Blind Lake (35 page)

Now he wanted the knife in his hand, ready to use. Worse, he couldn’t help thinking that he might have left some blood on the blade after all; and the idea of Sue Sampel’s blood touching his skin, invading his pores, was grotesque and intolerable. But in the absolute darkness of the stalled elevator he had a hard time finding the loose edge of the tape. He had wrapped himself up like a fucking mummy.

Nor had he given much thought to the physical problem of peeling what seemed like a quarter-mile of duct tape off his hairy leg. He was almost certainly taking some skin off along with it. He drew deep, gasping breaths, the way Marguerite had learned to do in that Lamaze class they had attended before Tessa’s birth. He was leaking tears by the time the last layer of tape came loose, and when he jerked that away it took the knife with it, slicing a neat little chunk out of his calf along the ankle.

That was too much. Ray screamed in pain and frustration, and his screaming made the stalled elevator seem much smaller, unbearably small. He opened his eyes wide, straining for light—he had heard that the human eye could register even a single photon—but there was nothing, only the sting of his own sweat.

I could die here
, he thought, and that would be very bad; or, worse, what if he was wrong about the Eye, what if Shulgin found him here after the crisis had passed, raving and with an incriminating weapon in his hand? The knife, the fucking knife. He couldn’t keep it and he couldn’t get rid of it.

What if the walls closed on him like teeth?

He wondered whether—if it became necessary—he could successfully kill himself with the knife. Like a Bushido warrior, falling on his sword. How badly, how quickly could he hurt himself with a six-inch blade? Would it be more efficient to slit his wrists or stick himself in the belly? Or should he try to cut his own throat?

He thought about death. What it would be like to sink away from his own untidy self, to drift deeper and deeper into the static and empty past.

He imagined he heard Marguerite’s voice in his ear, whispering words he didn’t understand:

ignorance

curiosity

pain

love

—more evidence, as if he needed it, that the O/BEC madness had already infected him…

And then the lights winked back on.

“God! Fuck!” Ray said, momentarily dazed.

The elevator hummed to life and resumed its journey downward.

Ray discovered he had bitten his tongue. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out onto the green tiled floor, rolled his cuff down over his bleeding ankle, and waited for the door to open.

“Maybe she went to look for her mother,” Elaine said, but when Chris called Tessa’s name there was no answer, and the brightly lit ground-floor corridor of the clinic was empty as far as he could see.

He took out his pocket server and spoke her name again. No answer. He tried Marguerite. Also no answer.

“This is just spooky,” Elaine said.

It was worse than that. Chris felt as if he had stepped into one of those nightmares in which something absolutely essential had evaporated in his hands. “What room is Sue in?”

“Two-eleven,” Elaine said promptly. “Upstairs.”

“You ring the duty nurse and ask her to look for Tess. I’ll find Marguerite.”

Elaine watched Chris sprint for the stairwell. Elaine herself wasn’t terribly worried. The kid was probably down in the cafeteria or off riding a gurney cart. “Quite the family man,” she said to Vogel. “Our Chris.”

“Don’t begrudge him what he found here,” Vogel murmured. “It could end at any time.”

He discovered Sue Sampel very nearly asleep, alone in her darkened room. “Marguerite left already,” she said. “Chris? Is that you? Chris? Is Marguerite lost or something?”

“I can’t raise her server. It’s nothing to worry about it.”

She yawned. “Bullshit.
You’re
worried.”

“Go on back to sleep, Sue.”

“I think I will. I think I have to. But I can tell you’re lying. Chris? Don’t get lost in the dark, Chris.”

“I won’t,” he promised. Whatever that meant.

He walked the hallway from end to end, opening doors. Apart from the room where Adam Sandoval lay motionless in his coma there were only empty storage spaces, locked pharmaceutical closets, vacant boardrooms, and darkened offices.

His server buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and talked to Elaine, who told him the night nurse had called Security and that the staff on duty were beginning a room-to-room search. “But there’s something going on out at the Eye, too. I got hold of Ari Weingart, who says the Alley is being evacuated.”

