"A lot of people will be looking for him in the normal places. I want to cover the un-normal."
"And I would like to offer my assistance."
Ellie glanced up from the bike chain she'd been inspecting for weak links. "Don't you want to lead the main investigation?"
"Like you said, the main investigation is the exhaustion of the normal. So let it be handled by the normal. Additionally, George would appreciate my inclusion."
"This is a very speculative trip, sheriff. I'm not sure it's worth your time."
He smiled, self-effacing. "Thank you for the attempt to spare my feelings. Now, shall we discuss your true objections? You were a professional, were you not?"
"Police detective? No. Intelligence analyst? Yes."
"Whereas I was no such thing. My background is entirely amateur."
"I hadn't known that," Ellie said.
"Then I'm disappointed in myself. I perceive you to be dedicated. Thorough. The type to reach her own conclusions rather than trusting the common knowledge. I suspect that, the moment I nominated myself to uphold the law, you delved into my background to assess my fitness for the position. How am I doing?"
Ellie laughed. "Strong start. Let's see how you finish."
He spun his bowler on his finger. "You discovered a CV that is light on experience, to put it generously. Having no interest in the position yourself, or believing it was a harmless show, you did nothing to object. But now that we have a real case in front of us—one that involves your family—you wouldn't trust me to handle its subtler edges any more than you'd tackle a wasp's nest with a wiffle bat."
"You're right. On all counts. Including the fact this isn't a dispute over a farmer's broken fence—this is my family."
"It's bigger than that, though. I'm pledged to protect the lakelands. If an unknown group is poaching our citizens, I am duty-bound to uncover it—and to root it out."
"All I care about is finding Quinn. I can handle that on my own. If it turns out he's been snared by this shadow org, they're all yours."
"George tells me you belonged to the Department of Advance Analysis. I've never heard of such a group. The only reason I know of it, and your involvement in it, is because you've let it be known." He narrowed one eye at her. "You take me for an amateur. What if I find myself most effective at my job when everyone else assumes I'm as incompetent as you do?"
Ellie rocked back on her heels. "Or that's bullshit to talk your way into a trip you have no business taking."
"The world is full of possibility."
She flexed her hands, which were stiff from taking notes regarding the status of their supplies. She was quick to judgment. She knew that. Most people would consider that a fault, and she couldn't argue with them (except to point out that quick judgment, if accurate, could save your ass when you come under fire). But at least she was quick to reassess those judgments when presented with new evidence. She would rather be right from now on than to stubbornly insist she'd never been wrong in the first place.
"We leave in thirty minutes," she said. "With our without you. And I lead."
He nodded thoughtfully. "Do you happen to have an extra bicycle? Turns out I ran here."
Between setting him up with a pack and Dee's last-minute fussing, it took closer to an hour. Ellie felt uncharacteristically sedate about the delay. Once their wheels hit the road, and the cold air rushed past their faces with the smell of pines and motion, all that mattered was the next mile.
She bore the trailer. To hedge against disaster, Dee and Hobson also carried a fraction of the essentials in their bike baskets—a gallon of water each, some bread, a couple blankets. At the first highway, Hobson got out his pocket watch.
"Got an appointment you didn't tell me about?" Ellie said.
"Measuring our mileage," he said. "May be useful if we need to determine whether we can reach shelter before dark."
"How fastidious."
"With my life? Yes, it's a rather eccentric trait." He checked his watch at the next marker, as well as the three after that. "About eight miles per. Hills aren't helping. Assuming we use every ounce of daylight, we might squeak into town by sunset Friday."
"That's my plan." She filled him in on what little there was to know about the men in the black fedoras. "Has anyone else gone missing from town lately?"
"Not that I'm aware of. It may be possible, however, they have deliberately targeted those whose vanishments would go unnoticed."
"Or there are no 'vanishments' at all."
"A skeptical approach. I approve."
"But why would they take him?" Dee said. "What are they doing?"
