by Ronald Malfi
“In that case, I wish you luck.”
“You, too.”
“Just hold up a sec.” Heck leaned over the back of the seat and rummaged around in the cramped compartment in the rear of the cab. A moment later, his hand reappeared clutching a balled-up polo shirt. He tossed it out the door and David caught it. “Whatever is going on with you two,” Heck said, “you won’t blend in with your shirt smeared with blood like that.”
David just looked down at the polo shirt he now held. When he looked back up at Heck, he said, “I’m really very sorry about your son. It’s terrible. It’ll haunt me.”
“Nothin’ you could’ve done.”
David wiped at his eyes.
“God bless,” Heck said. He reached out and pulled the passenger door closed with a squeal of hinges. As David stepped away from the truck, Heck released the brakes. The truck grumbled forward, then cut down a fork in the road. David watched its taillights slip between two of the darkened condominiums.
He wondered now if he should have asked Hector Ramirez to wait with them, just to make sure Tim showed up. They were here now at this campground with no car and it was getting cold. If Tim failed to show up, they were screwed.
When he turned back to Ellie, he was surprised to see tears standing in her eyes, too. “Hey,” he said, rubbing the side of her face. “What’s the matter?”
“That boy,” she said. “Benny.”
David smiled at her.
“Do you think Mr. Ramirez will be okay?” she said.
“Yes, hon. I think he’ll be fine.”
Because what was one more lie on top of all the others?
46
At the top of the hill, the fence surrounding Funluck Park rose out of the gloom—a series of iron pikes capped with spearheads at the center of which stood two wrought-iron gates. The gates stood open, though they were so entwined with vines and ivy that David doubted they’d be able to close. The sign above the gates was missing letters. It now read:
FU CK PARK
Things arced through the air just overhead as they crossed through the open gates. When Ellie noticed, she cried out jubilantly, “Birds! Birds, Daddy! Look!”
“They’re bats, hon.”
The park grounds were overgrown, the grass thwacking against David’s shins while coming up almost to his hips. Clouds of tiny insects billowed out of the underbrush with each step. Ellie walked behind him, allowing him to clear the way through the buggy undergrowth. When they came to a snare of thorny branches and desiccated holly bushes, David stripped off his bloodied shirt and stuffed it down within the prickly boughs. He pulled Heck’s shirt on over his head and found that it was at least three sizes too big. With some irony, he wondered what proved more conspicuous—a bloodstained T-shirt or Hector Ramirez’s XXL polo shirt hanging from him like a parachute. To make it appear less obvious, he tucked it into his jeans, feeling the hem of the shirt bunching up around his waist. He left only the rear untucked, so that it covered the butt of the Glock, which poked out of his waistband.
They came upon a clearing where a half-dozen picnic tables rose up out of the tall grass. The tables were empty, but David could see a few cars parked in the adjacent parking lot. Beyond the lot, he could see the flickering tongue of a bonfire and hear distant chatter. The cabins were no longer there, as they had been when he was a child, but a few tents had been erected in the nearby field, black triangles just out of reach of the sodium lampposts that lined the circumference of the parking lot.
“Where are all the old rides?” Ellie said.
David looked around. “There’s some, I think,” he said, pointing to a series of dark humps partially digested by the underbrush. “Come on.”
He took Ellie’s hand and led her over to the arrangement of shapes rising out of the ground. They were the bumper cars. Their metallic paint had faded to a dull monochromatic gray, and much of the rubber around the base had rotted away, leaving behind only black, jagged teeth of brittle rubber. He wouldn’t have thought it possible that this place could fall into further disrepair, but that seemed to be the case.
David tapped the hull of one bumper car with his sneaker and something small and furry darted from it, squealing like a creaky hinge. Both David and Ellie jumped back, then laughed nervously. The overgrown grass parted as the creature—a raccoon, most likely—carved its way across the field.
He surveyed the surrounding hillside. Deadfalls blocked the path leading to the top of the hill, and much of the hilltop itself was overgrown in forestry. He decided it made more sense to wait for Tim in the parking lot.
Please show up. Please show up.
On their way back to the lot, Ellie found the plaster face of a clown in the weeds. The face held a hideous grin, all its paint having faded to various shades of gray throughout the passage of years. It looked like something that had once decorated the roof of a carousel.
“Creepy,” Ellie said. She held it up over her own face. The clown mask leered at him.
“Cut it out,” he said. It reminded him of his students, and those terrible masks they wore. “Let’s go sit on one of those picnic tables over there.”
She dropped the plaster face and followed him to the assembly of picnic tables. From this vantage, they could keep an eye on the parking lot, the campers around the bonfire in the nearby field, and the dark curtain of trees that bordered the park. Far in the distance, a few windows glowed in the façade of the condos. Otherwise, they could have been camping out in some remote and undeveloped part of the world.
As they sat on the picnic table, Ellie leaned her head against his arm and continued to stroke the bird eggs. She sang to them in a low voice, though not bereft of musicality, and although David could not recall the name of the tune, he knew it had been one of the songs Kathy had sung to Ellie when she was just a baby.
