So they would return Hawkin to his home at Gunderson Woods. And there he would reunite with his mother. It actually hurt Victoria to hear this at first. She knew that was horrible of her. But this woman couldn’t possibly be reliable. Paralyzed? And a metal-eater? And some kind of shaman in what sounded like a cult? How could she be expected to care for Hawkin? And what about all the strangers who lived on the compound with her? What if one of them talked? What if Gunn came for him there? It couldn’t be a good environment for a child.
“If you knew anything about my family,” John said, “you’d say the same.”
“They’ll look for him there,” she said. “It’s practically right down the road. They’ll find him.”
“They haven’t found me.”
“Sorry—what?” she said.
“Nothing.” John shrugged his shoulders, as if he didn’t want to think too hard about any of this. His job was to get the kid there safely, not figure the rest of his life out. “That place has become its own kind of fortress. They’re armed to the gills. A lot of people show up there—more and more every week—to start over. Say goodbye to whatever they were. Metal is and all that. If you’re looking to hide in plain sight, it’s as good a place as any.”
“How do you know all this?” she said.
“Because my brother’s one of them.”
On television a woman throws up her arms and lets out a scream as a tentacle loops around her waist and drags her offscreen. Victoria and Hawkin watch for another few minutes, silent except for the occasional rustle of a candy wrapper as the boy snacks on M&M’s.
Then a knocking shakes the door in its frame.
Someone is there. Someone wants in.
* * *
The Cornhusker Motel is located off I-35, just outside of Ames, Iowa. The Vacancy sign blinks red. Brown weeds poke through the cracks in the asphalt. Two cars are parked out front, one rusted-out Pontiac missing its bumper and a forest-green Volvo with Minnesota plates.
The day is gray with cold rain. Along the sidewalk, a housekeeper pushes a cart heaped with dirty linens. When five black SUVs roar into the parking lot, she flattens herself fearfully against the wall and says a prayer, and the laundry cart trundles on another few feet before crashing against a timbered pillar.
Men in tactical gear spill out of the vehicles and arrange themselves in a half circle around the door of unit 9. She doesn’t know who is staying there, but they’ve kept the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob the entire time.
The men—bristling with rifles—move quickly, a swarm. But now another man approaches with deliberate slowness. Short, pudgy, balding, bespectacled. He wears a three-piece suit, like someone on one those British procedurals that play on public television. He looks so incongruous among this group of men. Instead of a rifle, he carries what appears to be a sword. If not for the threatening circumstances, the housekeeper would have wondered if it was a toy, since the blade gives off a crackling red light.
The small man stands before the door of unit 9 and studies the men who surround him as if to ascertain their readiness. They all creep closer as he raises a hand, makes it into a fist, and knocks.
There is a pregnant beat when he rises up on his tiptoes, presumably waiting for the peephole to darken. With two hands, he readies the sword at his shoulder. He then springs forward with surprising quickness, leading with the blade. The wood offers no resistance as the sword sinks through it all the way to the hilt. Smoke drifts from a black scar. When the small man pulls back his blade, he seems satisfied by the blood reddening it.
* * *
When the knock sounds, Victoria hurries Hawkin to the bathroom. “Go, go, go,” she whispers. There is a window made from frosted glass here. Too small for an adult, but perfect for him to slip out of, if need be. “You wait here,” she says. “And if there’s any trouble, you run.”
“Run where?”
“Fast and far. That’s all that matters.”
“I should be the one to answer the door,” he says.
“No.”
“I should be the one protecting you.”
“I said no.”
“But they can hurt you.”
“They can hurt you too,” she says and runs a finger along his chest, where he still carries an evil scar the color of frostbite. “We caught them by surprise before. But they’ll be ready this time.”
She climbs into the bathtub with him and props open the window above it. A cold breeze filters inside and steams their breath. “Stay here. And listen.”
“For what?”
“Me screaming. I’ll scream.” She kisses him on the forehead, then leaves him and slinks toward the door. A line of light glows beneath it, broken by the shadows of two legs.
Slowly she brings her eye to the peephole.
* * *
Thaddeus steps aside and allows the men to shoot out the lock. Gunfire rattles, and splinters spray. They shoulder through the door. It gives way before catching on something weighty—the body felled on the other side. They barely pay it any attention, just kick its ribs once and then move on to check the closet, the bathroom. They hoist the skirt of the bed and flap aside the curtains and shine a flashlight into the ventilation ducts. They call out, “Clear!”
Only then does Thaddeus enter. He stands over the body of a gray-haired man in a white polo shirt and pleated khakis. His face has been cloven through the middle by the wizard blade. The wound does not bleed, having been instantly cauterized, but it bubbles and smolders, and an acrid smoke rises, as if his soul is escaping. Thaddeus knows this man to be Wade Lennon, Victoria’s husband. They have never met, but Thaddeus has observed him from a distance and listened to him many times via the microphones nested in their home. Wade is his wife’s lesser. An inferior intellect, a waste of oxygen, a human teddy bear Victoria seemed to keep around for comfort alone. How either of them figured out how to splice their home’s surveillance system into a loop, he isn’t sure. How either of them figured out how to game Thaddeus down to Iowa, he isn’t sure. He doesn’t like to be bested.
