Shoggoths in Bloom (45 page)

Sanchez sheds her pack and hides it in about ten meters from where Brown secreted his. Standing, she feels light on her feet, some of the exhaustion stripped away with the load. “Watch for traps,” she says, and sets off at a light trot, leaning forward to make up for the slope up the mountain.

Dr. Klopft talked to them for a while, until Martha started yawning. Then he went away. He came back after they had slept, bringing breakfast and more questions. seemed to know about Martha’s hearing, but maybe he didn’t know enough. Because while he got up, crossed the room, and used the buzzer to get let out, he stood right outside it to talk to whoever he was talking to. Over a phone or an intercom, Martha thought, because she could only make out one side of the conversation. And because before he started talking, he said, “Callandar, get me the box, please?”

Matt was staring intently in the same direction. When she looked at him, he shook his head. He could only hear half of it, too.

“No,” Dr. Klopft said. “I don’t think there’s any mistake. Yes, they pretty much have to be from the first couple of reject batches—no, no. I know Corey was supposed to destroy them all, but I guess he spirited a couple out. Seems to have been raising them as his—yes, yes. No, they don’t look any better than you’d expect. No, and apparently before he vanished, the last time they saw Corey he left them alone with some supplies and went out with his gun.”

There was a pause. Martha started to say something, but Matt held his hand up. And sure enough, in a moment, Dr. Klopft began speaking again. “Well, obviously if he went to handle it himself, he wanted to hide the reasons from us. Which means it has something to do with the fetuses he stole—

“ . . . Yes, I do think it’s possible he was being blackmailed. Likely, even. I just wish he’d—yeah. Okay, yeah. I’ll look into it. What should I do with the subjects?”

Another pause, and Martha heard Dr. Klopft say, “Are you sure? It’s a little different now. No apparent cognitive defects, which is sort of a surprise—no? All right. All right. It’ll be a mercy. Good day, Mr. Chien.”

Silence followed. Martha looked over at Matt, who was licking sorelooking lips. He must have been biting them.

“We have to get out of here,” she said.

Sanchez expects the woods to be riddled with sentries and countermeasures, and she is right. Both she and Brown know what they’re doing—they move easily in jackets reversed to show green and brown interiors. The heat-reflective insulating linings of their clothing break up their outlines to any infrared scanners, and loam smeared on their faces reduces reflectivity.

Before they go silent, Brown shows Sanchez his panic button—a small beige box strapped to his wrist with an Ace bandage. If his heart stops, or if he keys a certain simple code, it will alert his control.

“Black helicopters?” Sanchez asks.

He smiles. “Close enough for government work. When I mailed in the warrant and the request for backup, I relayed what we know. I expect we’ll have support in a matter of hours, and clear and present danger to a pair of minors is enough for us to move now.” He frowns.

Sanchez says, “It’ll cost us Chien.”

Brown spreads his hands. She’s talking about discarding the work of months, and he just sighs. “Somebody else may have better luck. Or maybe we’ll get enough out of Klopft for Shanghai or Honolulu to bring him in.”

Sanchez meets his gaze. He looks resigned, but calm. “All right then. Let’s do this thing.”

Brown and Sanchez take to the woods. Their successful infiltration of the compound is a credit to their skill and equipment, and not any indictment of Klopft’s countermeasures. Apparently there’s significant money to be made in rare-animal smuggling.

At last, they lie belly-down along branches overlooking the compound, peering through camouflage netting supported by the very trees they’ve made their lair. Men in plainclothes bordering on uniforms—blue shirts, tan trousers, navy berets—come and go, some of them carrying automatic weapons. At the center of their activity—shadowed by the camo net—lies a low building obviously assembled from portable component parts. From above, Sanchez can make out the joints between individual rooms and hallways, the tan tape sealing tan waterproof recycled wallboard together. It’s the stuff the U.N. uses to throw up refugee camps in a hurry, repurposed ingeniously.

Somebody is leading two children out of the building. And Sanchez recognizes him.

She can’t have done so. He can’t be here, but there’s no mistaking him. He’s broad-shouldered and black-haired and dark and tall, and even at this distance she knows the span of his hands and the ease of his stride in her bones. Hands shaking, she raises the spyglass to her eye, shading the lens with her hand so it won’t flash in any stray beam of sunlight.