He kept an eye on the parking lot. Two teenage boys stood smoking and gabbing beneath a lamppost, and there was a woman sitting cross-legged on the hood of a prehistoric Cadillac the color of gunpowder, also smoking a cigarette. Don’t let me down, Tim. If Tim was a no-show, he and Ellie were screwed. They had no transportation, and a guy with a bandaged left arm might draw some suspicion wandering along the shoulder of the highway with an eight-year-old girl. Nine, he reminded himself. She’ll be nine in a few days.
Movement in the periphery of his vision caused him to return his attention to the other row of picnic tables, the ones standing against the backdrop of the woods. He thought it might have been the breeze stirring the leaves in the trees . . . but then he caught sight of a figure sitting on one of the picnic tables, a sizeable fellow dressed in dark, nondescript clothes. The guy had his feet planted on the bench, his buttocks on the tabletop. He was staring at David across the expanse of darkness, and David saw that there was something wrong with his face.
Not his face, he realized then. A mask. He’s wearing a mask.
It was another plain white mask, most likely fashioned out of a paper plate, and for a moment David thought this was the same man he had glimpsed in the field behind the burger joint earlier that day. But of course that was impossible.
As David stared at the man, the man raised a hand. A solemn wave.
Tim in disguise?
Or was it?
“Hey,” David said, bumping Ellie’s head from his arm with a hitch of his shoulder. “Sit here for a second, will you? I’m going to talk to that man.”
“Dad—”
“Just sit tight.”
He got up from the table and proceeded toward the next row of tables. As David approached the halfway mark, the man in the mask got up from the table, his heavy bulk shifting beneath the patchwork fabric of his clothes—his shirt looked like checkered flannel, his pants like camouflaged BDUs. He wore large forester boots.
“Tim?” David called, his voice a half whisper so as to not draw attention from the teenagers and the woman in the parking lot.
The masked man held up that same hand in anoth
er wave—or possibly to halt David’s progress—before stepping around the side of the picnic table and heading in the direction of the woods.
David glanced over his shoulder and saw Ellie still perched on the picnic table where he’d left her, half her body silvered in the glow of the lamplights coming from the parking lot. He could not make out her expression from this distance, but he could tell that she was staring straight at him, and the closed, tight shape of her body suggested she was suddenly afraid.
When he turned back around, he saw the masked man enter the woods, cutting between two large trees dense with foliage.
“Wait,” David said, and hurried after him.
Yet when he crossed through the trees, he could find no sign of the masked man. It was dark enough for someone to hide from him with ease . . . yet why would someone want to? Who would wave to him just to get up and hide from him?
He stood there in the lightlessness of the woods, waiting for movement, for the sound of twigs crunching underfoot. But after several seconds, all he heard was his own harsh respiration.
I’m making myself crazy.
He turned around and went back through the trees. When he stepped out into the clearing, he saw someone walking toward Ellie, who still sat watching him from her seat on the picnic table.
“Ellie,” he said, and broke into a run. He reached the girl and gathered her up off the table and into his arms just as the figure approached.
It was a woman—the one who had been sitting on the hood of the Cadillac, smoking. She had shoulder-length dark hair, a slender build, and was dressed in an unassuming pair of blue jeans and a luminous white tank top.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Easy, buddy. Are you David?” she asked.
He just stared at her.
“My name’s Gany,” she said. She had an unlit cigarette between two fingers, which she parked behind one ear now. “Your brother sent me to pick you up.”
47
He thought her name was Candy, and called her as much, for the first twenty minutes of their drive. It was Ellie, seated in the backseat of the Cadillac, who ultimately corrected him. “Dad, it’s Gany. With a G.”
Gany laughed. “It’s short for Ganymede.”
“That’s a cool name,” Ellie said.
“It’s one of the moons of Jupiter.”
“Sorry,” David said. “My mistake.” His head hurt.
“My parents were of the ‘free love’ variety. Big-time granola hippies. And my mom was something of an amateur astronomer.”
“What exactly did Tim tell you?”
“He said to meet you and your little girl here around nine o’clock. I’m supposed to drive you to straight to the Fortress. No stopping.”
“The Fortress?”
“Of Solitude,” Gany said. “Like in the Superman comics? The ice castle in the North Pole where Supe goes when he needs a little R and R?”
David shrugged, not comprehending.
“I thought you were supposed to be an English professor or something,” Gany said.
“Not much room in the curriculum to take on Superman comics, unfortunately,” he said.
“Are you Uncle Tim’s girlfriend?” Ellie piped up from the backseat.
“You know,” Gany said, drumming fingertips on the Caddy’s steering wheel, “that is a spectacular question. You should remember to ask your uncle exactly that when you see him. I’d love to hear the response.”
“I don’t understand you,” Ellie said.
“Story of my life, dear heart,” said Gany.
“What else did he say about us?” David asked.
“Nothing. He just said to take the Caddy and pick you guys up. He said if you weren’t there when I got there, I should wait. Give you a few hours. He thought you might be late, but you weren’t. Not too late, anyway. Oh—” she said, interrupting herself, “one more thing. Do you have your cell phone on you?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s take a peek-see.”
