by McLay, Craig
Except I couldn’t do that.
My parents had been killed. Violet had been driven away. Max was onto something. I knew revenge was out of the question. How do you smack a face that doesn’t exist? But I wanted to know what was going on. If I could find Max, maybe I’d finally get some sort of answer.
I thought back to the rehab centre. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where people were strongly encouraged to come and go as they pleased. It didn’t feel like any kind of hospital I’d ever set foot in before. It felt more like a prison. Especially with that tyrannical and Ratched-like “administrator” roaming the halls with the only key that could open all those doors.
Maybe Max hadn’t been wounded overseas. Maybe he’d found out something they didn’t want him to know and they’d thrown him in jail. But, Max being Max, he’d managed to escape. And now they were using me to try to find him.
I got up from the desk and went to the closet, where I grabbed my old university backpack. The straps were frayed from the weight of all the textbooks it had carried over the years and the zipper didn’t close all the way, but it would do. I stuffed three bottles of water, some beef jerky and some crackers inside and threw it over my shoulder, where it sat with a comfortable familiarity. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and turned it off. If they wanted to track me, there was no reason to make it easier than necessary. Once it was off, I stuffed it in my jacket pocket and headed out the door.
I looked up and down the parking lot carefully to make sure there was no one watching me. It was almost ten and there was no one out except for the old guy in the string vest who liked to sit on the balcony of the apartment building next door and watch the world go by. I didn’t know his name, but I’d seen him sitting out there since I had moved into the building. He liked spying, but that didn’t make him a spy.
I reached my car and made a show of “accidentally” dropping my backpack on the ground so that I could get down and make sure there were no tracking devices (or anything more sinister and explosive) attached to the underside of my car. As usual, the only thing hanging down was part of the heat shield, which sometimes popped loose and flapped in the wind. So far, so good.
It was a long trip and I needed to get gas, as the gauge was reading only a quarter tank. I didn’t go to the usual place and stopped by a station on the edge of town instead, where I paid cash. I didn’t know if all the precautions were necessary, but after what had happened to my parents, I wasn’t taking any chances. With my cell phone off, I was stuck listening to the radio. As I got further out of town, the stations started fading in and out and the only thing I could pick up was a career retrospective of Celine Dion. I shut it off and drove the rest of the way in tense silence.
The first part of the trip was easy. Things got tricky at the 90-minute mark when I had to turn off the main highway and on to Rural Route #521 North. It was still there, but I almost drove right past it. The sign post had been removed and the gravel road had not been maintained, allowing nature to encroach on all sides. Hanging tree branches brushed the roof and enormous weeds tickled the undercarriage. A couple of times I had to get out to move aside a fallen tree limb, one of which was so large that the best I could do was to sort of roll it to one side and drive over the thin part like a speed bump. Each time I got out of the car I eyed the roadside nervously. Had the limbs just fallen there or were they traps designed to catch trespassing motorists? Was someone crouched in the tall grass just waiting to throw a black bag over my head and cart me off to some top secret black site torture facility? Apparently not, because both times I made it back to the car unmolested, each time grabbing the steering wheel with clammy gratitude.
I was driving on memory now, and things didn’t look anything like I remembered them. I got lost twice at exactly the same place my father had all those years ago.
“Fuck the pope,” I growled, not really able to manage a smile. “Who signposted this sodomizing Appalachian hick highway?”
A large pothole – really more like a sinkhole in that it was the size of a swimming pool and almost two feet deep in places – forced me to stop and back up to the previous turn. The road wasn’t wide enough for two cars and I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t get stuck or roll off an embankment if I tried to turn around. I’m not good at driving backwards and did the whole thing with one white-knuckled hand gripping the steering wheel like grim death. When I made it back to the turn, I had to sit for ten minutes before my hand would un-cramp enough that I could let go of the wheel.
I found the lake a few more wrong turns and half an hour later. The first cottage I spotted was a permanent house that used to be owned by some guy who ran some sort of off-the-rack designer dress shirt business. Everybody knew this because it was the largest house on the lake and usually the loudest, because he threw a lot of parties for his drunken society friends from the city. I don’t recall knowing what his real name was, but everybody called him Gatsby.
I slowed down to examine the place more closely. There was a Mercedes in the driveway, but three of the four tires were flat and one of its back windows was smashed. It was rusted and didn’t look like it had been driven anywhere for quite some time. The house was the same way. Large sections of the siding were hanging off the walls like peeling wallpaper and the decorative ivy had swallowed the back deck like a thousand creeping pythons. Although I couldn’t see the large arched windows at the front – the ones that towered three stories high and were visible from one side of the lake to the other – I was willing to bet that many of them were no longer intact. The place looked wild and overrun. If someone or something was living there now, I was pretty sure it wasn’t the original owner.
