, thinking she’d literally been hit with something, a rocket or a bolt of lightning. Then, from all around her, the buzz-saw electric guitar chord repeated again, speeding faster as drums kicked in.
Living easy, living free, season ticket on a one-way ride, shrieked a rough, joyously unhinged voice.
Rock music? But from where? she wondered, trying to think. She scanned around. Were there speakers in the trees? In the ground?
The first “Highway to Hell” refrain had just started when the lights came on. Floodlighting from the trees beside the trailer suddenly bathed the entire slope they were standing on, completely exposing them. Then the lights started to strobe. It was like the whole desert hill had suddenly been moved to the middle of a dance-hall club. What the hell was this?
She was flipping up the now-useless night-vision goggles when the gunfire erupted. Estefan, in a crouch at the front of the line, suddenly dropped forward and slid down the trail face-first. Eduardo, behind him, starting to backpedal, suddenly sat down and began rolling after him.
“Back! Back!” Vida screamed, pushing Jorge behind her.
She could feel heavy slugs slam into the dirt at her heels and off the rocks beside where she’d just been standing as she retreated back up the hill. As gunfire popped up dust on the trail, she looked around for muzzle flashes to return fire at, but she couldn’t make out a damn thing because of the strobing lights.
She dove over some rocks at the top of the trail and lay flat, gasping, her heart trembling. The hard-rock music chomped on like a chain saw carving at the night. She knew it was just a tactic, but it put a chill through her just the same. This was no pushover they were going up against!
She cursed herself as she crawled through dirt toward the grass berm where her last man was hugging the ground. She’d gotten sloppy, and two of her best soldiers had paid for it with their lives. It was just her now, and Jorge, the young up-and-comer in the group. Just great.
She had to think. The trailer sitting there in the middle of the clearing with only one way down to it had obviously been a decoy, some kind of trap. There would be others.
She scanned the ridge above the clearing for the next logical point at which to take up a firing position on the trailer. She found it thirty seconds later. Off the trail to the left, about twenty-five yards through the brush, was an outcropping of rock that one could lie on and from which one could fire down on the trailer with pretty good cover.
She grabbed Jorge and pointed at the flat rock.
“Crawl over to that ledge and lay fire on that trailer and keep position until I tell you otherwise!” she screamed over the music.
Vida watched him go over the sights of her machine pistol. Jorge had emptied a magazine out of his AK-47 and was putting in another when it happened.
A clump of grass on the hill behind him suddenly, incredibly disappeared. From where the grass had been, a silhouetted figure rose up. He bobbed straight up out of the ground, silently, like a carnival-game Whac-A-Mole.
Only this mole was holding a rifle.
CHAPTER 103
THE SHADOWED FIGURE AND Vida fired simultaneously. Jorge pitched forward and off the outcropping as the figure disappeared.
Vida arrived out of breath at the spot where she’d seen the figure and looked down and stood there, gaping. She clicked on her flashlight. There was a hole in the ground with some kind of trapdoor attached to a chimneylike passageway with a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder lay a squat, gray-haired man, staring up at her with the side of his head shot open.
Vida laughed. The hippie! How do you like that? She’d done it! She’d truly whacked the mole!
Vida let out a breath as “Highway to Hell” ended. So that was where they were. The hippie had hidden the Bennetts literally underground.
No matter. She’d grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat. Even with her two friends dead, she could still pull this off and get back to Mexico with her twelve little boxed presents.
Vida changed the magazine in her pistol and slung it over her shoulder as she grabbed the ladder’s first rung and lowered herself. Slowly, ever so slowly, Vida made her way along the low-ceilinged corridor. It was strung with lights and had wooden loading skids for a floor. It looked just like the tunnel under the border at San Diego that had brought her into the country.
She turned a hard right-hand, ninety-degree corner, and there was a door. What the hell? The door was yellow and had rounded edges, like the door of a school bus.
Before Vida could take another step, the bus door opened inward.
Vida gasped at the young woman standing there. Her pale face, her blond hair. It was the nanny! The nanny, with a black gun in her hands.
Vida raised the machine pistol. She had brought it as far as her waist when the deafening shotgun blast sounded, taking off most of her left shoulder and the left side of her face.
Suddenly, Vida was sitting on the tunnel’s floor, still gripping the pistol. But, try as she might, she was unable to lift it. It was too heavy.
It was kicked out of her hand.
“Why?” said a voice.
Vida looked up with her good eye. The blond woman, Mary Catherine, was above her. So pretty, so American looking. Like a girl in a Coca-Cola ad.
Blood from the open artery in Vida’s neck sprayed softly against the dirt wall in a pinkish mist. She could actually feel the life going out of her, her heart slowly losing whatever magic it was that made it beat. Her soul was slowly losing its grip on her body, like a man hanging off the edge of a cliff. She was dwindling now, winding down.
