SYCAMORE BLUFF (Prequel to THE JACK REACHER FILES: ANNEX 1) (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 8)

by Jude Hardin

  “I care about your wellbeing, in that I need your services right now. Sort of the way I might care about a vacuum cleaner or a coffeemaker.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Follow me, John, love of my life.”

  Colt was now John Millington, and Diana his wife, Karen. John and Karen. What a cute little couple they made. Colt switched on his flashlight and followed her into the thick brush on the other side of the bluff.

  “What are we going to tell this welcoming committee?” he said. “You said they’ll be expecting us to land on the roof of the Town Hall. Aren’t they going to be a little suspicious when we don’t?”

  “Maybe, although I’m sure they’re accustomed to all kinds of goof-ups from the military. What do you think we should tell them?”

  “I think we should tell them that I have a fear of flying, and that we walked all the way here from Florida. Hey, if I lie down and start shouting for help, do you think they’ll send a St. Bernard with a keg of brandy around its neck?”

  “I doubt it. And don’t say anything about Florida. John and Karen Millington are from California, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  What Colt couldn’t remember was ever being as cold as he was right now. The temperature had to be in the twenties, maybe even in the teens. The ski jacket kept his upper body warm, but his legs were freezing. As soon as they could get to a store, he planned to purchase some long underwear.

  “Try to keep up,” Diana said.

  “You make it hard on an old man.”

  “You’re not that old.”

  “I turned fifty-two last month,” Colt said. “I can remember when I thought that was ancient. Hey, if we’re still here next December second, are you going to throw me a surprise party?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’ll at least have to bake a cake or something.”

  “Sure.”

  “Wait a minute,” Colt said. “I bet you don’t even know how to bake a cake. I bet you can’t cook anything. I bet you can’t even boil an egg.”

  “Shut up.”

  Colt laughed. “It’s true, isn’t it? I’ve finally found something that Diana Dawkins doesn’t know how to do. Some wife you are.”

  “Whatever. Maybe I’ll team you up with Martha Stewart next time. We’ll see how well she can land a helicopter.”

  “At least she could make a beautiful holiday centerpiece out of the wreckage,” Colt said.

  They trudged on. One foot in front of the other. A mile wasn’t that far to walk, but a mile through the woods, wading through the heavy underbrush and breathing the arctic air, felt more like ten to Nicholas Colt. He was seriously contemplating stopping in his tracks and insisting on a break when he saw some dots of light through the trees ahead.

  “There it is,” Diana said.

  “I see it. So tell me, why is this place such a big secret?”

  “Mostly to keep the media out. It wouldn’t be much of an experiment in isolation if news helicopters were landing every fifteen minutes looking for people to interview. That, and the fact that allocating billions of dollars for future space exploration might not be very popular with the public right now.”

  A couple of minutes later, they stepped out of the woods and crossed a strip of grass that led to the pavement. Suddenly, there were streetlights and houses and cars parked in driveways. Diana switched off her flashlight and stuck it in her coat pocket. Colt did the same. His fingers were stiff and blue. He would have to remember to get some nice warm gloves to go with the long johns.

  “This way,” Diana said, pointing toward what appeared to be some kind of industrial site. There was a steel and glass office complex, and further back from the road a large rectangular concrete structure with two smokestacks spewing puffy white clouds into the frosty night air. A sign out front said The Factory.

  A peculiar smell accompanied the plumes of steam, not pleasant but not unpleasant, something vaguely familiar, something Colt couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Why is the town so big? I thought you said there were only six hundred and twelve people living here.”

  “Six hundred and twelve, give or take. Through the years, a few couples have decided to leave the experiment for one reason or another, and a few have been added for one reason or another. Most of the houses are vacant. Supposedly, they have plans for a much larger experiment in the future, so they went ahead and built the town with that in mind while they had the funds.”

  “What do they make in there?” Colt said, pointing toward The Factory.

  “That’s called the five-one building,” Diana said. “Fifty-one Locust Street. They make pills in there.”

  “Pills?”

  “Yes. The name of the company is Pelican Nutritional Products. They make vitamins, herbal supplements, things like that. The grant application from the group of psychologists and sociologists who initially proposed this experiment was nearly shot down because of budgetary constraints. They had several billion dollars to work with, but it just wasn’t going to be enough. They needed to come up with a way for the project to help pay for itself, so they contracted Pelican to open a manufacturing plant here. All top secret, of course. The Factory employs over half the people in town, and it’s the reason the agency conducting the experiment was able to build on such a grand scale.”

  Vitamins. That explained the peculiar smell Colt had noticed. When he was a kid, his mother always made sure he took a vitamin tablet every day. He couldn’t remember the brand name, but you chewed them and they were different colors and flavors and they came in a clear glass bottle with a glass stopper, like the ones you see in antique stores sometimes. Whenever his mother pulled the wad of cotton out of a fresh new bottle, a chalky puff of dust would follow, and it smelled exactly like the factory they were walking by now.

  “You said we’re going to have jobs here,” he said. “Is this where we’ll be working?”

