by Tad Williams
They turned Gilbert's old car around in the open space in front of the gate and drove it a few hundred meters back down the road. Del Ray found a spot where the brush was high along the side, and although the increasingly slippery, bumpy ride and the ugly scraping sounds from the undercarriage suggested that getting it back on the road might be more difficult than getting it off had been, they hid it there before heading back uphill. As the twilight failed the mountain air rapidly became colder, and Joseph shivered as they made their way back across the uneven terrain, wishing he had brought warmer clothes with him. At first, with the squeeze bottles bumping in his shirt, he had felt like a guerrilla fighter with a bandolier of grenades. Now the bottles just felt heavy.
Even though it was getting dark quickly, they picked a spot well away from the road and gate for climbing the fence. Del Ray managed to prop the razor wire well enough that he got over with only a few rips in his already tattered clothes, but the stick popped out just as Joseph was pulling his leg through and he tumbled down the fence to the ground, cursing Del Ray's incompetence. The wounds were painful but not deep, and the polymer bottles had survived the impact handily, so Joseph at last decided it was worth continuing. He put on an expression of not-so-cheerful martyrdom and limped up the hill after Del Ray, heading for the base's huge front door.
The scrub was low, so Del Ray said they should get down and crawl. Joseph thought this was the kind of foolishness that came from too much time watching netflicks, but the younger man insisted. It was cold, uncomfortable work, and since Del Ray refused to turn on the flashlight he had brought with him, they spent almost as much time climbing out of thorny ditches or struggling back around unclimbable rocks as they did moving forward. When they finally reached a spot where they could see the entrance, they were both scratched and breathing hard. Joseph's urge to knuckle the back of Del Ray's stubborn head was cooled by the broad smear of light along the mountain stone and the sound of voices.
His first feeling when he saw the vehicle parked in front of the massive door was actually relief that it wasn't a black van. The truck standing with its back gate down was something larger and more primitive-looking, almost like a safari wagon, covered with thick gray plating. A spotlight on top of the cab illuminated the concrete slab that barred entrance to the mountain retreat. Three men, their shadows thrown in stretching black along the stone, were huddled in front of the code-box. Another pair sat on the gate of the truck, smoking. The faces of these two were hard to see, but one of them had a large, ugly-looking automatic rifle across his lap.
Joseph looked to Del Ray, hoping in a strangely dreamlike way that the other man would say something to make everything normal and acceptable, but Del Ray's eyes were wide with fear. He reached out and grabbed at Joseph's arm so hard it hurt, then pulled him back and away from the immediate vicinity of the squat, gray truck.
They stopped fifty yards down the hillside, now panting even harder.
"It's them!" Del Ray whispered when he had caught his breath. 'Oh, Christ! It's that Boer bastard, the one that burned my house down!"
Joseph sat on the ground, filling his lungs. He couldn't think of anything to say, so he didn't bother. He pulled the open bottle of wine out of his shirt and had a long drink. Strangely, it didn't make him feel any better.
"We have to get out of here! They're murderers. They'll rip our heads off just for fun."
"Can't do it," Joseph said. It didn't even sound like his own voice.
"What are you talking about?"
"They trying to get in the mountain. You said these people, they are angry at Renie. You think I can just go off and leave my daughter in there? You don't understand what I said before, do you? She in a big old machine. She . . . she is helpless."
"So what are we going to do? Walk up to them and say, 'Excuse us, we just want to go inside, but we hope you don't mind waiting out here?' Is that what we're going to do?" Sarcasm and terror made an unpleasant combination. "I've dealt with these people, old man. These are not some local bad men—these are killers. Professionals."
Joseph could hardly make sense out of anything, but he had a picture in his brain of Stephen lying in that terrible hospital bed, covered in plastic like some piece of meat in a store, and it filled him with shame. Everything else in his head was in shadow except that picture. Stephen and now Renie, too, both caught like animals in traps. His own children. How could he walk away again?
