Strange Country (18 page)

The photographs Boyd had taken from Prue’s house showed the inside of an old foundation, and he’d thought when he looked at them last night that the best place to start looking for the particular foundation pictured would be Jasper. It was one place where he knew there were lots of old foundations. But even overgrown and twenty years worn by winter and weather, it was still clear that none of them fit the photographs. Either the dimensions were wrong or the foundations were concrete block or brick rather than poured. There was one larger basement at the western edge of the old town that he thought might be it, but once he was down inside, he could see that the windows weren’t in the right place and he tripped over a furnace pad that was three feet too close to the south wall.

He climbed out, the holds slippery in the continuing sleet and drizzle. He looked east then west, saw a vehicle sitting up on the main road, engine idling, but as he trotted back to his patrol car, the car—black, he thought, and not a sedan—pulled back onto the road and drove off, not in a hurry, more like they’d stopped for a minute for some reason and then gone on.

He considered his situation. He was wet and cold, his waterproof boots weren’t as waterproof as advertised, and he wasn’t even sure what he’d find if he did locate the source of the photographs. He walked back up toward the road, turned when he reached the old baseball field, and looked back. From here he could see all four streets. Could he have missed a foundation? Overgrown as they were, it would be easy enough to do, though the time of year helped, since the native grass and nonnative invasives had been beaten down all winter by wind and snow.

Of course, there were lots of old foundations scattered all over Taylor County. Some of them didn’t have roads or drives or rutted muddy lanes leading to them anymore, places where someone had tried to make a serious go and failed—bankruptcy or fire or tornado had knocked them down and they’d stayed down. Aerial photos might help. And he could talk to old ranchers who not only knew where many of those abandoned places were, but also knew everyone who’d ever lived there and what had happened to drive them out.

He pulled the photographs out of an inner pocket and looked at them again. The poured foundation ought to be a clue. It wouldn’t have been built somewhere too remote. It would be a place someone had spent money on. At least to build it. He returned to his patrol car, backed around, and was almost back out to the road when he remembered the old farmhouse. It wasn’t in Jasper proper, but down a lane and close to the spot where Hallie’s sister, Dell, had died. He reversed back up the old road, his tires slipping on the slick, half-frozen, half-melted surface, turned, and drove along the barely visible track.

Where the house had once stood, there were the remains of two old fireplaces, stacks of scattered bricks from the chimneys. Old timbers lay in the grass and Boyd could see immediately that the house had burned. It didn’t mean that it hadn’t first been hit by the tornado that leveled Jasper, but it had definitely burned, most of the old timber charcoaled and black. It was a deep foundation and definitely poured, weeds and grass growing up through cracks in the floor. Boyd pulled out the photographs. He walked around the opening, careful not to get too close to the edge. There was an
X,
not large, but visible underneath one of the windows on the west side. The second window on that side had a circle inscribed underneath it, both of them faded with the passage of time but clearly visible.

He went back to his car, pulled a spade, a rope, and a couple of tie-down straps out of the trunk. He radioed his location back to the office.

“Does Ole know where you are?” Patty Littlejohn asked.

“Tell him I’ll fill him in when I get back,” Boyd told her. “If I find anything,” he added to himself after he signed off, though he was pretty sure he’d find something. Had already found something—the place where the photos had been taken, the symbols in them.

He fastened the rope to the base of a volunteer tree and used the tie-down straps to secure it, dropped the other end of the rope down the old wall, then lowered himself down through one of the old window wells. The floor was half dirt and half concrete, though it took him a while to figure that out, all of it covered with dirt and vegetation from years of wind and winter.

He taped the photographs up underneath the symbols that they matched, stood six steps away and halfway between them, scraped away the dirt until he found an arrow carved into the concrete, faded almost to nothing so that he had to feel it with his fingers. He took three steps in the direction the arrow indicated, felt the change between concrete and dirt. The last two photographs had been pictures of the same thing—a small area of bare ground—like it was never going to change.

