Deep Trek

by neetha Napew

  Jeff Thomas was also becoming scared. The woman should have been dead by now. But he'd heard the other guard, the nicer one, Ed, come into the passage. Then there'd been some talk, so quiet he couldn't catch what was being said.

  "Hey, out there," he called very quietly, his curiosity overcoming his fear.

  Nobody answered, so he stayed where he was, sitting on his small bed.

  Ed blinked open his eyes, seeing from his lowly position that the teacher lady was real close. One polished boot was on either side of his head, heels touching his neck. Then weight on his shoulders as she lowered herself onto his back.

  It wasn't an unpleasant feeling. In fact, it produced a tiny frisson of excitement riding through his terror.

  "Hands gripping the nice ironed seams of your pants, son, if you please."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  There was the breath of steel on leather as she holstered the powerful 9 mm pistol. Nanci braced herself, setting her feet firmly astride the guard's shaved skull. Leaning forward, she quickly clasped her hands under his chin, aware of the slight stubble against her palms.

  Jeff heard the odd noise.

  If he'd been an outdoor type, he might have compared it to the snapping of a dry branch.

  But he wasn't. City born and bred. So it reminded him of a powerful security bolt snapping shut.

  Nanci sat back, waiting for the last twitches and jerks to cease. A dark pool of urine was spreading across the floor from between the thighs of the corpse. Finally only the index finger on the man's left hand still moved, the nail scratching backward and forward for several seconds.

  She sighed, closing her eyes for a moment.

  There was a light rapping on the door at her back, accompanied by a muffled voice.

  "Time to go, Nanci," she said, straightening herself up from her seat on the dead man's shoulders.

  "Hey, you guys! Ed! Joe! Come on, guys. Chief wants the prisoner, Thomas."

  She heard movement from within the cell. Someone standing up and shuffling feet.

  "Chief'll get pissed! Pissed at me an' you two. Just hook the old slut and open up."

  Nanci considered opening the door and letting in whoever was out there. But she was already ahead of the game. Two guards. Two corpses. Eventually, if she waited for too long, the odds would stack against her and the game would end.

  Then the prisoner in the cell put in his two bits. "Hey, whoever's there. Better let him in. He's the chief's lieutenant. I know his voice. You'll just likely get us both into deep shit!" Jeff's voice was high and ragged, making Nanci smile.

  She walked toward the cell door, heels clicking, one hand on the butt of the Heckler & Koch, the machine pistol slung over her shoulders. She reached out to slide the bolt open.

  "Hello, Jeff. What a pleasant surprise to meet up with you again."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The chief wasn't very happy.

  Her assistant had called through from the isolated cell block to report that he hadn't been able to get any response from the two guards. As a consequence, he wasn't able to bring the prisoner, Jeff Thomas, along to her rooms at the scheduled time. But they were going to find the second set of keys as soon as possible and get inside. He'd report when he could.

  Margaret Tabor had placed the telephone back very gently onto its rest. She put the tips of her fingers together like a child playing "church and steeple."

  "Yes," she said to her empty office.

  It was no surprise to her when the news came through only seconds later that a four-by-four pickup had burst through the main gate, leaving a number of blazing vehicles behind it, cutting their transportation capability by two-thirds.

  When her skinny assistant eventually appeared at her door, looking as if he'd just developed an ulcer, she had even managed a thin-lipped smile designed to reassure him. It scared him even more.

  "Not your fault," she said. "But it's someone's fault, isn't it?"

  "Sure is, Chief," he admitted, eager to deflect the blame, his fingers playing nervously with the badge on his lapel.

  "Whose?"

  He had survived relatively unscarred the last few months of Flagg's rule, and had already learned the different ways of Margaret Tabor. She didn't mind honest admissions of failure, but it was better not to try to wriggle your way out of trouble by deceit or by lying to her.

  "Can't have been Thomas. Someone opened his cell after they butchered the guards."

  He laid some instant pix of the scene on her desk, one by one, as though playing some macabre game of patience. She leaned forward and scanned them, face showing no emotion.

