Pain stopped him. And the moment he relaxed, the cuffs eased their grip. People could be left hobbled as he was indefinitely. Choke-cuffs were called humane restraints. Blake had heard that in prisons—inevitably overcrowded—order was sometimes maintained by the threat of hobbling with such humane restraints. Hobbled prisoners were not isolated. They were left in with the general prison population—fair game. They frequently did not survive.
Lying on his back, helpless, eaten alive with frustration and fear, Blake knew how they must have felt.
Would it be possible to talk to the car family? Would there be even one member intelligent enough to understand the danger? And if there were one, what evidence could Blake show him? The bag was gone. Neither he nor the girls had symptoms yet. If Meda was right, there would be symptoms in a few days, but how far could a car family spread the disease in a few days?
“Is this their base?” he asked Rane. A true car family had no base, he knew, except their vehicles.
“This place isn’t theirs,” Rane said. “They took it. They killed the men and raped the women. I think they’re still keeping some of the women alive somewhere else in the house.”
Blake shook his head. “God, this is a sewer. There’s only one source of help that I can think of—and I don’t want to think of it.”
“What? Who?”
“Eli.”
“Dad … Oh no. His kind … they aren’t people anymore.”
“Neither are these, honey.”
“But, please, I gave these all the information they needed to convince Grandmother and Granddad Maslin that we’re prisoners. They’ll ransom us.”
“What makes you think people as degenerate as these will let us go after they get what they want?”
“But they said … I mean, they haven’t hurt us.” She groped for reassurance. “Let’s face it. Grandmother and Granddad would ransom us if we were alive at all—no matter what had been done to us, but the car people haven’t done anything.”
Blake sat up, tried to see her in the darkness. “Rane, don’t say that again. Not to anyone.” If only she thought before she opened her mouth. If only she hadn’t opened her mouth at all. If only no other listener had heard!
Unexpectedly, Keira spoke into the silence. “Dad? Are you there?”
Blake shifted from anger at Rane to concern for Keira. “We’re both here. How do you feel?”
“Okay. No, lousy, really, but it doesn’t matter. We were worried about you. You took so long to regain consciousness. But now that you’re awake, and it’s night … what would you think about one of us hopping over to one of those windows and signaling Eli’s people?”
Silence.
“Rane wouldn’t let me do it,” Keira added.
Blake touched Rane. “So you had thought of it.”
“Not me. I would never have thought of that. Keira did. Dad, please. Eli’s people … I couldn’t stand to go back to them. I’d rather stay here.”
“Why?” Blake asked. He thought he knew the answer, and he did not really want to hear her say it, but it needed to be said. She surprised him.
“I can’t stand them,” she said. “They’re not human. Their children don’t even look human. …Yet they’re seductive. They could have pulled me in. That guy, Kaneshiro …”
“Did he hurt you?”
“You mean did he rape me? No! There’d be nothing seductive in that. Nobody raped me. But in a little while, a few days, he wouldn’t have had to. I’m afraid of those people. I’m scared shitless of them.”
“That’s the way I feel about these car people!” Keira said. “Rane … so what if you were sort of … seduced by Eli’s people. I was, too. All it meant to me was that they weren’t really bad people—not the way rat packs are bad. They’re different and dangerous, but I’d rather be with them than here.”
Blake began to inch across the room, making as little noise as possible. Hopping would have been too noisy.
“Dad, don’t!” Rane begged.
He ignored her. If any of Eli’s people were outside, he wanted them to know where he was. It was possible, of course, that they would simply shoot him, but he did not believe they would—they could have done that long ago. The Clay’s Ark people wanted their captives—their converts—back. Perhaps by now they also wanted any salvageable members of the car gang and the ranch family. Mainly, they wanted to keep the disease from spreading, keep it from destroying their way of life. They had been totally unrealistic to think they could go on hiding indefinitely, but at the moment Blake was on their side.
He reached the window, managed to stand up, almost pulling down the drapes in the process. The leg restraints tightened as he stood.
The moon was waning, but still bright in the clear desert air. It was possible that someone outside might be able to see him in the moon and starlight, but he hoped Eli’s people had told the truth when they claimed to be able to see in the dark. He pushed the draperies to one side and stood in plain view of anything outside. He could see hills not far distant. Before them was a shadowy jumble of huge rocks—as though there had been a slide—or perhaps merely weathering away of soil. The rocks could provide excellent cover for anyone out there.
Off to one side was a building that might have been a barn. From the barn extended a corral. The barn looked spare and modern. The people of this ranch had not lived in the nineteenth century. It was possible that even the cuffs had been theirs. A car family would not care whether restraints were humane or not.
Scanning as carefully as he could, Blake could see no sign of anyone. Still, he stood there, at one point holding up his hands to show that they were bound. He felt foolish, but he did not sit down until he felt he had given even an intermittent watcher a chance to see him.
Finally, he hopped away from the window and let himself down quietly so that he could roll back to where the girls were. He had not quite made it when the door opened and someone switched on a light. He found himself squinting upward into the face of a squat, burly man in an ill-fitting new shirt and pants that were almost rags.
