Book Two of the Travelers (7 page)

R
un!”

Elli Winter was at the bottom of the six-foot-deep hole. Her shovel had just hit the box. She looked up to see what the commotion was about. Elli was a short woman, and the hole was so deep she couldn't really see anything. Just the blue, cloudless sky.

“Chopper!” somebody else shouted. “The dados are coming! Run!”

She could hear it then, the swoosh of the chopper blades over the horizon. She bent over and redoubled her efforts. Maybe she could get to the box before the security dados got there. She had a very strong feeling about this box. It was important. This was the last excav the team would ever do. She had to take a chance. She had to keep digging.

“Run!” Elli recognized the voice of the excav team leader, Olana Carlings. “Run for the trees!”

The hole was in the middle of a large meadow surrounded on both sides by small forested mountains.
She supposed Olana was right. If she ran now, there was a good chance of escaping into the wooded hills, where the dados would have trouble finding her.

Instead, though, she jammed the blade of the shovel into the soft earth, tipped it back. She could see the whole box move. It was a long thin box. Maybe. Just
maybe
she'd get to the contents in time.

 

Olana Carlings pulled out her binoculars as soon as she reached the tree line. Everyone in the team had made it to the tree line. Everyone, that is, except Elli.

Elli had just stayed there in the hole, digging away. Even now, from her high vantage point on the mountainside, Olana could see that Elli was ignoring the oncoming black chopper. Painted on its side was the unmistakable logo of Blok—the powerful corporation that controlled the entire territory of Quillan.

“What is she
doing
?” muttered Olana.

Another team member shook his head sadly as the chopper swooped down over the hole.

Olana squinted, trying to make out details in the wobbly viewfinder of the binoculars. Elli was calmly working at the clasp that held the box shut. “She's got the box. She's opening it.”

As she spoke, four black ropes tumbled from the belly of the chopper above Elli Winter. Then four green-clad security dados appeared, grabbed the ropes, and began dropping from the sky.

“What a shame,” the other team member said. “I guess that's the end of the road for the cleaning lady.”

Five Years Earlier

T
here is a road,” a voice said.

“Huh?” Elli Winter said, looking up to see who was addressing her. The voice had broken her from the terrible thoughts that had been running around her brain.

A smiling man stood behind a counter at the back of the video arcade. “There is a road,” the man said. “Even at the end of the road, a new road stretches out.”

She cocked her head. “I'm sorry, are you talking to me?”

The man motioned to her with his finger. He was a tall, good-looking man, dressed in a strange bright costume. Most people on Quillan dressed in shades of gray, so it was a little shocking to see someone dressed in bright colors.

“You're in pain,” the man said. “I can see that. You've suffered a terrible loss. A loved one perhaps?”

She stared blankly at the man. How could he know such a thing? She had just received the letter this morning. The final nail in the coffin that was her life. Her husband of twenty years, Marvek Winter, had died working in the tarz. Gentle husband, devoted father—the sweetest man she'd ever known. Now he was dead.

“My husband,” she said simply.

“Yes.” The man nodded and his smile saddened. “I know. You think you've come to the end of the road. You think that you can't take care of your daughter anymore. You think that you're of no use to anyone.”

A part of Elli Winter's mind wondered how he knew this, how he knew it so exactly. A part of her was angry that he was invading her little bubble of pain. But Elli was a polite and mild woman. It was not in her nature to snap at people. So she simply said, “Yes. But…how did you know?”

The man pointed at the sign on his counter.

 

SD FORTUNES
SUPER-DUPER!!!!!!
LEARN YOUR FORTUNE—ONLY 6 CREDITS

 

“Oh,” she said. “I'm sorry. I didn't know. I don't have any money. I can't pay you.”

She turned and stumbled away.

“No problem!” The man's cheery voice pursued her as she hurried toward the door of the video arcade. “This one's free! On the house, compliments of SD Fortunes, a subsidiary of the Blok Corporation.”

She pushed the lever opening the door and stumbled into the street.

She could still hear the man's cheery voice pursuing her as the door closed. “Even at the end of the road, there is a road!”