“For money?” Mary Catherine said sadly.
Vida could see that she was crying.
“They’re just kids, you know. Kids. Don’t you remember being a kid? Don’t you have kids where you come from?”
Vida put her good hand to her belly, cupping it. Her baby. Her prince. The bright, searing pain of it all spiked through her. What would be, what would not.
The last thing she felt was a single tear running down the intact side of her face as the tunnel lights dimmed.
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 104
IT WAS A LITTLE before noon when I got out of the state-police car in the crowded yard out in front of Cody’s house. It looked like the entire Susanville police force was there, along with agents from the US Marshals and local FBI.
It also looked like a party. Out back, Cody had his huge, smoking barbecue going as some country-western song blasted from a radio in the window. Something about God being great and beer being good and people being crazy.
Count me in, I thought as I hit the stairs for the deck.
Cody actually handed me a beer after I shook his hand, despite the fact that it wasn’t even noon. I immediately cracked open the can of Coors and tapped it to the one Cody was working on before I took a swig.
“Sorry for all the trouble I brought down on you, Aaron. I almost got you killed.”
The old cowboy grinned.
“Many have tried, Mike. My two brothers, my drill instructor, the Vietcong. Hell, even my first wife. But luckily, none of them seemed to figure it out.”
He pointed his beer toward the field beside the horse barn.
“Now, go see your family. They been missing you, I hear.”
I walked over slowly, watching my kids play Frisbee with Cody’s dogs. In the immaculate blue sky above them, a bunch of hawks were playing, swooping and circling as if they wanted to join in.
Beside the field, Mary Catherine and Seamus were sitting at a picnic table. Seamus saw me as I stepped up, but I put a finger to my lips as I stood behind Mary Catherine. I looked down at her, her blond hair, the self-possessed way she carried herself. If this was a dream, then I simply wasn’t going to wake up.
I leaned forward and put my hands over her eyes.
“Guess who?” I said in her ear.
She stood, squealing, and hugged me, clung to me unabashedly. I clung back just as hard. At that moment, I felt it leave us. The animosity that had been between us for the last few months. All hatchets were buried, all fouls erased. Because we still had each other. We still had everything that counted.
Life and love and time.
Without hesitating, we also started kissing. When we broke it up, we were both crying. We looked over at Seamus, who was sitting there blinking up at us, flummoxed, speechless. I leaned over and loudly kissed Seamus on the top of his bald head.
“Have ye gone mad, Mike?” Seamus said, pushing me away as he rubbed his head. “You haven’t gone Hollyweird on us down there in LA?”
Before I could answer, I turned around to the sound of screaming kids. They were still sweaty and dirty from their time in the hippie bomb shelter, and now they were covered in the soda and ice cream that Cody insisted they have for lunch. They looked like ragamuffins, like chimney sweeps, like the Little Rascals. In a word, beautiful.
I started crying again a little as I embraced them one by one. I had thought they were dead, and now they were alive. It was like they’d been resurrected.
“Look at you,” I said, wiping my eyes after I hugged Fiona. “You’re filthy.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, Dad, but you don’t look so hot yourself,” Fiona said, pointing at my face bandage.
“Well, it’s been a long day, hasn’t it?” I said. “A long couple of days and nights for you.”
“Face it, Pop. It’s been a long nine months!” said Brian, fingering the Frisbee. “So what’s the story?”
“What do you mean?” I said, feigning ignorance.
“He means, did you catch that Perrine guy?” Ricky said.
“Exactly,” said Trent. “Do we have to move again?”
I pictured Perrine once more, on the stretcher with his head blown open. I’d been so pissed at the Mexicans, but that feeling was gone now. They’d done me a favor. Done the world a favor.
“Yes, Trent,” I said. “I hate to break it to you, but unfortunately, we’re going to have to move again.”
I waited for the collective groan.
“Where this time?” asked Eddie, who sounded like he was about to cry.
“I don’t know. I was thinking of this place—what’s it called again?” I said, scratching my head.
“Nooo! It’s so nowhere Dad doesn’t even know what it’s called!” Bridget cried out.
“No, wait,” I said. “I remember now. It’s Man … something. Manhattan? That’s it. Manhattan. I hear West End Avenue is nice this time of year.”
A
ll around, little eyes and mouths opened in shock. There were more O’s than in a box of Cheerios. The kids started cheering then. The cops and Cody looked over as my kids screamed and leaped up and down. The dogs started barking. Even Seamus got up and did a little jig before he threw an arm over my shoulder.
“God love ya, Michael Bennett!” he said.
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Published by Century, 2013
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Copyright © James Patterson, 2013
James Patterson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Century
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