The Man From Taured (24 page)

"Wow," Eveline said. "That is some story."

"Do you think it sounds like horseshit?"

"No," Eveline replied, much to Noble's surprise. "Like I told you, with the crazy shit I've seen lately, why would the fact that you can find and heal rifts somehow be any stranger?"

"I guess I hadn't thought of it that way," Noble replied, taking a large and long drink from the sink in the bathroom. He refilled the glass and drank another.

"So, am I just supposed to stay at this hotel until you get this guy, or what?" Eveline asked.

"I don't know," Noble said, licking his lips and thinking about refilling the glass for a third time. "The amount of shit that I don't know is enough to fill the Grand Canyon to the top."

"Yeah, I feel you there," Eveline replied. "I am so tired right now. I think I need to go to sleep. Tomorrow, though, I need to figure out what I'm going to do. I can’t just stay here indefinitely."

"Do you have any relatives that you can go stay with or something?"

"I have a sister who lives in Milwaukee," Eveline said. "I haven't seen her for a long time. Maybe it's time to use up some vacation time and go see her. What do you think?"

"I think that sounds like a good idea. Can you get there all right?"

"Yeah, I can call a cab and get a bus there. I had better call her, though," Eveline said. "Will they go after me and my sister?"

"There's a chance," Noble admitted. "Just be careful. The guys in the shadows are on our side, remember that. They can protect you, most of the time. But if you see those creepy kids, just blow them the fuck away or get away from them as fast as you can. Don't let them in and don't let them touch you."

"Right. I got you. Well, you are certainly a very interesting person to have met, Noble Randle. I can't say that it's been a pleasure, but I also know that all of this ain't your fault. So, be careful, and stop this fucker. Stop this shit from happening to anyone else."

"I’ll try. That's all I can do."

"Take care of yourself," Eveline said. "When this is done, come back here and maybe you, me and your wife can all go to dinner."

"Sounds good to me," Noble said, suddenly feeling like he was going to cry. He felt like a fool for ever thinking that he could accomplish anything. The magnitude of all of this crashed into him like a tidal wave.

Eveline hung up and Noble stood in his bathroom for a moment and stared at the reflection in the mirror.

There had been a time when Noble was in shape. This was back in the days when he thought he would become your average beat cop and then, maybe some day, a detective. He was still in reasonable shape, but there was no denying that he was turning a bit doughy in places. The years of working mostly behind a desk had taken its toll. He was not an action hero, he was a guy who filled out reports. Most of the time, when the arrests were made, he was not even present. That stuff was turned over to police in tactical gear. He turned things over to people who were in shape like he had been when he wanted to be an average cop.

Noble took another long drink and then washed his face. He shut off the light to the bathroom, but left the light in the short hallway leading from the bedroom area to the bathroom on. He had always had a fear of total darkness, but it was strange to know that there were now reasons for that fear. Some part of him must have always known that he was going to end up here. He hated that feeling of unchangeable destiny.

Noble sat on the bed in his underwear and methodically took apart his automatic pistol. He cleaned each part and reassembled the thing, made sure the slide worked the way it was supposed to and put a full clip into place. He also made sure he had plenty more ammo handy.

When had he last shot that goddamn gun? Every year he had to be assessed and he always trained heavily before the test. However, the entire time he had been with Homeland he had never had a reason to remove the gun from his holster, let alone fire it. When it came to targets on a range, he was actually a very good shot. When it came to trying to shoot a living person, he had no idea how well he would do.

Was Whitten or anyone involved in this actually a living person? The question was too vexing to deal with at the moment.

When that task was done, Noble turned on the television and found some talk show to leave on in the background. He had no desire to sleep in total silence. He wanted noise. He wanted light. He crawled beneath the covers, put his head down and went to sleep.

When the morning came, Noble awoke from troubled dreams. Dreams full of darkness, but darkness that was alive, that came up from the sewers and flowed down the street like water and swallowed anything and everything. It was a darkness that moved like a living thing, and swallowed up the living and the dead and absorbed them into itself. There was also Whitten, with his dark eyes, but also with sharp teeth and ragged claws. Whitten wanted to tear Noble apart just as the darkness reached him so that he would be in pieces, b
ut alive, when the darkness absorbed him. Whitten wanted Noble to spend eternity in that hell, in pieces, screaming uselessly into that living darkness.

He stood under the hot water in the shower for a long time trying to wash the dreams away. He shaved, mechanically, nicking himself several times, not even realizing that his hands were shaking. He combed his hair haphazardly and then packed up his bags and checked out of the hotel. It felt weird, not knowing where he was going or what was going to happen, or if he would have a place to sleep tonight, but his course had been chosen.

Noble stepped out of the hotel and was surprised when a black van pulled up in front of him. Dash stepped out of the passenger side and slid open the side door. In the driver's seat was Dr. Shaw.

"Let's go," Shaw said.

