Where (22 page)

“
Here
here?” Yes, she is goading him. “Or stranded in this damn desert?”

“Either. I was out cold when it happened, same as you.”

“Out cold now, or back then on the first day we got here?”

“Both.”

They are sawing back and forth and Merrill doesn't know how to make it stop. “How do you know I was out cold?”

“They do that. Gas. Go easy, Merrill Laneuville Maxwell Poulnot.”
How does he
 … “We're in here for the long haul and nobody knows how long that is or what it will turn into, so will you let it be? Just let it be.”

… know these old names?
“I have to know.”

“Believe me, you don't want to know.” He stands abruptly. Paces the length of the shed. “We can't stay here. We need to find a way out.”

“I thought you said…”

He cuts her off. “In case.”

Troubled, she gets to her feet. The effort is tremendous. Shaking her hands as if to thaw them, she scuffs the sand underfoot to start the blood moving and takes out after Steele, walking where he walks, going faster, faster as her blood runs higher and her muscles respond, pacing the length and breadth of the shed. As they go she is thinking, thinking faster now that she's up and moving. “There's got to be a door. I mean, how else did we get in?”

“I don't know how we got in.”

He either does know or he doesn't know; it's troubling. All Merrill knows is that where they are now, there's sand on the floor, sand in her hair, but no sand coming in through the tightly fitted planks in the walls. She looks up. “Me either,” she says, “unless there's a hatch.”

He says, too fast, “No way. There would be stairs,” and busies himself at the far end of the shed.

Merrill persists, craning at the ceiling overhead as though she'll find daylight leaking in around the hatch. Afterimages from the LEDs blind her. If there's an opening overhead, it's hard to identify from here. How would they reach it?

Pile up all these suitcases from Treblinka and Manzanar, the clothes and belongings left behind by the Vikings who vanished in Greenland, the missing settlers of Roanoke, passengers on drowned ships, the lost tribe of Israel and all the other lost colonies represented here? Claw their way up the discarded shells of lost lives until they make it to the top?

Would that be sacrilege? Ray would know. She wishes to hell it was steady, dependable Ray locked in with her and not Steele, gorgeous and changeable as scenes in a kaleidoscope. She might not know where she was, but with Ray, she'd know where she stood. Steele is volatile, half dynamo and half wounded youth; she'd like to ask him about all this but he's distracted, rapping his way along the far wall, stopping to listen and moving on as though at some point it will sound hollow, and he'll find their way out.

There's a subtle shift, as though something big has begun to move. Startled, Steele looks up.

He groans, “Right.” As if this is inevitable.

Seconds later she hears it. They are many, and they're running this way. The vibration sets off a little sandfall overhead. Merrill jumps back. The wooden ceiling of the shed where they sat for so long is indeed its roof, with sand coming in faster, revealing a square of light. The hatch.

“Rawson, look!” Her voice goes up in a little shriek. “Look for the ladder.”

“Not now,” he says, but she's too excited to care.

Never mind the growing mob-sound overhead. Merrill parts the heavy coats to feel her way along the wall behind. Shaking with excitement, she works her way along the clothes rack, parting hangers to see, closing the gaps and moving on to the next rank so fast that empty costumes go by like pages in a child's flip book. Hidden so cleverly behind a tier of fur coats that the maker thought she'd never find it, there is a ladder. She calls, “Over here!”

He hisses, “Shhh!”

The first heavy feet pound across the concealed roof above them, disturbing the protective layer of sand, but Merrill doesn't care. She wants what she wants. “I found the ladder!”

“Don't!” He is behind her in seconds, locking protective arms around her, swaying to keep her in place. “Be still. If they find us…” He doesn't have to finish.

She backs into him so they are clamped together, one on one, and stops. Whoever he is, whatever this is, it feels right. Now she is aware of footsteps directly overhead— too many, running too fast. “My God!”

A shudder runs through him. “If you pray, you'd better pray that they don't stop.”