One of Wade’s eyes is a startled blue. The other is gone. Thaddeus steps onto his chest as he enters the room fully. A death gasp escapes the body.
The men lower their rifles and shuffle their feet and move out of the way as Thaddeus explores the room. One of them says, “Who is this guy?”
And Thaddeus says, “A traitor to his country.”
He opens the drawers of the bureau, one by one. Then he enters the bathroom and checks Wade’s toiletry bag. He shuts off the switch on the sword and the red sizzle of it fades and he sets its point on the floor and leans on the handle and says, “Well, gentlemen.” He looks at them each in turn. “I’ll admit I’m quite vexed.”
* * *
John stands in the doorway of the motel room. He wears sunglasses, though the day is cloudy. A black hoodie shadows his face. Snowflakes flutter around him and melt on his shoulders.
“Thank goodness,” Victoria says. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“Didn’t recognize you either,” he says. “The hair. You look twenty years younger.”
“Oh,” Victoria says and touches it. “Thanks. I think.”
“It’s time.”
Victoria tries to usher him inside, but he holds back. “Any problems?” he says. “Been driving by a few times every day. Last half an hour, I was watching from across the street. No red flags, right?”
“We’re fine,” she says. “Running low on treats. That’s all.”
He turns around and raises a hand, signaling someone parked in a Buick with snow-smeared wheel wells. The driver’s door is kicked open and a woman with strawberry-blond hair emerges; she’s followed by a little boy in a snow hat and a parka and corduroy pants several sizes too big and rolled up at the cuffs.
“Who’s that?” Victoria says.
“Friends.” He nervously tugs at the strings of his sweatshirt. The hood tightens around his face, pinching his expression, smushing
his cheeks, making him even more unfamiliar.
“I was starting to think you’d never come.” Victoria realizes she’s crying and palms the tears away. She isn’t sure if it’s due to relief or sadness. She isn’t sure what kind of life she’ll find outside of this room. “Have you heard from Wade?”
“He texted me from the burner yesterday. All good. He’s waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you. He’s waiting for you.”
In a way that’s been true from the start. She imagines her husband with the neat part in his hair and his kind, steady eyes and his tanned arms that are forever opening up to draw her into a hug. He likes to tour through country cemeteries to see if he can find the oldest grave. He knows every battle in the Civil War and World War II. He has a train set that he sometimes tends to in a railroad cap and overalls. He smells like butterscotch and shaving lotion and has never been anything but decent and kind to her. And now he is waiting for her to be done with her work here at last. So that they can move on. Staying married is about making compromises, he once said. Coming here was certainly a compromise. Escaping Northfall is one more compromise. She just hopes it’s not their last.
“I honestly don’t even know what’s next for us,” she says to John.
“I don’t know what’s next for me either. But we’ve made our beds. Now we’ve got to lie in them.”
The woman and her son kick the slush off their shoes and sniffle. “This is Jenna and her boy, Timmy,” John says as he motions for them to head inside. “If anybody asks, you all are just a couple of moms and their kids getting together to play some board games and have some snacks, maybe watch a movie. And if anybody makes trouble for you, rest assured that Jenna’s carrying.”
“I’m sorry.” Victoria feels addled, her mind elsewhere, still worrying over Wade. “Carrying? What?”
He pinches his mouth impatiently, and Jenna opens her coat to flash the revolver tucked into her belt.
“I see,” Victoria says. “Of course.”
Jenna says, “Nice to meet you,” on her way into the motel room, but Victoria is too baffled to return the greeting.
John reaches into his pocket and removes a pair of sunglasses. “Give these to the kid.”
She takes them without knowing why. Sunglasses? Why would Hawkin need sunglasses on a stormy day? And then she realizes his eyes would give him away, and it bothers her how slow she is at making connections. Her mind is a mess. Everything is uncertain.
“What about you?” she says to John. “Won’t you come inside?”
His eyes dart over her shoulder. “Nah.”
“Don’t you even want to meet him? You’re doing all this for —”
“Better like this.” John starts to walk to the car and says over his shoulder, “Pack up your things. We leave in ten. You lead, I follow. Any trouble comes our way, I’ll take care of it.”
“If there is trouble, you’re not going to be able to stop it. You don’t understand what these people are capable of.”
“Trust me,” John says. He spins around to face her, and maybe, just maybe, she sees his birthmark flash blue. “That kid isn’t the only one who can cause some mayhem.”
36
* * *
The longer John stayed in Russia, the more he put himself at risk, but he took the time to collect Anton’s broken body and carry it deep into the Khimki Forest and bury it beneath a rowan tree, and into the bark he carved Friend. He wants something similar to happen now, wants to move past the violence and do what needs to be done for Hawkin and then walk away.
