The idea made me sick. Jesus, we were in trouble. What if all our names were on a kill list? One mole in Gatehouse could quietly muster a dozen porters and hunters who would think they were doing their duty in following orders to take us out. We were in a world of crap, and whatever Nathan’s plans, I was afraid we would be no safer in New Mexico.
But I liked the idea of going on the offensive. We were going to take it to the Sacks.
Chapter 17
South of Raton, New Mexico, we took Route 64 southwest toward Cimarron. Except for some unimpressive hills to the north and west, this was flat, empty country, the kind of open land that made a sneak Sack attack almost impossible. Cimarron, too, was flat and brown, its main street lined with one-story motels and dirt parking lots. I was familiar with this part of New Mexico, but Zack wasn’t, and its bleakness was reflected in his expression. Like the rest of us, he longed to be home.
A few miles west of Cimarron the landscape shifted, becoming gently hilly, spotted with pines and cottonwoods until, farther west, the cottonwoods thinned and the pines grew thick on both sides of the road. As we rose in elevation, the hills, cleft by the highway, became mountains and snow blanketed the ground.
I was sure we were on our way to Eagle Nest, the only town of any size on the highway before Angel Fire, but at Eagle Nest we took State Road 38 north, and fifteen minutes later, about eight miles southeast of Red River, we left 38, making a right onto a dirt road and passing under the gateway arch of the B&R Ranch. We were truly in the middle of nowhere. Exactly where we needed to be.
The ranch house itself sat at the end of a long driveway on a flat, treeless patch of land a good fifty feet higher in elevation than the highway. Nathan couldn’t have chosen a better spot. Knowing the general area, and noting that the ground was covered in several inches of snow, I figured we were at eight thousand feet or so. I’d sleep well tonight. Mild oxygen deprivation had that happy effect on me.
Nathan parked and told us to wait in the car while he knocked on the door. Whoever lived here wasn’t expecting us. Like the rest of us, Nathan was through telegraphing his moves via phone or any other way.
Judging by his smile and hearty handshake, and his madly wagging border collie, the man who opened the door was a friend, and after a brief conversation, Nathan waved us to the house. We hauled our backpacks as well as his inside and dropped them, at the man’s signal, to the kitchen floor.
“This is Claude,” Nathan said, “and he’s graciously agreed to let us stay here for a day or two.” He offered no surname or elaboration, which didn’t surprise me. With a name like Claude, chances were it wasn’t even our host’s real first name.
Claude turned to face us, a smile washing over his face. “That’s me. Gracious.” He spread out his arms, presenting his house. “You’re in the kitchen, of course. If you’re hungry, serve yourselves. Whatever I have is yours. The laundry room’s down the hall if you need it. I’ve only got two guest bedrooms, so you’ll have to work that out somehow.”
That meant doubling up with Hall.
“Though there’s always the living-room couches,” Claude added.
“I’ll take a couch,” I said quickly.
“Shotgun,” Zack said.
Nathan pointed toward the large, rectangular table in the open dining area at the other end of the kitchen. “All right if we use the table?” he asked.
“Sounds good,” Claude said. He jabbed a thumb toward the front door. “I’ll be outside. My employees won’t be here for a couple days, so you won’t be interrupted.” He and Nathan exchanged glances and that silent chin-nod thing men do before Claude clicked his tongue at his dog and they both headed out the door.
I was curious about where Claude was going and what he’d be doing. Who were these employees? The B&R didn’t look like a working ranch to me, though it probably had been at one time. Horses, or possibly cattle. And Claude didn’t look like the working-ranch type. In his early fifties, he was still young enough to run a ranch, and maybe he chopped firewood from time to time, but I doubted he herded or milked cattle. His hands were too smooth, and his clothes—a turtleneck sweater and jeans—were too neat and impractical. Even his border collie looked unaccustomed to outdoor work.