I continued down the ring road. The cottage we had always rented was on the southeast side of the lake. It was surrounded by trees and sat at the bottom of a hill, which made sure that it received very little morning or afternoon sun. If the fanciest place on the lake looked like that, how was our old place going to look? Our place had looked abandoned and overrun when we rented it. If a big, new expensive place was half in ruins, then our old vacation spot was probably nothing more than a hole in the ground.
As I came around the corner, I saw that I wasn’t far off.
The cottage was gone.
I pulled alongside the edge of the property and stopped. The cottage had never had a proper driveway, just a rough patch of hardened ground that you could pull the car onto to get it off the ring road so other vehicles could pass. All of the ground was overgrown with three-foot high weeds. I wasn’t about to try to drive over them, but I figured that there wasn’t an abundance of traffic on the road, so nobody would care if I parked there.
I peered through the windshield, but there was no sign of any other living thing except for a couple of squirrels that had been scared into a nearby tree by the unexpected sound of the approaching engine. I took a long chug of water from one of the bottles in the backpack and turned off the ignition. The only sounds I could hear were my own breathing and the faraway high-pitched squeal of tree frogs.
I opened the door and got slowly out of the car. My legs weren’t as stiff as they would normally be, as I had exercised them to move the fallen tree trunks out of the way, but they didn’t seem to be entirely sure about carrying my weight again. Either that or they weren’t entirely sure about where I expected them to carry me. I closed the door and took a deep breath. The air was sweet and dank at the same time, as it often is next to large bodies of water.
I walked through the weeds to the spot where the cottage used to be. The foundation slab was just scorched concrete covered with charred debris. A jagged section of wall still stood in the far corner, blackened and weather beaten. The ground around the cottage looked mostly untouched, although some of the nearby trees were obviously missing branches. The fire – because that was certainly what it looked like – was intense and extremely localized. The cottage next door, although dilapidated, was still standing, and it was only 20 feet away at the m
ost.
I walked down the hill to the old dock. It was still there, but only barely. I wasn’t about to set foot on it, but it hadn’t been torched. I stood at the edge of the lake and scanned the shoreline. All of the other cottages appeared to be still standing. Although some were in worse shape than others, none of them appeared to have been burned down.
What could have caused it? Lightning? That was always a possibility. Electrical short? Also not impossible. The wiring in the place would probably meet the 1897 building code, but any inspector who examined it during the time we stayed there would probably have had a cardiac arrest and then ordered the building condemned. A vagrant could have decided to stay in the place and tossed a cigarette the wrong way. But why stay there when there so many other less-run-down options within easy walking distance? Or a couple of bored kids could have torched it for fun, but how many bored kids would be wandering around a deserted lake in the middle of nowhere?
No. I was pretty sure I knew what had happened.
I was suddenly furious. I had never been all that fond of the cottage when I was there, but it was now one of the last tangible connections to my childhood and the bastards had burned it to the ground. Who in the hell did they think they were? What right did they have? I reached up and was not at all surprised to find tears pouring down my cheeks. I sat down hard on the ground and bawled like a baby. I cried until my face was raw and my ribs ached. When I was done, I stood up, wiped my face on the sleeve of my jacket and took a deep breath. I closed my eyes and heard a splash out on the lake. I opened them again to see a spreading circle of ripples about ten feet beyond the end of the dock. It must have been a fish jumping.
Can’t destroy everything, you assholes.
I picked up my backpack and took stock of my position. The mine site was to the northwest, which was on the other side of the lake. Driving to the other side and parking would be faster, but I had spent enough time in the car and walking seemed more appropriate, so I decided to hoof it. I walked back to the ring road, checked to make sure the car doors were locked, and then set off.
It’s a strange thing to revisit a place you knew as a kid. I remember wondering who all of these people who lived around the lake were and what kinds of lives they led. Were they happy? Did they look forward to coming up here as much as I (kind of) dreaded it? Did they aspire to better things? Better places? Whatever the answer, it didn’t matter now. The only traces of them were these empty buildings, and soon those would be gone, too. Mine already was. As far as I could tell, I had nothing left to lose.
I made my way around the lake and cut through the vacant lot between the metal trailer, now lying on its side, and the squat cement brick cottage with tiny windows that we’d nicknamed The Bunker. Max had speculated that the windows were so small because the owner was a vampire. It reminded me of the pumping stations that sit on residential streets that cities try to camouflage so that they look like an ordinary houses. You admire the effort, but the place never looks like anything less or more than what it is. We never did see who lived in the place. Of all the cottages on the lake, it was the most unchanged. Concrete, after all, doesn’t tend to crack, peel and mildew quite as easily as wood, stucco and shingle.
Turning off the road and heading out into open terrain gave me a feeling of freedom that I realized I hadn’t felt since Max and I made the same trip all those years ago. I had sort of grown up in that time, but I wasn’t sure that it was worth the trade-off. I had gone from being picked on in the shower by Ida Melendez to persecuted by a giant, evil, all-knowing and all-seeing corporation with some sinister hidden agenda that imprisoned my best friend, blackmailed my (kind-of) girlfriend, and dropped my parents through the roof of a waffle house. Not a great improvement in the grand scheme of things.