Noble nodded at the two men and stepped into the van. The interior was comfortable, with gray fabric. The door slammed shut.

It felt very final.

***

They drove for hours. Noble sat in the back and studied the road as it flew past. Dash sat in the passenger seat and said little. Shaw had the GPS working and that was the only voice for a long time. Despite the directions, however, Noble felt that Shaw knew exactly where they were going. They were headed west.

Noble let his mind drift. Soon he was dozing in and out. Shaw never wanted to take a break to go to the bathroom. Dash never said anything, either. Noble still had a lot of questions, but right now it seemed that Dash and Shaw wanted to focus on the task at hand. He got the impression that getting where they needed to go was more important than talking, so he kept to himself.

When was the first time he could remember that strange feeling in his stomach? When could he remember suddenly wondering where he was and what was happening? Noble wasn't sure, but he did remember, as a child, being terrified of going out of the house without his parents with him.

Noble was constantly afraid as a child. He would burst into tears at the tiniest nudge and his parents were very close to him. This was in the years before his brother was born, those precious developmental years when so much is formed. His parents had a small house on a dead-end street and there were kids all over the block roughly his age. They wanted him to go out and play. He would, but only if they came with and then he would ride his Big Wheel or play in the sandbox in the backyard all by himself. He did not want to head out the door and run down the street to meet the other kids.

There had been many years he wondered why that was. What had him so scared? When he was even younger he had had to spend some time in the hospital, and in those days it was not common for parents to spend the night with the kids.
So, he was in a room with other kids, left alone in the dark at night, terrified, confused. He would wake up with men in lab coats around him jabbing needles into him and performing operations to correct a problem with his feet and legs.

His parents always thought that he was just afraid of being left alone after that. That being locked up in that hospital and his parents sent away had created a separation anxiety within him.

Now Noble was not so sure.

He remembered once waking up in the middle of the night in the darkened hospital. He was unable to move, unable to turn over, because there was something strapped to his leg. It immobilized him, making him afraid. He had always been the type to toss and turn in the night and now he was stuck laying face down and could not move. He burst into tears and a nurse came into the room. It was a nurse Noble did not recognize.

"It's a boardie," the nurse said in a high-pitched voice that she must have thought was soothing to children. "It keeps you from rolling around. We don't want you to pop your stitches."

"I can't move!" Noble had wailed.

"I know, and that's the way we want it," the nurse replied. "Now go back to sleep."

He had managed to get back to sleep, but the next day and the following days he did not see that nurse again. However, they did attach the thing to his leg.

Odd? Coincidence? Had she just worked a shift that one time in the children's ward and then not again? Or had he slipped through a Rift?

Now so much of Noble's life was in question.

Another memory surfaced of playing with Tonka trucks in his living room and suddenly finding the room filled with strange white things that snapped at Noble. He had a vivid memory of this white thing, like a living mousetrap, with teeth, snapping on the back end of the dump truck he was playing with and it snatching it out of his hands. The white things not much more than just a hinge surrounded by narrow white plastic with alligator-like teeth. He had burst into tears, afraid they would bite him, and hearing his mother's voice in the kitchen. Just like that he was back in his living room and she was running toward him to dry his eyes. The white snapping things were gone.

His truck was gone, too.

Noble had had memories of that incident pop up into his brain from time to time, but he always thought it was a fragment of some childhood nightmare, or perhaps a memory of something else that made more sense, but warped by his childlike mind.

Now, he wasn't so sure.

Shaw had told him that he had a knack for finding Rifts, but did some Rifts travel? Did they seek him out, too? He decided he would have to ask about that one later, but he guessed that the answer was yes. One moment he had been in his normal living room and the next he was in a world filled with strange, biting, plastic-like creatures.

Noble dozed, coming out of his sleep from time to time to see where they were. The landscape had gone from relatively flat to a terrain filled with large rolling hills. He had no idea where they were, but it was getting to be mid-day now and they showed no signs of stopping. His stomach growled, but neither Dash nor Shaw showed any indication that they were getting hungry.

Noble remembered a time when he got up from his bed, when he was still in that little house on the dead end street, and walked to the bedroom door. It was late at night. There was a short hallway that led to his parent's room and a bathroom in between. His parents had been trying to get him to stop wetting the bed and his mother was repeatedly telling him that if he got up in the night and went to the bathroom he was being a good boy. His parents did not seem to understand that he did not know he had to go to the bathroom when he was sleeping, his bladder just emptied. It wasn't as if he were in his bed, curled up, clutching at himself in the dark and trying to keep himself from peeing. He was sound asleep, lost in dreams, and it just happened.

That night, however, the pressure had awakened him and he got up and headed for the door. The world was transformed in the night. The house that he knew inside and out, backwards and forward, and played in all the time during the day was now ominous, despite the night light that glowed against the wall.

Noble remembered walking slowly and softly, the pressure in his bladder almost more than he could bear. When he opened the door, the hallways beyond seemed long and it was very, very dark.