Possibilities chase each other through her head so fast that she waits, holding her breath until it hurts.

Then he adds, “This time. Hang in.” His grasp on her is so steady, his voice so sure that she would do anything. “I think I can get you out before they come back.”

 

22

Dave

Friday into Saturday

“I have to go back,” Dave said when Earl put him down here in the back bedroom, filled with photos and trophies from some old war.

“Not while they're still out there. You got people after you.” Earl pushed him into place on the bed like a medic on the battlefield and threw a blanket over him.

Dave could not stop thinking, thinking, thinking. “I'll need your raft.”

“You'll lay low, asshole. When it's time, I'll carry you.”

The long afternoon blurred into a long evening. Davy slept through most of it. The hard days' nights since he lost her piled up like boxcars in a train wreck and ran right over him. This is what it boils down to. He lost her. He lost Boogie too, and he thinks it was sheer carelessness.

Like this whole mess is something he did.

When he most wanted to light out and fix everything he'd done wrong, Earl warned, “Lay low,” which he did in the Pinckneys' back bedroom, where no light came. Until the last cop car crunched down the road and the last of Poyntertown's knuckle-dragging supernumeraries crunched through the woods corralling off-islanders, there was no leaving this room. Earl's father slept here from the day he collapsed until he died of something Theda wouldn't talk about. She closed the paneled storm shutters the day his eyes glazed over and he fell out, and when they brought him home from the hospital she put him to bed in here and closed the shutters for good. She locked them down with Gaillard Pinckney Three's fancy wrought-iron latches— proof against hurricanes and tidal waves, whatever came. Never mind that Earl was too young to divine the future as it pertained to his mother, particularly not the one Theda's mind is wandering around in now. His own mother, and he never saw it coming.

Maybe she did. As they took Felix Pinckney away she said, “When I look like I'm fixing to die, lay me down in there.” That day she nailed the shutters tight so they would stay latched, as though anybody can batten down and keep death from coming in.

All they keep out is the light. An ideal place for Dave, short on sleep and looking like he does. Fuck, why didn't he grab his damn clothes out of the closet when he was back at Merrill's; he looks like a Necco wafer in Ray's things. Pastel store-dummy laid out on the bed in the Pinckneys' dying room in another man's clothes.

He left everything behind on Kraven, including Boogie Hood.

The dark, sad bedroom is like the Island of the Lost, lined with Felix Pinckney's books and photos from some old war— Nam, Dave thinks, although Earl never said. It's still just how he left it, probably because for Felix, it was the Last Good Time: one of those places where the past moves in to stay, getting so big that it crowds out everything else. There's no space in that room for unrelated objects— or for new thoughts, which Dave thought was fucking appropriate. With rednecks beating the bushes for him, followed by armed bounty hunters cross-hatching the channel on Jet Skis, the dying room seemed like the right place for him.

Beached in the old man's bed, Dave tossed and sweated, hounded by possible futures. Scenarios flashed on and off like lights in a hurricane, never the same thing twice. The dead man's remote past was a lot easier to live with than whatever was going on out there— or what went on back then, before the stupendous … what?

Vanishment.

It split him in two.

Stupid bastard, whatever he and Merrill had between them before they parted company is pretty much wrecked— that sad, ugly last exchange, with no way to rewrite it or start all over again. Like a man in an old copper diving suit dropping over the side of the mother ship, he fled into sleep, sinking until the next damn fool tromped up on Earl's front porch or tried to get in by the back way hunting him, and the altercation brought him to the surface— aggressive fuckers, your redneck whites.

Life went on in the rest of the house as though Davy wasn't there. Earl kept busy pretending he wasn't. Outside, intruders came and went until they stopped coming.

He slept until Earl brought in a plate with corn bread and his best shrimp pilaf— when? It was either stone dark outside or not. It was midnight inside his head. “Perloo. Bored much?”

“Hot and cold running rednecks.” Earl shrugged. “I had to look busy.”

