Sleepwalk (37 page)

Finally he got out of the truck, picked up his father’s lunch bucket, and slammed the door. As he started down the trail to the dam, he kept his head down, staring only at the path in front of his feet. As he came to the operations office at the end of the dam itself, he paused, steeling himself to show no emotion, no reaction except cooperation, no matter what was said to him.

He stepped into the office. Bill Watkins, busy with some paperwork, glanced up at him. In the inner office, clearly visible through an open door, Otto Kruger was talking to someone on the phone.

“I’ll send them down in groups of four,” he heard Kruger saying. “It looks like everyone’s here today, so there shouldn’t be any problem.” He was silent for a moment, then swung around as if he were about to speak to Bill Watkins, but stopped short when he saw Jed. His eyes narrowed, and Jed had to concentrate hard to keep himself from reacting to the man’s stare. Then Kruger said, “Arnold just came in,” his voice dropping, but still clearly audible. “He looks fine. He’s just standing in Watkins’s office, waiting for his orders.”

He dropped the phone back on its hook, then stood up and came to lounge in the door to his office, his lips twisted in a quizzical half smile. “Hey, Jed,” he said. “How you doing this morning?”

Jed let his head come up, but slowly. “Okay. I feel fine.”

Kruger’s brows rose a fraction of an inch. “Sleep okay last night? No problems?”

Jed shrugged. “I’m okay,” he said again.

Kruger’s eyes seemed to bore into him, but then he nodded. “Great,” he said. “Well, don’t just stand around here like an idiot—there’s a lot to be done down below, and we’re going to be shorthanded all day.”

A twinge of anger plucked at Jed as the word “idiot” struck him, but he managed to shunt it aside. Nodding, he turned and walked out of the office, never even looking at Bill Watkins. But when he was gone, Watkins scratched his head pensively. “What’s with Jed?” he asked.

Otto Kruger’s lips twisted into an unpleasant grin. “Maybe he finally decided his old man had the wrong attitude,” he said. “Looks to me like he figured out you’re better off if you just shut up and do what you’re told.”

Watkins grunted. “Well, I wish all the men were like that,” he said. “It’d sure make my job a lot easier.”

Kruger said nothing, but as he went back into the inner office, he smiled to himself. Bill Watkins was going to get his wish a lot sooner than he ever could have imagined.

Jed moved steadily down the spiral staircase that led into the depths of the dam, his steps echoing in a regular rhythm on the metal risers, sending an eerie resonance through the shaft. Finally he reached the bottom and moved slowly along the tight confines of the
corridor—lit only by bare bulbs in metal cages hung every twenty-five feet or so—toward the damaged power shaft. As he approached, the crew foreman’s eyes fixed on him.

“You’ll be working in the pipes today, Arnold,” he said. “There’s a miner’s light and probe waiting for you. All you got to do is look for cracks. When you find ’em, use the probe to open ’em up and clean ’em out as best you can.”

Jed said nothing. He set his lunch bucket on a shelf, took one of the miner’s hard hats off the rack, put it on, then found the probe. It was a piece of thick, hardened metal, its tip bent slightly, attached to a wooden handle. Finally he moved into the base of the power shaft itself.

A conveyor had been rigged up, a tall cranelike object that rose from the base of the shaft all the way to the top. A moving belt was already operating, carrying an endless circle of scoops upward, where their contents would be dumped onto another conveyor that would carry them out and drop them into a chute leading down to a dump truck waiting at the base of the dam itself.

On scaffolding high above, men were already working, chipping away at the damaged concrete of the shaft, dropping pieces of debris into a temporary chute that was designed to let men work at the bottom of the shaft in relative safety. Still, there was a steady rain of tiny fragments of concrete pattering down from above, and the air was thick with dust.

“Up here!” one of the men on the scaffolding called. Jed peered up, seeing the narrow opening of one of the intake pipes.

It might have been the same pipe from which his father had fallen on Friday morning. Taking a deep
breath, he began climbing the scaffolding until he came to the platform where the man stood.

He stared into the black hole, no more than two feet in diameter.