“Zack, set up your computer at the table, but don’t go online,” Nathan said. He reached into his backpack, extracted yet another burner, then zipped it back up. “I’ll be right back.”
He stepped out the door, walked a dozen paces from the house, and dialed a number on his phone.
“How many of those phones does he have?” Zack asked.
“Dig into his pack and find out,” I said.
Zack chuckled. “I wouldn’t dare to touch the zipper on that thing.”
“You sound like you’re afraid of him,” Hall said as she took a seat at the table across from Zack’s computer. “Why?”
I shot her a snotty look, complete with lip curl. “We’re joking. And it’s not fear, it’s respect.” I still hadn’t decided if she was a former Sack or a clever infiltrator, but I knew for certain that her subtle digs were getting on my nerves. She knew damn well we weren’t afraid of Nathan. What was she playing at?
“Nope, not fear,” Zack said, both his fingers and his eyes on the keyboard. “Or disgust.” He aimed the last word, a venom-filled dart, at Hall.
Ignoring the dart, she stared wordlessly at him. I searched her face for a telling reaction—anger, pain—but it seemed that Zack’s words has stirred no more in her than a general weariness.
Nathan had walked partway around the house and we could now see him out the dining-room window, phone to his ear, pacing and scanning the ranch. He talked briefly into the phone, lowered it, then raised it again, talking once more.
“Do you know what he’s doing?” Hall said, craning her neck for a better look.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
But of course I knew what he was doing. He was calling someone, disconnecting for safety, then calling again. Maybe more than one person. He was getting information or passing it along, starting the ball rolling. I was glad. The passive, helpless nature of being on the defensive rubbed me raw and sapped me of energy.
Helpless. Wasn’t helplessness what Hall had said made her willing and then turned her? Again I wondered what kind of helplessness she had faced—for it to turn her, either it had been a devastating helplessness or she had a low tolerance for natural frailty—but I knew she wasn’t going to tell me more, especially after my and Zack’s reaction to her confession of child murder. Zack still couldn’t look at her directly. He averted his eyes like an insecure teenager whenever she moved into his field of vision.
“I wonder if he’s checking on his wife,” Hall said.
In another abrasive attempt to fit in, she was talking about someone she almost certainly didn’t know. I glared at her—harshly for a moment—then deliberately drew back. I was being a shit and I knew it, jumping at every opportunity to remind her that she was an outsider. “Do you know her?” I asked.
Hall brightened at my tiny capitulation. “No, I never met her. Lydia’s her name, right?”
“Right.”
“I only met Nathan a few months ago, about two months before I joined Gatehouse. I’ve never been to his home. I’ve never been to New Mexico, period.”
“Then where did you meet him?” I glanced out the window as I asked. Nathan had finished with his phone and was now gazing out over the ranch and down to the highway, hands jammed into the pockets of his coat, deep in thought.
“Southern Colorado. Some high-ups in Gatehouse wanted him to vet me, though that’s not how they put it, of course.”
“And he did.” Nathan, I now saw, had walked away from the house and joined Claude closer to the road.
“I gained his approval.”
I looked away from the window and met Hall’s eyes. “Did you tell him about that kid at the campground?” For the first time since entering Claude’s house, Zack raised his head and looked
her way.
“I told him, and Gatehouse, everything. Every detail. There wasn’t any point in lying, I’m sure they knew.”
“What was their reaction?”
“Distaste.”
A flippant answer. My hackles on the rise again, I decided to change the subject. “Let me ask you something. Do Sacks ever talk among themselves about the possibility that some Sacks aren’t fully human?”
Hall began to grin.
“I ask,” I added, sure I was about to receive a verbal smackdown in addition to a smug smile, “because I’ve talked to such a Sack.”
“Who?”
I remembered the look of awe on Banishment’s face after I told her I was Septimania, and because I was curious to see how Hall would react, I almost said Banishment’s name, but I thought better of it. More and more every day I was getting to be like Nathan, holding my cards close. Over the past few days I’d finally begun to understand why he did that. “I’d rather not say.”
