“I need to find out what’s going on,” he said. “What parish are you?”
After a pause, she said, “Ohio. And you? Are you in trouble?”
He thought of the only delegate from the state that he knew. “What kind of radio do you like?” he asked. “AM or FM?”
“Tell us where you are,” the woman said, “and we’ll send a car to pick you up.”
“Okay, I’m … let me get back to you on that.” He slammed down the phone and stepped back.
The Diggers had taken control of the communication system.
* * *
He resisted the impulse to burst into Crystal’s bedroom and shake her awake. He opened the door slowly and let the light fall across her face. Crystal lay on her side, Ruby tucked under her arm.
He touched Crystal’s shoulder, and she jerked awake. “The baby?”
“She’s right here.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and gently rested a hand on Ruby’s legs. “I’ve got to go, Crystal.”
She sat up and pushed the hair from her eyes. Even this tired, she was beautiful. “What? What happened?”
“A lot of things. I think the Diggers are rolling us up. The phone system’s been tapped.”
“Does that mean—can they trace you?”
“I don’t know. I tried to get off the phone as soon as I could.” He didn’t know how tracing worked. In the movies, they were always trying to get criminals to stay on the line. He said, “Mr. Blunt needs me. He’s in Salt Lake, and I have to drive there.”
“Now?”
“I can’t wait till morning. The Diggers may be rounding us up.”
“Okay, okay.” She looked around at the darkened room. “I’ll feed Ruby, you—”
“No, you’re not coming with me. You need to get as far away from here as possible. Zip is—he might be starting the Big Bite. You need to get on a bus that doesn’t go through Salt Lake. I was thinking you should go to Denver, and fly out from there. Go see Alice.” He lifted the Commander Calhoun backpack onto the bed. Inside was a ludicrous amount of cash. “When you get to Chicago, you can buy yourself a new car. Something safe, like a Volvo.”
“You’re taking my car?”
“I can’t take a bus. Besides, it’s a crappy car.”
“You can’t drive by yourself,” Crystal said.
“It’s the middle of the night. Nobody’s going to see me.”
Crystal climbed out of bed. “Makeup. I’ll do your face.” At the bedroom door she stopped, turned. “You’re going to need a hell of a lot of base.”
Ruby emitted a squeak, but her eyes stayed closed. Stony carefully slid one hand behind her neck, the other under her bottom, and lifted. Her arms jerked in a startle reflex, but he brought her close to his chest and she immediately settled.
It was a mistake to come here. Yet again he’d put his family in danger. This time it had only taken him a week to force Ruby and Crystal out of their home and put them on the run—a new record. That could never happen again. Whether or not the world ended tomorrow, he couldn’t come back to them. He couldn’t see anyone in his family again.
He knew he was wrong about Zip, too. Only a few days ago he thought he could not kill the man, even if it meant saving the world. But now Ruby was in the world.
He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Take care of your mom, kiddo.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
1988
Salt Lake City, Utah
he Mormons were the most disciplined of urban planners. Like all their cities, Salt Lake was laid out in a grid, each street numbered from its distance from the temple at the center of the city. The address Blunt had given him, 750 East 400 South, put him seven blocks east of the temple, and on the fourth block south of it. He didn’t need to read any of the building numbers to guess which one was Zip’s safe house. Or rather, which one used to be his. Four squad cars, three ambulances, and two fire trucks had formed a semicircle of strobing lights around a smoking shell of a house. The fire seemed to be out, but firefighters were still spraying down portions of the structure.
He was too late, then.
Stony made a three-point turn—easy to do in the wide street—and parked a block away. When he shut off the engine, he realized that over the hours he’d become deaf to the whine of the differential.