A knot of fear formed in his stomach, but he forced it down, telling himself there was nothing to be afraid of.

“Headfirst,” the man told him. “Turn on the light, and keep your head up. The beam’ll give you enough light to work by.” The man glanced down then, and when he spoke, his voice had dropped. “If you start to panic,” he said, “just relax and give me a holler. I’m gonna tie a line around your ankle, and I’ll be able to pull you right out.”

Jed kept his eyes fixed on the hole in the side of the shaft. “I’ll be okay,” he said, doing his best to keep his voice clear of the fear he hadn’t quite been able to rid himself of. “I’ll be fine.”

He reached up and switched on the tiny light fixed to his helmet, then, gripping the probe tightly in his right hand, ducked down and thrust his torso into the hole.

The first thing he noticed was the suffocating heaviness of the air in the pipe. Stale and musty, it threatened to choke him.

The fear in his belly blossomed, and he felt the first fingers of panic reaching out toward him. He closed his eyes for a moment, willing the panic to subside, making himself breathe in the dank air.

“You okay?” he heard a voice asking him.

Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to open his eyes again. The dim beam of light glowed softly ahead of him, disappearing quickly into the blackness of the pipe. But the panic had eased slightly. “I’m okay,” he managed to say. “I’m fine.”

He crept ahead, using his fingers to explore the concrete tube. A moment later he felt a rough spot and twisted his head slightly so that the light on the helmet shone on the wall. Using the probe, he dug at the crack, scraping mud and algae away from it. A piece of concrete broke loose, then another. He kept at it, chipping away, until finally the probe could pry no more fragments out of the break.

He moved on.

He came to another crack, this one in the top of the shaft.

He tipped his head up, but there wasn’t enough room for the lantern to find the break.

He would have to roll over and lie on his back.

He began twisting his body, working it around in the narrow confines of the pipe.

A moment later he was looking at the top of the tube, only a few inches above his face.

Above it, he realized, were the thousands of tons of concrete of which the dam was made. And now, lying on his back, his belly exposed, he felt the full weight of the dam pressing down on him.

Once again panic closed in on him, and this time he couldn’t put it aside.

Instinctively, he tried to sit up, and instantly hit the close confines of the pipe.

He felt it tightening around him, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to scream, wanted to scramble to his feet and begin running.

His muscles contracted as he tried to draw his legs up, and then he felt them jam against the wall of the shaft.

He couldn’t move, but he had to. He struggled for a
moment, and the panic threatened to overwhelm him entirely.

A scream of unreasoning terror built in his throat.

And then, just as it was about to burst from his lips, he clamped his mouth closed.

He wouldn’t do it—he wouldn’t give in to the urge to scream, wouldn’t give in to the panic that had seized him. He struggled again, but this time the battle took place within his own mind. He closed his eyes, then forced himself to imagine that he wasn’t in the dam at all.

He was on the mesa, high up above the desert, with nothing around him except clean, dry air.

He imagined the air filling his lungs, washing away the dankness of the pipe.

Slowly the tension in his body eased, and at last he moved again, easing his torso forward to release his legs from the pressure of the pipe. He closed his eyes then and concentrated, as he had in the kiva with his grandfather; as he had alone in his room on Saturday night.

It worked.

Part of him stayed in the pipe, directing his body as it carried out the work he had been told to do.

But most of his mind moved elsewhere, traveling beyond the dam, breathing freely.

The panic—the terror of the pipe, which had overwhelmed his father—could no longer reach him.

After two hours he felt a tug on his ankle. “Take a break, kid,” he heard a voice calling. “Nobody can keep that up all day.”

Jed stopped working, and a moment later felt himself being pulled out of the pipe. The part of his mind that had been occupied with evading the terrible panic rejoined his body, and for a moment he felt another
twinge of the paralyzing fear. Then he was free of the tunnel, back in the main shaft. He scrambled down the scaffolding, then stepped out of the shaft into the turbine room. There was a sudden silence as the conveyor belt stopped moving, and then the rest of the men who had been working on the scaffolding above began to appear.