Hobson glanced at his pocket watch. "Between loss of machines and population, labor is in short supply. I have heard rumors of rampant slave-taking in more chaotic portions of the nation."
"But they can't do that."
"What's to stop them? Men like me?"
"Don't you?"
"I'd like to. But evil breeds in darkness, and these days, almost every corner of the map is black." He sniffed against the cold. "I never used to be a believer in big government, but our brave new world makes a convincing case."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Ellie said. "The first goal is to determine whether he's there. In the meantime, stay focused. If he was taken, they may be just ahead of us."
With the sunlight down to its last legs, she pointed out a rutted dirt path through the pines. They turned off. The dirt road snaked so far into the forest she feared the faux cabin at its end was remote enough to be occupied, but there were no candles in the windows and the pane beside the front door was broken with no sign of repair. The inside smelled of the dust that layered the floor. They opened the garage, brought in the bikes, closed it, and set up the tent in the back room to enclose as much heat as possible.
After a dinner of bread and venison jerky, it wasn't yet seven o'clock, but Ellie was sore and exhausted from a day of biking. She slept until an owl hooted her awake hours later. It was still dark, but Hobson's pocket watch ticked along; by the flame of a lighter, she saw it was five in the morning. Hobson woke, hair askew, and their furtive shuffling to go out back to pee and then to share some water from a canteen woke Dee. The moon was high and ringed by a vast white halo.
"Ice crystals in the sky." Hobson's face was pressed against the window and his breath fogged the glass and slid down in droplets. "Suppose we should pray to Notus, the south wind?"
"We need modern gods." Ellie's voice was hoarse and scratchy. "Me, I'm asking for the blessings of Starbucks."
The moon-ring wasn't a good sign for the weather, but it helped light the way. They got to an early start, taking an easy pace down the highway through the black woods. They crossed through a town so dark and silent it could have been a cave. Ellie imagined the whole continent to the west, equally vacant and primeval. The void could drive a person crazy. The stars twinkled, delivering her a vision of the creatures that had unleashed the plague on Earth. What if, when they left their homeworld, they hadn't been bent on extinction? What if their minds had been warped by billions and billions of miles of darkness? By the time they found us, eliminating mankind might seem like a mercy.
The sun rose, vaporizing her black thoughts. They stopped for breakfast, biked on, rested, ate, and continued, slowing to scout the scattered forest towns for signs of hostile strangers. They had reached the main highway early on and it sloped steadily downward from the retreating mountains, but that seemed to make the climbing sun feel all the more distant and cold, an aimless yellow pebble that might never come back.
They passed the night in a stern-windowed home overlooking a former campground south of Lake George. They set up the tent in a back room on the ground floor so they could use candles without being spotted from the road. A shuffling noise woke Ellie in the deep part of the night. She lay in her down sleeping bag, waiting for each gentle scraping step beyond the window. It was surely just an animal, and much smaller than it sounded, but she took a long
time to fall back asleep.
The morning came too early. They were down from the mountains and the highway threaded through town after town. Ellie kept her pistol on her hip and her rifle velcroed to the bike's wire basket. Columns of smoke were rare, isolated to the woods beyond the grassy meadows, protected from the unwanted traffic on the highway. They neither passed nor saw another traveler. A breeze fluttered from the north, but as they rode, their velocity matched it perfectly, leaving them in a moving bubble of perfect stillness.
A mile north of Albany, with the smell of a river drifting through the trees, torched cars all but blocked the highway. Ellie stopped and scanned the overgrown parkland. A bird rustled the branches. Hobson dismounted his bike, bent his knees and hitched his pants, and used the curve of his cane to hook a sign downed in front of the cars. He held it up and blinked owlishly, as if uncovering lost Nordic runes.
"'PROPERTY OF THE CLAVAN BROTHERS,'" he read. He peered past the highway to the shops and homes poking through the trees. "I assume they mean the town. If they're referring to these cars, I would say the Clavans suffer from a marked lack of ambition."
"What does it mean?" Dee said.
