Captives (33 page)

Arms raised, he turned and sprinted toward the orange trees. The spotlight tracked him, cutting across the uneven grass.

"Stop!" a male voice hollered from behind the wooden wall. "Or we
will
open fire!"

The trees were just ahead. He could reach them in another couple steps. Use them for cover until he dropped below the ridge. Good chance he wouldn't be slaughtered. Once he was down in the houses, they could search for days without finding a trace of him.

Then again, if he wanted to get inside the installation, what better way than to be led in by an armed escort?

He came to a stop, flung his laser into the brush, and lifted his hands back above his head. "I give up! Please don't shoot!"

A rope arced over the wall. A woman slid down it, followed by another. Walt turned and slowly walked toward them, keeping his hands high. As the man apprehended him, pulling his arms behind his back, the woman kept a rifle trained on him. A plastic zip tie cut into his wrists. The man patted him down, pocketing his jackknife, dumping the rest of his things in the grass. He was taken around the side of the wooden wall to a gate flanked by a security tower. The woman called up to the sentry, who threw a lever. A counterweight cranked down from the tower, drawing back the reinforced gate.

They marched him inside. Crops grew in clean lines. Further back, trees clustered around wooden buildings that had the simple look of things built after the plague. Past the trees, a lake sparkled under the stars.

He had little time to admire them before being taken inside a one-story structure with wooden walls and few windows. Mismatched strips of rugs lined the hardwood floors. The woman led the way, lantern in hand. At the end of a cramped hallway, she opened a door and ushered him inside a windowless room furnished in the style he now recognized as prison-standard: one blanket and one bucket.

The man moved to close the door. "If you need anything, don't bother asking. I got a double shift thanks to you."

"Sorry," Walt said. "Hey, not to bother you with stupid questions, but… what now?"

"You wait," he said. "For her."

He closed the door, then clicked the lock. Walt was then given several hours in which to decide whether or not he'd just made a huge mistake.

Eventually, he was rousted from sleep by a different man and taken to a larger room with a chair and small desk. Walt moved to sit down and the man shook his head. Walt rolled his eyes and leaned against the back wall. Fifteen minutes later, a woman walked in, round-lensed glasses straddling her nose. She wore trim black pants and a long-sleeved shirt.

She sat at the desk and set down a notepad and pen. "Name?"

"Dalton."

"Full name?"

"Patrick," he tried.

"Patrick Dalton?"

"No, Dalton Patrick," he said, leaning forward as if this were a critical point. "Of the Los Angeles Patricks."

She gazed at him through her round lenses. "What were you doing outside, Dalton?"

"I wanted to talk to Anson."

"In the middle of the night?"

"Apparently."

"Are you aware the Heart is off-limits except to the Sworn?"

"I barely know who the Sworn are," he said. "I thought we were free here. Is our government off-limits to regular Joes?"

"For the safety of the People, access to the Heart is restricted." The woman scratched something on her pad. "Does this strike you as unfair?"

"Who cares what I think?"

"I do, Dalton. Or I wouldn't have asked in the first place."

"I'm not generally a fan of anything being deemed too pretty for the grubby plebes. What's going on here that they're supposed to stay away from?"

She made another note. "I already answered that."

"No, you didn't. 'Them's the rules' isn't an answer. It's just another way to tell me I'm too dumb to be here."

"Do you believe you're an exception to the rules?"

"I think," he said, "that this is pretty weird. What's the penalty when an un-Sworn stumbles into the Heart?"

The woman tapped the end of her pen against the pad. "I don't recognize you. You are a resident here?"

"Just got here a few days ago. I'm with the fishermen down at Santa Monica pier." He cocked his head. "This was all my idea, though. They don't even know I'm here."

"If all you wanted to do was speak to Anson, why keep it a secret from your link?"

"What's a link?"

"The person assigned to oversee your transition from the outside world."

"You mean Soo? She made it clear we weren't supposed to wander outside our zone without approval."

"You knew you weren't supposed to be out, yet you did so anyway?"

He laughed. "What would happen if I said 'no' to that?"

The woman stared at him, weighing him with her eyes. She made a final note, stood, then nodded to the soldier in the corner of the room. He walked Walt back to the end of the hall.

