Deep Trek

by neetha Napew

  The trouble was that neither Zelig nor his agents knew where any of them now were.

  There had been the momentary flash of hope when he'd received the news of Princip and Lynch, with the son of Romero, down with Abbey. One of his very best men.

  But the patrol sent down there on December 4 had just reported that Caff's Groceries was a charred heap of cold ashes. There was also a burned-out pickup in the parking lot, and one corpse, believed male, among the ruins.

  No sign of any survivors.

  THE PLAN had been Flagg's.

  He'd originated it, perceiving the ramifications of the Earthblood virus long before anyone else at his level of power. Indeed, the new chief of the Hunters of the Sun had sometimes wondered whether Flagg might not have had something to do with the original release of the lethal plant cancer. He had certainly been lightning quick off the mark.

  And now he was gone. Dying, with the greatest of ironies, of food poisoning.

  The idea of men and women of authority combining to pick up the reins of the shattered wagon that had once been the United States had been Flagg's. He'd sounded them out and drawn them in.

  Everything was going so well, even better than the projections of the computer program that he had drawn up as a blueprint of what would happen and how they might assume absolute control.

  Everything was rolling along, except for Zelig.

  If only they could find him and purge his hidden nest. There were other people seeking his Aurora.

  "Stupid pretentious name," grunted the chief.

  Already they had one, and he would be interviewed by the chief the following day, on December 6. He might tell them something or help lead them in the right direction. It was north. They already knew that.

  The chief looked forward to interrogating this journalist. Jeff Thomas.

  She always liked interrogating men.

  IT WAS MOVING on to dusk in Muir Woods, with a light covering of snow lying wetly around the parked van.

  They'd had a meal of dried meat, with a tin of loganberries, washed down with fresh spring water. The last of the bread had been finished the day before. Food was down to subsistence level.

  "Still snowing," said Heather, her voice subdued after the disappointment of the long, empty day.

  "Yeah. Dark, as well."

  "Seems like nobody's coming, doesn't it? Nobody at all."

  "Looks that way, love." Jim Hilton felt close to despair. "Yeah, it looks that way."

  PART II

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The snow had stopped falling, leaving the forest around them layered in deep, silent white.

  The dry dead branches crackled and popped, sending fountains of golden sparks soaring up into the night sky between the towering sequoias of Muir Woods. The brace of steelhead trout bubbled and hissed on the makeshift spit that Jim Hilton had constructed over the glowing fire, and the scent of their cooking filled the nostrils of the man and his eleven-year-old daughter.

  "Never had turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, Dad."

  "Probably won't have any for Christmas, either. Less than three weeks away now."

  She nodded, her blue-gray eyes solemn. "Wonder if we'll meet up with any of the others by then."

  It was a thought that had been filling every waking hour for Jim Hilton for the past week, ever since the moment that they'd parted company in the Sweetwater Mountains with the other survivors from his crew.

  Heather got up to go and scavenge for more wood for the bright-flamed fire, leaving Jim with his memories of the past ten insane weeks. The events, the deaths, the partings, and those of the crew who were missing, swirled around in his head like a bizarre surrealistic dream, making him want to pinch his arm to see if he were really there.

  "Nearly made it," he said, his whispered words barely audible over the bubbling of the cooking fish.

  When he heard footsteps in the blackness, he looked around, his hand dropping from a combat reflex to the butt of the six-shot Ruger Blackhawk Hunter .44 at his hip, then he shuddered when he glimpsed his daughter. This was how far he'd come with the sweep of events—an unquestioning readiness to shoot and kill, without any thought or weighing of right and wrong.

  "It's only me, Dad."

  "Made me jump, kitten."

  "Dad!" she said reproachfully.

  "Sorry, love. Keep forgetting you don't like your old pet-name now."

  The slender girl knelt and methodically stacked the armful of wood at the edge of the fire to help dry it out. She was already learning vital techniques of survival in this desolate new world. Jim caught a flicker of his dead wife in his daughter's face, in the way she frowned in concentration. His wife, Lori, buried in the garden of their home below the huge Hollywood sign, his other daughter, Andrea, twin to Heather, lying in the damp earth alongside her.

  "You wondering about the others, Dad?"

  "Yeah. Kind of running over what's been happening in my mind. Trying not to lose control of any of it. One day someone might want to know all about what went down for us."

  His fingers rested in the tangled fronds of dead lichen and some small-leafed ivy. Jim plucked them up and stared at them, seeing the pallid pink color of the dried plants.

  "Fish is nearly done, Dad."

  "Sure thing. Don't burn your fingers on it."

  Heather glanced at her father with a look of infinite scorn. "Been cooking like this for weeks, Dad. Do you think I'm dumb?"

  "No, of course not."

  He was fumbling with the fish, partly charred and partly raw, when Heather asked, "You think Nanci was really a teacher, Dad?"

  Heather had finished her trout and licked her fingers, then wiped them on the leg of her jeans. Jim noticed that it had started to snow again, tiny feathers drifting down through the looming branches of the giant trees around them.

  "I think she may have been once. What made you think about her?"