“He or she is dead now, I take it. Death is a human condition.”
“Well, this Sack was very open to the possibility that some Sacks aren’t quite human—and aren’t quite dead.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s not—”
“You’d rather not say.”
“It’s not relevant to my question. But if you don’t want to answer, fine.”
Hall’s gaze dropped to the table as she fingered a knot in the polished pine. “The answer is yes. I’ve heard talk, but it’s only talk.”
“How do you know it’s only talk?”
“You forget who I was.”
“So in all your time as an Elation you never knew a Sack who might be more than human? What about the Embodiments?”
“They’re extraordinary.”
“And?”
Striding through the front door and up to the table, his attention on Zack’s laptop, Nathan removed his coat and slung it over the back of a chair before sitting at the head of the table. Question time was over, and just when I was getting somewhere. Nathan would blow a gasket if Hall and I discussed superhuman, possibly immortal Sacks.
“Elizabeth, I need your flash drives,” he said, leaning forward and pulling the laptop in front of him.
Hall pushed away from the table, grabbed her backpack, and dug out the five drives. She laid them on the table, scooted her chair closer to Nathan, and sat, watching the screen as he inserted the first drive into the laptop.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“First I want to see who our problems are in this part of the country.”
He had to be looking for southern Colorado and northern New Mexico Sacks. Anyone who could readily be sent to our door.
“But Gatehouse doesn’t have any idea where we are,” I said, wondering as I made my pronouncement if Gatehouse might soon find out. Claude appeared to be single, he knew Nathan, and he wasn’t hurting for money if the expensive but cattle-free ranch was anything to go by. Gatehouse men and women made big money—and earned every penny of it. Odds were Claude was with Gatehouse, or used to be.
“Information has a way of getting out,” Nathan replied.
“Three Sacks within, what, a hundred miles of here?” Hall said.
I suppressed a smile at her use of the word “Sack” and glanced at Zack. He’d caught it too. I was tired and achy from the drive, and if I didn’t get up and move I was going to start laughing from sheer fuzzy-headed exhaustion.
From an oak cabinet in the kitchen I took down a can of coffee and spooned enough grounds into a filter for the four of us. A ten-second inspection of his kitchen had told me that Claude was not a tea man and I should look no further, even for generic tea bags. It’s funny, the everyday things you long for when you’re away from home.
“I don’t think they’re our problem,” Nathan said. “Our problem is Colorado hunters—and maybe porters.”
I poured water into the reservoir and switched on the coffeemaker. “If they find out where we are, they’ll send hunters or porters from Colorado.”
“Wait a minute,” Zack said. “What are you two talking about? If who finds out where we are? Why are hunters and porters after us?”
“Those two men on I-25,” I said. “They weren’t Sacks.”
“I thought as much,” Hall said. She turned to Nathan. “Porters?”
“Could be.”
Offended that he hadn’t been informed of this crucial fact, Zack’s mouth dropped open. “Everyone but me knows they weren’t Sacks?”
“We don’t know anything,” Nathan said, softening the blow. “We’re throwing things out, making educated guesses.”
He didn’t mention the Gatehouse traitor, so I too kept quiet on that. As the last of the coffee dripped into the carafe, I pulled four mugs from the cabinet, put them on the counter, and asked if it was coffee all around. It was. We needed to eat, too, but I didn’t want to be the first one to break the invisible houseguest seal on Claude’s refrigerator.
“Say they were porters, then,” Zack said, exchanging glances with me and Nathan. “Can someone tell me why porters are trying to kill us?”
“We don’t know yet,” Nathan said before I could answer. A signal to keep quiet on any Gatehouse speculation.
I carried Nathan’s and Hall’s mugs to the table, then went back for Zack’s and mine.
“Are we on some porter’s kill list, like Jane was on Vogel’s?” I heard Zack ask.