Elli Winter had never put into words the things that the man had said. But it was true. She had been like a sleepwalker for the past year, doing her best not to think about anything at all.

Until a year ago she had lived a perfect life. As perfect as anybody could have on Quillan, anyway. She had a good job working maintenance at the Blok building. Her husband too had a good job. Neither of them made much money. But they lived a stable, modest life. And they had Nevva, their beloved daughter. For the first ten years of their marriage, Elli had been told by the doctors that she would be unable to have children. Adopting children on Quillan was nearly impossible for people without lots of money. But then one day, a miracle had happened—a miracle that brought Nevva to them.

Nevva had been an extraordinary child from day one. And both she and Marvek had been devoted to the girl. When it had become clear that Nevva was unusually bright, Elli and Marvek had put every spare penny into sending her to the best schools. But schools on Quillan weren't free. And the better the school, the more it cost.

The school Nevva attended had just been too expensive for their small incomes.

So Marvek had started betting on the games. At
first he'd done well. But then, inevitably, his luck had changed. Finally, in desperation, Marvek had come to this very arcade. He'd placed the ultimate bet—betting his own life against the pile of debts he'd accumulated.

And he'd lost. Losing the ultimate bet meant being sent straight to the tarz, the power plants that supplied all of Quillan. They were poisonous places. To work there was a death sentence.

For the past year, since he'd lost the bet, Elli had gone on with her life. As long as Marvek was alive, she had held out a scrap of hope. Maybe things would get better. Maybe Blok would have mercy on him, let him come home.

It was a dream. But it was a dream that helped her get out of bed, comb Nevva's hair, make her lunch, send her off to school. But Elli knew that, like all dreams, it was empty. For a year she'd barely been able to look Nevva in the eye. She hadn't been able to love her the way a mother should love a child. Because every time she looked at Nevva, she thought;
If only you hadn't been here, Marvek would still be coming home from work every day, giving me a kiss, reading the paper, eating dinner, smiling, laughing….
It wasn't Nevva's fault. But Elli couldn't help the thought coming into her mind.

What kind of mother would think a thing like that?

Well. The letter had come today.

And that was the end. The end of all hope.

She had balled up the letter, thrown it in the trash, and then said to Nevva, “I have to take a walk, sweetheart. Keep working on your homework.”

“Okay, Mom.”

So trusting. Nevva trusted her mother completely. Elli didn't feel worthy of that trust.

And now she was here. Now Elli Winter was here, walking down the street. A cold wind was blowing. A loud clap of thunder split the air, and then a frigid, driving rain hit her.

The street was crowded with tense, tired-looking people in gray clothes. Elli forced her way through them. Around her the tall gray buildings pressed in.

Elli looked at her surroundings as though she had never seen this place before. Had it always been such a miserable, cheerless, gray, ugly place?

Suddenly she came to a halt. In front of her was a low pedestrian barrier. On the other side of that lay a huge pit. Just a few months ago there had been some buildings here. They must have blown them up. Now they were building a new structure.

A large sign read,

 

FUTURE HOME OF BLOK CORP FUN DIVISION
THE FUN STARTS HERE!

 

The sign was cockeyed, one of the support posts hanging over the side, into the pit.

She stared in. From every direction huge streams of water flowed into the pit, turning it into a giant quagmire.
Several pieces of earthmoving equipment were digging in the center of the hole. Over on the far side, a swarm of grim-faced, exhausted men were clawing at the earth with shovels. But the deepening water had turned the dirt into mud. Every time they lifted out a shovelful of gray mud, more mud flowed back into its place.

Digging a hole that just filled itself back in. Her whole life seemed like this pit. A hopeless, pointless waste. If it weren't for Nevva…

Suddenly from the center of the pit came a scream. “Sinkhole! Sinkhole!”

A man, small as an ant, jumped from the seat of a giant earthmoving machine and started running. The mud came up to his thighs, so he seemed to be moving in slow motion.

“Run!” another man yelled. “Cave-in.”

