“Are you going to help or not? I have to get back.”
“All right. I’ll get your stuff, Mary. But you better remember who helped you. You’re working for Orc and me.”
“I’m taking care of little kids,” Mary said. “If I’m working for anyone, it’s for them.”
“Like I say, you remember who was there when you needed them.” Howard turned on his heel and swaggered away.
“Two babysitters and food,” Mary called after him.
Mary returned to the day care. Three kids were crying, and it was spreading. John was staggering from crib to floor mat.
“I’m back,” Mary said. “Get some sleep, John.”
John simply crumpled. He was snoring before he hit the floor.
“It’s okay,” Mary told the first crying child. “It’s going to be all right.”
NINE
277 HOURS, 06 MINUTES
SAM SLEPT IN his clothes and woke too early.
He had spent the night on the couch in the large main room of the hotel suite. He knew from campouts on the beach that Quinn talked in his sleep.
He blinked and saw Astrid, a slender shadow against the sun. She was standing in front of the window but looking at him. He quickly wiped his mouth on the pillow.
“Sorry, sleep drool.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you up, but look at this.”
The morning sun had come up behind the town, up from behind the ridge. Rays of sunlight that sparkled and danced on the water seemed unable to touch the gray blankness of the barrier. It curved far out to sea, a wall rising from the ocean.
“How high is it?” Sam wondered aloud.
Astrid said, “I should be to able to calculate it. You measure from the base of the wall to a point, then you figure the angle and…never mind. It has to be at least a couple hundred feet high. We’re three stories up and we’re nowhere near the top. If there is a top.”
“What do you mean if there is a top?”
“I’m not sure. Don’t take anything I say too seriously: I’m just thinking out loud.”
“So think out loud enough for me to hear,” Sam said.
Astrid shrugged. “Okay. There may not be a top. It may not be a wall, it may be a dome.”
“But I see the sky,” Sam argued. “I see clouds. They’re moving.”
“Right. Well, imagine this: You’re holding a piece of black glass in your hand. Like a really big, really dark sunglasses lens. You tilt it one way, it’s opaque. You tilt it another way, it’s reflective. You squint real hard straight into it and you almost think you can see some light coming through. It all depends on the angle and the—”
“You hear that?” Quinn asked. He had arrived unnoticed, scratching himself indiscreetly.
Sam listened hard. “An engine. Not far away, either.”
They ran from the room, pelted down the stairs, and burst through double doors onto the hotel grounds. Around the corner, back to the tennis courts.
“It’s Edilio. The new kid,” Sam said.
Edilio Escobar was seated in the open cage of a small yellow backhoe. As they watched, he maneuvered close to the barrier and lowered the shovel. It bit through grass and came up with a shovelful of dirt.
“He’s trying to dig his way out,” Quinn said. He broke into a run and leaped up impulsively onto the backhoe beside Edilio. Edilio jumped about a foot in the air, but came down grinning.
Edilio killed the engine. “Hey, guys. I guess you kinda noticed this, huh?” He jerked a thumb at the barrier. “By the way, don’t touch it.”
Sam nodded ruefully. “Yeah. We figured that out.”
Edilio revved the engine and dug three more scoops. Then he hopped down, picked up a shovel, and pried away the last few inches of dirt between the hole and the barrier.
The barrier continued, even underground.
Working together, Edilio, Sam, and Quinn dug five feet down with backhoe and shovel. They found no bottom to the barrier.
But Sam did not want to stop. There had to be a bottom. There had to be. He was hitting rock, unable to get the shovel to bite deep. Each spadeful was lighter than the one before.
“Maybe a jackhammer. Or at least some picks to break it up down here.” Only then, hearing no response, did he realize he was the only one still digging. The others were standing, looking down at him.
“Yeah, maybe,” Edilio said finally. He bent down to give Sam a hand up out of the hole.
Sam clambered up, tossed his shovel aside, and beat the dirt from his jeans. “It was a good idea, Edilio.”