I latched onto the mugs, and as I turned for the table, I caught sight through the kitchen window of Claude’s border collie trotting through the snow between the house and the highway—and steps behind him Claude, now with a rifle in the crook of his arm, looking for all the world like he was on patrol.
“It’s possible all of us are, though the chances of you being on a list, Zack, are smaller.”
“I think his chances have increased since Laramie,” Hall said.
“Here you go,” I said, handing Zack his mug. He looked like someone had dropped a rock on his head. He wasn’t supposed to be part of this. We’d involved him by having no other place to go but his house in Laramie, and now he was trapped.
“The world’s turning upside down,” Hall added.
Nathan cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t go that far. It’s much more likely we’re on one porter’s return list rather than the central Gatehouse list. The sudden appearance of our names on that list would raise too many red flags.”
I don’t think he appreciated Hall’s melodrama. He could see what it was doing to Zack. We needed clear thinking, not hysteria. Maybe Hall, so recently out of the Sack world, was finding it hard to switch to a more rational gear.
Taking my seat at the table, it hit me that I had gone from utterly distrusting her to just about believing she’d been restored. Going over and over in my mind what she’d said to Kath—that Kath could choose a new life, change her course—and reflecting on how she had twice put herself on the line to save us from Sacks had finally convinced me. Ninety-five percent of me.
But I still didn’t like her.
“Can you find out if we’re on some porter’s list or the main Gatehouse list?” I asked.
“I intend to.”
For the next fifteen minutes Nathan went over the rest of Hall’s flash drives. Looking for what, I wasn’t sure. When he was finished, he slid the drives over to Hall, downed the rest of his coffee, and rose from his chair, announcing he’d be back in about an hour. But instead of cutting through the kitchen toward the front door, he walked toward the back of the house and, by the sound of it, began to rummage through Claude’s things. He emerged a minute later carrying a small laptop under his arm.
“Stay alert,” he said as he made for the door. “I’ll let Claude know I’m going.”
As soon as Nathan swung the front door shut behind him, Zack reached for his holster, removed his weapon, and laid it on the table in front of him. It was pointing at Hall, I noticed with a touch of childish
amusement.
“Are you sure you should do that?” I said.
“My kidney can’t take another second of that thing digging into it.”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
Hall carried her mug into the kitchen, taking a last sip before setting it on the counter. “Is anyone hungry? I’m famished.” She looked expectantly our way.
Now’s your chance to not be a shit, I thought. “I’m hungry too. What’s he got?” I rose and followed Hall into the kitchen, and I gazed along with her at the contents of Claude’s refrigerator.
“I’ve never seen so many condiments,” Hall said.
I nodded my agreement. “Two kinds of mustard, three kinds of salsa, peanut sauce, plum sauce, horseradish, Thai curry paste. Holy cow.” On the right side the top shelf I noticed three bottles of El Tirador Autumn Ale and was tempted to grab one, but I was willing to bet the bottles were special delivery from Nathan, not easily found at the nearest supermarket.
After retrieving a carton of eggs, some cheese, and a tub of butter from the shelves, I searched Claude’s lower cabinets until I found something resembling an omelet pan.
“What are you making?” Zack asked from his chair.
“A cheese omelet. If you want something else, you’ll have to make it yourself.”
A blast of cold air hit me as Claude walked through the front door, his dog at his heel and his rifle muzzle up, the sling over his shoulder. “Ladies,” he said, tipping his head. He placed his rifle on a horizontal wall rack in the dining room, just above a beautiful Remington pump-action shotgun, then sat opposite Zack at the table.
“I’m making a big omelet,” I said to him, holding up two eggs as visual evidence of my intent. “Would you like some?”
He put a hand to his stomach and leaned back in his chair. “No, thank you. I had a late lunch.” He pointed in the direction of the front door. “There’s some mixing bowls in the cabinet closest to the door, cutlery in the drawer below it.”
All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller Page 17