Bonfires Burning Bright (3 page)

“That’s hardly legal,” Frost said. Griffin frowned, but then she smiled at him. “But we’ve got extraordinary circumstances here, and we’re not exactly part of the United States...or Earth. We’ll do what needs doing to keep this town alive.” She looked at the others around the table. “Anyone have any objections? Pastor?”

Dodge just shook his head.

“Okay,” she turned back to Griffin. “Why don’t you take Lony—sorry, Avalon—with you. I’m going to take a look at the old abandoned power station, out behind Winslow’s place. It’s supposed to be empty, right?” She looked to Julie for reassurance.

“It was empty the last time I was there. They took everything out—even the wiring in the walls. Place is just a concrete husk.” Julie crossed her arms as if she was expecting Frost to doubt her.

“So it’s probably still a husk. But Ellison—or Turkette—could be holed up there…and it would be the perfect place to assume no one would come looking. When was the last time you were out there?”

Julie looked uncertain. “A year or more.”

Cash stood up. “With money like Ellison’s, he could have had the inside turned into a Hilton by now, and we’d never know.” He headed for the door and nodded at Julie as he passed her. He paused at Kyle’s side, and leaned down. When he spoke, Griffin could just barely hear him. “Shit hits the fan, you keep Laurie by your side.”

“You know I will,” Kyle told him.

Then Cash and Julie left.

“Pastor,” Griffin said. “Mind tagging along with the Sheriff?” He looked at her. “No one goes anywhere alone, right?”

She nodded at Dodge. “Meet me out front in five minutes.”

Frost left while the others stood up from the table. Griffin stopped the pastor as he moved to leave the room. “No unnecessary risks. I want both of you back in one piece.” He regretted the phrasing. Rebecca Rule, the town’s previous sheriff, had been cut in half during the first shift. At least he hadn’t said it in front of Frost, and Dodge seemed not to notice.

The man gave a knowing nod. “One of us more than the other.”

Griffin smiled and released him.

Kyle stepped out next, and then Avalon was by Griffin’s side.

“You worked that out with him beforehand, didn’t you?” she asked. “With Pastor Dodge. He already knew he was tagging along with Frost. You’re sneakier than I thought.”

“You have no idea,” Griffin said. He hoped she wouldn’t have to witness any of his much darker secrets, especially the ones that might wander into town.

3

Cash was surprised that Julie had wanted to come along, but he was strangely glad to have her with him. She not only had the key, but was able to point him to the new, small substation building. It was a flat, concrete structure, one story and probably no more than thirty feet long, but between the profusion of windmills lining the edges of the old air field, and the hundreds of massive solar panels, he would have been stumbling around for a while before he found the low-profile structure.

He’d been keeping an eye on the woman whenever he could in the last week, after her out-of-character and violent combat with one of the fire-breathing creatures from the lizard world. He knew there was something more to her than the real estate gig, but he still wasn’t sure what. He’d shared his concerns with Griffin, and the man had told him about the similar proficiencies of the missing nurse, Turkette. They’d agreed that both women were more than they seemed. Cash had been tasked with trying to surreptitiously discover more about Julie, so he was secretly pleased she had wanted to come out to the airfield. But he was also being cautious. It hadn’t escaped his notice that her suggestion about the power—hell, her critical reasoning skills regarding it—were also out of character with her previous façade as a ditzy, clueless land peddler. That also made him suspicious of her desire to accompany him. He even found himself wondering whether she was on to his task of keeping an eye on her.

Have to play it careful
, he told himself.

“You have keys to the door, too?” he asked, as they stepped up to the entrance to the substation. The air in town was still pretty clear, but here on the western edge, the thick smoke from the distant bonfires was spreading in long tendrils.

Julie shook her head, her blonde ponytail flipping back and forth over her black fleece jacket. Even though it should have been July back home, on this world it was probably early winter. It hadn’t started to snow, but there was a wicked chill in the air. The shrieking they’d heard from the Sheriff’s station was lessened by the wind heading to the south—toward the distant cityscape.

Cash grunted and tried the metal door, but it was locked. He moved along the wall to the sole window in the front of the concrete building.

“Do we even need to get in? Can’t you just follow the cables coming out of the building?” Julie asked, looking up at the thick black power lines running from one point of the roof out into the field of solar panels. Cash could hear annoyance creeping into her voice.