It’s Doe Callandar. She recognizes the curve of his mouth, the shape of his chin, the boyish cheeks, the satiny sheen off his skin. His face is set in a scowl, an expression Sanchez knows a little too well. It’s the one he wears when he’s faced with a task he finds unbearable.

He’s got two kids in pajamas beside him, walking barefoot over hardpacked earth.

Brown must notice something, because the earbud he gave her crackles. “Sanchez?”

“That’s my husband down there,” she says. “Cascadia LEC is on the job. Except they didn’t tell me they had an inside man here . . . ”

Or he’s dirtier than she ever imagined. And having witnessed a little, like any lover betrayed, she imagined a lot.

When Sanchez’s gaze follows his arm down to the little girl on her left, she almost drops the spyglass.

Because the little girl has the face of a woman of sixty. She’s slight and skinny, her shriveled apple head bobbing on a stick-thin neck, her thin hair hanging in gray wisps about her face. The boy, too, is wizened and thin and bald. Sanchez can see the discomfort in his expression as he twists his fingers over and over again in Doe’s grip, trying to pull his hand loose. Doe holds both children tight, thought, and by the weapon on his hip, Sanchez has a horrible sense she knows what’s about to happen.

He leads the children into the woods.

“Brown.”

“Copy.”

“Hit your panic button, man. I’m going after those kids.”

“Sanchez!” A desperate hiss. “Don’t be crazy, lady. You don’t have a gun!”

“Yeah,” she says, already gathering her feet under her, getting ready to move. “I know that.”

Officer Callandar dragged Martha and Matt along, away from the bustle of the camp. Nobody would look at them as they passed, and Martha had a horrible feeling that she knew why they didn’t want to notice her. Because if they noticed her and Matt, they would have to take responsibility for what was going to happen to them.

Nobody wants to know when something horrible is about to take place.

She screamed and cried, but the big man was stronger than anybody, and he just kept walking. He had a gun—she could smell the gun cleaner, as sharp and green as Daddy Corey’s—and his skin was so hot against hers that her palm and wrist were all slicked with sweat. If she could just pull away, she would run—

And leave Matt here alone? Run off into the woods in pajamas, barefoot? Without a knife or a fire?

She wouldn’t last the night.

She picked her feet up and hung on the man’s arm, trying to drag him to a stop, but he just kept walking. He lifted her up by her wrist, so she dangled clear of the ground, and though she kicked and kicked she couldn’t hit him in the face like she wanted. His big body just seemed to soak up any punishment she could dish out. Matt, too, struggled and tried to bite, but couldn’t get ahold of the man.

Finally, they were well away from the camp, the big man stopped. He set Martha and Matt on the ground, kneeling beside them, and let go of their wrists. “Go on,” he said. “Run.”

Martha took a step back. Another. Her bruised hand groped out and clutched after Matt, finding his wrist after two grabs. He slapped his fingers over hers, squeezing.

“If we run,” Matt said, “you’re going to shoot us. Like you shot Daddy Corey.”

Matt was just guessing, Martha thought. But Officer Callandar winced.

He reached down and slowly pulled his gun from the holster. “What do you think is going to happen if you don’t run?”

Something moved in the trees behind him. Over the thunder of her own heart, the rasp of her breathing, Martha heard a rustle in the needles. She held her breath.

It was the wrong thing, because the big man noticed. He pointed his gun straight up and fired it twice. “Run! You stupid little shits. Get out of here!”

Something big fell from up above.

Martha did not stay to see what happened. She grabbed Bobby’s hand and turned and ran, her knees aching with every step.

Sanchez hits the dirt and Doe at the same time. She puts all the force of her leap-and-fall into the stick she swings, bringing it down on his skull. He crumples, the gun he only fired into the air spinning out of his hand to slam into the earth two meters away. Secured by a squeeze safety and a palmprint-lock, it does not discharge.

Sanchez stands over her husband, the bloody stick speckled with a few tight coils of hair in her hands like a baseball bat, like a samurai sword. She breathes heavily—in, out. It hurts.

Doe moans.

She drops the stick and reaches for her cuffs, cursing under her breath when she realizes that in this persona, she does not own any.