"Why don't we go in the way I come out?" Joseph said suddenly.
Del Ray stared at him as though he had lost his mind. "Then what? Hide in the mountain and wait for them to break in?"
Joseph shrugged. He had another drink of wine, then put the cap back on and slid the bottle into his shirt. "It is a military place. Maybe there are some guns in there, we can shoot the bastards. But you don't have to go—I suppose it is not a place for a fellow like you." He stood up. "Me, I'm going."
Del Ray was staring at him as though faced with an entirely new kind of animal species. "You're crazy. How much of that wine have you drunk?"
Joseph knew that the other man was right about how foolish this was, but no matter how he tried, he could not lose the picture of Stephen in the bed. He tried to make another picture, a sensible one of himself getting in the car with Del Ray and driving away down the mountain, but he just could not imagine it. Sometimes there were things you had to do. Wife died, leaving you alone with two children? What could you do? You went on, even if you had to stay drunk most of the time to manage it.
Joseph began clumsily to make his way back up the moonlit mountainside, this time angling away from the entrance, circling toward the spot on the far side where he remembered coming out. A rustle in the brush startled him so that he almost wet himself. Del Ray had caught up to him, eyes still wide, breath steaming. "You are crazy," he whispered. "We're going to get killed, you know that?"
Joseph was already out of breath, but he doggedly continued to clamber up through the jagged outcrops. "Probably."
For some reason, it was far more difficult getting back in through the air shaft than it had been getting out. Four bottles of Mountain Rose clicking and sloshing in his clothing might have had something to do with it, not to mention a continuous mumbling litany of complaint and disbelief from Del Ray, who was crammed into the shaft behind him.
"Why don't you drive away, then?" Joseph said finally, wedged into an angle of the shaft and taking a breather. "Just go."
"Because even if they kill you and your entire damned family, that doesn't mean they won't come back and get me, too, just to leave things neat." Del Ray bared his teeth. "I don't even know what this is about—not really. Maybe we can find out what they want to know from Renie. Cut a deal, something."
The cramped, unpleasant journey came to an end when they reached the far end of the air duct and discovered that the screen Joseph had originally removed had been replaced, neatly screwed back into its socket.
"For Christ's sake, man," Del Ray fumed. "Just kick the bloody thing out."
Joseph gave it a good sharp crack with the heel of his shoe, enough to strip one of the bolts and shove a corner free. After a few more kicks the screen clattered down to the cement floor.
They hurried through the wide, cavernous garage and into the base, Del Ray staring all around. At a different time, Joseph would have been happy to give him a proprietorial tour, explaining what all the things were—as far as he had been able to discover during his wandering explorations—but for now all he wanted to do was find the deepest, most secure part of the underground fortress and pull everything in on top of himself. He was already regretting the foolishness of his heart that had forced him to climb the air shaft. The empty base was full of echoes and shadow. The thought of being chased through it by men with guns made him want to throw up.
It took a little while to find the elevator. When it dropped them down into the hidden basement lab and the door hissed open, something anticipatory about the darkness outside the car made Jo
seph pause, his heart beating hard.
"Jeremiah. . . ?"
"Step out," a voice said, squeezed and tight and not immediately recognizable. Joseph stepped out. A sudden tight in his face dazzled him.
"Oh my Lord, it is you. Sulaweyo, you fool, what have you been doing?" Something clicked and the overhead fluorescents warmed halfway, filling the tomblike lab with yellow light. Jeremiah Dako stood before them with a flashlight in his hand, wearing a dressing gown and unlaced boots. "And who is this. . . ?" he asked, staring at Del Ray.
"No time to talk," Del Ray said. "I'm a friend. There are men outside, bad men, trying to get in. . . ."
Jeremiah spoke briskly and evenly, but he was clearly frightened. "I know. I thought you were them. I was going to hide and try to hit someone with this, then go hide again." He lifted the metal table leg he had been holding in his other hand. "If I had time, I would have jammed the elevator. I suppose we'd better do it now—let's push that table into it."
