The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Ashlee said, “Some of these kids must own cars.”

  “Right. And Ramone Dudley looked into that. Four of the eight do have vehicles registered to their names, but the vehicles are all accounted for. None of the parents reported a stolen car, and in fact pretty much every auto theft in the city during the time these kids took off was either clearly professional or a joyride that ended with the vehicle trashed or burned. Stealing a car isn’t as easy as it used to be. Even if you get past the personalized locks, every car assembled or imported in the last ten years routinely broadcasts its serial number and GPS coordinates. Mostly people use it to find their car in a parking lot, but it also complicates auto theft considerably. A modern car thief is a technician with a lot of different cracking skills, not a kid out of high school.”

  “So they didn’t use one of their own cars and they didn’t steal one,” Ashlee said. “Great. That leaves nothing. Maybe they are still in town.”

  “That’s what Ramone Dudley thinks, but it doesn’t make any sense. These kids are pretty obviously on a haj. So I asked Dudley to check the four cars they own, a second time. So he did.”

  “Ah — he found something?”

  “Nope. Nothing’s changed. Three of the vehicles are still exactly where they’ve been parked for the last week. Only one’s been moved at all, and only for round trips to the local grocery pickup, not more than twenty miles on the odometer since the disappearance. The kid left a set of keys with his mom.”

  “So we’re no farther ahead.”

  “Except for one thing. This mom who’s driving her kid’s car to the store. On Whit’s list she’s Eleanor Helvig, member in good standing of the Copperhead club along with her husband Jeffrey. Jeffrey is a junior VP at Clarion Pharmaceuticals, a couple of levels above Whit. Jeff’s making pretty good money these days and there are three vehicles registered to the family: his, his wife’s, and his kid’s. Nice cars, too. A couple of Daimlers and a secondhand Edison for Jeff Jr.”

  “So?”

  “So why is the wife driving the Edison for groceries, when her Daimler’s a big utility vehicle with lots of room in the back?”

  Ashlee said, “Could be all kinds of reasons.”

  “Could be… but I think we should ask her, don’t you?”

  Dinner was excellent — I told Ashlee so — but we couldn’t stay to savor it. Ashlee elected to stay home while Hitch and I did the leg work, on the condition that we would call her as soon as we learned anything.

  In the car I said, “About that package…”

  “Right, the package. Forget about it, Scotty.”

  “I’m not going to forget an old debt. You fronted me the cash to leave Thailand. All I owed you was a favor, and it didn’t happen.”

  “Yeah, but you tried, right?”

  “I went to the place you told me about.”

  “Easy’s?” Hitch was grinning now, the kind of grin that used to make me deeply uncomfortable (and was having that effect again).

  I said, “I went to Easy’s, but—”

  “You mentioned my name to the guy there?”

  “Yeah—”

  “Old guy, gray-haired, kinda tall, coffee-colored?”

  “Sounds like the man. But there was no package, Hitch.”

  “What, he told you that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did he tell you that in a gentle way?”

  “Far from it.”

  “Got a little irritated, did he?”

  “Practically reached for a gun.”

  Hitch was nodding. “Good… good.”

  “Good? So the package was late, or what?”

  “No. Scotty, there never was any package.”

  “The one you told me to pick up for you — ?”

  “No such object. Sorry.”

  I said, “But the money you gave me—”

  “Mainly, no offense, but I thought you’d be safer back in Minneapolis. I mean, there you were, stuck on the beach, Janice and Kaitlin gone, and you were starting to drink pretty heavy, and Chumphon wasn’t a good place to be a drunk American, especially with all the press guys getting rolled on a regular basis. So I took pity on you. I gave you the money. I had it to spare: Business was good. But I didn’t think you’d take it as a gift and I didn’t want to call it a loan because I didn’t want you trying to find me and pay it back like a good scout. Which, admit it, you would have. So I made up this ‘package’ thing.”

  “You made it up?”