"Who knows?" Ellie said. "Could be the Clavans died years ago. Or it could be they're the ones we're looking for."
"That's like so helpful. I see why the government put you in charge of figuring stuff out."
Ellie's annoyance flared. "When you're young, a wrong answer sounds better than no answer. Experience is the process of learning when you know nothing."
"Is that a quote?" Hobson said.
"Not to my knowledge."
"Then I won't feel poorly for not recognizing it."
"Here's another one: open eyes, open mind."
Dee sighed. "What's that mean, Confucius?"
"It means you let what's in front of you shape what's in your head. Not the other way around."
She recentered her weight on her bike and pedaled down the road, trailer dragging behind her. A Walgreens slumped apologetically at the edge of town. The windows were bashed in and it had been heavily looted, but there was a phone book behind the front desk. She tore out the page and ran down the address on the contract from the men with the black fedoras. Couple miles in from the river, right off I-90.
It was 3 PM and the sun waned to the west. A winding road snaked past the trees on the other side of the highway and the three of them cut across the rough field to intercept it. The address was a glossy, six-sided oblong beside a two-level parking garage. A wood axe tonked from the distance. The crick of a socket wrench echoed past the pillars of the garage.
Ellie left her bike in the grass by the road and walked to the glass doors, carrying nothing but her pistol and her lightweight day-pack. The doors were automatic sliders. Nonfunctioning, of course. Hobson pushed one open. The lobby was dimly lit by the fading sun and two electric bulbs. A machine thrummed from somewhere beneath the floor. The front desk was empty. Ellie walked up, cleared her throat, and rang the bell.
After her third ring, a man emerged from the side door. He wore glasses and clean jeans but his fingernails were crescents of black. He smelled like motor oil. "May I help you?"
"We're looking for someone," Ellie said.
"Does he work here?"
"We think he may have been brought here."
The man wrinkled his forehead. "Brought?"
"I represent an interested client," Ellie tried. "Discreet. Wealthy."
The man reached for a sheaf of papers. "I'm not sure I take your meaning."
"Light-skinned African-American, twenty years old. Farmboy build. If you've seen him, I have an offer."
The man looked up from his papers. "Young black male?"
"His name is Quinn," she said.
"I don't think I can help you."
"Bullshit. You know him. I saw it in your face."
The man's gaze rested on hers. Unknown gears clicked behind his eyes. "Who did you say you represent?"
"I didn't."
"Hang on a minute." He left the desk and exited through the same door he'd come in.
"What's happening?" Dee said.
Ellie glanced around for cameras. "Stay quiet."
"Suppose he's bringing someone back?" Hobson said.
She touched the butt of her gun. "Dee, if something happens, you run. Meet us on the highway at the Clavans' sign."
Dee stuck out her jaw, lips parted. "You want me to leave you? What kind of plan is that?"
"The one that saves your life. I made this very clear: do as I say or go home now."
Dee tipped back her head and shook it, as if concluding a conversation with the ceiling about how stupid Ellie was. The door opened. Ellie tensed. A woman with white curly hair walked inside and smiled. Her back was bent, but she moved smoothly enough.
"James told me why you're here." The woman's eyes moved between the three of them. "What's the nature of your relationship to the boy?"
"Like I told James," Ellie said, "we're agents of an interested party."
"No need to get testy. I ask so I know how to break the news." The old woman showed a fragile expression that could have been a smile or a frown. "Yesterday, a body was found in the woods. Young black male."
"What?" Dee screeched. She swayed into Ellie's shoulder.
Ellie found Dee's hand and squeezed. "I'd like to see it."
The woman folded her hands in front of her stomach. "Ma'am, it's a body."
"And right now, it could be anyone's."
"It's been in the woods. The animals. There won't be much left to see."
Beside her, Dee's shoulders shook. Ellie leaned over the counter. "She needs to know."
The old woman sighed through her nose. "Excuse me."
