I didn’t like thunderstorms much—lightning always scared me, and I was always sure I was going to get hit no matter where I was—but the nearest shelter was the tall trees, and I knew damned well you didn’t go next to trees in a thunderstorm.
The next ten minutes or so was the longest ten minutes of my life. It was one hell of a storm; the rain came down like I’d never seen it before, and all around there was a thunder-and-lightning show that was both scary and awesome. I never knew that much water could fall over such an area; it was as high-volume as if you were under a fire hose turned on full. It was more like being in a swimming pool than a shower or rainstorm, but it sure as hell got rid of that black, smelly powder.
It tapered off as quickly as it had come, and off in the direction from which we’d first seen it, the stars actually began appearing once more, while the area behind us was getting the treatment. That sucker was some storm.
I had mostly stood, frozen with fear, through the thing, and I found myself damned near unable to move now. The grass was high, thick, and very wet, and although the soft wind was drying me out, it wasn’t doing anything for the surroundings. I could hear running water everywhere, and to take a step was to squish. At least Brandy had guessed right about taking off our clothes; on us or off us, they’d have been just as soaked, only now we were reasonably clean underneath.
The clothes, however, were definitely not wearable for some time. We picked them up and tried to wring them out, but no matter how much you twisted, there seemed to be more and more water, and that was just the shirts. Twisting out fairly new jeans wasn’t easy, either. I always thought they were sort of water-repellent, but they just seemed to absorb more than the shirts.
Brandy had prepared for the washing as much as possible, while I hadn’t thought much about it, so like a fool I’d left my boots straight up to the sky. One had fallen down, but toward the storm, and the other was filled to the brim with water.
“Well, what do we do now?” I mused aloud, not really talking to Brandy.
“I think we head for the trees and find someplace to hang this all up to dry,” she replied. “Then we settle down and see if we can get any sleep or what out here in the wilds. Don’t seem no use to try and find out where we are ’til mornin’. Daylight comes, maybe we can find a road or something.”
There seemed like nothing else we could do. We didn’t know one direction from the other and wouldn’t until the sun came up, but with the clearing, we figured the clothes would get some kind of breeze and some sun no matter where we hung them, so long as they were exposed. All we could do, of course, was find some low bushes and drape them across the tops. Neither of us had remembered to pack clothespins.
There wasn’t anyplace really dry to settle down, but we found a spot behind a big tree that was grassy and had escaped the full force of the rain. Somehow, though, with the dripping-down, I didn’t think we’d get much sleep that night. We lay close together, and put our arms around each other.
“Well,” I sighed, “back a couple of weeks ago I figured we were about as low as we could go, and now here we are, stark naked in the woods in which live who knows what, with nothing but some drying clothes, a partial pack of cigarettes, and a pocket lighter, stuck in the middle of nowhere. We got nothing, not even answers to any of this.”
She sighed and kissed me. “I know. Maybe we’re jumping bail to boot, too. No matter what, I keep draggin’ us down more and more. Now it’s Adam and Eve and no fruit trees. At least I got no trouble with bugs. Nothin’ that lives ’round here can be as scary as the cockroaches of Camden. It’s like a punishment, somehow. Everything I ever did, I screwed up. School, business, Daddy’s dreams, everything, including you.”
“I was wrong,” I told her. “I said we got nothing and I was wrong. I’m like the guy on the news whose house burns down, and he’s standing there, crying about how he’s lost everything, with his wife and kids all standing around him safe and sound. I love you, Brandy. I love you more than anything else in the world. You didn’t do anything to me. I came willingly, all the way, ’cause I fell in love with the cutest, sexiest, craziest girl in the world. All we did here, including the bad mistakes, we did together. You’re a part of me, the most important part. How could you screw me up if I wasn’t just as crazy as you?”
She grabbed me and kissed me, hard and passionate. “I love you, Sam Horowitz,” she whispered sexily. “I love you a thousand times more now than when I married you.”
