Thirty-eight
I slammed into the fence, grappled for handholds, toed up from the base rail, went monkey-fast over the top, and fell to the ground on the farther side just as a hail of man-stoppers cracked the top rail and the cross-boards. Bullet-plucked chicken wire twanged and plinked as I went flat and squirmed away.
The land sloped down to a wall of boulders stacked as they might be in a breakwater at the entrance to a harbor. I scrambled down them to a flash-flood channel about twelve feet wide and at least ten feet below the elevated orchard. Crane-placed boulders formed the farther wall, as well.
Maybe the cultists knew what lay beyond the fence, knew that I could stand upright and still be well below their line of fire. The guns fell silent again. In seconds, they would be climbing the fence.
We didn’t get a lot of rain in the Mojave, but from time to time we were hit by a storm of such power that everyone made lame jokes about building an ark. In town, a well-planned and extensive drainage system could handle all but the most intense, protracted downpours. But where there were no city streets and storm drains, the rushing torrents either created temporary lakes or raced through the arroyos that had been carved in the land by centuries of such deluges. This was one such arroyo, fortified for the length of this property to protect the orchard and to prevent further erosion.
If I went to the right, west, I’d eventually reach a two-lane county road. There wouldn’t be much traffic at that hour. Even if I could flag down a vehicle, I would be less likely to escape than to be shot along with whoever stopped to give me a ride.
I hurried to the east, toward the array of buildings that served the orchard. If you’re running for your life, a drainage channel of that kind is no safer than a long hallway, which itself has much in common with a target lane in a shooting range. When my pursuers caught up with me, I wouldn’t have anywhere to hide, because the sloped walls of boulders weren’t as nature might have tumbled them, but were instead stacked tightly and with calculation, to ensure stability.
Far away in the night, a siren wailed. It didn’t give me any hope. The police might have been responding to 911 calls related to the barrage that destroyed the Explorer, but they surely weren’t already aware of events at the orchard.
Delaying a few seconds longer than seemed wise, I finally darted to my right and scrambled up the massive rocks. Maybe the assassins’ weapons, which were more cumbersome than pistols, and whatever other gear they might be carrying slowed them down a little when they had to scale the fence. Or maybe they needed a few seconds to spot me after they reached the channel. Whatever the reason, I made it to the top of the boulders and started toward the nearest building before gunfire rattled again. One brief burst. The keening of a few spent rounds ricocheting off stone. The subsequent silence suggested that I must have gotten ahead of them to an extent that persuaded them not to waste ammunition.
Here the ground was heavily graveled to keep down workday dust, and it crunched underfoot as I approached the first building, which appeared barnlike but massive. Perhaps two hundred feet long and sixty wide. Two stories. Small windows high on the long wall, maybe thirty of them in a row, a few feet under the eave of the curved roof. All were dark. The narrow end of the structure featured two large roll-up doors and a man door between them. Above each truck-size entrance, a security lamp poured forth a pool of light, and a camera gazed down from higher still.
I feared being an easy target in that brightness, but I didn’t want to waste time running wide of it. I sprinted onto that well-lit stage and hoped that we had not arrived at the death scene. Past the first big door. Past the second. Turned right at the corner. For the next several seconds, they would not have me in sight, with or without night-vision goggles.
Twenty or twenty-five yards beyond the first building stood three others, smaller but still large, each a different size, a different shape. This one wood, that one concrete block skinned with stucco. I ventured among them, putting more walls between me and the cultists. The security lights here were dimmer, regular bulbs, not floodlights like the first two. Shadows were plentiful.
Gravel had been spread in a thinner layer here than elsewhere, but silent movement remained impossible. On the upside, I couldn’t leave footprints in a carpet of small loose stones.
I’d had about enough of running, whether under fire or not. The air temperature was seventy-five degrees or a little higher. I was sweating like you would think a pig would sweat; actually, however, pigs don’t sweat, another fact that I learned from Ozzie Boone, who wrote a novel in which an expert on hogs trained three of them to kill an enemy of his. Anyway, my mouth was dry. Throat scratchy. Eyes burning from sweat salt. I needed to get out of the chase, find a hidey-hole.
Acutely aware that I had mere seconds to disappear from sight before the search team streamed among the buildings, rejecting one possible hiding place after another, I came to the back of the two-story block-and-stucco building. Ladder rungs embedded in the wall led to the flat roof. I almost didn’t see them in the dim light from a caged security lamp at the farther end of the structure. They were painted to match the stucco.
When you think of hiding places, you imagine crawling under something or behind something, or into a hole, but you can be easily trapped in such places. I could be trapped on a roof, too, but they would not be able to get me in their sights if I stayed below the parapet wall. And the only way to get to me would be by the ladder. Any fool who climbed it, even mildly suspicious that I might have taken refuge up there, would lose the top of his head when he came into view.
I climbed quickly. The parapet wall, encircling the flat roof, was about three feet high, maybe higher. On my hands and knees, I crawled across the forty-foot-wide roof, intending to take a position directly opposite the ladder.