  "Something is very wrong here," she said.

  "No evidence of anyone else being involved. Just this…" He consulted a small notepad. "Veronica Poole. Teacher aged about sixty. From Fort Worth. The guard, Joe, was supposed to be hooking her. Doesn't figure."

  "Woman of sixty, alone and unarmed, did this—" She waved her hand at the livid photographs. "Got a big man up on her own. Gouged out his eyes. She somehow overcame him. Got his gun… what was he carrying?"

  He rifled the pages. "Oh, yeah. Something else odd. The old woman had a Port Royale machine pistol. Sixteen round, like an Uzi. Joe had it. Seems he also took one of a pair of matching Heckler & Koch P-111s that she'd been carrying. Nine-millimeter automatics. Fifteen round. Other guard had a standard .38."

  "Wait, wait. This old woman had weapons of that quality on her and nobody told me about it?"

  "I didn't know, Chief."

  Margaret Tabor nodded slowly. She reached for a yellow pad and then stopped. "Who interrogated her?"

  "Miller and McCabe. I checked."

  "And neither of them thought that it was odd to find… Let it pass. This is spilled milk. Bring me the folder on Mistress Poole and the black file on people we're supposed to be looking out for. Right away."

  MCCABE SAT on the floor, holding a kerchief to his broken nose, trying not to bleed on the carpet of her office. He was white as parchment, hands trembling.

  "This is something very serious. And you missed it."

  "I'm sorry, Chief," he mumbled through the blood and splintered teeth.

  "No," Margaret Tabor said very quietly. "Mistake like that doesn't get you sorry, McCabe. It gets you dead."

  AFTER THE MAN had been taken away to the narrow passage with the rusting iron hooks in its wall, Margaret Tabor sat and looked at the slim file on Nanci Simms.

  The light blue eyes stared back at her from a slightly blurred snatched photograph. It was a street in small-town America, and the woman was glancing sideways, as though she'd somehow detected the click of a hidden camera. From the car that appeared in the picture, it looked as if it had been taken several years ago around the mid 2030s.

  There was surprisingly little information on her. No birth date, no birthplace. Nothing on parents. No home. No friends. No social security number or bank details, though it did mention her most common pseudonym of Veronica Poole and the phony job record of English literature teacher in Fort Worth.

  Height of five feet eleven was followed by a question mark, showing it was only a guess. Same with the weight and age. Approximately sixty years old, it said.

  The rest was a jumbled mass of supposition and partial information. What came through was a dangerous woman who'd been around a lot. Traveled in Europe and extensively in the Far and Middle East. Was believed to have flourished as an undercover assassin for several years. Skilled in armed- and unarmed-combat techniques.

  "You got that bit right," said the chief, laying the folder back down.

  Someone who might have worked for Zelig… who might well have known where the opposition headquarters of Aurora was hidden.

  It was bitterly frustrating to have had this lethal woman safe and snug in a cell. A chicken ready for the plucking. And then to lose her…

  The chief of the Hunters of the Sun glanced at her wrist chron. Just forty-five minutes had passed since Nanci Simms had butchered two experienced
guards and broken out of the compound with an important prisoner. She wouldn't have gotten too far away in less than an hour.

  The red button on her desk intercom brought an instant response from her assistant. "Yes, Chief?"

  "Get the chopper out."

  "Now?"

  "No. I thought around about the end of February would be a real good time."

  "Sorry, Chief."

  "Being sorry doesn't butter the turnips, does it?"

  "No."

  "I want a search for that woman. We know what she's driving. Probably she'll have headed north. Toward where we think… Then again, she might try and second- or third-guess us. Tell the pilot to sector the land for… for fifty miles around."

  "That takes us to the hills."

  "Yes."

  "We don't have too much gas for the chopper at this particular temporal window, Chief. Difficult to get our hands on more of it right now."

  "We'll manage."

  "Sure, Chief."

  IT WASN'T too much of a surprise to Margaret Tabor when the helicopter pilot reported back to her two hours later. "Fuel arrow was down in the red, Chief."

