“We haven’t gotten very far,” Dad said, disappointed. “HM1 is right over there.”
Two or three miles away, a dome caught the full force of the afternoon sun and reflected it toward them in a blinding starburst of light. Martin squinted at the shimmering halo, and then he stood on his tiptoes and squinted to the south. Sure enough, another starburst dazzled him from that direction, high on a hill and far away.
“There’s our dome, Dad, way back over there. The dome you’re looking at is Fred’s suburb, BNBRX.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I came past BNBRX twice, on the other side of it. See that short hill on the other side of the dome? You can just see there’s something white there; it looks like a big salad bowl when you’re next to it. I think it must be Points Visual, where the camera is. That’s where the packet lines split too. One line comes to us, one goes to BNBRX, and one goes up north, toward the abandoned suburbs.”
Mom shaded her eyes and leaned forward, as if six inches of space would make all the difference in getting a clearer view. “I see the white thing,” she said. “I almost think I see the packet line, but that’s probably just wishful thinking.”
Dad squinted hopelessly. “I don’t see a white bowl. So you say the abandoned suburb is ahead? Can you see it? We need to look at those houses.”
“It’s a long way away,” Martin said. “Across open country where those agent guys could spot us. There’s even a weird bot out there. Chip didn’t like him.”
That wasn’t strictly true. Hertz hadn’t liked Chip; he was the only bot in Martin’s experience who hadn’t. But that wasn’t something Martin felt like thinking about right now.
“Can you see them from here?” Mom asked. “Because I see things that look like houses. Right over there.”
She pointed to a patch of thick forest to the north of them, nestled at the feet of the gray mountains. Sure enough, Martin could see the ragged outlines of tumbledown structures poking through the dusty green leaves.
“I can’t really tell,” he lied. But even Dad could see them.
“Fantastic!” he said. “With any luck, we’ll have a front door to close tonight.”
Martin tagged after his parents as they headed down the hill. He had goose bumps on his arms.
“Dad, no! Why do we need a front door? We’re fine without one.”
“I think he’s right, Walt,” Mom said. “I like sleeping under the stars. It’s nice to feel the air moving past our faces.”
Dad’s expression didn’t change.
“We face more kinds of danger out here than I care to count,” he said. “The least we can do is go indoors at nightfall.”
Martin shivered. “There’s things indoors. Way worse things inside than outside.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see about that.”
The yellow blaze of sunset was upon them by the time they reached the edge of the forest that held Dad’s houses. Tall shade trees towered above the native scrub. Long shadows stretched across a flat, narrow patch of rock seeded here and there with the hardiest of weeds. Mom mistook it for a dry streambed. Martin was the one who identified it as a road.
Twilight fell as they walked along it. The shade trees bent over them as if they were closing the travelers in. Dad stopped every few feet to peer through the tangle of tall weeds at the road’s edge. “Where did those houses go?” he said. “We need to find a place for the night.”
“Dad, the last thing we wanna do is spend the night in one of them,” Martin said. “Those places, it’s like living your own game of Make-a-Mutant Battle Machines House-to-House Hunt-Down.”
“You can’t equate real life with some silly game,” Dad said. “Your mother and I need you to be mature about this.”
The first house they found was about fifty feet from the road. The walk to its doorstep was an obstacle course around ancient machinery and old junk, as if a garage sale had spread itself out across the ground and then, lacking visitors, had mummified. Mom got her foot caught in a mesh of twisted wire. Chip lit his eyebeams, and Martin dug out his flashlight so they could figure out how to free her.
“See what I mean?” Martin said, scanning the shadows anxiously. “And we aren’t even inside.”
They climbed broken steps onto a wide concrete porch. The front door had warped into a saucer and half lay, half leaned in place, holding on to the doorframe by the lower hinge alone. When Dad and Martin tried to maneuver it out of the way, it snapped off the frame with a sound like a gunshot. From the trees came a fluttering and scurrying. From inside the house too.