She went back through the door. Ellie expected to have to console Dee, but except for her shallow breathing, the girl seemed to calm down. The old woman returned less than a minute later.
"State park west of town. About ten miles. Take Thacher Park Road in, then follow the trail where it meets Beaver Dam. James said it's a couple hundred yards from there. On the left."
Hobson scribbled notes. Ellie nodded. "Thank you."
"Be careful," the woman said. "Bears. Dogs. Night's coming. Might be best to wait till tomorrow."
Ellie nodded. Dee stared at nothing. Ellie took her arm and led her toward the doors. Outside, the cold hit them like it had been sprayed from a hose.
Ellie got out her map from the phone book and traced a route. "Need to ride hard if we're going to beat the sunset."
Dee got on her bike, keeping pace without complaint. To Ellie's right, Hobson watched the trees fronting the highway, keeping his thoughts to himself. His cheeks and nose were red with cold.
The highway crossed a downtown of sedate brick storefronts. A few towers rose from the trees near the river. They exited the highway to a long two-lane road that stretched through wooded subdivisions, then fallow farms. The sun arced to the west and they chased it up into the hills. Clouds overtook them, and then the sun, too. The air grew as sharp as sheared metal.
The road was swallowed by pines and rough-cut trunks. Twilight swept over the woods. Where the roads met, Ellie dismounted, lit two lanterns, passed one to Hobson, and found the trail. The lanterns flickered. It smelled like spent oil and pine needles. Ellie spaced them twenty feet apart and walked parallel to the trail, with Dee closest to it, Hobson in the middle, and herself at the outer edge.
Fine white dust sifted through the pine needles. It had begun to snow.
The powder fell with the sound of hushed surf. At once it was as dark as midnight. Hobson veered toward Dee to share his light. Leaves crackled underfoot. Beyond that, there was no sound or sight of life. After a quarter mile of walking, Ellie stopped and turned around for another pass back toward the roads, putting some distance between herself and the trail. The ground froze and the snow began to stick, frosting the grass and leaves, gleaming white in the light of the lanterns. Ellie tried to keep her eyes
open and her mind quiet, but the silence of the forest invaded her with visions of Quinn's upturned face, gawking and blind, sight stolen first by death, and then by crows.
"Ellie," Hobson pointed.
The body lay in the leaves, shirtless, shoeless. Little was left of its face. Dee fell to her knees and screamed.
13
"I must warn you," Lucy said to Duke, "I have an umbrella."
Duke lifted his brows. The knife remained near his hip. "You do! What do you intend to do with it?"
"If I hit you too low, I might make you wish you'd never been born. But I'm probably just going to kill you."
He laughed with little humor. Lucy faced a couple of problems. First off, Duke and his boys added up to three, and she only had two shells in the umbrella. Beau had tried and tried to rig up more, but she knew she was lucky to pack more than one while retaining the illusion that it wasn't in fact an operational firearm. If she was clever, she might maneuver to wing two of them with one blast, but whatever she did, she was going to have to take at least one hand to hand. And they were bigger than her. Surprise and resolve were great equalizers, but they'd only take you so far.
And second, she was supposed to be getting in bed with the Kono. If she started planting them in graves instead, that threw Nerve's whole use for her out the window. Not a great way to convince him to fast-track her request to see Tilly.
"Don't make this any worse for yourself," Duke said.
"God was kind to men like you," she said. "For his most venomous creations, he stamped them with a bright red hourglass, or gave them a rattling tail so you'd know better than to poke at them. Well, he forgot to give me a stamp or a rattle, so you need to listen to my words instead: put down that blade and walk away."
He titled his head. "I know you from somewhere, don't I?"
"I doubt that."
"Brian, how do I know her? This whole time I'm trying to put my finger on it but it keeps slipping away."
One of the two men across from Lucy—Brian, presumably—rocked on his heels. He had a buzzcut and looked like he ate a lot of sausage. "I don't know. Maybe she's got one of those faces of the world."
Reapers (Breakers, Book 4) Page 15