  "So I would expect. And you found nothing." It was a plain, calm statement, not a question. But the woman pilot chose to treat it as a question. "Nothing. Spotlight picked up tracks, heading off into the back country. Toward the north. Then they went onto a ribbon of old blacktop, and that was where I lost it. Quartered the whole area. Long as I could."

  "Don't feel bad about it. Looks like we thought we had us an old, harmless sheep in our trap. Turned out we caught a real vicious wolverine."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It was Jeanne who finally managed to persuade Henderson McGill to stop the hopeless task of trying to retrieve the buried corpse of Angel McGill.

  The others had all tried.

  After the thunderous avalanche had swept half a mountain of thawing snow down the steep cliff, erasing the woman from life in a handful of seconds, the whole family had rushed to the scene. Paul had been there first, skiing from the other side of the broad valley, slicing across with speed and control, glancing up above him to see whether there was any danger of a further fall. But the rock face had been scoured clear.

  By the time Mac himself had strapped on a pair of skis from the back of the Phantasm and lumbered clumsily to join the others, there was only silence. The spray and turbulence of the avalanche was over. Already there were dozens of birds appearing, eager to find whether any potential food might have been revealed from beneath the snow cover.

  Mac had slung a shovel across his shoulders as he left the huge RV. While the others looked unbelievingly at the massive fall, he had started digging, working like a demented fury, clawing his way into the mixture of snow and water and mud.

  "No point, Dad," said Paul. "We don't even know where she might be." The mountainous pile was fully three hundred yards long and at least forty feet high.

  "There's a chance," Mac had panted.

  But there had never been any sort of a chance.

  It took Jeanne's hand on his arm to persuade Mac to finally give up the pointless, hopeless struggle. His own hands were blistered and raw, his back a tangle of strained muscle.

  "Come in, love," said Jeanne gently.

  "She's gone." He straightened painfully, dropping the scratched shovel at his feet. "By God, but she's gone. Just plucked away from us. No goodbyes."

  "It's often the way." Jeanne looked around. "Thaw's still going on."

  "Yeah. I guess we… Oh, Christ!" His hands covered his face, shoulders heaving. Jeanne put her arms tightly around him and held him like a child while the sorrow shook him. She hugged him and whispered her love.

  Eventually Mac sighed, swallowing hard and trying for a smile. "All right, now," he said softly. "I can deal with it. But there's so much damnable death around. Seems that where I let my shadow fall, somebody goes to meet their Maker. It's not rightly fair, Jeanne."

  "We have to keep moving, love."

  "I know it. But there were ten of us only a few weeks ago. Ten of us, all close and loving."

  "We're still close and loving, Mac."

  "Less than three weeks. And three of our little ones dead. Now Angel torn away."

  "Come inside and rest. Way the snow's going we could maybe try to move on in another day."

  Mac blew his nose. "Life's turned upside down for us. Nothing makes sense, you know."

  But he allowed her to lead him back to the RV, where the four surviving children were waiting for them.

  ALTHOUGH THEY DIDN'T even know where Angel's mangled body was buried, early the next morning they held a kind of a service for her. One by one they said a few words about how they remembered her. The good times. The laughter.

  Even Sukie, four years old, managed to overcome her sorrow to say farewell to her mother.

  Afterward they all hugged, together in a tight circle of grief.

  The following morning Mac rose early and stood outside in the pallid glow of the false dawn, looking across the monstrous pile of snow and earth along the valley.

  The narrow stream, frozen over when they'd become trapped by the blizzard, was now swollen into a frothing brown torrent. Patches of the highway showed in spots through the melting snow, and it looked as if they could get moving again.

  Mac had slept badly. He'd gone through periods of restless turning, eyes open, listening to the steady, sullen drip of water all around the vehicle. The thought of the deaths of the loved members of his family lay more heavily on his mind. Even when he slithered into brief moments of sleep, his mind's eye was flooded with terrible images of his children and his young wife suffering ghastly deaths while he stood by, unable to do anything to help them.