  The girl grinned. "I knew you were wondering about everyone. She's the one that seems real odd. You know about her and Jeff Thomas, Dad?"

  Yeah, he knew, but he hadn't known that the girl had known—assuming she was talking about what he thought she was talking about.

  "Her and Jeff, love?" he said, stalling for time.

  "Sure. You must've seen it, Dad."

  "What?" His cheeks were beginning to flush at the line the conversation had taken.

  "Weirdly weird."

  "The way she orders him around?"

  Heather snorted with laughter. "That what they call it, Dad? Just ordering around? I seen them two or three times. He was like a slave in some porno vids. Doing everything she told him to. Licked her boots and stuff."

  Jim decided that it would be better if he didn't probe too deeply into what his eleven-year-old daughter understood by "and stuff." He also wondered when Heather had been watching any porno vids. But also decided to let that lie.

  "I guess both of them could have been chilled by now," he said.

  "Won't cry for shit-for-brains Jeff."

  "Guess nobody really liked him that much."

  "No. Had a teacher in third grade, Miss Leventhal, used to say that everyone had a bit of good in them. Jeff didn't. I reckoned he was the sort of person who was a bully to people weaker than him and a coward with anyone stronger."

  "Nanci was certainly stronger than Jeff," agreed Jim. "Fact is, she was probably stronger than most anyone. Can't really believe she's bought the farm."

  "Maybe they'll all turn up first thing tomorrow morning," Heather said without much confidence.

  "Maybe. And Maybe Zelig'll appear with a chopper to whisk us all to Aurora."

  They fell silent in the face of such uncertainties, until Heather said, "Fire's going out, Dad."

  "Best get ourselves into the van for the night. Leave the embers to smolder. Won't do any harm, not with this snow starting again."

  "What about tomorrow?"

  He smiled at the girl, her face only a pale blur in
the gloom of the forest. "Tomorrow's another day, Heather," he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  "Poole!" The voice was strident and hard.

  Nanci Simms had been dozing after an intensive hour of deep meditation, trying to calm her mind and ready it for what she knew was coming.

  "Get off that bed and get yourself to the fucking door."

  "Sure." Just for a moment, as she reentered the real world, she had forgotten that the guards knew her by the name of Veronica Poole. The decent, gentle, retired schoolteacher from the northern suburbs of Fort Worth. That was the story she'd stuck to when they caught her and that had been her story through a number of interrogations. In her time Nanci had been examined by serious experts, and what had surprised her now was how little interest the inquisitors had shown in her.

  Most of them had been callow young men, who seemed merely to be going through the motions with the questions.

  How had she lived since Earthblood?

  Where had she been?

  How had she gotten hold of her sophisticated weapons? Her response to that had been to plead an old-fashioned, old-maidish ignorance of such things, explaining that she'd found them and wouldn't even know really how to use them.

  Nanci was only too aware from her foreknowledge of the Hunters of the Sun that it was all probably futile. They had no need of a single old woman and would dispose of her as quickly and cheaply as possible as soon as they'd carried out their superficial interrogation.

  Already she'd seen and heard about the row of stout hooks set in a corridor near an outer wall of the complex and the loop of thin wire that was hung behind the door.

  Nanci Simms had no illusions at all about how brutal her passing was likely to be.

  The only time that the young man with the pink-tinted glasses caught her momentarily off balance was in the last of the sessions.

  She'd been sitting in a plastic chair, lower than the top of his high-tech steel desk. The questioner, his badge with the polished golden arrow glittering through the heart of the silver sun, had been flicking through a large folder, looking bored and somewhat put-upon.

  Then he'd casually tossed over a single sheet of paper with stats and photographs of a dozen men and women.

  "Ever come across any of these people?"

  Nand had guessed who it was going to be and schooled her face to careful indifference.

  There they all were.

  Mostly looking younger and rounder than the lean group that she'd met. Their names were printed neatly beneath each picture. Not all of them were familiar.

  James Hilton, captain of the USSV Aquila. A good thirty pounds heavier and with markedly less hair than the man Nanci had gotten to know. To know and to admire.

  Marcey Cording. Alongside the name was typed: D.O. Landing?

  A similar line was next to Michael Man, Ryan O'Keefe and Bob Rogers.

  But there was Kyle Lynch and Steve Romero, and Carrie Princip, looking a good deal perter and prettier than the tough young woman Nanci had met.

  It had crossed her mind to wonder how many of them were still alive.

  An older, harder face. Henderson McGill. The one who had a family in New England and had gone off with the second pilot, Pete Turner. Nanci knew that Jim Hilton felt in his heart that both men were dead.

  Jed Herne. Nanci had studied the face carefully, certain that Jeff Thomas had murdered him. And there was Jeff.

  "Think I might know him," she said, pointing at the foxy face with the smug, self-confident smile. "Have I seen him on the vids or someplace?"

  "Could be." The man took back the sheet. "Doesn't matter about him. Not him."

  As she'd been returned to her cell, Nanci had wondered why it didn't matter about Jeff. Could be he was already dead and they knew it. That made sense.

  Now she was going to get chilled. "Down there. Move it, you old cow. Don't wanna miss my chow."