“Like what you did at the fire, man,” Edilio said. “You saved the hardware and the day care.”
Sam didn’t want to think about what he had saved or not saved. “Wouldn’t have saved anything, including my own butt, without you, Edilio. And Quinn and Astrid,” he added as an afterthought.
Quinn shot a hard look at Edilio. “So why are you here?” he asked.
Edilio sighed and propped his shovel against the barrier. He wiped sweat from his face and looked around at the well-tended grounds. “My mom works here,” Edilio said.
Quinn smirked a little. “Is she, like, the manager?”
“She’s in housekeeping,” Edilio said evenly.
“Yeah? Where do you live?” Quinn asked.
Edilio pointed at the barrier. “Over there. About two miles down the highway. We have a trailer. My dad, my two little brothers. They had a bug, so my mom kept them home. Alvaro, my big brother, he’s in Afghanistan.”
“He’s in the army?”
“Special Forces,” Edilio grinned. “The elite.”
He wasn’t a big kid, but he stood so straight, he didn’t seem short. His eyes were dark, seeming almost without whites, gentle but not fearful. He had rough, scarred hands that looked like they belonged on another body. He held his arms slightly out from his trunk, hands turned palm forward just a bit, like he was getting ready to catch something. He seemed both completely still and yet ready to jump into action.
“This is stupid when you think about it. People on the other side of the barrier, they know what’s happened,” Quinn said. “I mean, it’s not like they haven’t noticed that we’re behind this wall all of a sudden.”
“So?” Sam asked.
“So they have better equipment and stuff than we do, right? They can dig a lot deeper, get under the barrier. Or go around it. Or fly over it. This is a waste of time here.”
“We don’t know how far down or high up the barrier extends,” Astrid said. “It looks like it stops a couple hundred feet up, but maybe that’s an optical illusion.”
“Over, under, around, or through,” Edilio said. “There’s got to be a way.”
“Kind of like when your folks came over the border from Mexico, huh?” Quinn said.
Sam and Astrid both aimed shocked looks at Quinn.
Edilio stood even straighter and, despite being six inches shorter than Quinn, seemed to be looking down at him. In a calm, quiet voice Edilio said, “Honduras is where my folks are from. They had to come all the way through Mexico before they even reached the border. My mom works as a maid. My father is a farmhand. We live in a trailer and drive an old beater. I still have a little accent because I learned Spanish before I learned English. Anything else you need to know, man?”
Quinn said, “I wasn’t trying to start anything, amigo.”
“That’s good,” Edilio said.
It wasn’t a threat, not really. And in any case, Quinn had twenty pounds on Edilio. But it was Quinn who took a step back.
“We have to go,” Sam said. To Edilio, he explained, “We’re looking for Astrid’s little brother. He’s…he needs someone to look after him. Astrid thinks he may be up at the power plant.”
“My father’s an engineer there,” Astrid explained. “But it’s about ten miles from here.”
Sam hesitated before asking Edilio to join them. It would annoy Quinn. Quinn wasn’t acting like himself, which wasn’t really strang
e, given what was going on, but Sam found it unsettling. Edilio, on the other hand, had kept his head together at the fire. He’d stepped up.
Astrid made the decision for him. “Edilio? Would you like to come with us?”
Now Sam was a little peeved. Did Astrid think Sam couldn’t take care of things? She needed Edilio?
Astrid rolled her eyes at Sam. “I thought I would cut to the chase and avoid more male posturing.”
“I wasn’t posturing,” Sam grumbled.
“How are you going to travel?” Edilio asked.
“I don’t think we should try to drive a car, if that’s what you mean,” Sam said.
“I maybe got something. Not a car, but better than walking ten miles.” Edilio led them to a garage door hidden away around the back of the pool changing room. He raised the garage door, revealing two golf carts with the logo of Clifftop Resort on the sides. “The groundskeepers and the security guys use them to get around and go over to the golf course on the other side of the highway.”
“Have you driven one of these before?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. My dad picks up a shift sometimes at the golf course. Groundskeeping. I go with him, help out.”