I tried to remember how long we’d been walking when we stopped the last time. None of the countryside really looked familiar. I remembered a valley with a lot of fir trees, but there were dozens of those poking between the sloping green hills. Had we been going for an hour? More? Less? My memory of what happened when we stopped was so clear that the walk itself was almost entirely forgotten.
Just thinking about it did have one effect, though: I needed to pee. I had consumed almost all of the bottled water in my backpack and had been too tense on the way here to drop my pants, but it was certainly top of mind on the issues chart right now. I climbed down a narrow embankment and found a cluster of trees. This definitely wasn’t the same place we had stopped the last time – the trees were mostly bushes and there was no cabin in sight – but it would do.
I had only just unzipped my pants and started the evacuation process when I felt something sting the back of my neck. Figuring it was a bee, I reached up to swat it away. Instead of an insect, however, my fingers came away with a small metal object with what looked like purple feathers sticking out the back. I just had time to look confused before my vision went blurry and my legs did the same.
-23-
“I can’t believe you shot me! Again! You asshole!”
Max smiled. “I had to make absolutely sure you were on your own. And I had to check you for tracking devices.”
I woke up on the floor in some sort of cabin. The only furniture I could see was a rickety wooden table in the kitchen area next to an old wood stove and a couple of worn camping chairs with fabric hanging from the seams. Thin black curtains were closed over the small front window, but I could see enough light streaming in around the edges to tell that it was still afternoon. I hadn’t been out of it for long. I sat up stiffly and rubbed my neck. I could feel a small, mosquito bite-sized swelling where the dart had hit me.
“Hell was in that dart?”
“Whaddayou care?” Max said. “You woke up, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“Well, we have different colour darts for different things. Blue’s for snooze and red’s for dead.”
“But it was purple.”
“Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Especially from those who’ve been under the influence of military-grade tranquillizers.”
“But I’m pretty sure it was. Am I now gonna be awake for twenty-four hours and then suddenly drop dead?”
“Nag, nag, nag.”
“How long were you following me?”
Max crouched down and shone a penlight quickly into each of my eyes. “From the road. You drove down the same wrong turn three times again. I had a little side bet with myself to see how many times you would keep doing it. You owe me fifty bucks.”
I blinked madly, trying to get the residue of the flashlight out of my eyes. “I would say it’s good to see you again, Commander, but now I can’t see a damn thing.”
Max yanked me to my feet and pulled me into a hug. “Damn good to see you again, too, Commander Simms.”
We stepped back and I looked at Max more closely in the dim light. He looked thinner, but I could tell from his bear hug that he was probably strong enough to bench-press a jeep. He was dressed in a long-sleeved green shirt and khaki pants that looked to have approximately fifty pockets on them.
I wobbled slightly and Max steered me toward one of the ratty camping chairs.
“I knew you would figure it out,” he said. “Faster than I thought, too. I was worried you might rack your brain for days.”
I opened my mouth to say something and found my throat too dry. Max passed me a canteen and I chugged several gulps before handing it back.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m really hoping you can explain what the hell is going on. Where have you been? I haven’t heard from you since the JD and the next thing I know the CEO of Firmamental’s calling me in to his office and asking me to track you down because you walked off with something that they want back? Why didn’t you tell me you worked for the same company? They told me you were wounded overseas, but you look fine to me.”
“I wasn’t wounded, I was arrested.”
“Arrested? For what?”
“Are you hungry? I mea
n, for something other than the expired beef jerky you were carrying in that excuse for a backpack?”
“It was expired? I didn’t think beef jerky ever expired.”
“By three months. Is that the same stuff we had out here when we were kids?”
“And what do you mean excuse? That backpack served me quite well through university.”
“It’s not even waterproof. And it doesn’t have any ammunition storage pockets.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought that to trek into the hostile terrain of liberal academia.”
“So that’s a no to food.”
Now that I was starting to get my legs back, I had to admit that I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since the morning. “What have you got?”
Max paused. “Actually, here…nothing.”
“In that case, I’ll have a large bacon cheeseburger with a side of why the fuck did you ask me, then?”
Max sat down opposite me and grinned. “Sorry. There’ll be food at our next stop.”
“Next stop?” I thought about getting up to look out the window, but wasn’t entirely confident that my legs would get me there just yet. “Where are we going?”
“There’s somebody I think you need to meet.”
“Who?”
“It’ll all be explained when we get there.”
“Can you explain any of it now?”
He glanced at the door. “We shouldn’t stay here too long. They’ll be looking for you.”
“Who? Firmamental?”
“No. Firmamental’s just one of their many front organizations. It was an insurance company a long time ago. Now they just use it as a glorified data warehouse.”
“That would certainly explain all the cutbacks. Most of the time, I felt like I was the only one working there. Well, me and Gotoguy.”