“Looks like you’re going to live,” he said to Blake.
Blake rolled onto his back and sat up. “I’d say so.”
“Your people want you. Big surprise.”
“I’m sure most of your victims have people who want them.”
The man frowned at Blake as though he thought Blake might be making fun of him. Then he gave a loud, braying laugh. “Most of you walled-in types don’t give a piss for each other, Doc. You don’t know family like we do. But the hell with that. What I want to know is who else wants you?”
Blake sat up straighter, staring at the man. “What do you mean?”
The man pushed Blake over gently with his foot. “Those your own teeth, Doc?”
Blake writhed back into a sitting position. “Look, I’ll tell you what I know. I just wanted to find out what’s happened since I’ve been unconscious.”
“Nothing. Now who else wants you?”
Blake wove a fantasy about Eli’s people, made them just another rat pack with ideas no loftier than this one’s. Ransom. He said nothing about the disease. There was nothing he could say to a man like this, he realized. Nothing that would not get his teeth kicked in. Or if the man believed him, he might shoot Blake and both girls, then run—on the theory that if he got away fast enough, he could escape the disease. Blake had known men like him before; confronting them with unfamiliar ideas was dangerous even in controlled, hospital surroundings.
He got absolutely no response from the man until he mentioned the mountaintop ranch. The moment he said it, he knew he was talking too much.
“Those people!” the burly man muttered. “I been planning for a long time to bury them. Maybe not bother to kill them first. Bony, stripped-down models. Shit, you’re a doctor. What’s the matter with those guys?”
“They never gave me a chance to find out,” Blake lied. “I think they’re taking something.” Drugs. That was something a s
ewer rat could understand.
“I know they’re taking something,” the man said. “One time I saw a couple of them running down jack rabbits and eating them. I mean like a coyote or a bobcat, tearing into them before they were all the way dead.”
Blake blinked, repelled and amazed. “You saw them do that?”
“I said I did, didn’t I? What have they got, Doc, and what do you think it’s worth?”
“I tell you, I don’t know. We were prisoners. They didn’t tell us anything.”
“You got eyes. What did you see?”
“Dangerous, bone-thin people, faster than average, stronger than average, and close.”
“What close?”
“They give a piss for each other. Listen, who are you, anyway?”
“Badger. I head this family.”
He looked the part. “Well, Badger, I didn’t get the impression these people knew how to forgive and forget. They probably see us as their property. They probably want us back—or maybe they’ll settle for a share of our ransom.”
“Share? You’ve got too much sun, man. Or they have. What are they doing, growing something?”
“I don’t know!”
“I gotta know. I gotta find out! Shit, it must be good stuff.”
“They look like a strong wind would blow them away, and you think they have good stuff?”
Badger kicked Blake again, this time less gently. Blake fell over. “You’re a doctor,” Badger said. “You ought to know! What the hell is it?” Another hard kick.
Through a haze of pain, Blake heard one of the girls scream, heard Badger say, “Get away from me, cunt!” heard a slap, another scream.
“Listen!” Blake gasped, sitting up. “Listen, they have a garden!” His head and his side throbbed. What if his ribs were broken? Meda had said broken bones would be fatal to him now. “Those people have a big garden,” he said. “They never really let us see what they grew there. Maybe if you could—”
He was cut off by the crack of a shot. The sound echoed several times into a world that had otherwise gone silent. Another shot. It hit the window near them, somewhere near ceiling level, then ricocheted with an odd whine. More bulletproof glass. A house located where this one was was probably hardened as much as possible against any form of attack.
Someone outside had perhaps seen or heard Blake. Someone outside was either a bad shot trying to kill him or a good shot trying to protect him.
“Shit!” Badger muttered. He turned and ran from the room, slamming the door behind him.
“If we could break the windows,” Keira said when he was gone, “Eli’s people might come in and get us.”
And Rane: “If bullets couldn’t break them, we sure can’t with our bare hands.”
“But we’ve got to get out! That guy Badger is crazy. If he kicks Dad’s ribs in, Dad will die!”
Blake lay listening to them, thinking he should say something reassuring, but now that the danger was less immediate, he could not make the effort. His side and head were competing with each other to see which could hurt more. He lay still, eyes closed, trying to breathe shallowly. He was desperately afraid one or more ribs were already broken, but he could do nothing. He felt consciousness slipping away again.
“I’m going to try something,” he heard Keira say.
“There’s nothing to try,” Rane told her.
“Shut up. Let me do something for a change.” She paused, then spoke in an ordinary voice. “Eli or whoever’s out there, if you can hear me, fire three more times.”
There was nothing.
“What did you expect?” Rane demanded. “All that stupid talk about seeing in the dark and being able to hear better than other people—”
“Will you shut up?” Keira tried again. “Eli,” she said, “maybe we can distract them. We can help you get them. You’ll want them now that they’ve been exposed to the disease. Help us and we can help you.”
More silence.