“Dad, this place is occupied,” Martin said desperately.
“Son, I think you need to keep quiet.”
Dad set his pack and gear down on the porch. He took Martin’s flashlight, walked around the fallen door, and went into the dark house. Dad took two loud, creaky steps. Then his shadowy form vanished in a dull, splintering crunch, and the flashlight went flying through the air.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Chip! Light!” Martin yelled.
The twin beams of Chip’s eyes lit up Dad’s face, contorted in terror. His head was where his feet should have been. For one sickening second, Martin thought his father had been decapitated. Then he picked out grimy arms, scrabbling for purchase on the rotten floorboards. The rest of Dad appeared to be gone.
“Floor! Floor!” Dad gasped. Small white insects, like tiny ghosts, flitted across his upper body and disappeared into the rips and gaps of his buttoned shirt.
“Walt!” cried Mom, rushing forward. Chip danced sideways to bodycheck her, and the room fell into darkness again. Martin caught hold of Mom’s arm. He heard hoarse rattles as Dad fought for breath.
“Gotta stay here,” Martin said. “The floor’s gone.”
“Oh, Walt!” she cried.
Chip’s eyebeams picked Dad out from the shattered floor again. Martin could see the veins standing out on Dad’s temples. Dad gurgled and coughed, and one of the white bugs came sailing out of his mouth and landed near Martin’s sneaker.
“Chip, can you stretch out long?” Martin asked. “See if you can reach him.”
The bot dog crouched down in the doorway and stretched himself out. Two long vines appeared to sprout where his front legs should be. Quickly, they wrapped around Dad at floorboard level, right below the armpits. The boards squeaked loudly in protest as Chip’s paws levered Dad loose, and Dad came crawling out over the warped door.
“Good job, Chip!” Martin said, and Chip scrambled up from the doorway to lick his ear.
“Are you all right?” Mom asked. She made Dad sit on the concrete steps. “Let’s get those nasty things off you, Walt; they’re even in your hair. You’ve torn your shirt. Oh, there’s blood. Martin, we need the first aid cream.”
Dad’s face was haggard in the light from Chip’s eyebeams, and he bled from a dozen scrapes. The knees of his pants had shredded, and the left sleeve of his shirt flopped around his elbow.
“I told you, Dad,” Martin said. “You looked just like the little people in David’s ImCity game when they stepped on slime demons.”
“Martin Revere Glass,” said his mother, “this is not a joke!”
“Hey, I’m not the one who called it silly,” Martin countered. “Maybe now Dad believes me about these houses.”
“He’s right, Walt. We were better off by the little river. First thing tomorrow, we’re getting out of here.”
Dad managed to get to his feet, and they limped away from the deadly structure. But he was too shaken to travel far, and they wound up bedding down in the middle of the stony road. It was by far the most uncomfortable choice they could have made, and the broken house seemed dangerously near. As night fell, it looked more and more like a scene from Martin’s monster games. He twisted to and fro on his bedroll, scanning for enemies.
The moon shone its pale beams through the whispering canopy overhead. Small pools of moonlight lapped the weedy ground and picked out and ennobl
ed odd bits of junk in the yard. Dad dozed off, then thrashed as if he were falling through the floor again. His sudden movement startled Martin, and something else, too: a black shape nearby went crashing off into a thicket of young trees.
The oppressive feeling of danger hung over Martin’s restless sleep. He could sense the presence of the hideous house brooding over them as they lay side by side on the weedy road. He could feel silent shapes watching them from the bushes. He jerked himself awake and sat up.
Chip was on his feet, barking. Several pairs of eyes caught the light of the moon. Dark forms circled Martin’s little camp— three or four at least. Martin couldn’t make out what they were, but they were big, bigger than Chip, prowling on four legs and snuffling close to the ground.
Chip’s barks had turned into a savage roar. But the glowing eyes refused to retreat. They shifted and winked and drew closer.