Then she heard it—a loud cracking noise. Something in the center of the pit had given way. A massive jagged hole opened up, like the snaggle-toothed mouth of some buried giant.

The men in the pit were abandoning their shovels, running panic stricken for the thin dirt path leading up to street level.

The mud and water began to flow toward the sinkhole. The pit became a huge vortex of water and mud circling down into the earth. Screams filled the air. The hole was widening. Earthmoving equipment toppled and sank into the hungry maw growing in the center of the pit.

Is this is it?
Elli thought.
Is this is the end of the road?

For reasons she couldn't quite express, she felt drawn toward the pit. She took a step forward. Then another.
Carefully she climbed the barrier. When she reached the edge, she stood as if hypnotized. Chunks of clay the size of cars began detaching from the side of the pit and falling in slow motion toward the bottom. Huge splashes of mud and water.

I should go back,
she thought.
I really should.
But she didn't move.

Something gave way beneath her. And then Elli Winter was falling, the gray world pinwheeling around her.

Y
ellow sky. How strange.

The first thing Elli became conscious of was that the sky was yellow. She blinked.

“Look!” a voice said in a loud whisper. “She's conscious.”

“Don't let her see your faces,” another voice said. A man, harsh sounding.

Elli blinked. Not a sky after all. It was a ceiling. Who would paint a
ceiling
yellow? It was just the oddest thing.

She sat up, choked, coughed. Her mouth was full of dirt, and it felt as if there were water in her lungs.

It started coming back to her. She'd fallen into the pit. But after that? Nothing. Blackness. Blackness and the feeling of being carried along by water—spun, flipped, slammed into things.

“Where am I?” she said.

There were three of them. Two of them were covering parts of their faces with their shirts. The third, a very large man, wore a black mask. “Be quiet,”
the large man said harshly. “And don't move.”

She frowned. Was this some kind of dream? She looked around. She seemed to be in some kind of warehouse. Long rows of shelves filled the immense space. One wall was splintered and twisted. A huge slick of mud had poured through it into the large room where she was lying.

“But…what happened?”

“One of the old subway tunnels under the city caved in. A bunch of water flowed through it and tore out the wall of our—”

“Quiet!” the large man shouted.

But it started coming back then. She remembered standing by the edge of the pit. Feeling it pulling her forward. Falling. Then blackness. Blackness and the feeling of being pulled down into the ground by the flowing mud.

The large man whispered to the others. “We can't let her…” He let his sentence die.

“Are you saying…” One of the others, a woman, spoke. She too couldn't seem to finish her sentence.

The third one, a smaller man, said, “What? You want to kill her? That what you're saying?”

The big man shrugged. “We have no choice. If we let her go, she'll talk to Blok's security people. There'll be dados blasting through the doors in an hour.”

Silence.

“You know I'm right,” the big man said.

It took Elli a minute to realize it: They were talking about her! And yet, somehow, she didn't really care. The end of the road. She'd come to the end of the road. Right?

The woman said, “Tylee will be here first thing in the morning. Let's let her decide.”

“She can't go anywhere,” the smaller man said. “Just leave her be. Tylee can decide.”

“We have to evacuate now,” the big man said. “If Blok's people come down that tunnel, they'll find us. We can't risk it.”

“But we need to get this mess cleaned up!”

The man shook his head. “It won't do us any good to clean up a few boxes, and then lose half our people.”

The two others nodded grudgingly.

The big man turned and looked at Elli. “This place is surrounded by guards. If you try to leave, they'll shoot you on sight. Clear?”

Elli nodded.

“Stay here. We'll be back in the morning.”

The three turned and walked away. Their footsteps echoed hollowly and finally disappeared.

Elli stood up, looked fearfully around. There was still a disconcerting gurgle in her lungs that made her cough every few breaths. Her clothes were slick with mud. She shivered and wondered if there was someplace to clean up. She wandered around for a few minutes, looking at the warehouse. There were huge shelves running far off into the distance. Each shelf was lined with cheap cardboard boxes, some of which looked quite old.

Elli couldn't help wondering who these people were who had found her. They were obviously some kind of criminal organization.