Once again, warning bells went off in his head. The woman knew more than she was letting on about what had been happening to Refuge. And he was getting the sense that she was after something particular on this little expedition.
Interesting.

He just looked at her for a minute, then bent to pick up a large rock from the overgrown tall grass at his feet.

“Those lines go to the panels. I need to see the schematics for everything inside. There should be charts, probably in plastic, right on the walls.” Cash pulled his arm back and lobbed the huge chunk of gray granite through the window. The shattering glass was far louder than he thought it would be, and he instinctively looked around, then mentally berated himself for thinking anyone might be watching. Then he noticed Julie had done the same thing, and he felt a little better.

He pulled off his plaid flannel shirt, leaving himself just a faded yellow t-shirt in the cold. He balled the flannel around his fist, then swept away the remaining shards in the window frame, until the way was clear. He went to unravel the shirt and put it back on, but he spotted a lot of tiny glass slivers embedded in the fabric, so he just tossed it to the grass.

“Now what, MacGyver?” Julie asked with a thick layer of sarcasm. She appeared to dislike their only method of entry.

Cash just shrugged at her, then held onto the window frame and vaulted in through the opening, his work boots crunching down on the glass fragments on the other side. She’d either find her own way in or not, but he didn’t need her for this phase, and he was growing tired of her company. While he understood that she wasn’t personally responsible for the downfall of his electrician business, she had brokered the deals that retrofitted the town for a self-sustainable solar and wind platform. She’d made a convenient target for his wrath.

Julie Barnes was
about at the end of her rope with this hick. She could easily have leapt through the damaged window, like he had, but she needed to maintain her cover at least a little. So she walked along the exterior of the building like a helpless child, waving a hand in front of her face to redirect some of the smoke that was crawling into town on the breeze.

She looked around at the eerily abandoned airfield and its array of power-sucking protuberances. She’d brokered the deal, yes, but she’d known all along what it was for. Ellison’s deals and contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had all been cancelled. So what was the old man doing, installing cutting-edge technology, and retrofitting an entire town in Nowheresville, New Hampshire with alternate energy? Sent by DARPA, she was supposed to have been keeping an eye on his progress. The real estate gig was a perfect cover. Until it wasn’t, and the crazy bastard somehow did what DARPA couldn’t and teleported them all to some distant place.

She didn’t know how the tech worked, but she knew the man was here somewhere, and he would be her only hope of getting home. She might have been a spy before, but now she would be Ellison’s new best friend. If only she could find the man.

Charley Wilson had been useless as an associate. She had checked out the farm, at his suggestion, but she hadn’t found anything useful there either. So her plan to enlist Cash Whittemore and his electrical expertise was the next best thing. Maybe he could figure out where the juice was going, and that would lead her to Ellison.

She looked again at the oncoming smoke spreading over the sky, and wondered what Ellison’s endgame was. Obviously he’d arranged for the town to shift to new worlds, but what was he seeking? Some things at DARPA had been classified beyond her level. They’d have some explaining to do when she got back—if she got back.

A loud creak turned her around. Cash stood in the doorway. He’d opened the door from the inside for her.

She started for the door. “Thanks.”

“We’re done here,” he told her, as he stepped out and let the door close and lock behind him.

Julie just stared at him.

“Got what we need,” the man explained. “No power running to the pylons, far as I can tell, so they must be getting their juice from somewhere else. But there’s a wicked shit-ton of power running in a conduit out to Green Meadow Farm. Way more than there should be.”

Julie nodded.
So it
was
out at the farm somewhere, and I missed it. Damn
. “Let’s go check it out,” she said, jingling her key ring.

Cash started walking back toward the gate, and she followed him, touching the Ruger LCP she had concealed under her fleece jacket in the waistband of her jeans. Once she knew where Ellison was, Cash would become a liability.

4

Winslow Herman ran a hand through his gray, messy hair and shivered in the cold. He peered through his telescope again at the hideous monstrosity of a city down in the valley, past the edge of Refuge. He focused on the thick tan sheets stretched over the walls and towers.

It looks like leather
, he thought.