It was kind of kinky doing it there in the wet grass, out in the open and all, but, damn it, if you couldn’t eat and you couldn’t sleep and the only thing that really meant anything to you was there in the same mood, it sure beat thinking.
The underwear and the cigarettes and lighter were okay, but the rest was a real wreck. That sun was hot, as hot as I had ever felt it, and I’d been in the Philippines and Hawaii in midsummer. That sun had done a real job on some of the clothes.
“I never knew jeans could shrink,” I said glumly. They didn’t look all that different, but there was a good two- or three-inch rise in the leg bottoms, and as for closing the top flap and zipping them up, forget it. I didn’t regret the flannel shirt that much, not in this heat, although at least I could get it on—though not buttoned—but the pants were a pain.
Brandy’s hadn’t fared much better. There was enough give in the briefs and even in the bra to make them serviceable, like my jockey shorts, but as for the jeans and dyed tee shirt, forget it. Seemed that no matter what, we were stuck in our undies, and as for the boots, well, mine felt as wet as last night, although Brandy’s were okay, only mildly damp, but still had some of that black gunk in them because they hadn’t been rinsed out.
“Well, it’s not a total loss,” I commented sourly. “At least when we find some civilization we’ll have our underwear.”
Brandy shrugged. “Well, it’s something. Our big problem isn’t clothes, it’s food. Wonder what grows in Oregon?”
“Apples, I think, and maybe potatoes, or is that Idaho? From the looks of things here, I’d say we’d better move or learn to eat grass.”
The grass, in fact, was tall, going up to almost waist height in the lower areas. I knew it’d seemed bad last night, but not this bad. We picked up our soggy boots and walked up the rise to the nearly flat center of the big meadow, which was about where we’d come out, or woke up, or whatever it was we’d done, and Brandy looked around and frowned.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her.
“This place. You got to use a little imagination, but it sure does look like the same area that plant was built in.” She checked the sun. “If that’s east, or sorta east, then let’s go south a bit and see what we find.”
“If there’s a train yard down there, I’ll believe anything,” I responded.
It really was a vast area of grass, maybe a hundred or more acres, and it did kind of look like the lay of the land where the plant had been—if, as she’d said, you used some imagination. It was kind of like what the place would have been if the plant had never been built and this area never developed. There was even a steep downslope, but it led to the start of the trees at the bottom, not any rail yards. It was, however, a flat area, more or less, built up from the looks of it by occasional stream floods.
“You got any idea where we’re heading?” I asked her.
“South is all. We can’t stay around here, can we? Nothin’ to eat but grass. South’s as good as any.”
I had to admit that much. There was no reason not to head south. We entered the trees and kept walking, but I still couldn’t feel like this was all real. We’d gone from the bottom to an assignment to find a guy who skipped with mob money, trailed him to the house of some dame that looked like his identical twin, right down to his fingerprints, tracked them to a redneck town in rural Oregon that was the headquarters for a company that supposedly sold junk to TV ads and had a plant that was run with no workers, then saved our quarry from a gunman who turned out to
be another twin, got taken to the cleaners by the town for our pains, and then we’d broken into that damned plant and wound up communing with Mother Nature in our underwear.
We reached a streambed that was still somewhat swollen from the results of the previous night’s storms, and Brandy started walking east along it. There was no way I wanted to risk crossing that thing now, not at this point, anyway.
“This stream look familiar?” she asked me.
I shrugged. “I’m a city boy. See one stream, one forest, you see ’em all.”
“There was a stream running alongside them railroad tracks. Looked kinda like this one.”
“Yeah and we’re gonna hit a road down to town just through here, I suppose.”
“I doubt it. I really doubt it.”
“So what’s the point? What do you expect to find?” I asked her.
“Something. Anything. Something like—that area over there. See where it’s sorta cut out by the stream?”
“Uh huh. So?”