But why would a criminal organization be guarding an underground building full of cheap boxes? She
decided to take a peek into one of the boxes. Inside the box she found a stack of small paintings. Elli was no expert in art, but they appeared to be watercolors. She took one out and stared at it. She looked at the date in the bottom corner. It was over two hundred and fifty years old! But the colors were amazingly bright and vivid. It was a picture of a laughing girl in a bright-colored dress, playing in the middle of a field of flowers.

She had never seen anything like it. Something about it took her breath away. She looked at another box. More beautiful pictures. There was something about all of them—something so bright and colorful that they seemed almost to have come from another world. Another box. More beautiful pictures. Bright flowers in each one of them. Brilliant yellows, rich reds, deep blues and purples. A sense of peace and calm washed through her.

She looked around the area where the concrete wall had been ripped apart. Boxes were sprawled in heaps, covered in mud. With horror she realized that every single one of those boxes must have been full of the same kind of beauty she'd just seen. They would be ruined!

Elli crawled over the chunks of concrete and mud and started pulling boxes out of the mess. She had no awareness of time. She just felt impelled to save as much as she could.

Once she'd gotten the boxes out of the muck, she began opening them one by one. Sometimes the contents were completely ruined. After she'd carefully sorted through an entire box and found every single picture destroyed, she found herself bursting into tears.

What's gotten into me?
she wondered.

Suddenly it struck her—she had no idea what time it was, how long she'd been working. Was it night or day? She had no clue.

The only thing she did know for certain was that her daughter, Nevva, was sitting at home wondering what had happened to her mother. The thought made her clench up inside. But Elli knew that even if she could have left this strange subterranean place, she couldn't have faced going home.

So she picked up another box and tried to put Nevva out of her mind.

With as much care as she could muster, she began cleaning the dirty pieces of paper. But she realized they needed to be dried. She wandered around the echoing building and found a room with some office supplies in it, including a roll of string.

She brought the string back, ran several strands from one shelf to another. If a painting was wet, she hung it to dry. Soon there were papers hanging everywhere overhead.

Elli worked and worked, cleaned and cleaned. The harder she worked, the more she cleaned, the better she felt. She felt as though she were cleaning her whole life away, leaving her old life behind.

Eventually her eyes grew gritty and her body became heavy with fatigue. But still she worked. If she slacked up for even a moment, so much of this beauty would be lost!

Finally, though, she couldn't put off the inevitable.

She sat down in a chair and slept. When she woke, her back and neck were stiff. She looked around. The
mess was still considerable. It seemed as if she'd barely made a dent.

She began to work again. As she worked, she began to mutter little phrases to herself. Advertising jingles, silly little poems she'd read. All her life Elli had been able to memorize pretty much anything she read or heard, so her head was full of thousands of useless little words.

As she worked, she repeated them. Over and over and over.

“It's not just clean. It's Blok clean! It's not just clean. It's Blok clean!” That was an advertisement for a cleaning product she used at home. There were plenty of other phrases that stuck in her head. They kept her mind occupied, filled up, so that she could stop thinking about what a terrible mother she was, so she could stop wondering where Nevva was or how Nevva felt.

“It's not just clean. It's Blok clean! It's not just clean…”

And so it went for a long time. Elli Winter had no clear idea of how much time had passed. The big man in the mask had said that he and the others would return the next morning. But they didn't. And if there were guards anywhere, Elli never saw them.

No one came for a very long time. Maybe as much as a week. She had no clock, so she really couldn't know for sure.

And in all that time, she did nothing but work. She found some food in a refrigerator. So when she got hungry, she ate. Eventually she cleaned her clothes in the bathroom, washed the mud from her face, her hair, her fingernails. But otherwise, it was just work and sleep.

And then, suddenly, armed men were streaming through a door.

“Get down on the ground!” one of them screamed. “Down! Down! Down! Do it now!” So Elli lay down, splaying her arms across the cold concrete floor.

The end of the road.
She'd put it off by a few days. But now it was finally here.

Well,
she thought,
at least I saved some beautiful pictures.