  “No,” Diana said. “I’ll be working here, but you’ll be working at The Hardware Store.”

  “As a cashier or something?”

  “Or something,” Diana said.

  She coughed into her fist, trying to mask a chuckle. Colt didn’t like it. It made him nervous. Diana laughed even less often than she smiled.

  “Are you going to let me in on the joke?” Colt asked.

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  Colt wondered what other information Diana was keeping from him. He was starting to get the feeling that there was a lot more to this place than met the eye. Diana worked strictly by the book, and she would only divulge the information she thought Colt needed to know. It seemed like he was in the dark half the time, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

  They trekked past the pill factory and into another residential section. All the houses were eerily identical. Wood frame, white clapboard siding, one car garage. Each home probably had two bedrooms and two baths, Colt thought. In a brief domestic moment, he wondered if the residents were allowed to choose the colors of their sheets and towels.

  He and Diana turned down Beaver Avenue, and three blocks later they were on Main Street.

  Colt noticed quite a few vacant storefronts, probably constructed for the future expansion Diana mentioned, but there were plenty of occupied spaces as well. It could have been any small town, anywhere in the United States, except for one striking anomaly: the names of the businesses. There was a place called The Grocery Store, and one called The Book Store. The Bakery, The Pharmacy, The Laundromat, The Restaurant, The Automotive Repair Shop. Big white signs with black letters. And there, directly across the street now, was The Hardware Store, Colt’s future place of employment.

  “What’s with all the generic names?” Colt asked.

  “It’s part of the experiment. With a population this small, and with no currency exchanged, there’s no need for competition among
businesses. The residents here take what they need, no more and no less. As long as everyone follows the rules, there’s plenty of everything to go around. So far, it has worked out fine. Nobody has gotten greedy, and nobody has started hoarding supplies.”

  “That’s just plain old un-American,” Colt said.

  “It’s communism, in the strictest sense of the word. Everyone shares equally, and there are no class distinctions. Doctors don’t receive any more privileges or supplies than garbage collectors, for example.”

  “Interesting. So where’s the motivation to do a good job? If the slackers make out as well as the workaholics, why not just be lazy? Why not just take the day off?”

  “Because that would be against the rules,” Diana said. “And everyone has to follow the rules for the experiment to work.”

  “But you said there’s nobody to enforce the rules, so—”

  “I said there’s no active law enforcement here in town. It is possible, however, for residents to be pulled from the experiment. If you disregard the rules, you’re out. It’s as simple as that. So following the rules is a matter of pride, for one thing. Nobody wants to be the first kid on the block to be ostracized. And, it’s a matter of money. If you get yanked, for whatever reason, you lose the compensation you would have gotten at the end.”

  “When do I get to see a copy of these rules?” Colt asked.

  “Supposedly, we’ll receive a booklet on arrival. Speaking of which, there’s Town Hall, right down there past The Ice Cream Shop. See it?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was a two-story brick and stone building, with a steeple mounted above a series of columns. The steeple reminded Colt of a thoroughbred track he went to one time. There was a clock embedded in the little hexagonal tower, and a weathervane planted on its peak. Windows surrounding the foundation indicated a full basement, and from his and Diana’s angle of approach, Colt could see that the roof was flat—which made sense, of course, since it was the usual spot for helicopter landings.

  As opposed to the houses, which looked cheap and new, Town Hall wore the facade of a grand old meeting place, as though it might have been there a hundred years or more.

  “There should be a statue of Karl Marx out front,” Colt said.

  “Try to chill with the wisecracks, okay? All of the residents take this experiment seriously, and we’re supposed to be one of them. Starting now.”

  “I understand. No humor. Is that another one of the rules?”

  “Just behave yourself.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Please do.”

  But for Nicholas Colt, that was nearly impossible. He just hoped he didn’t get tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail before sunrise.

  “Any idea why the basement windows have bars over them?” he said. “Is there a jail down there or something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As they approached the building, only half a block away now, Colt thought of his wife, and how much she would have loved that steeple. He doubted that she would ever get to see her favorite things again, and it broke his heart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  When Juliet sleeps, which is most of the time, incredibly vivid and colorful dreams jitter through her mind like old home movie reels projected on a wall. In her dreams, she is not a helpless patient in a hospital bed. She is not hooked up to a feeding pump, and she is not dependent on a nursing assistant to turn her from one side to the other. In her dreams, she is a whole human being again, and the world is beautiful.

  In the one she is having now, the one that recurs most often, there is an acute and palpable sense of déjà vu, even though what happens in the dream never happened in real life.

  She and Nicholas are walking along the beach in St. Augustine, gulls shrieking in the distance, waves lapping at their toes. Early summer, cloudless sky, perfect breeze.

  “I had this patient the other night,” Juliet says. “He had liver disease, and his ammonia level was up, and he was very confused. He kept jabbering, and most of it was incomprehensible, but every now and then he would break into song, as though he were in a Broadway musical or something. Have you ever heard that song called, ‘Back in the Saddle Again’?”