Keira spoke again softly. “I’m sorry I had to hit you.” She hesitated. “But I did have to. You told me I couldn’t have you, then you made me choose between the little I could have and my father and sister. What would you have done?”
For a long while, there was no sound at all. Then it seemed to Blake in his pain, in his confusion at what he had heard his daughter say, he heard three evenly timed shots.
PART 5
Jacob
Past 23
MEDA WANTED A GIRL.
Eli merely wanted Meda to survive and be well. When that was certain, he would concern himself with the child.
He worried about her in spite of his confidence in the organism’s ability to keep its hosts alive. This was something new, after all. None of the Ark’s crew had been able to have children during the mission. Their anti-conception implants had been timed to protect them and had worked in spite of the organism since no doctor had survived to remove them.
Before the Ark left, there had been discussion of the unlikely possibility (emphasized by the media and de-emphasized by everyone connected with the program) that the crew might find itself stranded and playing Adams and Eves on some alien world. Thus, the effectiveness of the implants was intended to last only through the time allotted to the mission and the quarantine period scheduled to follow it. In spite of everything, Eli had been pleased to discover that his had worn off right on time.
Another fear played up by the media and down by everyone in the program was the possibility that faster-than-light travel might have some negative effect on conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. The Dana Drive that powered the Ark involved an exotic combination of particle physics and psionics. Parapsychological mumbo jumbo, it had been called when Clay Dana presented it. Even when he was able to prove everything he said, even when others were able to duplicate his work and his results, there were outspoken skeptics. After years of tedious, uncertain observation of so-called psychic phenomena, after years of trickery by “psychic” charlatans, some scientists in particular found their prejudices too strong to overcome.
But the majority were more flexible. They accepted Dana’s work as proof of the psionic potential—specifically, the psychokinetic potential—of just about everyone. Some saw this potential in military terms—the beginnings of a weapons delivery system as close to teleportation as humanity was likely to come. Others, including Clay Dana himself, saw it as a way to the stars. Clay Dana and his supporters demanded the stars. They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed. The Dana faction feared humanity would extinguish itself on Earth, the only world in the solar system that could support human life. There were always hints that the Dana people knew more than they were saying about this possibility. But what they said in Congress, in the White House, to the people by way of the media, turned out to be enough—to the amazement of their opposition. The Dana faction won. The Ark program was begun. The first true astronauts—star voyagers—began their training.
Because of the psychokinetic element, a human crew was essential. The Dana drive amplified and directed human psychokinetic ability. Surprisingly, some people had too much psychokinetic potential. These could not be trusted with the drive. They over-controlled it, affected it when they did not intend to, made prototypes of the Clay’s Ark “dance” off course. Only strange, old Clay Dana tested out as having too much ability, yet was able to control his drive with a psionic feather touch. Both Eli and Disa had been able to pilot the prototypes and later the Ark itself. This meant they were psionically ordinary. And for some reason, old Dana had taken a liking to them, though Disa admitted to being a little afraid of him. And what she felt about Dana, was what a lot of people watching their TV walls felt about the Ark crew and backup crew. People were curious, but a little afraid—and envious. Earth was becoming less and less a comfortable place to live. Thus it was necessary that the crew have weaknesses and fac
e serious dangers. People knew children had been born on the moon and in space safely, but the gossip networks with their videophone-in shows and their instant polls, their interviews and popular education classes, jacked up their ratings with hours of discussion of whether or not faster-than-light travel could be dangerous to pregnant women and their children. There was even a retrogressive women’s protection movement intended to keep women off the Ark.
Eli and Disa were too busy to pay much attention to TV nonsense, as they thought of it, but they went along when the implants were proposed. And Eli left frozen sperm behind—just in case—and Disa left several mature eggs.
Now, Eli wished somehow that his frozen sperm could have been used to impregnate Meda. He knew this was not a reasonable wish, under the circumstances, but he was not feeling very reasonable. He watched Lorene walk Meda back and forth across the room. Meda did not want to walk, but she had tried both sitting and lying down. These, she said, made her feel worse. Lorene walked her slowly, said it would not do her any harm. Lorene had had some nursing experience at a birth center before she married. She had trained to be a midwife to women too poor to go to the better hospitals and too frightened to go to the others.
Meda stopped for a moment beside Eli’s chair, rested her hand heavily on his shoulder. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Feeling guilty and helpless?”
He only looked at her.
She patted his shoulder. “Men are supposed to feel that way. They do in the books I’ve read.”
He could not help himself. He laughed, stood up, kissed her wet forehead, then walked with her a little until she wanted to sit down in the big armchair. He was surprised she did not want to lie down, but Lorene did not seem surprised so he said nothing. He pulled another chair over and sat beside her, holding her hand and listening as she panted and sometimes made low noises in her throat as the contractions came and went. He was terrified for her, but he sat still, trying to show strength and steadiness. She was doing all the work, after all, pushing, enduring the pain and risk, giving birth to their child without the medical help she might need. If she could do that and hold together, he could hold together, too.
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