Martin extricated himself and followed her line of sight: pale sky, a couple of plump white clouds, some dried weeds, little outbuildings, and rusted piles of junk, all bounded by the high cinder-block fence.
“I hate to tell you, Mom, but that’s pretty ugly. Save yourself for the good stuff.”
He marshaled them along to the outer gate. Mom shaded her eyes as she squinted up at the sky and tripped over rails, rocks, pebbles—everything. Dad maintained a distracted commentary on the pieces of equipment they passed. “See that? That moves earth; you can tell. They must have moved a lot of it to make that access space you showed us.”
Then Chip rolled them through the outer gate, and even Dad was speechless.
Martin stood at the top of the hill that fell away for miles into the distance, and joy swelled in his heart. Without the blockade of buildings and fence, the strong wind pushed and shoved at him, and he opened his arms to let it flow past. Ahead, a flock of birds swooped and turned like a single entity, and Mom put her hands over her mouth and started to cry.
“Now, this looks better,” Martin told her. “See those? They’re blackbirds. And this crazy bot named Hertz told me that the bushes over there with the silver leaves are sagebush. No, sagebrush. Anyway, same thing.”
He reached for the water bottles to load Chip up again, but the German shepherd barked happily at him and tore off at a dead run, then came swinging back around like a boomerang. Martin grabbed for him as he whirled past, and took off running in his wake. “Chip, you moron! Get back here!” he yelled. But it felt good to yell, and good to run, while his parents put their arms around each other and looked at the world in amazement.
Dad cleared his throat and picked up his canvas satchel. “Where did those agents go?” he asked gruffly. “How far do we have to go to get away from them?”
“We can go wherever we want,” Martin decided, and the realization made him almost burst with excitement. “Anyplace we wanna go, that’s where we’re going. All this out here is ours.”
Dad looked around. “Where’s the fishpond?”
“Okay, fish,” Martin said. “We’ll go this way, to the mountains. There’s a lake there, and I’ve seen rivers. They’ve got fish in them.”
They started off. Dad kept wiping his eyes.
“I know, Walt,” Mom said. “I never imagined a place could be so beautiful.”
“It’s not that,” Dad said, looking embarrassed. “It’s just that it’s so bright.”
“Oh, hey,” Martin said. “We gotta get you guys covered up! And me, too, even though I’m used to it. Pull out your sheets. Dad, did you bring a sheet or just a blanket? No, not the blanket. Get your sheet.”
They helped one another drape the sheets over their heads and shoulders. Martin couldn’t help laughing when they were done. Dad was enveloped in brown-and-green plaid, and Mom in pale lilac with blue flowers.
“You look like a ghost, Mom,” he said. “A ghost with no fashion sense.”
“Well, you look like a laundry pile,” she countered. “And now I can’t see the view.”
They shambled on their way again, hampered by their protective layer. After a while, Dad stopped wiping his eyes, but by then, he was puffing loudly enough to be heard over the wind hissing through the wildflowers.
“Need . . . to stop,” he panted. “Pack and tackle . . . too heavy. We can just . . . stay here.”
Martin turned around. The dome still loomed behind them, a gigantic steel bubble gleaming fiercely in the midday sun, and he could still make out the line of track that the maroon packet car would travel once the agents’ interrogation of Fred was complete.
“We haven’t gone very far,” he pointed out. “We gotta keep going. We need to get out of sight.”
Dad dropped his fishing gear and turned to look back at the dome. Then he mopped the sweat from his face with the corner of his sheet. “You’re right,” he panted. “Too close.”
“Walt, I’m sorry,” Mom said, “but I’ve told you for years you need to get daily exercise. It’s very important to lose abdominal fat. All the morning shows say so.”
Across their line of march grew a shabby thicket of scrub oak trees with thick, waxy, ugly leaves. They entered the thicket and could no longer walk straight ahead, but had to weave in and out among the rough trunks. Birds swooped across their path or sat on the spindly branches and sang.
“This is good,” Martin said. “It’ll be harder to find us in here. That should make you happy, Dad.”
There was no answer.