He scanned the area. The sleet was coming harder now. It made a sound as it hit his slicker, like the slap of a wire brush. To his left there was a big crack in the upper wall—a tall bull thistle and some dried lamb’s-quarter, bursting through. He looked down, and just in front of him but obscured by an old timber laid crossways, was a patch of ground a foot or maybe a foot and a half square that was green with foxtail actually starting to seed out, barnyard grass, and chicory in flower—all of it growing in the hard-packed dirt of an old cellar in March, when everything else was still brittle and brown. He took off his glove and felt the ground—soft and muddy and definitely not frozen, felt the dirt floor to the right of the green patch. It was much colder, still frozen hard.

He wiped his hand, pulled his glove back on, and dug.

He had to go down nearly a foot and a half before he found it, and by then he’d more or less guessed what would be there—another stone. It was larger than the others and a deep purple that looked almost black in the gray afternoon light. He picked it up with his gloved hands and wiped the mud off. The sleet had lessened by the time he finally climbed back out of the old cellar, though there was a steady drizzle, like cold mist. He could hear cars up on the main road, tires sounding loud on the wet pavement. He was careful—had always been careful, it was how he knew himself—but after scanning the area to see if there was anyone or anything around, he took off the glove on his left hand and dropped the stone into it.

He didn’t see anything right away, and had nearly decided that maybe what happened the last time had been a peculiar combination of a particular stone and a particular person, when he smelled the faint odor of sulfur and smoke, the scent of gunpowder, and then the sound of the shot, which came loud, like it had been fired right beside him. He dived sideways without even thinking about it, the stone gripped tight in his hand. After a moment—when there wasn’t another shot and he didn’t see anyone close enough to have fired the one he’d heard—he picked himself up. He kept the stone in his hand and snapped open the flap on his holster with his right. It was another vision, he was sure it was, but picking up the stone was enough risk, and he was going to be careful about this.

The sky overhead was the same as it had been all afternoon, but the ground in front of him—or the ground of the vision—looked like it had been cast in deep shadow. Night, maybe? A body lay there, the face turned away from him. His heart thumped hard once as he moved closer, then remembered that he couldn’t. The body would never be any closer than it was or look any different than it did. He heard a siren, someone shouting. But what was important was the body, the blood that trickled slowly along the curve of the neck.

Because whether he could see her face or not, he knew that it was Hallie.

*   *   *

Something was following Hallie, had been following her since she left the cemetery. Her instinct was to run, to run forever, out of Taylor County and South Dakota and the world if she could pull it off, and that was wrong, so wrong because Hallie didn’t run. She’d known that one thing about herself for years, got her through her mother’s death, through basic training, through goddamned Afghanistan and dying, through Dell’s death, through everything. She didn’t run. She stood and she faced things.

She
did
.

She slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road, her truck slanting toward the ditch. She got out, grabbed the fireplace poker automatically, then deliberately put it back behind the seat, shut the driver’s door, and crossed behind the truck. A semi hauling hay stacked five tiers high blasted past her on the road so fast, it rocked her truck. Maker appeared beside her.

“Is it Death?” she asked. Her voice sounded like it had when she talked to Beth, too high-pitched and thin. Damnit. She wasn’t going to be afraid. Not anymore. She
wanted
this life. Here. The way it was all coming together. She couldn’t have it if she ran, if she hid out on the ranch. It wasn’t life then. It was just … living.

Grass heeled over way out in the field.

“Not Death,” Maker said.

“What, then?” Hallie asked.

But Maker barked once, something Hallie had never heard it do before, spun around twice, and disappeared.

Her cell phone rang, rolled over to voice mail, then rang again almost immediately. Without taking her eyes off the open field and the spot where the grass lay flat, Hallie pushed it to vibrate. It vibrated twice in quick succession. The thing in the field didn’t move.