Thermoses were opened and someone handed Jed a cup of steaming coffee. Around him he could hear the voices of the men, swapping jokes and casual insults, but Jed took no part in it. He sat still, staring at nothing, sipping with careful disinterest at his coffee.

When the allotted fifteen minutes was nearly up, the foreman spoke.

“Hey, Gomez. Take Harris, Sparks, and Hankins, and head down to the hospital, okay? Company’s springing for flu shots.”

Jed froze, but managed to say nothing, managed even to keep himself from looking up as Randy’s and Jeff’s fathers got up and, demanding to know if they were getting paid for their time away from the job, followed the other two men toward the stairs that would take them to the top of the dam. “Yes, you’re getting paid,” the foreman called after them. “If the company wants you to do something, the company pays you to do it.”

A rowdy cheer erupted from the four men as they disappeared into the narrow corridor.

Jed wanted to yell after them, to warn them not to take the shots, but he knew he couldn’t.

If he did, he would only give himself away.

*  *  *

Judith watched in silent dismay as her third-period class filed into the room and quietly took their seats. Randy Sparks, along with two others, was absent, but of the twenty-two students who were there, five had that strange glassy-eyed look that Gina, Randy, and the others had exhibited yesterday. The room was almost unnaturally silent, for in this class, as in her two previous classes of the day, it was the liveliest of the students who seemed to have been affected by whatever was being done to them.

Judith, like Jed, had done her best to betray nothing of what she suspected. During the just completed mid-morning break, she’d even managed to force a small laugh when Elliott Halvorson had joked that he wished that whatever kind of flu was going around this year would stay on. His classes seemed to have calmed down, and for the first time in years the students were actually paying attention to what he was saying.

Judith had felt like screaming at him that what was happening to the students had nothing at all to do with the flu, but she’d suppressed her words and coerced a smile from her lips instead.

It had been that way all morning.

She’d tried to tell herself that she was getting paranoid, just as she had yesterday when she’d thought that blue car was following her. Even on her way to work this morning she’d found herself glancing around, searching in every direction for something that might tell her she was indeed being watched.

There had been nothing.

No cars parked where they shouldn’t have been; certainly no one who appeared to be following her. And yet, why should there have been? If anyone wanted to know where she was, it wouldn’t be hard to locate her
in Borrego. All anyone would have to do, really, was keep an eye on the main road leading north and south. Unless you had a four-wheel drive and were just a little bit crazy, there was no other way out of town. And as long as she was in town, anyone could find her in ten minutes.

She’d avoided the teachers’ lounge entirely before classes that morning, certain she wouldn’t be able to fake even an appearance of being relaxed, but by the time the break came, her paranoia had overcome her once more, and she’d decided that not to show up for a quick cup of coffee would look suspicious. Besides, if the rest of the classes were like hers, by then it must have been obvious that something was haywire.

Yet during the break none of the teachers seemed the least bit concerned. Most of them—like Elliott Halvorson—actually appeared to welcome the change. Their disciplinary problems had evaporated, and their classes actually seemed attentive.

But Judith wasn’t certain exactly how attentive they really were. Now, as she looked at the class, an idea came to her.

She turned to the board and began quickly writing out a series of problems. Deliberately, she put some of the harder ones first, then scattered out the simpler ones toward the end.

Finally she turned to face the class. “You have five minutes to copy these,” she said. “Copy them in order, please.”

A few groans drifted up—groans Judith welcomed as at least a small sign that some of her students were still perfectly normal.

Judith watched carefully as they set to work. Most of the class kept glancing up at the blackboard, then turning
their attention to the paper in front of them while they wrote in short bursts, only to look up at the blackboard once more a few seconds later.

The affected students—the sleepwalkers, as Judith had begun to think of them—seemed to look at the board less often, and their writing, though Judith couldn’t actually see it, appeared to proceed at a much steadier pace.

At the end of the five minutes Judith reached up and pulled the map down to cover the board. “All right,” she said. “Begin working on the problems. You have thirty minutes.”