Martin turned around and pushed back his sheet so he could see better. “Hey, Dad?” he called. “Mom, we’ve lost Dad!”
They hurried back the way they had come and soon found Dad. He had sagged down onto a low outcrop of rock. His mouth was open. “Tried to . . . call,” he gasped. “Had to . . . sit down.”
“Walt!” Mom said. “Walt, goodness! You’re so red, you’re purple!”
Martin disconnected a water bottle. Dad drank some and made a face. “Already warm,” he groaned.
“Look, we need to get going,” Martin said, picking up Dad’s pack. “I’ll carry this if you can get the fishing stuff.”
After that, they made good time. Dad sauntered along while Martin struggled with the heavy pack. Martin’s temper began to wear thin, but he refused to slow down. He was determined to show Dad up.
By early evening, they came to the bank of a lazy stream about half a foot deep and fifteen feet wide. It flowed over pebbles and orange dirt, cutting tiny channels for itself and leaving narrow sandbars high and dry. Long, curvy patterns in the wet sand seemed to trap the tracks of waves. Tall cottonwoods shaded the little stream, and many delicate bird tracks stippled the shore.
“Let’s stay here tonight,” Martin said, dropping Dad’s pack and rubbing his sore arms. “It looks like a fun place to explore.”
“It does,” Mom agreed.
Dad unwound himself from his plaid sheet and looked around in vague confusion. “But . . . ,” he began.
Martin was easing his own pack from his shoulders. The minor movements this exercise required of his strained limbs felt like the cartilage-popping contortions of a circus athlete.
“But what?” he asked crossly.
“I don’t know.” Dad lifted his hands. “It’s just that there’s nothing here.”
“We’ve got water,” Mom pointed out. She was folding her stained sheet into a tidy rectangle. “Martin, can we drink it?”
“I’ve got a filter for it,” Martin said.
“But—no house,” Dad said, turning to gesture at their surroundings. “No chairs, no beds, no fridge, no cooker, no table, no plates, no nothing. No television, and tonight’s the last night of Chef’s Got Game.”
“Are you serious?” Martin cried. “You’ve got a million great things to check out here, and all you can think about is the stupid television?”
Mom silenced him with a look, and he stomped off. Then she stepped up to Dad and put her arms around his waist. “It’s an adventure,” she said. “Our first real adventure, Walt. We don’t need an easy chair.”
“Maybe you don’t,” Dad said. But he kissed her.
Martin pulled the pairs of bottles off Chip. More than a few were already empty. He took the filter from his pack, found a spot near the bank where the river was deeper than a couple of inches, pushed the hose down into the water, and started to pump. His sore arms immediately protested. The pump took a lot of force. Hertz had made it seem so easy.
Martin wondered for a few uneasy seconds about Hertz. The rugged outdoorsman had seemed normal at first, as if he belonged in the great outdoors. He had known everything about how to survive out here, and yet he was a bot. Where was he now? Were there other bots like him, wandering the hills? Martin pushed the thought away.
Dad came over to see what he was doing. “I’ll take a turn, son,” he said, reaching for the pump, and Martin’s resentment toward him eased.
While they pum
ped, the heat of the day backed off. Then the birdsong died down. Martin glanced up to find that the glade around them had turned golden, and at that same moment, Mom let out a shriek.
“It’s red!” she cried. “It’s cherry red! You have to come see this!”
They followed her up a little rise. The sun was setting. Sedately, it gathered its colors in the peaceful western sky. Gold blended into rose, which blended into vermilion, then finally coalesced into the sun’s broad crimson ball. The sun withdrew with tremendous dignity before the coming night.
Dad was speechless, and Mom cried.
The clear sky changed almost imperceptibly in the aftermath of the sunset as it faded into twilight. A cool wind flowed over them, the first breath of the chilly night breeze. “You gotta watch for the stars,” Martin advised. “One minute, you won’t see any, and the next minute, you’ll see five or six.”
“I think I see one,” Mom said.
Dad smacked his own arm. “Hey! Look at that!” The meager light revealed what seemed to be a small black tangle of sewing thread next to a dark smear. “I saw it!” Dad said. “It stuck me with a needle. It took a sample of blood!”