“See that big rock there, stickin’ sorta out of the bank? Look familiar? Use your imagination a little.”
“It’s been overworked the past week.” Still, I did see her point and I didn’t much like it. That rock was almost a dead ringer for the one jutting out across from the picnic table where we’d had that first meal from the cafe. There was also a kind of dip, or fold, in the land, more than a valley, that went off beyond it to our right and curved around and down a little, and the fold continued up something of a slope to our left. If I were going to build a road, it’d be along that fold for sure, even though it was a little creek of its own to the left and had been cut dry by the stronger stream to the right.
I stopped. “All right, I admit it looks a lot like the same place, or the same place if people had never been here, but what’s that prove? I bet there’s a ton of places that look just like this all over these hills.”
“Sam—when we took the walk up the tracks last night, I paced off the distance. You know I’m always just doin’ that kind of thing in my head.”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, this is about three hundred and eighty standard paces from where we came down. That gate and sidin’ was less’n four hundred yesterday. Face it. This place here is just where it would be if we were still in the same place, and that’s too much for coincidence, ’specially with that big cleared area just up there right where it should be—only it ain’t cleared, it’s natural. There may be a ton of places around that ain’t developed, but I betcha not a one has just this way.”
I sighed. “So what are you saying? They didn’t send us anyplace, they sent us back in time or something, before there were people here?”
“I don’t think so. You ain’t noticed nothin’ queer about this whole place? Think about it.”
I thought. “What do I know? I’m from the city, remember, and so are you.”
“Don’t have to be off the farm to see this. No birds, Sam. No birds, no squirrels, no animals or sign of animals around. Bugs, yeah—and I couldn’t tell one bug from another, so I can’t say if they’re funny lookin’ or not—but no birds, that I can see.”
I looked around and up at the trees and the patches of sky, and I knew she was right. There were insects, yeah—crawling, buzzing around, all sorts of bugs, but if they didn’t look like roaches, wasps, or bees, I was no better at telling one from another, either.
“Well,” I said slowly, not really wanting to think much further on this, “we have to decide what to do next, then. We can say this is some kind of limbo where there’s no company, no people, no animals, go back up to the clearing and hope that old Monocle-and-Moustache sent some kind of message and they’ll come and pick us up before we starve to death, or we figure they aren’t coming for us, and try and find some food someplace before we starve to death.”
“Well, if they didn’t come for us last night, with our pants hung out there like signposts and us not far away, then we can’t count on them comin’ any time soon. I figure we see if we can find some food or something, and if we can, we figure they’ll be able to track us and come to us. Sure ain’t much here to lose a scent ’cept maybe another big storm. I mean, they sent us here, so somebody knows and can find us if they want, but we can’t count on it.”
I nodded. “Okay, then—which way?”
“You pick it. I haven’t had much luck lately.”
I thought a moment. “Well, let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is somehow the same place as we were, although how that can be I can’t imagine. If we go across the stream and down that way, we’ll have miles and miles of ups and downs and forests until we hit the river valley. That might be the place to play house, but it’s ninety, a hundred miles, maybe. We won’t make that without something to eat. Still, I remember the map enough. If this fold holds true for the road, going north is more of the same until we hit the river valley, only it’ll be mostly uphill for a while. These are only baby mountains compared to the big ones around, too.”
“So?”
“Well, no matter what, we curve around and get back to that river valley, right? That means the river runs north and south. You got to figure the shortest route down there is by going west, along this big stream, here. We’ve been thinking road, and we don’t have a road to travel.”
“Sounds good to me, but I sure hope we find something to eat real soon, or I don’t think either of us will make it all the way.”
We headed back up, and now that I’d come to accept her theory, at least as a working model, I could actually almost visualize building that railroad through here.
About a half hour beyond the big clearing, the slope started down, and the whole thing widened out. Suddenly, we weren’t in forest anymore, but in a thick grove of very different-looking trees. I stared at them. “I’ll be damned! Apple trees!”