It was seven in the morning and still dark. He’d made it to Salt Lake in a little over four and a half hours, driving fast through Green River and Price, slowing down only when he joined the interstate at Spanish Fork, where Crystal told him the cops liked to set radar traps. It was the farthest he’d ever driven a vehicle in his life, and it quadrupled the amount of time he’d spent behind the wheel. When he’d asked to borrow his sister’s car he wasn’t even sure whether he’d be able to drive all that way without causing an accident or getting pulled over. That he’d been able to do it felt like an achievement. That he’d enjoyed the speed and the freedom felt like a betrayal of Junie.
He pulled on the toboggan hat Crystal had loaned him and checked himself in the mirror. Commander Calhoun had said he was handsome, which was LD code for “almost normal.” Crystal had tried to take him the rest of the way to passing by coating his face in Clinique Honeymilk “City Base,” turning him into an extremely tanned dead man. He told her he looked like George Hamilton in Love at First Bite. She told him he looked fine. It would have to do.
He stepped out of the car and walked uphill toward the burned house, his hands jammed into the pockets of a denim jacket that used to belong to Crystal’s ex. It was a tree-lined residential neighborhood, a mix of wooden houses and brick apartment buildings. The only people on the street were down by the fire, a dozen bystanders standing outside the yellow tape line. He walked across the street to a spot perhaps fifty yards from the house, where he could look out over the hoods of the parked cars to watch the crews work. He leaned against a tree to project casualness.
What had happened here? Did Zip set fire to the house to cover his escape? Had Blunt tried to burn them out? Where was everyone now?
After ten minutes he had a partial answer: Some people had never left the house. Two firefighters carried out a body bag to a gurney, and that was loaded into one of the ambulances. There was no way to tell whether the body was Blunt’s, or Zip’s—or belonged to an LD at all.
Over the next half hour four more bodies were brought out, loaded into the ambulances, and driven away. The sky lightened, and in the distance the Wasatch Mountains coalesced out of the dark. Only one ambulance remained.
Zip and his people weren’t the Jonestown type—their entire goal was to go down biting as many breathers as they could—so, it had been a fight. Sometime after Blunt had called the answering system and left his message for Stony, he’d gone into the house after them.
Was Blunt really some kind of hit man for the LDA? He and Stony were friends—at least, Stony thought they were friends—but he’d only seen the man every few weeks when he brought the mail. It wouldn’t have been hard for Blunt to keep him in the dark.
And if Blunt wasn’t an assassin, someone like him would be necessary. It was the only explanation for why the Big Bite hadn’t happened yet. The Diggers were good, and they could swarm a safe house once they’d been tipped off, but they didn’t have much of a chance to prevent a bite—that required inside information. The LDA had to police itself. Jesus, Delia had to be part of it, too. She said that they didn’t kill their own people, but of course she’d lie to him if she thought that was best for the army. The less he knew—the less any of the LDs knew—the less they could tell the government if they were caught.
He watched as they loaded a body bag into the last ambulance. A voice behind him said, “What’s going on?” He started to turn, and stopped himself.
“Just a fire,” he said.
The woman’s dog, a white poodlesque creature, sniffed his shoe, then ran away from him, straining at the leash.
“Proxy! No. I heard gunshots,” the woman said. “Early this m
orning.” He didn’t look into her face, sure she’d see through his disguise. She said, “Do you think they’re drug dealers?”
He shrugged, kept his eyes on the house. Finally the woman let the dog pull her away, and he watched her go. Ten yards down, she forced the dog to come away from some bits of garbage on the sidewalk. After she passed, the passenger window of the parked car at that spot rolled down, and cigarette smoke drifted out. A hand tossed out a lit butt. The smoke, when it reached him a few seconds later, smelled of menthol.
Stony looked at the house, then back at the car, a boxy green Chevy Caprice. He walked toward it, trying to see through the rear window while making it seem like his attention was on the burned house. Two men sat in the front seat. When he drew closer he caught a glimpse in the car’s side-view mirror of a pale face under a dark hat, but in another step the angle was wrong. He stopped, looked at the stretch of sidewalk outside the passenger window. Twenty, thirty cigarette butts lay on the cement.
Hours of cigarette butts. Hours of watching the house burn.