  Before opening the door and going out into the morning, Mac had taken down his shotgun, the blued-steel imported Brazzi 16-gauge weapon, holding five rounds. The stock was cold and damp to the touch.

  His breath feathered out around him as he looked at the dark, blighted landscape, clouds gathering toward the west where Jim Hilton and the others might be waiting for them. Mac imagined that he could taste salt, carried on the breeze from the Pacific Ocean.

  The gun felt heavy in his hands, and he stared down at it, his mind blanking, unable to remember why he'd brought it out with him. Mac watched as his right thumb eased off the safety and his index finger moved to the trigger.

  His brow furrowed, wondering where the enemy was. His gun was ready for an enemy.

  "The last enemy is death," he whispered, without any idea where the words had come from.

  The muzzle of the scattergun was huge, seeming to suck him down into it. "No more pain," he said. The door of the vehicle opened behind him, but Henderson McGill was locked too deep into his own bleak sadness to be aware of it. "Hi, Dad."

  "What?" He responded from somewhere far away, louder than he'd intended, making his youngest child, Sukie, jump and nearly slip off the top step. She was wearing a blue dressing gown, her eyes still heavy with sleep.

  "What're you doing, Dad?" she asked, vaguely curious at the sight of her father cradling the glittering weapon in his lap, the stock between his knees, the end of the barrel pointing toward his face. His finger was white on the trigger.

  "Doing, honey?" He felt like a man trapped on the sticky border between waking and darkness.

  "That's real dangerous, Dad." She moved to stand on the same step where he was sitting and touched the Brazzi. "Never point a gun unless you're going to use it."

  Mac nodded, eyes misting with tears. Suddenly he was aware of the lonely road that he'd been about to walk, shocked at the realization that if his little girl had woken a couple of minutes later she'd have walked out to find herself covered in blood and brains and splintered bones.

  "That's true, honey. Wasn't thinking straight."

  "Thinking in bendy lines, were you?"

  He hugged her, feeling her frail body. "Yeah. I was thinking in seriously bendy lines, honey."

>   She looked around in the growing light. "Snow's gone real fast, Daddy."

  "And we'll soon be going real fast, as well. To join up with Uncle Jim and the others." He stood up, the gun dangling in his hand like a forgotten gift. "But first we'll start up some coffee and breakfast and wake the others. What d'you say to that, honey? Sound good to you?"

  She nodded and kissed him on his cold cheek.

  JIM HILTON WAS STIRRING the oatmeal in the kettle, squatted down on his haunches.

  The weather had changed in the past forty-eight hours as the wind veered around, bringing warmth and chasing the snow away from Muir Woods.

  "What day is it, Dad?"

  Heather was standing by the truck, rubbing her hands together, her steady blue-gray eyes taking in the morning.

  "Eighth of December."

  "You said we'd wait until the eighth."

  He nodded. "Right. Looks like it's just you and me heading north toward Aurora."

  "Will there be other children there?"

  "Don't know." He added hastily, "But I'm certain that there will be."

  "Girls my age?"

  "Of course. And boys."

  Heather sniffed. "Bad news, Dad. Boys are just gross gherkins, and all they want is to get in your pants."

  Jim Hilton stopped stirring and looked up at his daughter, startled. "How's that?"

  "Andrea had a friend. Kyrie Ellison. Her mom was big in promo-vids. She told us that."

  It crossed his mind that this might be a good moment to embark on a serious father-to-daughter conversation on the subject of personal relationships but decided almost immediately that it would involve opening a can of worms he'd much rather leave firmly closed.

  "Breakfast's nearly ready," he said.

  "We going, then?"

  "I suppose so."

  "Leave a message?"

  "Course."

  "Do you think that the others…?" The sentence faded away into the dank, dripping stillness.

  Jim sighed. "I'll sort of be surprised if I don't ever meet up again with old Mac this side of the Pearly Gates. Tough son of a space suit, Mac. Kyle and Steve and Carrie and the rest…i just can't even begin to make a guess. The world's turned upside down, Heather."