“Oh yeah,” Martin said. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just this weird kind of bug.”
“It’s a tracking bug,” Dad said. “Tracking us. For the agents!”
Mom plucked the delicate tangle from his arm and tried to examine it in the failing light. The stars came out, but she wasn’t looking at them anymore.
Martin shook his head. “No, Dad. I’ve gotten stuck by those lots of times. They just whine around. And those A and Z twins don’t even know we’re gone yet.”
“Not twins,” Dad said. “They’re clones. All the agents are clones of the same person. I’ve worked with agents three times, and they look the same, just a little older or younger. ‘You know how we took over the Agency?’ one of them said to me once. ‘We weren’t smarter or stronger than the other agents. It’s just that we never give up.’ They never give up. And now they’re tracking us.”
Martin started to scoff, but then he didn’t. The ice blue stare of Hertz intruded uncomfortably on his thoughts. Hertz, with his built-in killing device. With the radio link back to his masters.
I lost someone very important to me, Hertz had said. But later, he’d told Martin he’d never seen another human being. Had Hertz been placed in the wilderness to track somebody down? Someone he had been programmed to find?
“I can’t believe I let you talk us into coming out here,” Dad said. He stalked to his backpack, jerked his sheet off the ground, and muffled up in it. “The bugs in the suburb listened to us and watched us, but we didn’t have bugs with needles!”
CHAPTER SIX
When Martin awoke in the morning, the sun was already up and birds were starting to flit among the branches. A trail of tiny black ants was taking a shortcut along a fold of his sheet. He sat up to find a thin wild dog the color of gray dust drinking from the bank across the river. It stopped when he moved and stared at him through amber eyes. Then it trotted away.
Mom was working on a watercolor of the tall cottonwoods against the morning sky. “It’s amazing how different the colors are out here,” she said. “I’m mixing colors I’ve never used before.”
Dad had his pants rolled up, and he was splashing around in the river. Martin thought he was having fun, but Dad waded back to shore with a frown.
“The fish out here are no larger than my little finger,” he said. “I don’t know why you told me to bring my fishing gear, and I have no idea what we’re going to eat.”
“This is a tiny river,” Martin said. “It’s got tiny fish in it. Trust me, they get bigger than that.”
They packed up for the hike. Mom was disappointed when Martin made them wrap up in their sheets again.
“Look,” Martin said, tucking his sheet securely around him, “you wouldn’t even believe what I looked like on my second day. I hurt so much, I thought I was gonna die. You’re pink on the nose already. You don’t wanna get worse.”
They trekked toward the mountains. Dad insisted on helping to carry his pack, so he and Martin slung it between them, and each held a strap. Martin soon grew to hate this. They had to walk so close together that they made each other stumble, and Martin could no longer pick his own way through the rocks and scratchy weeds.
The ground began to rise and fall in short, steep hills. The higher ground was hard for them to tackle because of the weight of their packs and the burning sunshine, but the gullies between the hills were so choked with short bushy scrub that there was little room to walk.
At their first break, Chip scared up a covey of quail. The birds flew off with such a loud beating of wings that Mom and Dad jumped and gasped, and even Chip sprang back. Martin laughed at them, but Dad grew stern.
“There’s danger out here, son,” he said. “You may choose not to think about it, but some of us have to.”
“I think about it,” Martin protested. He had just discovered a wonderful new variety of bug. It lived inside a little cone in the orange sand. It had huge jaws like tweezers, and everywhere it went, it scooted backward on its soft little behind. It was scooting across Martin’s hand right now. Martin was completely enchanted with it.
“And what about the wild animals we keep seeing? And those plants with spikes all over them? And what about this sheet? Why do we have to muffle up like children at a costume party? Because the light’s trying to kill us, that’s why.”
“It doesn’t kill you,” Martin pointed out.
Dad ignored him. “I think it’s time we faced facts,” he said sorrowfully. “This may not be blowing sand and poison gas—although it might have been when the domes were built— but I’m afraid it’s just as impossible to live out here the way it is. Our leaders were right about putting us inside domes.”
