Reapers (19 page)

It wasn't the trailer itself that was the problem. It was that, as close as the non-trailer solution felt, she could never get it to add up.

In the garage, she pulled the tarp off the bike trailer and started packing. Jugs of water. A tent, blankets. Spare socks and shoes. Sweaters and jackets for layering. A couple boxes of ammo. And, since they were visiting a human settlement, the goods of trade.

This was a dilemma in itself. There was no single currency. Some still favored gold, silver, and jewelry, but that stuff was no longer scarce.
Humans
were scarce. Spend enough time picking through the old homes and safe deposit boxes, and anyone could become "rich" with metals and gems, devaluing all of it. Ammo was better, because much of it had been hoarded during the collapse, and was now hidden or lost, but ammo was heavy. And some of the more survival-oriented crowd were drowning in it.

The true coin of the realm was anything consumable or semi-perishable—meaning people often ran out—that couldn't be easily replaced. Coffee. Tea. Chocolate. Antibiotics. Herbs. Spices (which, she had discovered, were often more useful as preservatives than for their flavor). Recreational drugs were favored by some, and she'd toyed with the idea of growing marijuana, but Chip would have frowned on that. Although, now that Dee was an adult...

Focus. She settled on a diversified portfolio. A few gemstone necklaces and small bars of silver. A couple boxes of ammo she didn't use herself, .357 and .223. Half a box of chocolate bars, stale but delicious enough to anyone who hasn't tasted chocolate in years. A fat baggie of coriander seeds and tiny Tupperwares of oregano, turmeric, and chili powder. Packs of disposable lighters.

The camping and cooking gear was already sorted and boxed on the garage shelves, ready to be used. Ellie loaded it into the trailer. Dee came in with a couple of bags and added them to the load.

"How much of that is clothes?" Ellie said.

"You said we'd be gone for a week."

"That means two pairs of jeans. Max."

"That's gross. We're going to be biking all day."

Ellie set down the fishing net she'd been considering adding to the hunting/foraging supplies. "If this is how it's going to be—"

Dee grabbed a bag from the trailer and rolled her eyes. "Fine. Two pairs of jeans. When we're sharing a tent and I smell like a football team at halftime, you'll know who to thank."

Ellie continued packing, then went to the larder and bagged up all their bread. Over the short term, you didn't need much more, though she tubbed some dried apples and venison, too. The garage door was open and it smelled like cold and the fresh scent of the lake. As she finalized the trailer and triple-checked her list, Sheriff Hobson appeared in the entry and doffed his hat.

"I hear you're on your way to our fair former capital."

"Ruling out a lead," Ellie said.

"I hope it's a strong one." He leaned on his cane. "A trip to Albany will require, say, a week? Forgive my indelicate words, but if Quinn Tolbert is still missing by the time you return, he may not ever be found."

"A lot of people will be looking for him in the normal places. I want to cover the un-normal."

"And I would like to offer my assistance."

Ellie glanced up from the bike chain she'd been inspecting for weak links. "Don't you want to lead the main investigation?"

"Like you said, the main investigation is the exhaustion of the normal. So let it be
handled
by the normal. Additionally, George would appreciate my inclusion."

"This is a very speculative trip, sheriff. I'm not sure it's worth your time."

He smiled, self-effacing. "Thank you for the attempt to spare my feelings. Now, shall we discuss your true objections? You were a professional, were you not?"

"Police detective? No. Intelligence analyst? Yes."

"Whereas I was no such thing. My background is entirely amateur."

"I hadn't known that," Ellie said.

"Then I'm disappointed in myself. I perceive you to be dedicated. Thorough. The type to reach her own conclusions rather than trusting the common knowledge. I suspect that, the moment I nominated myself to uphold the law, you delved into my background to assess my fitness for the position. How am I doing?"

Ellie laughed. "Strong start. Let's see how you finish."

He spun his bowler on his finger. "You discovered a CV that is light on experience, to put it generously. Having no interest in the position yourself, or believing it was a harmless show, you did nothing to object. But now that we have a real case in front of us—one that involves your family—you wouldn't trust me to handle its subtler edges any more than you'd tackle a wasp's nest with a wiffle bat."