The ambulance rolled past, lights flashing, but with no siren. The taillights of the Caprice lit up, and then the engine started. Stony froze. The car backed up a few feet, turning to angle out of the parking spot, and suddenly the passenger window was beside him. The passenger’s face was gray, but his hair was coal black and cut in a bowl—like Moe Howard. It was Zip’s man from the congress, who’d crawled under the RV to look for a bomb. The man suddenly realized someone was standing outside his window, and threw up a pale hand to shield his face. The car pulled away.
Had he recognized Stony? It was impossible to tell.
Twenty feet away, the Caprice stopped abruptly, then began to back up at an angle. Stony spun in the other direction and began to walk quickly away. Then he calmed himself. The car had to turn around, because the way was blocked by the fire crews. It didn’t mean they’d recognized him.
The Caprice slowly came up alongside him, this time with the driver’s window facing him. Stony ducked his head and kept walking.
A moment later the car accelerated. He looked up to see it stop at the next intersection behind the ambulance. The ambulance turned right, and the Caprice went straight, toward downtown. Stony ran for his car. He was thankful the car was already pointing in the right direction.
The streets were starting to fill with morning traffic, but the slope of the hill let him see the Caprice two blocks ahead and below him. At the stoplight at State Street he was able to slide up behind the car with only an El Camino between them, and after that he was able to follow the Caprice north to where it pulled into a parking garage.
He slowed as he approached the dark entrance. What the hell were they doing? Going to the mall? The sign said ZCMI, which seemed to be some kind of department store or shopping center. He sat on the ramp, unwilling to follow too closely, until a car pulled up behind them. He took his ticket and began to follow the arrows first down, below street level, then around and up. The garage was mostly empty. On the third story he caught a glimpse of the green Caprice, heading up a ramp to the next level, and he followed, keeping his speed low. This level was a bit more crowded, and there was a double-door entrance to the store here. He rolled slowly past the rows of cars, craning his neck to see whether the Caprice was climbing the next ramp—and suddenly passed the car. It had just backed into a parking spot next to a white panel truck, which had also backed in. With a start he realized that on the side door of the truck was a Commander Calhoun logo.
Keep calm, he told himself. He drove past the car without looking at it, turned the corner, and went up the ramp to the next level, which turned out to be the last. He parked next to a stairwell. He felt like Jack Gore, or one of the Hardy Boys. True, they’d only traveled four blocks. It was the shortest “tail job” he’d ever read about, outside of an Encyclopedia Brown story. That kid only had a bicycle.
He stared out the windshield, trying to decide what to do. If Zip had been burned out of the safe house, then he should have hit the road to a new safe house, or rejoined his people who’d already left. Blunt had said in his message that his breather driver, one of the men they’d used at the congress, was following a group who’d slipped out yesterday.
There was only one reason for Zip to come here, a shopping center full of security cameras: In less than an hour it would be full of people.
Stony turned off the engine. He tucked the car keys under the seat and shut the door without locking it; he didn’t know whether Crystal kept a spare set. He patted the roof and thought, Thanks little Honda. Then he hurried down the stairwell to the street. It took him ten long minutes to find a working pay phone.
“Collect call to Crystal Mayhall, from John,” he told the operator. When his sister picked up the phone he had to interrupt her before she asked too many questions. He told her where to find her car if she refused to take his advice and buy a new one. Then he said, “I need you to do me one last favor.”
* * *
Stony emerged from the stairwell a few minutes later, then found a spot behind a cement pillar where he could lean out and see the Caprice and the panel truck. The two vehicles were parked in the first row, about fifteen spots down from the store entrance. The car was empty, but there was a figure in the cab of the truck, masked by a fog of cigarette smoke. The parking garage was filling up, and people that Stony took to be staff members were being let into the store by a security guard. Two older women in bulky coats stood outside the doors, waiting for ZCMI to open, and more shoppers were probably waiting at the other entrances. It would be a busy shopping day. Christmas was only a week away. Mormons celebrated Christmas, didn’t they?