David dug it out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I’ve been careful not to—”
Gany rolled down the window and flipped the phone out into the darkness.
“What the hell?” David said.
“Tim said to lose the phone. So now it’s lost.”
“Jesus. There might have been info on there that I needed.”
“Was there?”
He considered this. “I guess not.”
“Besides, I wouldn’t have let you turn it on. Tim was very adamant about that—‘Do not let him turn on that phone. Get rid of it. Don’t fuck around with the phone.’ Oops, sorry about the language, honey pie. I’m just quoting your uncle.”
“I’ve heard ‘fuck’ before,” said Ellie.
“Hey,” David said, leering at his daughter from over his shoulder. Then he turned back to Gany. “I was careful with the phone. I figured they might be able to trace it if I was on it.”
“I assume you mean the federal government,” Gany said. “In that case, they don’t even need for you to be using it. Just having it is a liability. Did you know that the Feds have a device that can turn any cell phone into a listening device? Like, an actual microphone?”
“Jesus,” David said. “No, I didn’t.”
“Of course, on the other hand, you’ve got some things playing in your favor right now, too.”
“Do I? By all means, fill me in.”
She glanced at him, an expression on her face that suggested he might not fully grasp the entirety of the situation. “For one thing, David, the whole world is falling apart, in case you haven’t noticed. The government has a lot more important things to worry about than to track down you and your kid, no matter what you’ve done.”
“So Tim didn’t say anything about why we needed help?” he asked.
“He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. That’s sort of how we operate in these types of situations.”
“These ‘types of situations’? What’s that mean? How often does something like this come up?”
Gany laughed. It was a pretty sound. David examined her profile. It was too dark to guess her age with any accuracy, but he could tell she was younger than he was. There was no glamour about her—she wore no makeup or jewelry and her fingernails had been gnawed to nubs—but there was an innate attractive quality about her that was unbridled, untamed. What some people called a natural beauty.
“Your brother’s always got his mitts in something or another,” Gany said. “I’d like to say this isn’t the craziest thing I’ve ever helped him with . . .” Here, she paused. Her gaze flirted in his direction again, albeit for just a second or two this time. “Far as I can tell, anyway.”
When he heard light snoring from the backseat, David turned around and found Ellie asleep, sprawled out across the seats, the shoe box wrapped in her arms.
“Your kid asleep?” Gany asked.
“Yeah.”
“You get in a bar fight or something?”
“Huh?”
“Your face. And that bandage on your arm.”
“What happened to asking no questions?”
“Sorry, Charlie. Was just making conversation. It’s a long drive, you know.”
“I know.”
“So . . . bar fight? Please tell me it was an angry bar fight.”
“You should see the other guy,” David said.
Gany put her head back and laughed a silent laugh.
“You said we’re driving straight through without stopping,” David said. “To Wyoming?”
“Just sit back and enjoy the ride,” Gany said.
“But you must be exhausted.”
“Not yet, but I’ll get there soon enough. That’s when you’ll take over the driving duties. In the meantime, I suggest you get some shut-eye. I’ll wake you when I start feeling sleepy.”
“I can’t sleep. I’m too wired.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. She pushed a CD into the player and a moment later, Zeppeli
n issued through the Caddy’s crackling, overwrought speakers. She lowered the volume so it wouldn’t wake Ellie. “Close them eyes, bugaboo.”
David considered protesting some more. Instead, he reclined the seat, folded his arms over his chest, and shut his eyes. Night air coming through the cracked windows, cool and fresh-smelling, coupled with the melodious caterwauling of Robert Plant, helped usher him to sleep. At one point he thought he woke up and asked Ganymede some question—what it was, he had no idea—but then he realized he was only dreaming, and so he let himself fall into it.
48
Seven weeks earlier
There was some talk about it on the radio, but before he could catch any of the details, he lost the signal completely. It was his final day at the college—the last of his students had bailed out of their summer courses this past week, a determination David made after several attempts at e-mailing those few remaining students were met with no responses—and he had been only half-listening to the radio broadcast while letting his mind wander on the drive back home. When he finally realized what had happened, he turned up the volume . . . only to lose the station completely an instant later.
He scrolled through the other radio stations, but the rest were all dead, too. However, it wasn’t just static on each channel, but a high frequency trill that emanated from the Bronco’s speakers, a sound that was not exclusive to any one station in particular, but to all of them. It sounded like someone was deliberately jamming the frequencies.
About a mile and a half before his exit off the beltway, traffic snarled to a stop. Up ahead, two large white vehicles with flashing orange lights on the roof were parting the traffic. David could see no windows on either vehicle, and there were large vents on the sides. Despite the nondescript whiteness of them, he could tell they were comprised of bulletproof armor. Government vehicles.
A few people got out of their cars and snapped photos of the vehicles with their cell phones. Other commuters honked and shouted out open windows. David’s own vehicle came to a standstill beneath the shadow of an overpass. When he unrolled his window and craned his head out, he could see traffic on the overpass above at a standstill, too.