Chris looked at the server in his hand: if his was working, why not Marguerite’s or Tessa’s?

If Marguerite and Tess were both missing, did that mean they were together? And if they weren’t in the building, where had they gone?

He made his way back to the lobby, to the heavy glass doors. If Marguerite had left the clinic she would have taken the car. There was no other way to travel in this weather. If the car was gone, maybe he could borrow a vehicle and follow it.

But Marguerite’s conservative little runabout was parked where Chris had left it, wheels on the curb, under a fresh layer of snow. He opened the door and snow came into the lobby on a fugitive wind, small flakes turning to watery diamonds on the tiled floor.

Elaine stood behind Chris and put a hand on his shoulder. “This is freaky, but you need to calm down.”

“You think Ray has something to do with this?”

“I thought of that. Ari said he’d been on the phone to Shulgin, who talked to Charlie Grogan. Ray’s out at the Eye somewhere.”

Chris held the door open a crack, letting frigid air play over his face. “She was
right here
, Elaine. Playing with that fucking wooden truck. People don’t just disappear.”

But they do, he thought. They slip through your fingers like water.

“Mr. Carmody?” This was Rosalie Bleiler, the duty nurse. “Could you close that door, please? Elmo—Elmore Fisk, he’s our night guard—would like to see you at the back entrance.”

“Did he find Tess?”

Rosalie flinched from his voice. “No, sir, but he found some child-sized footprints in the snow out there.”

Tess wasn’t dressed to be outdoors. “Did he
follow
the footprints?”

She nodded. “About fifty yards out past the visitor’s lot. But that’s the problem. He says the footprints don’t go anywhere. They just sort of stop.”

To date there had been seven serious attempts to break out of Blind Lake. Three of them had resulted in the deaths by pocket drone of those who breached the fence and entered the no-go zone. Four more had been interrupted in the attempt by Security forces within the Lake. The most recent case had been an agoraphobic caterer who had elected to scale the fence solo but had lost his nerve halfway up. By the time Security found him and talked him down he had suffered frostbite to the fingers of both hands.

Herb Dunn, a fifty-two-year-old navy veteran, had worked in Civilian Security ever since he was downsized from a FedEx branch in Fargo ten years ago. The quarantine of Blind Lake had severed communications between Herb and his creditors (including two ex-wives), which he regretted not at all. He missed access to current movies and web-based erotica, but that was about it. Once he realized he wasn’t about to contract some kind of plague, Herb had settled into the lockdown quite comfortably.

Except this week. This week he was on what the Security force called Dawn Patrol, nobody’s favorite duty. The idea of Dawn Patrol was to send out a guy in an all-weather vehicle to ride the circuit of the fence, presumably to rescue miscreants from their own misguided escape attempts. Dawn Patrol had yet to encounter even a single miscreant, but Herb supposed it had a certain deterrent effect. Today, given the shit-awful storm that had blown through the Lake overnight, Shulgin had told him his route was cut short: just a drive out to the main gate and back. But that was bad enough.

The snow had begun to taper off when he left the garage, but a fierce wind out of the northwest was still complicating matters. These Security vehicles were decent machines, smart-drive Hondas with mutable-tread tires, but a snowmobile would have been more efficient, Herb thought.

The main road from the Plaza at the center of town had been plowed during the night, but only as far south as the staff housing tracts. From there to the fence it was all blown and drifting snow, not quite deep enough to conceal the road but slow going even for the Honda. Herb took some consolation from the fact that there was absolutely nothing urgent or even necessary about this run. It made the delays easier to endure. He settled back in the steamy warmth of the cab and tried to picture his current favorite actress in a state of radical undress. (Back home, he had videoserver apps that did this trick for him.)

By the time he approached the main gate dawn had come and gone. There was enough light now to mark the limits of vision, a bubble of windblown snow around the cab of the Honda and a glimpse of ponderous clouds in a sky like a muddy river.