Halfway across the roof, I realized my mistake. Forty feet would be too far from the ladder. In spite of my aversion to guns, I had learned to use them, but I was not a skilled sniper. And the Glock wouldn’t be as reliable at forty feet as it would be from a distance of, say, six inches.
As I crawled back the way that I’d come, I heard the rattle and crunch of footsteps on gravel. I kept moving, making a lot less noise than the hunters were. Sitting with my back pressed to the parapet wall, immediately to the right of the ladder, I drew the Glock.
As dark as it was on the roof, I could nevertheless see the pale-white stucco of the parapet, the clean sweep of it. If I had been sitting directly opposite the ladder, I would have been spotted the instant the climber’s eyes cleared the top. I would have been the only dark shape silhouetted against the stucco, except for a few low vent stacks.
On the ground, the cultists didn’t like the gravel. Moving among the buildings, they tried to place their feet cautiously, but the loose stones defeated them. After taking several careful steps, each of them made the same decision: to bull forward, clattering through the pebbles without regard to the noise, evidently convinced that too much caution was more dangerous than advancing boldly.
The distant siren had faded to silence. Either the patrol car had been responding to a call about the shooting at the Explorer or to something else altogether that had nothing to do with me and the posse on my trail.
As I waited for the sound of feet on the ladder rungs, I tried to figure out how these people kept finding me. After the events in Nevada, they had revenge on their minds. They were using all of their considerable resources, all their corrupt contacts in everything from the political establishment to law enforcement, to get their hands on me. If they had known about the beach cottage where I’d been living for a couple of months, they would have tried to kill me there. They knew about the Big Dog Bulldog Bagger, but apparently didn’t know that it had been garaged at the cottage.
With my left hand, through my T-shirt, I felt the tiny silver bell at the end of the chain. I pulled it out from under the T-shirt and held it between thumb and forefinger. My racing heart slowed, and my fear diminished.
If my enemy with a million eyes remained blind to the cottage, if they were unable to locate it, their failure had something to do with Annamaria. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed as though I was not only safe from them but also invisible to them while in Annamaria’s company. Almost from the day I met her, I had known that she was more than she appeared to be, that the eccentric things she often said would in fact prove to be the plainest truth if only I knew who and what she was and could consider her words in the context of her identity. I remembered what Mrs. Fischer said: For all you may think differently, I’m only human. Annamaria’s human, too, though she’s more than that, as you no doubt suspect. Human but more than human—and with curious powers that, if fully known, would probably make my paranormal abilities seem pathetic by comparison.
Below, the searchers were still crunching through the gravel, but not with as much enthusiasm. Not as many of them, either. From over near the largest building, the one I’d first come upon, I heard voices, but I couldn’t make out the words.
I turned the miniature bell back and forth between thumb and forefinger, pleased by the smoothness of it. It remained pleasantly cool. Neither the warm night nor my body heat nor the friction of my fingers rubbing the smooth, smooth silver could steal the coolness from it.
Okay, the Big Dog motorcycle. I had known since March, since Nevada, that sooner or later I would be returning to Pico Mundo, that the cultists had plans for my hometown. I knew, as well, I must make the trip alone. This threat was mine to thwart or fail to thwart. My fate, whether or not the promise of the fortune-teller’s card would be kept, depended on my success or failure. Mrs. Fischer insisted on buying a car for me, but I worried that Tim and Annamaria would be determined to make the trip with me if I had a car. I would not put them so directly at risk. Furthermore, Blossom Rosedale had sold her house in Magic Beach and had been intending to join us as soon as her affairs there were concluded; I couldn’t put her in jeopardy, either. Finally, and most important, I didn’t want to rely on whatever protection Annamaria’s immediate presence might afford me. This battle was mine to win or lose, by my best efforts, by my choices, by the right or wrong exercise of my free will. And so Mrs. Fischer had bought for me instead the Big Dog bike.
The cultists found me as I’d driven home to Pico Mundo, found me more than once thereafter; and not all of their success in that regard could be attributed to reverse psychic magnetism. If you believed the condition of humanity to be what they believed it to be, then their patron was the prince of this world, and at least some of his dark power was theirs to draw upon. The quest to find and kill a fry cook with a few marginal psychic talents that he couldn’t fully control might not be a war to them, might be instead a pleasant game. For all of Mrs. Fischer’s wealth and cleverness and loyal friends and courage, she and I might be hopelessly outmatched by the cult.
Two floors below, the sound of gravel scattering underfoot had ceased. I listened, wondering if they had gone or were only standing still, waiting for me to emerge from hiding. The voices over by the main building had fallen silent a couple of minutes earlier.
Although I continued to rub it, the bell remained cool, cool and smooth. I was still sheathed in sweat, dripping—except for the thumb and forefinger on my left hand, which were perfectly dry as they held the tiny silver bell.
I strained to hear the stealthy tread of shoes on ladder rungs. Nothing. There was no climber. No one could ascend that ladder in absolute silence.