"You're right. On all counts. Including the fact this isn't a dispute over a farmer's broken fence—this is my family."

"It's bigger than that, though. I'm pledged to protect the lakelands. If an unknown group is poaching our citizens, I am duty-bound to uncover it—and to root it out."

"All I care about is finding Quinn. I can handle that on my own. If it turns out he's been snared by this shadow org, they're all yours."

"George tells me you belonged to the Department of Advance Analysis. I've never heard of such a group. The only reason I know of it, and your involvement in it, is because you've let it be known." He narrowed one eye at her. "You take me for an amateur. What if I find myself most effective at my job when everyone else assumes I'm as incompetent as you do?"

Ellie rocked back on her heels. "Or that's bullshit to talk your way into a trip you have no business taking."

"The world is full of possibility."

She flexed her hands, which were stiff from taking notes regarding the status of their supplies. She was quick to judgment. She knew that. Most people would consider that a fault, and she couldn't argue with them (except to point out that quick judgment, if accurate, could save your ass when you come under fire). But at least she was quick to reassess those judgments when presented with new evidence. She would rather be right from now on than to stubbornly insist she'd never been wrong in the first place.

"We leave in thirty minutes," she said. "With our without you. And I lead."

He nodded thoughtfully. "Do you happen to have an extra bicycle? Turns out I ran here."

Between setting him up with a pack and Dee's last-minute fussing, it took closer to an hour. Ellie felt uncharacteristically sedate about the delay. Once their wheels hit the road, and the cold air rushed past their faces with the smell of pines and motion, all that mattered was the next mile.

She bore the trailer. To hedge against disaster, Dee and Hobson also carried a fraction of the essentials in their bike baskets—a gallon of water each, some bread, a couple blankets. At the first highway, Hobson got out his pocket watch.

"Got an appointment you didn't tell me about?" Ellie said.

"Measuring our mileage," he said. "May be useful if we need to determine whether we can reach shelter before dark."

"How fastidious."

"With my life? Yes, it's a rather eccentric trait." He checked his watch at the next marker, as well as the three after that. "About eight miles per. Hills aren't helping. Assuming we use every ounce of daylight, we might squeak into town by sunset Friday."

"That's my plan." She filled him in on what little there was to know about the men in the black fedoras. "Has anyone else gone missing from town lately?"

"Not that I'm aware of. It may be possible, however, they have deliberately targeted those whose vanishments would go unnoticed."

"Or there are no 'vanishments' at all."

"A skeptical approach. I approve."

"But why would they take him?" Dee said. "What are they
doing
?"

Hobson glanced at his pocket watch. "Between loss of machines and population, labor is in short supply. I have heard rumors of rampant slave-taking in more chaotic portions of the nation."

"But they can't do that."

"What's to stop them? Men like me?"

"Don't you?"

"I'd like to. But evil breeds in darkness, and these days, almost every corner of the map is black." He sniffed against the cold. "I never used to be a believer in big government, but our brave new world makes a convincing case."

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Ellie said. "The first goal is to determine whether he's there. In the meantime, stay focused. If he was taken, they may be just ahead of us."

With the sunlight down to its last legs, she pointed out a rutted dirt path through the pines. They turned off. The dirt road snaked so far into the forest she feared the faux cabin at its end was remote enough to be occupied, but there were no candles in the windows and the pane beside the front door was broken with no sign of repair. The inside smelled of the dust that layered the floor. They opened the garage, brought in the bikes, closed it, and set up the tent in the back room to enclose as much heat as possible.

After a dinner of bread and venison jerky, it wasn't yet seven o'clock, but Ellie was sore and exhausted from a day of biking. She slept until an owl hooted her awake hours later. It was still dark, but Hobson's pocket watch ticked along; by the flame of a lighter, she saw it was five in the morning. Hobson woke, hair askew, and their furtive shuffling to go out back to pee and then to share some water from a canteen woke Dee. The moon was high and ringed by a vast white halo.

"Ice crystals in the sky." Hobson's face was pressed against the window and his breath fogged the glass and slid down in droplets. "Suppose we should pray to Notus, the south wind?"