That simplified the decision. Even Quinn had to see the logic. “Okay,” Quinn said grudgingly. “You drive.”
Sam said, “We can try the direct road to the highway. It’s the first right.”
“You’re avoiding downtown,” Astrid said. “You don’t want kids coming up to you, asking you what they should do.”
“You want to get to PBNP?” Sam asked. “Or do you want to watch me stand around telling people they have nothing to fear but fear itself?”
Astrid laughed, and it was, in Sam’s opinion, probably the sweetest sound he had ever heard.
“You remember,” Astrid said.
“Yeah. I remember. Roosevelt. The Great Depression. Sometimes, if I really strain my brain, I can even do multiplication.”
“Defensive humor,” Astrid teased.
They motored across the parking lot and onto the road. There they took a sharp cut-back right turn onto a narrow, newly paved section. The golf cart slowed going uphill to barely better than walking speed. They soon saw that the road dead-ended into the barrier. They stopped and stared solemnly at the abrupt end of the pavement.
“It’s like a Road Runner cartoon,” Quinn said. “If you go paint a tunnel onto it, we can go through, but Wile E. Coyote will smash into it.”
“Okay. Back down to the cliff road then, but cut through the back streets to the highway—don’t go near the plaza,” Sam said. “We need to find Little Pete already. I don’t want to have to stop and talk to a bunch of kids.”
“Yeah, plus we don’t want anyone stealing the cart,” Edilio said.
“Yeah. There’s that,” Sam admitted.
“Stop,” Astrid yelled, and Edilio slammed on the brakes.
Astrid jumped off her seat and trotted back to something white by the roadside. She knelt down and picked up a twig.
“It’s a seagull,” Sam said, puzzled that Astrid should care. “Maybe bashed into the barrier, huh?”
“Maybe. But look at this.” She poked the bird’s foot with the twig, lifting it up.
“Yeah?”
“It’s webbed, of course. Like it should be. But look at the way the toes extend out. Look at the nails. They’re talons. Like a bird of prey. Like a hawk or an eagle.”
“You sure it’s a regular seagull?”
“I like birds,” she explained. “This is not normal. Seagulls don’t need talons. So they don’t have talons.”
“So it’s a bird freak,” Quinn said. “Can we move on now?”
Astrid stood up. “It’s not normal.”
Quinn barked a laugh. “Astrid, we’re not even in the same time zone as normal. This is what you’re worrying about? Bird toes?”
“This bird is either a solitary freak, a random mutation,” Astrid said, “or it’s a whole new species that suddenly appeared. Evolved.”
“Again I have to go with ‘so what?’” Quinn said.
Astrid was on the verge of saying something. Then she shook her head a little, telling herself no. “Never mind, Quinn. Like you said, we’re a long way from normal.”
They loaded up again and took off at twelve miles an hour. They turned on Third and cut back, distancing themselves from town, and ran up Fourth, which was a quiet, shady, decidedly shabby, older residential street close by Sam’s house.
The only cars they saw were parked or crashed. The only people they saw were a couple of kids crossing the street behind them. They heard TV sounds coming from one house, but quickly determined that it was a DVD.
“At least the electricity is still on,” Quinn said. “They haven’t taken away our DVDs. MP3s will still work, too, even without web access. We’ll still have tunes.”
“They,” Astrid noted. “We’ve moved on from ‘God’ to ‘they.’”
They reached the highway and stopped.
“Well. That’s creepy,” Quinn said.
In the middle of the highway was a UPS tractor-trailer. The trailer had broken free and was on its side, like a discarded toy. The tractor, the truck part, was still upright, but off to the side of the road. There was a Sebring convertible smashed against the front. The convertible had not fared well. The impact was head-on. The car was crumpled to about half its usual length. And it had burned.
“The drivers poofed, car driver and truck driver,” Quinn said.
“At least no one got hurt,” Edilio said.
“Unless there was a kid in the car,” Astrid pointed out.