I felt the night moving like a sea toward some shore, a great wave of darkness swelling under me, a tsunami under Pico Mundo, under Maravilla County, rising toward a terrible height from which it would fall in upon us, smash us, and sweep us away. And not just the town and county but the state, too, and the country. The feeling grew so strong that I was tempted to rise to my feet and survey the land in all directions, as if the darkness itself might in fact have acquired real mass and the power to wash destruction across a continent.
Just then the largest building in the orchard complex was torn by a massive explosion.
Thirty-nine
The blast rocked the ground, the building under me shuddered, and I nearly bit my tongue as my teeth clacked together. The flash left my eyes less adapted to the dark than they had been an instant earlier. Louder than any crack of thunder that I’d ever heard, the detonation rolled away through the orchard, but in the aftermath a solemn tolling continued in my ears, as if I were not atop a two-story building but were inside the bell tower of a cathedral.
A sudden downpour clattered onto the roof. Not rain. Debris. Splinters of wood. Slabs of wood as long as my arm. Dirt and gravel. Scraps of metal, twisted and hot and smoking. I closed my eyes and averted my face and covered my head with both arms until the stuff stopped peppering me.
Torn and burning, the massive edifice, the almond-processing plant, groaned as if it were a living leviathan, groaned and torqued out of true. At the sight of that structural torment, a woman below let out a wild rebel yell of exaltation, her voice shrill with glee. Another cultist answered her. A second. A third. A fourth. The curved metal roof of the tortured structure bulged and buckled, rivets popping like corn, welded joints shrieking as they separated, widths of sheet metal peeling up to claw like robot hands at the night sky, where the low clouds reflected the sudden rush of fire.
Two hundred feet away, at the farther end of the same building, a second explosion equaled the first. Because it was more distant, the flash seemed less bright. The bang split the night with cleaver-sharp sound. Although the stucco building quaked less violently under me than before, the effect on the processing plant was greater than that of the first explosion. Lit by fire, the immense structure rippled from the farther end to the nearer, as if I were not looking at it directly but were seeing its reflection in the surface of a breeze-ruffled lake. Wood rafters and joists and studs cracked like the whips of the gods, structural metal squealed as it was deformed by the initial shock wave, and what window glass had not shattered in the first blast shattered now.
The behavior of the cultists, when they shot the Explorer to pieces and when they opened fire on me in the almond orchard, had been reckless, but this was insanity. They had not come here with the intention of blowing up that building; they had come here only because they were chasing me. The doors were locked, the windows high. I couldn’t be hiding inside the place. The destruction of the processing plant seemed to be a pointless crime of opportunity. Worse, it seemed to have been done on a whim. They probably thought that I had gotten away clean, and they were frustrated, disappointed, badly in need of a mood boost. Nothing could elevate your spirits more than blowing the crap out of a large building, a point of view that half the lunatics in the world would enthusiastically endorse—if, when you asked their opinion, they weren’t busy beheading people.
I figured we could be certain now that the ton of C-4 hadn’t been hijacked by some other group of maniacs, that these apostles of the demon Meridian were indeed the culprits. The amount detonated in this instance was at most a few pounds, which left them with more than enough to break the Malo Suerte Dam if that happened to be their intention. Maybe C-4 was the least of it.
But if they did intend some epic act of evil, destruction on a scale so enormous that it would assure this night a place in the history books, wasn’t it stupid to waste their time and risk compromising their main objective by blowing up a nut-processing plant in an almond orchard? Just because I’d given them the slip and they were miffed? They were probably fist-pumping when they let out those rebel yells, maybe doing an end-zone dance of triumph. They appeared to be spiraling out of control. The discipline that had marked their scheming in the past seemed to be dissolving.
Great tongues of flame seethed from the roof of the stricken building, licked through every crack in its walls, spewed out of the small high windows. Huddled against the parapet, I was at most eighty or ninety feet from the blaze. The heat began to wring more sweat from me than had
the long run through the cottonwoods and the almond grove. Smoke, thus far churning into the night sky, suddenly rushed in thick gray masses from the side of the structure and plumed toward me as a portion of the wall collapsed.
I couldn’t stay on the roof. If smoke inhalation didn’t kill me, it would cause fits of coughing, which would locate me for the cultists. If they didn’t want to brave the climb and come after me, they could just wait for me to suffocate. Or they could blow this place up, with me atop it. In fact, maybe they had already placed more packages of C-4. Maybe they were going to destroy every building at the orchard.
I rose, turned to the ladder, and looked down, pretty sure that I would see a grinning face and a gun muzzle. No one waited below. Although some shadows danced here and there, the graveled ground between this building and the other two was largely well revealed by throbbing reflections of firelight. I hoped that the cultists were either gathered elsewhere to watch the fiery spectacle or had gone away altogether.
Holstering the Glock, I swung onto the ladder and started down just as a tide of smoke washed across the roof. Even though I was under the worst of the fumes for the moment, the air smelled wicked, a bath of toxic chemicals. At the bottom of the ladder, I drew the pistol, surveyed my surroundings, saw no one.
Holding my breath, I ran toward the last two buildings, toward the space between them. No one would hear footsteps in gravel above the roar of the flames and the thousand sounds of distress issuing from the doomed building.