Hallie took a deep breath and stepped off the shoulder into the grass, wet from sleet and a hard rain that was almost ice. She hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when she was soaked to her knees. Her phone vibrated again, then again. The thing in the field moved away from her—at least the grass heeled over like something was moving south, like it didn’t know she was even there.

Hallie pulled her phone from her pocket. Three texts and two missed phone calls, all from Boyd. She looked at the texts without taking her eyes off the field.

Answer your phone!

All the texts said the same thing, even the exclamation point at the end. Boyd never spoke in exclamation points.

Hallie called him back.

He answered on the first ring, said her name—“Hallie”—then didn’t say anything, though she could hear him breathing hard, like he’d run a race.

“Boyd?”

“I need to see you,” he said. “Now.”

“There’s something—”

“No. Right now.”

Not an order, but urgent all the same.

Hallie looked out into the field. The thing waited. It had been waiting months, hadn’t it?
She’d
been waiting months. “All right,” she said to Boyd.

“My house. Be careful.”

He disconnected without saying anything more.

Hallie turned her back on the thing in the field. Let it come, she thought.

*   *   *

Boyd got home in record time, put the fourth stone in the safe with the others, and was outside in the rain, pacing when Hallie arrived. It had been night he told himself, the vision happened at night. But things could change, the dreams he had could be changed, so it stood to reason that the visions that came with holding the stones could be changed too. Hallie was fine. He’d just talked to her.

He forced himself to stop pacing. There was time. They could fix this. He didn’t know where or why or how or when. He didn’t know if the vision as he’d seen it was even a real thing or symbolic. Could Hallie be dying metaphorically? Because she’d stayed in Taylor County? Was that killing her? Staying with him? Staying at the ranch?

He saw her truck when it turned onto the street, and he just stopped himself from running to her as she pulled into the driveway. He felt like this almost every time he had one of his prescient dreams, like the world was going to end, like everything had gone horribly wrong, like there was nothing anyone could do, and for some mysterious reason, he was the only one who knew. When he was a kid, it had sent him racing through the house and into the barn, tracking down his brother and his parents. Once he’d called every single kid in his class, then couldn’t figure out what to tell them or their parents. He’d made up a story about inviting them to a birthday party he wouldn’t even have for seven more months. His parents grounded him for a week, and it had been the last time he said anything to anyone even remotely related to the dreams he had until he met Hallie.

“Jesus, Boyd, it’s raining,” Hallie said when she got out of the truck, and he almost laughed because it sounded so normal, so—Hallie.

“I just … wanted to see you,” he said. He grabbed the front of her jacket, like he could physically hold her there forever.

“Really?”

“Well—” Before he could finish the sentence, before he even knew precisely what the sentence would be, there came a sound like a high-pitched whine, like an oversized angry insect or an overcranked engine.

Hallie grabbed him at the same time he grabbed her, and they dived for the ground as the sound and the concussion of an explosion hit like a thunderclap.

18

Sirens.

Boyd rolled over and spit dirt out of his mouth. He searched for Hallie, who was just sitting up next to him, shaking her head and wiping a hand across her face, streaking dirt in a dark smudge like war paint. She grinned at him. “Maybe you should move,” she said.

Before Boyd could respond, a patrol car swung into Boyd’s short driveway and almost hit them, slamming on the brakes so hard that the hood tilted sharply downward. Boyd rose, offered a hand to Hallie, and pulled her to her feet. Teedt got out of the car with his radio mike in one hand and the other on the butt of his gun.

“Fire truck’s on its way,” he said, which turned out to be unnecessary because the West Prairie City ladder truck and a pickup with a blue and red light panel on top pulled to a stop in front of the house before he’d finished talking.

“What the hell’s going on?” Teedt asked.

Boyd didn’t bother to answer, thinking both, What does it look like? and I have no idea. Hallie was already halfway across the front yard. Smoke poured around the corner of the house along with a thin flicker of flame. The volunteer firefighters moved quickly, pulling hose, and ran past Hallie and Boyd as if both were just in the way, which they probably were.