"How did you know?" Joseph demanded. "How did you know about those men? And how is my Renie?"
"Your Renie's fine, more or less," Jeremiah said, then scowled. "If you're so worried about her, why the hell did you take off?"
"Good God, man, you are not my wife!" Joseph stamped his foot on the floor. "How did you know about those men outside?"
"Because I've been talking to someone, and he told me about them. He's a friend, or at least he claims he is." For the first time, the strain Jeremiah was under truly began to show. When he spoke again, it was with the exhausted resignation of a man who had just sighted a flock of winged pigs, or received incontrovertible proof of snow flurries across Hell. "In fact, he's on the phone right now. He says his name is Sellars. Do you want to talk to him?"
Christabel was tired, even though she had slept in the back seat for a lot of the trip. She didn't know where they were, but she had a feeling her daddy had been driving in some kind of big circle. They had stopped several times, always in campsites or turnouts that were out of sight from the main roads, and every time her daddy had gone back to take off the wheel-compartment cover and talk to Mister Sellars. The terrible boy was still being quiet, but he had eaten a whole candy bar Christabel's mommy had given them to share, and even had licked the chocolate off his fingers, like he never got to eat candy or something.
They were driving slowly through a city. Christabel had never seen it before, but the name "Courtland" was on lots of the stores, so she thought that might be its name.
"We need to stop for a few minutes," her father said. "I have to do something. I want the rest of you to stay in the car. I shouldn't be too long."
"Is that the reason we came all the way up into Virginia, Mike?" her mother asked.
"More or less, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to take a bit of a roundabout route." He looked out the window for a while and didn't say anything, then steered the van into a service station. "Fill it up, honey, will you?" he asked Mommy. "And use cash. I'll be back in twenty minutes. But if I don't check back in with you by half an hour, just go on along this street until you get to the Traveler's Inn. Cash there, too. I'll catch up to you." He suddenly smiled, which was good, because Christabel had not liked how serious his face had been. "And don't eat all the pillow-mints before I get there."
"You're scaring me, Mike," said her mommy, almost too quietly for Christabel to hear.
"Don't worry. I just . . . I don't want us to do anything stupid. I'm still trying to figure all this out." He turned around in his seat so he could look at Christabel. "You do what your mother says, okay? I know things are a little strange at the moment, but it's all going to be all right." He looked at the boy, who looked back at him. "That goes for you, too. Just listen to what the Señora has to say and do it, and we'll all be fine." He tossed the keys to Mommy and got out of the car.
While her mother went to give money to the man in the glass box, Christabel watched her father walk around to the back of the station, where he disappeared. She was just about to turn away when she saw him come out the other side and walk across the parking lot toward a building which had a big sign over the front door that said Jenrette's. It looked like the kind of place they stopped to have lunch when they were on other car trips, restaurants where they had pies under little glass bowls on the front counter, and it made Christabel think about food. Her father walked in through the front door. She couldn't help being sad when it swung closed behind him.
It was all very upsetting and confusing. She was glad her mommy and daddy had met Mister Sellars and they wanted to be his friends—that terrible big secret had begun to feel like something alive in her stomach that would never lie still. But ever since it had happened, everything was different. They were going somewhere, but no one would tell her where, and Mommy and Daddy still had lots of whispering arguments. Also, there was the strange thing of leaving Mister Sellars curled up in the back of the truck, hidden in that small place like one of those Egypt mummies Christabel had seen on a really interesting and creepy program on the net, until her mother had noticed she was watching something about dead people and made her switch to another node so she wouldn't have bad dreams. But that was just what it was like, except he wasn't dead, and she didn't know what to feel about that, exactly.
Her mother was having a long conversation with the man in the glass box. Maybe trying to use paper money was confusing to them—Christabel had almost never seen her mother do it before, but Daddy had got a whole lot of it out of the bank before they left, a big pile of paper with pictures on it, just like in old cartoons.