He reached the turnaround point at the main gate—no daring escape attempts in progress—and stopped, idling the vehicle’s motor. He was tempted to close his eyes and make up for some of the sleep he’d lost, sitting up after midnight watching old downloads, up at 3:30 to get ready for this pointless expedition. But if he was caught sleeping he’d be on Dawn Patrol for the rest of his natural life. Anyway, his breakfast coffee had worked its way through him and he had an urge to write his name in the snow.

He was climbing out of the cab into the frigid morning when the low clouds lifted and he saw something moving beyond the main gate. Something out there in no-man’s-land. Something big. He supposed at first it was one of those robotic delivery trucks carrying food and supplies, but when the wind shifted again he saw more of these uncertain shapes.
Huge
machines, just outside the fence.

He goose-stepped a few feet closer through the snow. Just to see, he told himself. He was as near the main gate as he meant to get when without warning it began to swing open. There was another lull in the wind, a moment of almost supernatural calm, and he recognized the vehicles out there as Powell tanks and armored personnel carriers. Dozens of them, lined up outside the Lake.

He turned and took a few awkward steps back toward the Honda, but before he reached it he was surrounded by a half-dozen soldiers in camouflage-white protective suits and aerosol masks. Soldiers wearing enhanced-vision goggles and carrying sonic-pulse rifles.

Herb Dunn had been in the service. He knew the drill.

He put up his hands and tried to look harmless.

“I only work here,” he said.

Confused beyond the point of terror, Marguerite forced herself to focus on her breathing. She ignored the sandy soil under her hands and knees, ignored the sensation of dry heat, above all closed her eyes and ignored the presence of the Subject. Draw breath, she thought. Breathing was important. Breathing was important because—because—

Because if she were really on the surface of UMa47/E, breathing would be impossible.

The atmosphere of UMa47/E was less oxygenated than Earth’s and highly rarefied. The pressure differential would have burst her eardrums, had she traveled here from Blind Lake.

But it was fear, not anoxia, that was making her gasp, and her ears felt normal.

Therefore, she thought—still kneeling, eyes tightly closed—therefore, therefore, I’m not really here. Therefore I’m in no immediate danger.

(But if I’m not here then why do I feel the grains of sand under my fingernails, why do I feel the breeze on my skin?)

The summer Marguerite turned eleven, her parents had vacationed in Alaska. Much to Marguerite’s dismay, her father had bought the family a ride over Glacier Bay National Park in a tiny single-engine aircraft. The aircraft had dipped and rocked in the mountain winds, and Marguerite had been terrified to the point of nausea, far too terrified to even think about looking out the window.

Then her father had put an arm around her and said in his most profoundly ministerial voice, “It’s all right, Margie. You’re perfectly safe.”

She had repeated that phrase to herself for the rest of the flight. Her mantra.
You’re perfectly safe
. Oil on troubled waters. It had calmed her. The words came back to her now.

You’re perfectly safe
.

(
But I’m not. I’m lost, I’m helpless, I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know the way back home
—)

Perfectly safe. The perfect lie.

She opened her eyes and forced herself to stand.

The Subject stood motionless more than a meter away from her. Marguerite knew from experience that, once he was still, he would probably stay that way for a while. (She remembered Chris’s comment—
not a great party planet
—and suppressed an incoherent urge to giggle.) Those inscrutable white eyes stared at her, or at least in her general direction, and she was tempted to stare back. But first things first, Marguerite told herself. Be a scientist. (
You’re a scientist. You’re perfectly safe
. Two enabling lies.)

Evaluate your surroundings.

She stood just inside the perimeter of the structure the Subject had entered. Looking back through its arches Marguerite could see with a shocking immediacy the desert, which she instinctively put into the context of the geography of UMa47/E: the central plateau of the largest continental plate, far from any of the planet’s shallow, salty seas, at the equatorial extreme of a temperate zone. But it was so much more than that. It was a sky as luminous and white as freshly fired china; it was a range of eroded basaltic hills fading into the distance; it was the long light of a foreign sun, and shadows that lengthened visibly as she watched. It was an irregular wind that smelled of lime and dust. It was not an image but a place: tactile, tangible, fully textured.