Then Chip sprang over Martin, and the eyes rushed to meet him.
Martin couldn’t see what happened, but he heard it. He heard crunching and tearing. He heard slobbering, choking breath. And over it all, he heard the sound of Mom sobbing, high and quick, like birdsong.
One of the assailants got away. Its strident yelps of pain diminished in the distance. The other attackers didn’t escape. Martin thought he heard weak scrabbling coming from nearby, but the sighing wind drowned it out even as it brought to him the nauseating odor of blood.
Chip came back. Worried growls bubbled out of him, low and muttering, like an old man’s mumbled complaints.
“Tris?” That was Dad, very quiet, as if other things might overhear him. But those other things weren’t listening anymore. Martin thought he could make out a lump on the dark ground before the evil old house, an addition to the eternal garage sale.
“Walt!” That was Mom, a little breathless, and then the two shadows that were his parents locked together.
“Chip, how are you doing, boy?” he whispered. His hands found Chip’s ears in the dark, nervous and pricked, swiveling this way and that. Martin rubbed the soft fur around them.
“Martin, are you all right?” Dad’s voice was stronger now.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think so. My leg’s asleep.”
“Is the bot all right?”
“He’s just a little upset right now.”
“Martin . . . are you sure that thing is safe?”
Chip tucked his big head into Martin’s chest, and his growls changed to whimpers.
“If you mean, did he save our lives just now, then yeah, I guess he’s safe.”
Mom’s hand reached out of the darkness to pat Chip’s ruff. “Good dog,” she murmured.
They got no more sleep that night. At Dad’s suggestion, they sat back-to-back in order to keep watch in all directions. Chip sat up between Mom and Martin, snuffling the breeze to scent for enemies.
Daylight brought a grisly scene and a loud buzzing of flies. Three huge dogs lay sprawled among the weeds and junk in front of the evil house. They had very short, smooth black-andtan coats that revealed their bulky muscles and lean flanks. All three were bigger than Chip.
Strange injuries marked them. One had a long rip in its hide from breastbone to tail, as if someone had pulled on its zipper. Inside the tear was dark, greasy flesh. Another lay with its head turned around to face its tail, its round white eyes bulging out of its sockets in the manner of a tasteless joke.
“Would you look at that!” Dad marveled.
Chip wouldn’t. He didn’t come near the dead dogs. He skulked on the opposite side of the road, head and tail drooping. “Come here,” Martin coaxed. “You were a good dog. You should be proud.”
But Chip was anything but proud.
“They would have killed us,” Mom said in a low voice. “Isn’t that right? We’d be looking like this right now.”
Dad cleared his throat. “Maybe,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she’d asked for his opinion about a fishing tournament. “But my sense is that dogs wouldn’t kill in quite this fashion. More bite marks. More tearing, I think. Something that looked . . . more like steak.”
Martin’s stomach churned. The dead bodies, with their glazed eyes staring into infinity, seemed invested with a horrible power and knowledge.
“Okay, let’s get out of here,” he said. “I say we head back the way we came. There was this great lake back there, I saw it on my first night out, we must have gone right by it and not known it. It had birds all over it. Big ones. I bet that means big fish, too.”
“No,” Mom said, and her voice was unusually stern. “No, Martin, your father’s right. We aren’t safe out here with these wild animals roaming around. We need a front door of our own.”
Martin’s jaw dropped. “Mom!”
“I’ll tell you what we do, Tris,” Dad said. “We’ll investigate every single one of these old houses until we find a place that’s fit for us to live. We’re putting walls between us and them, and that’s a promise.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Trailing behind his parents as they hiked down the old road, Martin tried to talk them out of their decision. Instead of nagging or whining, he tried honesty: he attempted to convey some idea of the dangerous enemies these houses held. But honesty failed in spectacular fashion. He wasn’t surprised. It usually did.