“I should go.” With Merrill missing and whatever hopes he has for the two of them pending, he asked, “Is it time?”

“Not nearly. It's half past nine.”

“I should…”

Earl took the plate from him. “Not yet.”

“Earl, it's already fucking dark.”

He was halfway off the bed when Earl stopped him with the flat of his hand. “Not now.”

He snapped to, electrified. “There's someone in the house.”

“Shuh, that's just a DVD.” Earl pushed him back down on the bed. “I put on
The Wild Bunch
for Mom.”

“You're some kind of ironist.” He tried again. “Let go.”

“Can't.”

“Why not?”

They were beyond explanations. Earl stared Dave into obedience:
stay.
When he had him back in the bed Earl said patiently, “Not until the last patrol boat's come and gone.”

“Patrol boat?”

“I warned you.”

Dave sagged. “You did.”

“And the motherfuckers are armed.”

“OK, when?” Like a drowning sailor, he submerged with no memory of the last thing Earl said to him. He thinks the last and most important thing he asked Earl, that Earl never answered was, “How?”

This way.

They took the fiberglass flat-bottomed boat Felix gave Earl for his tenth birthday: a kid's thing, lightweight and easy for two men to carry. They stopped Earl's pickup a half-mile short of the Kraventown causeway and ducked under the boat without needing to discuss it. Raising it over their heads, they walked it the rest of the way, two grown men creeping down on the sand like a giant turtle, under the boat's scarred shell. When the lights swept their way they squatted, so they'd look like debris from an old wreck to whoever happened to be looking. They carried the boat out to the Kraven island bridge on the fisherman's path that flanked the raised road, pushed it into the water and shoved off. They rowed without talking, letting the current take them under the bridge and into the channel. They tied up under the dock in Kraventown harbor, waiting until isolated gunshots and the shouting died and it was safe to go on.

Early Saturday: Now

When they hear hollow footsteps overhead, the last designated sentry heading back along the dock to the street, they talk, but only a little bit.

Earl says reflectively, “So, what the fuck do you think happened here?”

And Dave is blindsided by the thing scuttling around underneath the wreckage in his head.
The plans.
He was so intent on getting here that he forgot. “I don't know what I think, I only know what I know.”

“That being…”

The Northerner abandoned everything when he left that room in the Harbor City Inn. “I think Steele's behind it.”

“Who?”

“I searched his room.”

“Whose room?”

“Rawson Steele, or whatever the fuck his real name is.”

“Who's that?”

“Crap developer, as it turns out, came in sniffing around all charming, but I knew. I saw the plans,” he says, going on what little his Maglite showed him before he had to cut and run. “He's fixing to ruin Kraven, like the monster that shits on everything it's too full to eat. Giant water park on the lake, apartment tower, megamall, the works. He holds messes of deeds and shit. People you don't know about already sold out to him.”

“I don't know much about Kraven,” Earl says.

“I do. This dude's bought up half the property out there.”

“Without you knowing?”

“Shills,” Dave says. “He sent shills in to pick it up for him, and they got it cheap. Too bad he didn't scope the lake for himself before he sank all that money into it.”

“The lake!” Earl smothers a laugh. “Wait'll he starts to dig.”

Dave finishes, “In flood season.”

“He'll be floating out to sea on the forms before they even think about pouring cement.”

It's dark under here, but Dave knows Earl is grinning. The idea that anybody can do anything but grieve tugs him eight ways to Sunday.

Earl adds, “But I kind of don't think he could disappear a whole mess of people.”

“He wants to get rid of us somehow.” It takes him a painful while to say, “If it's him and I can prove it, at least we'd know where to start.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“They're all gone, and besides.” Desperation makes him dogmatic. “Everything happens for a reason!”

“Who says?”

Anger roars into Dave,
wham.
“It has to! There's gotta be an explanation.”

“Like, scientific or techno?”

“Yeah.”