  “I’m sorry, Scotty, I guess you thought you were a drag mule or something, but that kinda appealed to my sense of humor, too. Knowing your whole college-educated clean-cut image of yourself, I mean. I thought a little moral dilemma might put some variety into your life.”

  “No,” I said, “this is bullshit. The guy at Easy’s recognized your name… and you just described him to me.”

  I was driving into the sunset and the lights on the dash were just starting to brighten. The air coming in the window was cool and relatively sweet. Hitch took his time answering.

  Then he said, “Let me tell you a little story, Scotty. When I was a kid I lived in Roxbury with my mom and my little sister. We were poor, but that was back when the relief money was enough to get you by if you were careful about things. It wasn’t especially bad for me, or at least I didn’t know any better than to be happy with what I had, plus maybe a little shoplifting on the side. But my mom was a lonely woman, and when I was sixteen she married this tough old piece of shit named Easy G. Tobin. Easy ran a mail pickup and sold coke and meth out the back door. I will say for Easy that he never actually hit her — or me or my sister, either. He wasn’t a monster. He kept his drug business away from the house, too. But he was mean. He talked mean. He was smart enough that he never had to raise his voice, he could cut you down with just a few words, because he had the talent for knowing what you hated about yourself. He did that to me and he did that to my sister, but we were the minor leagues. Mainly he did it to my mom, and by the time I was ready to leave home a couple years later I had seen more of her tears than I cared to. She wanted to get rid of him but she didn’t know how, and Easy had a couple of other ladies on the side. So me and a few of my friends, we followed Easy to one of his ladyfriends’ houses and we went in there and punished him a little bit. We didn’t, you know, beat him senseless, but we made him scared and we kicked him around some and we told him to get his ass out of my mom’s house or we’d do worse than that. He said that was okay with him, he was sick of me and my sister and he had used up my mom — his words — and he meant to leave anyhow, and I said that was fine as long he did it, and I would be keeping my eye on him. He said, ‘I’ll forget your name in a week, you little shit,’ and I said he’d hear from me now and then and he’d better not forget my name because I wouldn’t forget his. Well, we left it at that. But I made it a point for some years to see that he did come across my name, at least now and then, every once in a while. A card, a phone call, like a negative Hallmark moment. Just to keep him on his toes. I guess he remembered me, huh, Scotty?”

  I said, “He could have killed me.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think it was likely. Besides, that was a fair piece of change I gave you. I figured you understood it might entail a little bit of risk.”

  “God damn,” I said faintly.

  “And, see? This way, you don’t have to thank me.”

  We were lucky enough to find Mrs. Jeffrey Helvig home alone.

  She came to the door in casual clothes, wary as soon as she saw us in the porch light. We told her it was about her son, Jeff Jr. She told us she had already talked to the police and we certainly didn’t look like police to her, so who were we and what did we really want?

  I showed her enough ID to establish that I was Kaitlin’s father. She knew Janice and Whit, though not very well, and had met Kait on more than one occasion. When I made it clear that I wanted to talk about Kaitlin she relented and asked us in, though she was clearly not happy about it.
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  The house was meticulously clean. Eleanor Helvig was fond of cork coasters and lace antimacassars. A dust precipitator hummed in one corner of the living room. She stood conspicuously next to the home security panel, where a touch of her finger would narrowcast an alarm and a camera view to the local police. We were probably already being recorded. She was not afraid of us, I thought, but she was deeply wary.

  She said, “I know what you’re going through, Mr. Warden. I’m going through it myself. You understand if I’m not anxious to talk about Jeff’s disappearance yet again.”

  She was defending herself against some accusation not yet made. I thought about that. Her husband was a Copperhead — a true believer, according to Whit. She had accompanied him to most but not all of the meetings. She would probably echo his opinions but she might not be deeply or genuinely convinced of them. I hoped not.

  I said, “Would it surprise you, Mrs. Helvig, if I told you it looks like your son and his friends are on a haj?”

  She blinked. “It would offend me, certainly. Using that word in that way is an insult to the Muslim faith, not to mention a great many sincere young people.”

  “Sincere young people like Jeff?”