All this time, John has been aware of the boy—he’s been nibbling at the edges of his attention—but there was something distancing about the high fences and concrete walls of the DOD facility. Hawkin felt more like an idea than a person. Now that he’s out, John can’t concentrate or calm the paranoia twisting sourly inside him. His dreams are back. The dreams that used to plague him, the dreams he thought he had cut off, said goodbye to.
One involved every window and door in the house swinging open and spilling forth a blinding light. When John squinted and shaded his face and tried to close one of them, a tentacle shot forward and curled around his wrist.
Another involved the boy. He was curled up inside of John’s chest, where John’s heart should have been, hidden. When Hawkin awoke, he began to punch and then kick, seeking a way out, trapped in a rib cage that he finally mustered the strength to shatter.
John doesn’t want to talk to the boy, doesn’t want to risk even looking at him, for fear of being recognized as a citizen of the same nightmare.
Gunderson Woods is only thirty miles away but feels impossibly distant. He drives there now and feels watched every inch of the trip. It’s not just the ramped-up military presence in Northfall over the past few days—the helicopters buzzing the air, the black SUVs with military plates in the streets, the thin-waisted, broad-shouldered men wearing earpieces in restaurants and at gas stations—it’s the boy. The boy in the Buick that’s driving twenty yards ahead of him. A disturbed magnetism links them.
A stormy day such as this seemed the best time to make a move. The snow falls thickly and sweeps past the windshield. The wipers creak back and forth, and gusts rock the Bronco, and ice patches skid its wheels. The overall sensation is vertiginous and makes driving feel more like flying. Extra-dimensional. Which matches the sensation inside him, everything at once expanding and contracting so that he isn’t quite sure how to navigate his feelings or the road before him.
The Buick’s taillights wink red every time Jenna takes a turn. The car quakes and fishtails on occasion, but he’s happy for the cover of the early-winter storm. And for the emptiness of the roads. He checks his mirrors constantly but has seen nothing except a logging truck and a furnace-repair van.
All this time he studies the boy through the rear window of the Buick. At one point, Hawkin turns around, his auroral eyes visible—and John shrinks back in his seat and lets his foot off the gas to lengthen the distance between them. Forty yards. Fifty. Eighty.
It’s then that a squad car pulls out from a side road with its rack lights flashing and cuts between the Buick and the Bronco. The snowflakes become red and blue confetti. The cop squawks his siren a few times and Jenna pumps her brakes but doesn’t stop.
John pulls out his cell to call her, but she’s already on the line. “What do I do?” she says. “Do I keep going?”
“You pull over,” he says.
“Was I speeding?”
“Give the forty-five to Victoria and tell her to keep it ready but hidden. In her lap, under her scarf.”
“I don’t —”
“And the kid isn’t wearing the goddamn sunglasses like he’s supposed to. He needs to put on his —”
“He’s got them on now.”
“It’ll be fine. Just be cool. Don’t hang up. Set the cell phone down beside you. I’ll be listening. Anything happens, I’m there.”
The siren squawks again and Jenna slows and pulls over as far as she can without risking the ditch. The cop noses up behind her. The road bends here, and John parks far enough back to be half hidden among the trees. Not parked. His foot on the brake, ready to slam the gas.
The cop has a linebacker build evident even under his winter coat. He shambles through the snow and knocks at Jenna’s window even though it’s already half rolled down. He doesn’t ask for her license and registration but says right away, “Don’t I know you?”
“I’m Dan Swanson’s wife.”
“You’re Dan Swanson’s wife. And that’s his boy.”
“That’s our boy.”
“That’s a hell of a thing, him going missing.”
“It is.”
“Don’t give up hope.”
“I haven’t.”
“You shouldn’t. None of us have. We keep the light on at his desk, you know? Every night.”
“That’s sweet of you. Thank you.”
“Mrs. Sw
anson, you know why I pulled you over?”
“I—I’m not sure. I don’t think I was speeding? Is one of my headlights out?”
“I’m supposed to do random checks here. On account of all the loonies. Because this is the way to Gunderson Woods. The sheriff says we’re supposed to set up what you might call a harassment campaign.”
“Oh?” she says and then gives a nervous chuckle. “Are we the loonies you’re looking for?”
“You’re not headed to Gunderson Woods, are you?”
“No. Never.”
“Then where are you headed?”
“We’re friends.” She nods at Victoria and tries to keep a steady smile, just like she does at the restaurant when dealing with customers displeased with their orders. “We’re just getting together with our kids to have some hot cocoa, play board games.”
The deputy is a big guy, the kind who has enough fat in his throat to make him always sound stuffed up. “Board games?”
“And maybe watch a movie.”
“Huh.” There is a long beat during which John grips the wheel so tightly, his knuckles pop. He imagines the cop studying the kids, maybe wondering about the age gap between them and why one is wearing sunglasses on a day like this. “Well, fun as that sounds, it’s honestly kind of not genius to be driving around in a two-wheeler in these conditions. Especially with kids.”
“I—yes—you’re right.”
“Last winter, a family slipped off the road during a storm. Froze to death. Car was buried in a drift. Didn’t find them until spring.”
The Ninth Metal Page 27