  “Sure,” Nicholas said. “It’s an old Gene Autry number.”

  “He kept singing that song, belting it out loudly, only he said, ‘Back in the salad again.’ It was so funny. Sad in a way, of course, but it cracked me up. Me and everyone else at the nurses’ station.”

  “That’s hilarious,” Nicholas says. He starts singing the tune, replacing the word saddle with salad.

  “Yes,” Juliet says, laughing hysterically. “Just like that!”

  Nicholas bends over and picks something up out of the sand. He swishes it around in the water, then holds it up and examines it.

  “It’s a penny,” he says.

  “I can see that. My mother used to have a saying when I was little. Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck.”

  “But this isn’t just any penny. It’s a special penny.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Juliet says. “Tell me what is so special about it.”

  “This penny was made in nineteen forty-three. They were trying to conserve as much copper as possible for the war effort, so they made pennies out of steel that year. Steel, coated with zinc. This penny is actually very rare.”

  “Is it worth a lot of money?”

  “Not a lot, but it’s special in other ways. You see, this is a magic penny. If you rub it between your thumb and forefinger, like this, the love of your life will come to you and sweep you off your feet and carry you away, and you will live happily ever after.”

  “You’re just making that up,” Juliet says.

  “No, really. Try it.”

  He hands her the coin. She holds it up and squints the date into focus: 1943, just as Nicholas said. And it looks different than a normal penny. It’s almost black, and there’s some rust around the edges.

  “It’s not very pretty,” she says.

  “Maybe not. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s magic.”

  “Magic, huh? Okay, then. Let me just give it a try.”

  She rubs it between her thumb and forefinger, and she screams in delight as Nicholas lifts her in his arms and starts running along the shore, sprinting and laughing as if he’s in a mad rush to carry her across some distant threshold.

  “You’re crazy!” she says.

  “But that’s one of the reasons why you love me so much.”

  He stops running then and kisses her deeply. With the sun warm on her shoulders, the tide whooshing softly in her ears, and the scents of cocoa butter and Cajun crab boil mingling with the salt air, it is one of the most perfect moments of her life.

  And then she wakes up, and immediately realizes that the entire episode is only a dream. That it never really happened. That she is a prisoner in a dark smothering hole now. That this vacuous pit of misery is deep and black and impossible to climb out of. That there is no hope for her, and that nothing is ever going to change.

  Still, if she were able, she would smile now, because the dream always makes her so happy.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hello?” Diana said.

  Her voice echoed through the cavernous Town Hall meeting room as she and Nicholas Colt opened the double set of oak doors and stepped inside. There were lighted sconces on the walls, similar to the ones found in movie theaters, and the room smelled as though it had recently been painted.

  “The place looks deserted,” Colt said.

  “Maybe they gave up on us. Hey, at least it’s warm in here.”

  They set their suitcases and backpacks by the door and ventured further into the dimly lit space. There was a portable stage set up at the end opposite the door, with an upright piano and row upon row of folding steel chairs facing it. On the stage, looking totally odd and out of place, was a table with a reel-to-reel tape recorder on it. The tape machine looked lik
e some sort of robotic owl perched there in the shadows, its huge eyes watching over the auditorium.

  “I thought there was going to be a welcoming committee,” Colt said. “I was expecting a big buffet table with fried chicken and macaroni salad and apple pie. I figured there might even be a band, with trumpets and trombones and tubas, and a big bass drum with Sycamore Bluff High School decals on it.”

  “There’s no high school here, goofball.”

  “There’s no food either. Let’s get out of here. I’m sure Taco Bell is still open.”

  “I’m going to look around upstairs,” Diana said. “The Director said there’s a book here somewhere with phone numbers for all the residents. It even has their photographs next to their names, sort of like a yearbook. I have a list of the people who were supposed to greet us, so I’ll just give one of them a call. Care to join me?”

  Before Colt gave her an answer, she heard footsteps clomping overhead. A few seconds later, a man appeared at the top of the staircase.

  “Hi, there!” he said. “You must be the Millingtons. My name’s Brad Washington.”

  Brad Washington was one of the names on Diana’s list. He descended the stairs excitedly. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt and a pair of brown leather work boots. Thick blond hair, chiseled features. Diana guessed him to be in his mid-forties. He walked over and shook Colt’s hand first.

  “I’m John, and this is Karen,” Colt said.

  “Pleased to meet you. My goodness, what took you so long? We were expecting a helicopter. My wife was here earlier, and another couple, but they finally decided you weren’t coming tonight. I stuck around, just in case, and it’s a good thing I did, huh? How the heck did you guys get here?”

  “Hang gliders,” Colt said. “There’s nothing like it, especially when it’s fifteen degrees outside.”

  Brad just stood there with a puzzled look on his face.

  “John likes to joke around,” Diana said. “We flew in by helicopter, but there was a mechanical problem and the pilot had to make an emergency landing out on the bluff. Another copter is flying in with a mechanic on board, but we decided to hike on into town instead of sitting out there in the freezing cold. We’re very tired, and very hungry.”