They were apple trees, and while some of them were better along than others, there were some there with apples as ripe as you could want. We ate a few each, throwing caution and possible bellyaches to the wind, since they were either all right or they weren’t. At least they were enough to give us some energy to keep walking for a while.
“Funny about those trees,” I commented. “They’re really kind of out of place here. I don’t remember much about farming stuff, I admit, but it also seems kind of hot here for apples, and it always seemed to me that red apples were picked in the fall, not the middle of the summer.”
“You think they were planted? To keep people like us alive?”
“Maybe. Let’s go on a little and see. People can’t live on apples alone, or at least I don’t think they can.”
The valley dipped down and widened out still more, and it was clear after a while that in fact this whole area wasn’t totally natural. There were pear trees, and peach trees, and huge wild-growing clumps of grape plants, and while they weren’t all ripe, some of each were. There was stuff there that shouldn’t be ripe and there was other stuff there that I would swear shouldn’t be there—the grapes, for one, and a whole grove of trees dropping walnuts by the score. Equally odd was the fact that only a small amount of each was ripe, with others clearly in a kind of line, going east, from ripe down to not ready for a long, long time. If you didn’t pig out, maybe up to a dozen or so people could live here for months, maybe indefinitely, so long as nothing spoiled the crops.
“They shoulda put up signs,” I noted. “Not everybody would come east.”
“Maybe there’s one like this in every direction,” she suggested. “It might be worth finding out. If they have this stuff here to stash people who get into their system or whatever, there might even be others here, or there might have been others here.”
Except for the sound of rushing waters and the buzzing of insects, I couldn’t hear any sign of anybody else. “If there are others, we’ll find them soon enough, if they haven’t taken some of these and moved on. I almost doubt there’s anybody else here, though. Doesn’t look like there’s ever been anybody
in this place, except the ones who set this up.” I sat up. “However, they can’t keep a place like this up without some attention. Somebody’s got to be by, if only to check it out and correct anything that’s not right, sooner or later. Trouble is, that may be weeks, even months from now, unless old Monocle reported us and it wasn’t filed for attention someday in the future.”
“I’m sure we were reported, and I’m sure they know we’re here, and just who we are by now. I think we’re just stuck on a siding in the middle of nowhere. Face it, Sam—who are we to them, anyway? So they have our IDs and the cards and stuff like that. How long would it take you to have our life history if you had your wallet?”
I thought a moment. “About two hours, tops. Yeah, I see what you mean. They got more resources than we have by a long shot. So they find out we’re both bankrupt detectives with no assets and no close family, nobody to even miss us, and that we got overeager, thanks to Little Jimmy. We’re nobody back home, but to this company or whatever it is, we stuck our nose in and we know too much. If we didn’t before, we sure as hell do now, although I can’t think about what it is we really know. I mean, did we stumble into some deal where the Martian Mafia is trying to muscle into the Philadelphia drug trade? It’s still crazy.”
“Yeah, you’re sure right on that.” She undid her bra and panties and tossed them away.
“What’d you do that for?”
“I don’t know. We had nothin’, Sam, and we still lost what we had. Might as well be totally nothin’. I mean, face it—I think we’re here, and here to stay. I always had a kind of fantasy to be stranded on a desert island or something, just me and men—a man—you—oh, all right. If we’re stuck, we’re stuck in a pretty place with a lot of food and water, and maybe we got a whole world to ourselves. I can keep washin’ them things out, and weeks or months from now they’ll fall apart anyway. Then what do we wear? Skins? There ain’t no animals here, Sam, and even if there was, I wouldn’t know how to trap ’em, kill ’em, skin ’em, or make what I needed to make into something that wouldn’t feel and smell like rotten, dead animal. And if somebody comes, it ain’t no more embarrassment to be naked than to be in a bra and panties. The hell with it.”
The Labyrinth Of Dreams Page 13