He was glad again that Carol had opted to stay downstairs inside the station. The wailing shrieks that rose up out of the distant structures were bad enough, but if she’d seen this... He shook his head. She had only recently recovered from her ordeal with the giant wasps. She was well enough to help out with the others downstairs, but neither of them were spring chickens anymore.

At 64, he felt like he might not be able to deal with too many more of these shifts. He’d worked a full career at JPL, dealing with arrogant asses and unstoppable bureaucrats, and his former status as backyard astronomer had been a hard won victory. Now he was this town’s only possible hope for scientifically explaining this mystery, but Griffin had been turning to him more and more for a role in leadership too. He could do it, he just didn’t want to. He was tired. He’d done his time.

Now after days of staring at those damn coded documents, he was ready to tear what was left of his hair out.

He stood to his full 6’4” height and stretched his lower back, while looking past the barrel of the telescope at the labyrinth beyond. It was clearly a functional maze. Structures stood on the sides and around the fringe that looked like homes or storefronts, but it was difficult to see through the smoke rising up from the towering bonfires.

What chilled him more than the unseasonably cold weather was the source of those fires. While he’d been unable to get a good look at the few moving figures he’d spotted on the ground, he’d been able to focus on the bonfires. Piles of human bodies mounded at least twenty feet in height, but also other things—part human and part something else. As if multitudes of animals and humans had all been ground together in a vortex mixer, like the one they’d had in JPL’s chemistry lab. There were people with small rodent ears growing from their chests, and others with limbs missing, which had been replaced by other odd appendages. One looked like an elephant’s trunk.

All the strange chimera creatures had one thing in common though—they were all dead, and someone or something had heaped them onto the blazing pyres. Whoever, or
whatever
that was, worried him the most.

That and the coming night. They sky had been growing darker as he’d stood in the roost. He’d thought it was just the smoke at first, but the daylight was definitely receding.

How much worse will this place be at night?

The shrieking on the wind had died down at least, and Winslow took the opportunity to descend the ladder from Griffin’s observation platform, down to the station. Inside he found Carol helping Laurie Whittemore with some of the children. He didn’t want to disturb her, so he simply ran his hand along her back as he walked by. She looked up and gave him a glowing smile, but he could see in her radiant blue eyes that she was tired.

He moved through the throng of people taking shelter in the station, and headed toward the Sheriff’s office, where he had set up shop with Joshua and Lisa. The more time he spent with them, the less he thought of them as kids. He also made an effort to think of the boy by his proper name, because he’d heard Lisa use it, and saw how the boy liked it. Nicknames, especially in a small town like Refuge, could be impossible to shake.

“Anything?” he asked, as he walked through the door.

Joshua, sitting behind the desk, smiled up at him. Lisa was by his side, looking ecstatic.

“What is it?” Winslow asked.

“I did it. I cracked the code.”

Lisa nodded her head furiously, beaming brightly. “He did!”

Winslow rushed over, around the desk and looked down at the scribbled paper the boy had been working on. He couldn’t make much out of all the letters and numbers scrawled over the page in Joshua’s handwriting, except for a small phrase:

Confiden…

“What was it?” he asked.

Joshua pointed at the partial English word. “From the inside cover of the journal. I’m sure it was Confidential.” He held up the journal and poked his finger through the hole. “Some of the text is missing. I was right, though. It’s a substitution code…but there’s an extra layer. Remember how Griffin had found the Nelson Florider name? The man likes anagrams and puzzles. I should have thought of it before. It was a substitution, but then everything was written right to left.”

“Backwards?” Winslow asked.

“Yep. Look.” Joshua quickly jotted out a sentence from one of the pages in the journal:

The construction of the array will be rather expensive, but ultimately worthwhile.

“Now all we have to do is translate what we can,” the boy said, smiling.

“Not that we should trust everything in here,” Lisa pointed out. “It came from that horrible dragon-creature world, not ours.”

“They were Gila monsters,” the boy said.

“
Fire-breathing
Gila monsters,” Lisa said. “Whatever. Not everything on that Earth is going to be the same as on our own, right?”

“Absolutely correct,” Winslow said. “But this information might shed some light on what has happened on our world.”

“And maybe help us find a way home,” Joshua said.

Just then a fresh bout of screaming and wailing came into town on the breeze. Outside the window, it was nearly dark.

“Let’s hope so,” Winslow said, shivering.