Decayed houses crowded the underbrush at the edge of the road like grotesque monsters shambling into the light. Their busted doors seemed to leer at Martin; the sunlight glittering on their broken windows winked with obscene meaning. The roof of the house closest to him had fallen in, so that it looked like it was wearing a hat pulled down over one eye. “I swear, I’ve seen zombies hiding in better-looking houses than these,” he told them. “We’re gonna be sorry once it gets to be night.”
Dad ignored him. He sized up the line of sinister wooden buildings as briskly as if they were new scooters. “We won’t go look at that one,” he said, pointing. “Too worn. It’s gone all soft.”
“Walt, this one coming up doesn’t look so bad.”
“Great, Mom,” Martin groaned. “That one looks just like our house back home . . . in a few million years, maybe.”
Their shabby road wound around the base of a steep, forested hill. Other roads branched off it. Dozens of ruined houses came into view. “Wonderful,” Martin whispered. “A whole zombie suburb.”
They came around a long curve, and the road changed. It split into two roads running parallel to each other, with a strip of tall weeds and bushes between them. The concrete slabs of the two roads heaved and tilted at awkward angles.
Enormous trees lined each side of the new double road. A number of them were hollow black shells with only a spray or two of green leaves to show that they still lived. Others were dead, rattling skeletons with brittle branches. Several had fallen across the roadway.
Off to the left was open ground, a break from the dilapidated houses. Iron swing set frames and the remains of a stand of bleachers stood among bushes and wildflowers.
“That was a park,” Mom said.
A couple of hundred yards beyond the old bleachers, the ground lapped up to the edge of a steep incline covered with massive pine trees. Directly above that slope rose gray granite cliffs.
“Wow!” Martin said. “The mountain starts right over there.” The nearness and hugeness of it made his pulse race with excitement. It was accessible. It was personal. Heck, it was part of a park! What fun he and David would have had if they’d had a mountain in their park.
“A park is good news,” Dad opined. “The best houses are by the park.”
A shallow, pebbly stream flowed down from beneath the dark pine trees at the mountain’s foot and cut across the park parallel to their street. It sang loudly with its own importance.
“Come on, Chip,” Martin called, and they hurried over to investigate.
The stream wasn’t deeper than two or three feet. Its streambed was full of light gray rocks, and it foamed over these minor obstacles with great excitement, as
if it were a fearsome cataract. Martin liked it right away.
Chip liked it too. He waded into it up to his hocks, and it tried to sweep his tail downstream. He bit at the water while Martin plunked stones into it. Then the two of them ran back to make their report.
“I saw fish, Dad. They were brown, maybe this big, with little spots all over them. Even though the water’s moving really fast, they didn’t move.”
“That’s some good news at last.”
“Look at that,” Mom said. “Over there.”
Across from the park, grand houses were set far back from the street, all but invisible beneath tough gray-green vines. Handsome details peeked through the leaves: stately pillars on either side of the driveway, a bay window here, a carved lintel there. They were like nothing Martin had seen before.
“Maybe families were bigger then,” Dad said. “I think you could fit twenty people in that one.”
Chip sniffed at a statue of a little boy tilted at an angle next to the street. Its stone skin was green with mold, and ivy smothered it; only the head and one chubby arm escaped. Under a massive tree were the concrete ends of what had been a graceful bench. Its boards were gone, leaving only the suggestion of leisure: the ghost of a seat.
“It’s cool,” Martin said, “but spooky. I like the park better.”
They investigated the larger houses as the day wore on. Several of the buildings were promising, but others, being bigger, had just fallen into more dramatic decay. Entire walls of glass had shattered and exposed their rooms to the elements, and massive beams were wedged precariously against shifting supports.
Evening came early in the lee of the towering mountain. A hush had already fallen under the cool shadows of the trees. Birds sang quiet, senseless songs in the lush, overgrown bushes. Even the loud stream in the park sounded subdued now. It had wandered away, and a portion of its water had been diverted into a large, quiet pond.
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