  There were slitted windows, high in the cinder-block walls, and she could just see through them that afternoon light was already fading away.

  The guard was six feet six tall, with the physique of someone who worked out with weights. To add insult to murder, her Port Royale machine pistol was slung loosely across his broad shoulders, and one of her pair of Heckler & Koch P-111 automatics rested in his belt.

  "Where are you taking me?" Her voice quavered, and terror and bewilderment played over her features. She let her head slump, hands plucking at the seams of her khaki pants and dragged her feet so that the heels of her boots scuffed at the dusty concrete floor of the narrow corridor.

  "Taking you outside."

  "Why?"

  "To let you go."

  "Free?"

  "Sure." The brutish laugh gave the lie to his words. The man was totally arrogant in his sense of complete power over the cringing old woman.

  For a few paces they were out in the open, crossing a patch of dead grass and barren soil. Nanci glanced around her, trying to get her bearings, making sure that he was taking her to the isolated killing passage.

  There was what she thought might be a smaller cell block, with only two or three rooms in it. The guard unlocked another grilled door, pushing her into a brightly lit room, then through another door. Two doors to the left. One to the right.

  A second guard was lounging against the wall.

  "Hi, Joe. How're ya going?"

  "Just got to get rid of this."

  "Want a hand?"

  The same laugh that made Nanci bite her lip. "For this? You're jokin', man. Get her doing the chicken dance and be back ready for supper."

  "See you in there."

  "Sure."

  The door slamming.

  A stretch of corridor about thirty feet long. Stark overhead strip lights. One door on the right. One more ahead, heavier, with steel double bolts.

  And iron hooks, eight of them, set in the stone wall. The wall and the floor beneath were stained brown and black, and the smell almost made Nanci Simms gag. Terror and pain and death. Something that could never be cleaned away.

  "What is this place?" she asked.

  "End of the road, slut."

  There were two small four-legged stools against the wall. "You said I could go."

  "Won't need them stools. Just lift you up and loop the wire around your scrawny neck. Let you dangle."

  "No, God Almighty. You can't do that."

  "Watch me." One hand scratched his balls. "Yeah, your eyes'll pop out of your ugly bitch head watching me."

  "Mother of mercy, this can't be the end of Veronica. Someone'll hear me."

  "Yeah. Me and Ed through there. And our special prisoner in his own little room," he said, pointing to the side door. "He won't help. Nor me an' Ed will."

  That was what she needed to know.

  The door must be to the outside. If the guard had the key, it might work. If he didn't…

  And nobody else close enough.

  She dropped suddenly to her knees, looking up at the hulking figure with a pleading, desperate expression, hands reaching in a hopeless, clumsy fumbling toward the guard's belt. "I'll do anything," she stammered.

  "Anything?"

  "Everything. Bet you never been offered everything. I could be real nice for you."

  She stared into his face and saw the momentary flicker of crimson lust deep in the tiny eyes.

  "No, forget it. Might let you give me a blow job 'fore I swing you. Least you can die happy." He bellowed with laughter. "Die fucking happy."

  IN HER OFFICE in the main administrative block, the chief of the Hunters of the Sun wiped her mouth with a white linen napkin, dabbing gently at her lips. She looked at the last few inches of wine in the dark green bottle and decided that she would wait until after the questioning.

  It was going to be special.

  Reports she'd read of the initial interrogation of the journalist by some of her juniors had tended to make her believe that he truly didn't know much about Zelig and his secret rat hole in the north. But she
was equally sure that her own tender, feminine touch might easily open up parts of his memory he didn't even know about himself.

  They knew that most of the crew of the ill-fated shuttle were dead. But some had dropped clean off the face of the earth, and Jeff Thomas would certainly be able to tell her all about them. Point a helpful finger.

  She laid her napkin on the table and stood up, pressing a white recessed button beneath the edge of the table. "Think I'm ready to speak to the prisoner, Thomas, now," she said when her skinny male assistant pushed his head around the door.

  JEFF THOMAS had been sleeping, an uneasy, patched sleep broken by wakeful moments that seemed to have the horrors of nightmare seeping into them. There had been one where he'd been hounded through an echoing warehouse by a gang of young thugs, armed with tiny, pecking knives. It was something that clearly had its roots in the moment in San Francisco when he'd first met Nanci Simms.

  The voice of one of the regular guards penetrated his fitful rest.

  "Die fucking happy."

  There was a small slit in the door where food and drink could be passed through, and Jeff eased himself off the bunk and flattened himself against the wall. He tried to see through the narrow gap, but the angle was wrong.

  But he could hear clearly enough.

  The voice of a woman. Old and sick and terrified. Begging for her life.

  In the short time he'd been held prisoner, Jeff had heard enough helpless victims kicking and thrashing in the corridor outside, and seen some of them as he'd been led out for questioning.

  They were some of the nastiest corpses he'd ever seen.

  The thin steel wire was looped around the throat so that they strangled slowly, in great agony. The guards didn't even bother to tie their hands or feet. Once they'd been lifted up, or stood on one of the square stools, they were inexorably doomed.