No one suggested checking. Nothing had survived that crash or the subsequent fire. None of them wanted to see if there was a small body in the backseat.
The highway was four lanes, two going each way, not divided, but with a turning lane in the middle. There was always traffic. Even in the middle of the night there was traffic. Now, only silence and emptiness.
Edilio laughed a little shakily. “I’m still expecting some big old truck to come barreling down on us, run us over.”
“It would almost be a relief,” Quinn muttered.
Edilio stepped on the pedal, the electric motor whirred, and they eased out onto the highway, skirting around the overturned UPS trailer.
It was an eerie experience. They were going slower than a strong cyclist on a highway where no one ever traveled at less than sixty miles an hour. They crept past a muffler shop and the Jiffy Lube, past a squat office building that housed a lawyer and an accountant. In several places cars from the highway had plowed into parked cars. A convertible was all the way inside the dry cleaner’s. It had taken out the plate-glass window. Clothing in plastic wrap lay strewn across the car’s hood and into the passenger compartment.
There was a graveyard silence as they drove. The only sound came from the soft rubber tires and the strained whirring of the electric motor.
The town lay to their left. To the right the land rose sharply to a high ridge. The ridge loomed above Perdido Beach, its own sort of wall. The thought had never occurred to Sam so forcefully before that Perdido Beach was already bounded by barriers, by mountains on the north and east, by ocean to the south and west. This road, this silent, empty road, was just about the only way in or out.
Ahead was the Chevron station. Sam thought he saw movement there.
“What do you guys think?” he asked.
“Maybe they have food. It’s a mini-mart, right?” Quinn said. “I’m hungry.”
“We should keep going,” Astrid said.
“Edilio?” Sam pressed.
He shrugged. “I don’t want to be paranoid. But, man, who knows?”
Sam said, “I guess I vote for keeping going.”
Edilio nodded and eased the golf cart to the left side of the road.
“If there are kids there, we smile and wave and say we’re in a hurry,” Sam said.
“Yes, sir,” Quinn said.
“Don’t pull that, brah. We took a vote,” Sam said.
“Yeah. Right.”
There were clearly people at the Chevron station. A slight breeze carried a torn Doritos bag down the highway toward them, a red and gold tumbleweed.
As the golf cart approached, one kid, then another, stepped out into the road. Cookie was the first. The second kid Sam didn’t recognize.
“T’sup, Cookie,” Sam called out as they drew within twenty yards.
“T’sup, Sam?” Cookie replied.
“Looking for Astrid’s little brother, man.”
“Hold up,” Cookie said. He was carrying a metal baseball bat. The other kid beside him had a croquet mallet with green stripes.
“Nah, man, we’re on a mission, we’ll catch you later,” Sam said. He waved, and Edilio kept his foot on the pedal. They were within a couple of feet and would soon be past.
“Stop them,” a voice yelled from the Chevron station. Howard was running and behind him, Orc. Cookie stepped in front of the cart.
“Don’t stop,” Sam hissed.
“Man, look out,” Edilio warned Cookie.
Cookie jumped aside at the last second. The other kid swung his mallet hard. The wood shaft hit the steel pole that supported the cart’s awning. The mallet head snapped off and narrowly missed Quinn’s head.
Then they were past and Quinn yelled back, “Hey, you almost knocked my head in, jerkwad.”
They were maybe thirty feet on and pulling away when Orc yelled, “Catch them, you morons.”
Cookie was a big kid, not fast. But the other kid, the one holding the broken mallet, was smaller and quicker. He broke into a sprint. Howard and Orc were farther back, running full out, but Orc was heavy and slow and Howard pulled away from him.
The kid with the mallet caught up to them. “You better stop,” he said, panting, running alongside.
“I don’t think so,” Sam said.
“Dude, I’ll stab you with this stick,” the kid threatened, but he was panting harder. He made a weak stab with the shattered end of the mallet.
Sam caught it and twisted it out of his hands. The kid tripped and sprawled. Sam tossed the stick aside contemptuously.
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