He leaned back against the pillar and checked his watch. It was 8:35, twenty-five minutes before opening. Were the men from the Caprice in the truck? Was Zip in there with them? And what about Blunt?
The big question: If Blunt was in there, was Stony willing to sacrifice him to stop Zip?
He leaned out again and saw the man in the truck cab looking at him. Stony jerked his head back behind the pillar—and felt something hard press against his temple.
“Holy shit. Zac was right. You’re the kid from Iowa.”
Stony turned his head slightly, trying to ignore the pressure of the metal. It was the man with the Moe Howard haircut. The pistol looked smaller in his hand than it felt against Stony’s temple.
Moe leaned past Stony to look at the store entrance. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to walk to the back of the truck. If you say a word, or try to signal that security guard, I will shoot you in the back of the head.”
Stony stopped himself from putting up his hands. “Is that where Zip is?” he asked. “In the truck?”
“Shut the fuck up. Move.”
Moe lowered the gun, then shoved Stony between the shoulder blades. Stony had been afraid before, but never like this. He’d grown up feeling invulnerable. Unstoppable. But now that he was a twitch of a finger from having his head blown off, he realized that he was not brave at all. He wanted to live. He wanted it desperately. So he was going to do whatever this LD man said.
They walked slowly to the truck, the man a few feet behind him. He looked toward the entrance without moving his head, but now the security guard had disappeared, and the number of waiting customers had swelled to almost twenty. None of them glanced in his direction.
Stony reached the back bumper of the truck, and Moe rapped on the panel door, three quick knocks. The door slid up and a ripe, butcher-shop smell rolled out. Inside were five LD men, in various states of decay. All carried bulky assault weapons. In front was Tevvy, the green-skinned LD who’d thrown Stony around at the congress. After a moment’s hesitation, Tevvy grabbed Stony by the front of his shirt and yanked him into the bed of the truck. Then the big man threw him to the floor and sat on top of him. Another man touched a rifle barrel to Stony’s forehead.
“Are you wearing makeup?” Tevvy asked.
The floo
r was wet beneath Stony’s back. The plywood wall to his right was splattered with blood. Had they already started?
“You can’t do this,” Stony said.
“Oh, we’re doing it all right,” Tevvy said. He turned to one of the other men. “Call Zip. Tell him we’ve got one of Blunt’s people here.” They had radios like Delia’s. Of course they did. Until recently they’d all been part of the same army.
Tevvy said, “Did Delia send you?”
The men loomed over him. Stony said, “Nobody sent me. I haven’t been able to reach anybody. I was afraid you’d, you’d killed them. Is Mr. Blunt still alive?”
One of the men made a series of indistinct sounds, which Stony took a moment to parse into the sentence: “Blunt came after us.” The man’s jaw was unhinged on one side, making every expression a leer. “He torched the house. Came in with a pistol and a—”
Stony couldn’t make out the word. “A what?”
“A machete,” Tevvy said. “It came out of his arm.”
“He cut off their heads!” the leering man said. “He’s a psychopath!”
“He took out four of our people before we shot him down,” Tevvy said. “But he’s dead now. Right, Jason?” He glanced at the one with the Moe Howard haircut.
“Five bodies, five body bags,” Jason said.
Someone rapped three times on the rear door. Tevvy rolled off Stony and nodded to have them open it. Stony lifted his head. Zip and another man climbed in. They seemed to be unarmed, but as Zip stood up his coat swung open to reveal a white T-shirt soaked with blood. He laughed. “Stony Fucking Mayhall!” Someone pulled the sliding door back down.
“Are we still on?” one of the men asked.
“Shit yes, we’re still on,” Zip said. “Bobby’s team is ready to hit the loading dock. We all go in”—he glanced at a wristwatch—fifteen minutes.”
“You can’t do this,” Stony said. “You can’t start the Big Bite.”
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