  “I hope Jeff is sincere, but I won’t accept a facile explanation of what’s happened to him. I should tell you honestly that I’m skeptical of absentee fathers who rediscover their children in times of crisis. But that’s the kind of society we live in, isn’t it? People who think of parenthood as a genetic merger, not a sacred bond.”

  Hitch said, “You think Kuin will make that better?”

  She stared back at him defiantly. “I believe he could hardly make it worse.”

  “Do you know what a haj is, Mrs. Helvig?”

  “I told you, I don’t like that word—”

  “But a lot of people use it. Including a lot of idealistic children. I’ve seen a few. You’re right, it’s a rough world we live in, and it’s hard on the children in particular. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen haj kids butchered by the side of the road. Children, Mrs. Helvig, raped and killed. They’re young and they may be idealistic, but they’re also very naive about what it takes to survive outside of suburban Minneapolis.”

  Eleanor Helvig blanched. (I believe I did, too.) She said to Hitch, “Who are you?”

  “A friend of Kaitlin. Did you ever meet Kait, Mrs. Helvig?”

  “She came by the house once or twice, I think…”

  “I’m sure your Jeff is a strong young man, but what about Kaitlin? How do you think she’ll do out there, Mrs. Helvig?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Out there on the road, I mean, with all the homeless men and soldiers. Because if these kids did go off on a haj, they’d be safer in a car. Even Jeff.”

  “Jeff can take care of himself,” Eleanor Helvig whispered.

  “You wouldn’t want him hitchhiking, would you?”

  “Of course not—”

  “Where’s your husband’s car, Mrs. Helvig?”

  “He took it to work. He’s not home yet, but—”

  “And Jeff’s car?”

  “In the garage.”

  “And yours?”

  She hesitated just long enough to confirm Hitch’s suspicions. “In for repairs.”

  “At what garage, exactly?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “We don’t have to discuss this,” Hitch said, “with the police.”

  “He’s safer in the car. You said so yourself.”

  She was whispering now.

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Jeff Jr. didn’t talk about the… pilgrimage, but when he asked for the car I guess I should have suspected. His father said we ought not to tell the police. It would only make Jeff a criminal. Or us, for abetting him. He’ll be back, though. I know he will.”

  “You could help us—” Hitch began.

  “You see how upside-down everything is? Can you blame the children?”

  “Give us your license and the car’s GPS signature. We won’t bring the police into it.”

  She reached absently for her purse, then hesitated. “If you do find them, will you be nice to Jeff?”

  We promised we would.

  Hitch talked to Morris Torrance, who traced the car to El Paso. The GPS package was sitting in a local recycler’s yard; the rest of the car was missing, probably sold or bartered for safe passage across the border. “They’re bound for Portillo,” Hitch said, “almost certainly.”

  “So we go there,” I said.

  He nodded. “Morris is arranging the flight. We need to leave as soon as possible.”

  I thought about that. “It’s not just a rumor, is it? Portillo, I mean. The Chronolith.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “It’s not just a rumor. We need to be there soon.”

  Fifteen

  At the exit into Portillo we were turned away by soldiers who told us the town was already uninhabitable, full of Americans squatting like dogs on the street, a disgrace. As if to confirm this, they waved through a convoy of Red Cross relief trucks while we waited.

  Hitch didn’t argue with the soldiers but drove a couple of miles farther south along the cracked and pot-holed highway. He said there was another way into Portillo, not much more than a goat track but passable enough in the battered van we had rented at the airport. “The back roads are safer anyway,” he said. “Long as we don’t stop.” Hitch had always preferred back roads.

  “Why here?” Ashlee wondered, looking out the window into a blank Sonoran landscape, agaves and yellow scrub grass and the occasional struggling cattle ranch.

  The Kuin recession had been hard on Mexico, rolling back the gains of the Gonsalvez administration and restoring the venerable and corrupt Partido Revolucionario Institucional to power. Rural poverty had reached pre-millennial levels. Mexico City was simultaneously the most densely populated city on the continent and the most polluted and crime-ridden. Portillo, contrarily, was a minor town without any known strategic or military significance, one more dusty village drained of prosperity and left to die.