"We need modern gods." Ellie's voice was hoarse and scratchy. "Me, I'm asking for the blessings of Starbucks."

The moon-ring wasn't a good sign for the weather, but it helped light the way. They got to an early start, taking an easy pace down the highway through the black woods. They crossed through a town so dark and silent it could have been a cave. Ellie imagined the whole continent to the west, equally vacant and primeval. The void could drive a person crazy. The stars twinkled, delivering her a vision of the creatures that had unleashed the plague on Earth. What if, when they left their homeworld, they hadn't been bent on extinction? What if their minds had been warped by billions and billions of miles of darkness? By the time they found us, eliminating mankind might seem like a mercy.

The sun rose, vaporizing her black thoughts. They stopped for breakfast, biked on, rested, ate, and continued, slowing to scout the scattered forest towns for signs of hostile strangers. They had reached the main highway early on and it sloped steadily downward from the retreating mountains, but that seemed to make the climbing sun feel all the more distant and cold, an aimless yellow pebble that might never come back.

They passed the night in a stern-windowed home overlooking a former campground south of Lake George. They set up the tent in a back room on the ground floor so they could use candles without being spotted from the road. A shuffling noise woke Ellie in the deep part of the night. She lay in her down sleeping bag, waiting for each gentle scraping step beyond the window. It was surely just an animal, and much smaller than it sounded, but she took a long time to fall back asleep.

The morning came too early. They were down from the mountains and the highway threaded through town after town. Ellie kept her pistol on her hip and her rifle velcroed to the bike's wire basket. Columns of smoke were rare, isolated to the woods beyond the grassy meadows, protected from the unwanted traffic on the highway. They neither passed nor saw another traveler. A breeze fluttered from the north, but as they rode, their velocity matched it perfectly, leaving them in a moving bubble of perfect stillness.

A mile north of Albany, with the smell of a river drifting through the trees, torched cars all but blocked the highway. Ellie stopped and scanned the overgrown parkland. A bird rustled the branches. Hobson dismounted his bike, bent his knees and hitched his pants, and used the curve of his cane to hook a sign downed in front of the cars. He held it up and blinked owlishly, as if uncovering lost Nordic runes.

"'PROPERTY OF THE CLAVAN BROTHERS,'" he read. He peered past the highway to the shops and homes poking through the trees. "I assume they mean the town. If they're referring to these cars, I would say the Clavans suffer from a marked lack of ambition."

"What does it mean?" Dee said.

"Who knows?" Ellie said. "Could be the Clavans died years ago. Or it could be they're the ones we're looking for."

"That's like so helpful. I see why the government put you in charge of figuring stuff out."

Ellie's annoyance flared. "When you're young, a wrong answer sounds better than no answer. Experience is the process of learning when you know nothing."

"Is that a quote?" Hobson said.

"Not to my knowledge."

"Then I won't feel poorly for not recognizing it."

"Here's another one: open eyes, open mind."

Dee sighed. "What's
that
mean, Confucius?"

"It means you let what's in front of you shape what's in your head. Not the other way around."

She recentered her weight on her bike and pedaled down the road, trailer dragging behind her. A Walgreens slumped apologetically at the edge of town. The windows were bashed in and it had been heavily looted, but there was a phone book behind the front desk. She tore out the page and ran down the address on the contract from the men with the black fedoras. Couple miles in from the river, right off I-90.

It was 3 PM and the sun waned to the west. A winding road snaked past the trees on the other side of the highway and the three of them cut across the rough field to intercept it. The address was a glossy, six-sided oblong beside a two-level parking garage. A wood axe tonked from the distance. The crick of a socket wrench echoed past the pillars of the garage.

Ellie left her bike in the grass by the road and walked to the glass doors, carrying nothing but her pistol and her lightweight day-pack. The doors were automatic sliders. Nonfunctioning, of course. Hobson pushed one open. The lobby was dimly lit by the fading sun and two electric bulbs. A machine thrummed from somewhere beneath the floor. The front desk was empty. Ellie walked up, cleared her throat, and rang the bell.