Martin was so angry, he started to shake. He dropped the wonderful new bug back into the ruin of its home. “Our leaders!” he said. “Our leaders were maniacs.”
“Martin!” Mom cried.
“They were, Mom. No kidding! They were evil cold-blooded killers. The blowing sand was just a big trick so they could kill off anybody they wanted to.”
Dad drew himself up. “That kind of speech is hateful and offensive, particularly coming from a child.”
“Walt, it’s my fault,” Mom said. “When Cassie left, I’ll admit I thought horrible things, and I let Martin know about them. But, Martin, you can see now how wrong I was. Even Cassie’s school turned out to be true. And if we’re in trouble, that’s our fault, not the fault of our leaders. We’re the ones who broke the rules.”
“Martin broke the rules,” Dad said. “Son, you’re ungrateful. You don’t know how lucky we are. Were. How lucky we were.”
Martin stood up and looked his parents squarely in the eye.
“Oh, yeah, I do know,” he said. “I know exactly how lucky we were. See, way back when, about a hundred years ago, a President got to thinking. ‘What do I need all these people for?’ he thought, because we were sick a lot, and we needed medicine, and big crowds of us didn’t have jobs. So he said, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll plan this big epidemic, like everybody’s going to die, and I’ll get the science people to help me make it look real. And people will be so scared, they’ll give up living in this beautiful world and hide under my stupid little domes.’”
Mom put up her hands as if she were pushing his words away. “Oh, Martin, that’s wicked!” she said. “How could you make up such a thing?”
“Because I didn’t make it up. I got told the whole story. And the guy who told it to me should know, too, because he’s a scientist, and he knew all about what the science people did to help. He’s the one who stole Cassie and the other Wonder Babies before the government could collect them. He’s the reason they’ve got a school, and he says it’ll be really bad if the government ever finds out where they are.”
Dad shook his head in disbelief. “So the domes were a
fraud? Are you serious?”
“Does this sound like a joke?” Martin said. “The President decided if he only had a few people, he could give them everything he wanted them to have, and everybody around the world would marvel at how great his people were. But before he could get to those great people, first he had to kill off nine hundred and ninety-six people out of every thousand. He only kept four. Four out of every thousand! Now, that’s what I call sick.”
Dad and Mom looked deeply troubled. Mom kept glancing over her shoulder, as if she suspected some walls might have followed them into the wilderness and be lurking behind a juniper bush, listening. Dad turned away and busied himself with a water bottle. “Anyway, you have no proof,” Dad said.
“I kinda wish I didn’t,” Martin said. “It’s not my favorite thing, but I’ve seen the real, old suburbs, and they cover more ground than we can walk in a day. Every house is ruined, but every one is bigger than ours. And their roads were bigger, and their buildings went way tall, and their grass and flowers weren’t just plastic stickers on a window, but plants in a whole square of ground in front of the house, as big as our house back home.”
Mom tapped Dad on the shoulder. “That’s true,” she said in a low voice. “I learned about that from Granny.”
“I’ve seen those flowers, Mom,” Martin said. “Big ones. Beautiful. They’re still there. Thousands of houses, Dad. Nobody was dying. They were all just fine.”
Dad stared at Martin. Then he said the last thing Martin expected to hear.
“Houses.”
“What?” Martin said. “What are you talking about?”
“Houses. You said there are houses out here. I want to see them. We need a house of our own.”
Martin shook his head. “You don’t get it. Those things are worse than a collector bot. I know. I’ve had to run away from both.”
Dad dropped the subject, and they started off again. For half an hour, they toiled up a gradual slope. Once they reached its broad summit, they finally stood above the scrubby growth that had blocked their view of their surroundings for so long. The gray mountains loomed over them now, a daunting spectacle. Dark green pine trees mantled the rounded lower slopes and marched diagonally up the mountains’ rocky faces, clinging to long cracks. Behind the nearest peaks, Martin could see more distant, higher peaks, whose cliffs and crags were bare of life.
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