"Afraid your mama gonna take off and leave you with me?" the terrible boy Cho-Cho said behind her. "You ain't taked your nose off that glass since she left, mu'chita. What, think I'm gonna eat you, something?"
She looked at him with her best You-Go-Away look, but he just grinned. He did look smaller and less scary now that he was clean and wearing other clothes, but the broken-out tooth made her nervous. He always looked like he might get close enough, then bite.
She wasn't sure why, but she suddenly got up and pulled open the van door. "You're just stupid," she told the boy, then slammed the door and ran to her mother.
"What do you want, sweetie?"
She couldn't quite explain why she had gotten out, so she said, "I need to use the bathroom."
Her mother asked the man in the glass box something, and he pointed to the side of the building. Her mother frowned. "I don't want you in there by yourself," she said. "And I've got my hands full. You see that restaurant there? The one that says 'Jenrette's? You just go over there and ask to use their bathroom. Don't talk to any strangers except the ladies behind the counter. Understand?"
Christabel nodded.
"And come right back. I'll watch you till you're in the door."
Christabel skipped across the parking lot, turning back once to wave to her mother. The van looked faraway and strange, a familiar thing in an unfamiliar place, and she couldn't help thinking about Mister Sellars, lying there curled up in the dark.
The restaurant was busy, with lots of women and men in brown clothes going from table to table, taking food to people and pouring water. The seats were the kind she liked, squishy booths where you could slide from one end to another, something that always drove her father crazy. 'Christabel,' he would say, 'you are a child, not a ball bearing. Just stay in front of your plate, will you?'
Her daddy was in here, she remembered. Doing something, maybe making a call. She didn't really need to use the bathroom, not much, so she stood on tiptoes near the front counter, looking around the big room trying to find him.
He wasn't in the back, by the comm box. To her surprise, he was sitting in one of the booths, only a short way away, with his back to her. It was him—she knew the back of his head almost as well as the front—but there was someone else sitting in the booth with him.
For a moment it felt like another big, bad secret, and she wanted to turn around and walk back across the parking lot and get in
to the van, even if the boy was going to smile at her and say things that made her squirm. But the man her daddy was talking to didn't look scary, and also she wanted to see her daddy's face, see if he was smiling or serious or what, because she needed something like that to make the confusing parts less confusing.
She walked toward the booth so slowly that two different women in brown almost ran into her. "Mind where you're going, muffin," one of them said, and by the time Christabel had finished apologizing to the woman's back as she hurried on, her daddy was staring at her.
"Christabel! What the . . . what are you doing here, baby?" He looked as though another thought had just come to him. "Is everything okay?"
"I just came in to use the bathroom." She looked shyly at the man sitting with her father. He was wearing a brown-gray suit, and had very dark skin and black curly hair cut close to his head. When he saw her looking, he smiled. It was a nice smile, but she didn't think she was supposed to smile back, even if her daddy was right there.
"Well . . . well, damn," her father said. "I'm kind of in the middle of something, honey."
The man sitting across from him said, "That's okay, Major Sorensen. Maybe your little girl would like to sit down for a moment."
Daddy had a funny look, but shrugged. "I can't stay much longer anyway—my wife's just filling up the van."
"What's your name?" the man asked her. When she told him, he stuck out his hand to shake. His palms seemed very pink because the rest of the skin was so dark, almost like they had been scrubbed clean, but they were dry. He didn't squeeze too hard, which she liked. "Nice to meet you, Christabel. My name is Decatur, but my friends just call me Catur."
"Say hello to Mr. Ramsey," her daddy said.
"Oh, please, not Mr. Ramsey. Like that old joke, Mr. Ramsey's my father. Or, I suppose it would be more accurate to say Captain Ramsey is my father. You see, I've had a bit of experience with the military myself. Lived on more than a few bases, growing up." He turned to smile at Christabel again. "Do you like the base where you live, pumpkin?"