There were two red eyes floating in that darkness, near his parent's bedroom door. They looked evil…mean. There was a loud hissing sound that Noble associated with the sounds a bull would make before it charged (they always did in the cartoons he watched, anyway). He gasped in fear and slammed the door shut. He jumped back into bed. The next morning, he was wet from the waist down. His mother had had a fit.

Noble had told people, with a laugh, about his nightmare of the bull in the hallway of his home when he was a child. Now he wondered if what he had seen was one of the shadow men from IDEA, perhaps one using a breathing apparatus.

It seemed cruel. Who would do that to a child?

"Noble, are you hungry?"

Noble opened his eyes. It was Dash, turned around in the seat.

"Yeah, I could eat," Noble replied.

Dash reached down to something that must have been between his feet and came up with several paper bags.

"I have chicken, turkey and ham," Dash said. "I ate the tuna."

"I'll take the ham," Noble said.

Dash handed him the sandwich bag. Inside was a ham sandwich with cheese, pickles and mayo. It also contained a can of soda and a bag of chips. Noble tucked in eagerly, devouring the sandwich in what seemed like seconds. For some reason it tasted like the best damn ham sandwich he had ever had.

"Are we getting close?" Noble asked.

"Not much longer," Shaw replied. "Just a couple more hours."

"Can I ask where we're going?" Noble asked.

"You can," Shaw said. "We are headed to Pennsylvania. A little town called Knorr."

A chill went up and down his spine. That name had popped up a few times now.

"That's the place with all the weak spots," Noble said, crunching chips and drinking his soda.

"There's no better place for you to realize your potential," Shaw said.

Noble nodded. Before they had gotten started on the road he told them about his meeting with Whitten. Dash and Shaw listened with interest as he told them about telling his wife and Eveline. Then they sat in silence for some time.

"I guess that was for the best," was what Shaw said, at last, as they headed out onto the highway.

Outside the window the world was greener and greener, with rolling hills. The towns got further and further apart. Noble dozed again, with more troubled dreams. This time what awoke him was the sensation that the vehicle was slowing down and that the road beneath them had changed. He sat up and looked around to see they were pulling off the highway. There were trees on either side of the ramp, pushing up against the pavement.

"I guess we're here?" Noble said, rubbing his eyes.

"Almost," Shaw replied. "We'll check into the hotel. I don't think we're going to get much done around here tonight. However, we'll get an early start tomorrow and then we'll see what we can find."

"I wish I had a better idea of what you expect me to do," Noble said.

"I wish I could tell you," Shaw said. "I wish I had a playbook for this thing, but that does not exist. We are going to sink or swim tomorrow. I have a few ideas, but I have no way of knowing if anything is going to work. I guess we'll find out."

Noble was not entirely satisfied with that answer, but he doubted Shaw was anymore satisfied. They pulled off the highway and onto another road. The hotel was close to the ramps, just off to the right. There were three rooms waiting for them, all of them suites, all of them with sinks and a fridge and a microwave and a coffee maker. Across the street was a Wal-Mart and there were restaurants and more hotels all around. It looked like any kind of small town that you would find anywhere in the world. Nothing about it was odd.

Once the three of them had checked in and put their suitcases away, Dash and Shaw went off to get dinner. Noble begged off, not feeling particularly hungry at the moment, and he walked out into the parking lot. The sun was low, but the horizon was blazing orange and red as if the world near the horizon were burning.

The hotel was high on a hill and he could look down at the restaurant and the store and the highway. There were more rolling hills that stretched out and away as far as the eye could see. Shadows were crawling over the hills and darkness was claiming the land.

As Noble scanned the area, he wondered where downtown Knorr was. His eyes focused on a section of the rolling hills off to his right. For just a second, the air over a large section of the trees appeared to shimmer. It was as if a huge heat source was located there. It was there for an instant and then it was gone.

"That's it," Noble muttered. "That's Knorr."

He closed his eyes. The wind blew through his hair and he smelled foliage on the wind. If he had been a country boy, he might have been able to identify the flowers he was smelling or whatever trees or leaves, but he had no idea. It was just a smell he associated with the wilderness.

Just beyond that scent, beyond the noise of the trucks as they shifted up and down the hills, beyond the sound of cars, the sound of people laughing as they staggered from the bar down the road, he felt something else. There was a kind of tugging sensation deep in his chest. It was as if a hand were reaching into him and pulling him, wanting him to walk, just set out, put one foot in front of the other and walk right toward that shimmer in the sky. As Noble focused on shutting out the world around him, focusing on the tugging, concentrating on that shimmering, he could almost hear a voice on the wind.

"Come to me, Noble," that voice said. "Come here and see."

Just then there was a loud air horn from a passing truck and he was pulled from his reverie. He looked around the parking lot. The place was full. There were semis parked along the edge of the parking lot, but the rest of the spots were filled with minivans and family vehicles.