The ancient, alien thunder of helicopters rises up the mountainside. The cavalry has arrived.

She must not have hit Doe hard enough—Pulling your punches? Really?—because he suddenly scrambles forward, kicking up clods of composting needles. She dives after him, but he rolls and comes up with the gun. Blood trickles stickily across his forehead. He wipes it away with his free hand.

“Mauritza.” It comes out as a sigh of relief, startling her. Still, she watches the gun like you’d watch a snake. “Thank God.”

“You’re under arrest,” she says.

He lowers the gun, but doesn’t put it away. “What for? I’m legit, love. On a license for Seattle. I replaced some private security goon they busted leaving town. What are you doing here?”

She folds her hands. She could lunge for him—she’s inside twenty feet, and his gun’s not ready. She might be able to disarm him.

But he’s bigger and stronger.

She says, “You killed Darwish, didn’t you?”

He spreads his hands, leaving the gun in his lap. Intentionally disarming himself. “Klopft killed him. And if you’re smart, and you want Klopft to stay in jail, that’s the story you’ll support.” He pauses. “You’ll find Darwish’s harvested organs and DNA in the freezer here. You’ve got him dead to rights. Your collar, love.”

She meets his gaze. “Like last time?”

He hesitates. And then nods, as if deciding very slowly to be honest.

“In Oakland you planted evidence,” she says. “You saved my life, and I covered for you. This time, you framed somebody for murder. For a murder you committed.”

“If you send Klopft up for trafficking in endangered species, or for illegal adoptions, he’ll serve a couple of years. A few months. I know he killed babies, but I can’t prove it. I can prove he killed Darwish. And do you know what Darwish did? Did you see those kids? That’s what he was involved in, Mauritza. The first babies they made all had genetic defects. Progeria. They put most of ’em down, but Darwish kept a couple as pets. They’ll die of old age before they turn fifteen. These people are horrible. Play it my way and you’re a hero.”

“You can stop me,” she says. “You have a gun.”

“I know.” But he doesn’t reach for it.

“You poor stupid son-of-a-bitch,” she says. “Darwish was an informer, Doe. The guy you killed and cut up was on our side.”

Back at the camp, Cascadia and Interpol’s licensed ops and sworn officers bustle about as they hustle men and a few women into coffles. There could have been a firefight—Sanchez is surprised there wasn’t a firefight—but surprise must have ameliorated the worst of it.

She hands Doe off to a uniformed officer, dazzled for a moment by the cost in energy, hydrocarbons, fuel cells to bring all these people out here. She tells the woman that they need to mount a search party, that there are two children suffering some form of progeria lost in the woods. That the kids are witnesses against Klopft, and need to be protected.

And then she goes to join the search for them, confident that neither Cascadia nor Interpol had trackers much better than her.

The bole of the fallen tree stretched over them kept the rain off, and the ground underneath was only damp, not soaked like everything else. Martha and Matt had no knives, nor anything but sticks rubbed sharp, but Matt was pulling up the bark and probing in the tunnels underneath for grubs. They chewed them carefully, not wasting anything: food was food.

Martha didn’t think the people from the compound—or the other people, the ones who had been fighting the people from the compound— would find them here. They’d run far, and hidden well.

And for a couple of hours, everything was silent except the sounds of animals, and the rain.

Until a boot crunched outside, footsteps approaching, and somebody parted the boughs that fell over them with a pale-skinned hand.

“Hey,” said the woman who had hit Callandar and then fought him while Martha and Matt ran away. “You guys want to come out of there? My name’s Mauritza. I have a warm dry place for you to sleep.”

Martha looked at Matt. Matt shrugged, deferring to her.

How bad can it be?

Gingerly, Martha reached out a cold hand.

Brown waits for her near the outskirts of the camp, his arms folded, letting the official types do their work. He’s watching a team carry cages out of the building and line them up in the shade—strange purple birds in polymer boxes with airholes, snakes that seem long and whippy and as curiously jointed as those wooden toy serpents you shake by the tail, octopuses in large wheeled terrariums.

“Look at this stuff,” Brown says, when Mauritza walks up to him. “Squonks. Tree octopuses. Hoopsnakes.”

She decides she doesn’t want to know about hoopsnakes. “What’s a squonk?”