  “There are more Chronoliths outside urban centers than in them,” I told Ashlee. “Touchdown points seem almost random, excepting the large-scale markers like Bangkok or Jerusalem. Nobody knows why. Maybe it’s easier to build a Chronolith out where there’s some free space. Or maybe the smaller monuments are erected before the cities fall to the Kuinists.”

  We had a cooler full of bottled water and a couple of boxes of camp food. More than enough to last us. Sue Chopra, back in Baltimore, was still correlating data from her unofficial network of informants and from the latest generation of surveillance satellites. The news about Portillo hadn’t been made public. Officials feared it would only attract more pilgrims. But Internet rumors had done that quite efficiently despite the official veil of silence.

  We had food and water for five days at least, which was more than enough because, according to Sue’s best estimate, we were less than fifty hours away from touchdown.

  The “goat track” was a rut through rocky chaparral, crowned by the endless turquoise sky. We were still a dozen miles outside of town when we saw the first corpse.

  Ashlee insisted on stopping, though it was obvious there was nothing we could do. She wanted to be sure. The body, she said, was about Adam’s size.

  But this young man dressed in a dirty white hemp shirt and yellow Kevlar pants had been dead quite a while. His shoes had been stolen, plus his watch and terminal, and surely his wallet, though we didn’t check. His skull had been fractured by some blunt instrument. The body was swollen with decomposition and had evidently attracted a number of predators, though only the ants were currently visible, commuting lazily up his sun-dried right arm.

  “Most likely we’ll see more of this kind of thing,” Hitch said, looking from the corpse to the horizon. “There are more thieves than flies in this part of the country, at least since the PRI canceled the last election. A couple thousand obviously gullible Ame
ricans in one place is a magnet for every homicidal asshole south of Juarez, and they’re way too hungry to be scrupulous.”

  I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point? The evidence lay on the sandy margin of the road, stinking.

  I looked at Ashlee. Ashlee regarded the dead young American. Her face was pale, and her eyes glittered with dismay.

  Ashlee had argued that she ought to come with us, and in the end I had agreed. I might be able to rescue Kaitlin from this debacle, but I had no leverage with Adam Mills. Even if I could find him, Ashlee said, I wouldn’t be able to argue him out of the haj. Maybe no one could, including herself, but she needed to try.

  Of course it was dangerous, brutally dangerous, but Ashlee was determined enough to attempt the trip with or without us. And I understood the way she felt. Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.

  But the dead American was a demonstration of every truth we would have preferred to evade. The truth that our children had come to a place where things like this happened. That it might as easily have been Adam or Kaitlin discarded by the side of the road. That not every child in jeopardy can be saved.

  Hitch climbed behind the wheel of the van. I sat in the back with Ash. She put her head against my shoulder, showing fatigue for the first time since we’d left the United States.

  There was more evidence that we weren’t the only Americans to have taken this route into Portillo. We passed a sedan that had ridden up an embankment and broken an axle and been abandoned in place. A rust-eaten Edison with Oregon plates scooted recklessly around us, billowing clouds of alkaline dust into the afternoon air. And then, at last, we topped a rise, and the village of Portillo lay before us, dome tents clustered on the access roads like insect eggs. The main road through Portillo was lined with adobe garages, trash heaps generated by the haj, poverty housing, and a nearly impassable maze of American cars. The town itself, at least from this distance, was a smudge of colonial architecture bookended by a couple of franchise motels and service stations. All of it belonged now, by default, to the Kuinists. Haj youth of all kinds had gathered here, most with inadequate supplies and survival skills. The town’s permanent residents had largely abandoned their homes and left for the city, Hitch said; those who remained were the infirm or the elderly, thieves or water-sellers, opportunists or overwhelmed members of the local constabulary. There was very little food outside of the supply tents set up by international relief agencies. The army blockade was turning away vendors, hoping hunger would disperse the pilgrimage.