"Hang on," Walt said. "I'm claustrophobic. Can we walk around outside a little before you put me back in the box? I'll pick you some flowers."

The man smiled like he was laying out a winning poker hand. "Home sweet home."

Walt shuffled inside. The accommodations were even more basic than the Abyss' cell at the reservoir. His life of late had whiplashed between wandering across wide open spaces and being stuffed into tiny lightless boxes. Were these people drawing inspiration from each other, or was all the kidnapping and imprisonment a case of convergent evolution? If the former—if it stemmed from one guy deciding to do the unthinkable and blazing a trail for others to follow—then said guy was in need of a serious stomping. If the latter—if different groups of people separated by hundreds of miles were coming up with the same idea on their own—well, it got a whole lot tougher to fault the aliens for wanting to shuffle humanity off the stage.

24 hours later, he was extracted from his room and taken past a quarter mile of fields on his way to a clapboard longhouse. As he and the guard waited, he got a good long look at the people tending to the fields. Carrie wasn't among them.

After ten minutes of standing around, they were approached by an older man in a lab coat. The man fitted Walt with anklets connected by a tether a little more than two feet long. The material was slightly springy, like soft plastic or hard rubber.

"What did you build this out of, Doc?" he said. "A jumprope?"

The man in the lab coat laughed through his nose. "The absolute latest in restraint technology. A fraction the weight of steel, yet no less strong."

Walt couldn't tell if the man was joking. What was certain, however, was that the restriction on his gait was maddening, a few inches shorter than his natural stride. The fastest he could travel would be a shuffling jog. Climbing would be virtually impossible.

The "scientist" left. The guard stuck around. Eventually, another man shuffled through the grass, also fettered, wearing floral gardening gloves and overalls with no shirt. He did have tennis shoes, at least. The sight of this buoyed Walt's spirits beyond reasonable measure.

The man in the overalls eyed the guard, who smiled smugly and gestured at Walt. "Harry, this is Dalton. Dalton, Harry. From what Reeds says, I get the idea the two of you will be the best of friends."

Harry hooked his gloved thumbs into the belt loops of his overalls, smiling like the ideal of a hayseed. The guard walked off. Harry turned on Walt and laughed humorlessly. "You must be a
real
asshole."

"How do you figure?"

"You got assigned to me."

"You being?"

"Your guide to Anson and Reeds' brave new world."

Walt swept back his hair. "It doesn't look very new or brave. In fact, I keep seeing the same shit wherever I go."

Harry smirked. "Were you sent straight here? Or did they call you up from the city?"

"The city. I'd only been there a few days."

"Notice anything strange?"

"Not particularly. The locals seemed happy enough."

"Exactly. That's what you get when you toss all the bad apples to the swine." A cabinet of mismatched cups stood beside a Culligan-style water dispenser. Harry selected a chipped Denny's mug from the rack and filled it, the fat blue tub glugging as air bubbled to its top. He emptied the mug in one long swig. "Well, come on. Best way to learn the job is to do the job."

The job consisted of two main skills: identifying what was edible (cabbage, squash, beans, and so on), then eradicating everything that wasn't. Harry procured him a set of gloves and set him to work. The hardest part of it was trudging along without yanking all the crops up with his rubbery fetter. The third time he did so, yanking free a loop of undeveloped bean pods, Harry swore and threw down his gloves.

"Jesus Christ, man!" he hollered, drawing glances from the workers further down the rows. "Do we need to start you off with walking lessons?"

"Sorry about that," Walt said. "I'll try to slave smarter, not harder."

Harry glared. "You're some kind of punk, aren't you?"

"What gave it away? The mohawk?"

"That's how you end up inside. If you knew how to shut your fucking mouth, you'd still be out there."

"Dude, you've got more projection than an opera singer."

"And you deflect like a racquetball wall." Harry waved toward the high wooden fence. "If you'd been polite like a normal person when Reeds hauled you into the shrink chair, you'd still be down there, trying to figure out how to get your hand up your link's blouse. Think about that when you're wondering why you're here. You're here because of
you
."

Walt knocked dirt from his knees. "That and the people who decided we belong here."

Harry turned on him with a hard smirk. "You think this is hard? Pulling weeds?" He turned to look down on the hills and the city beyond. "Shit, man. You think management's bad here, you should see Zone Zero."

Walt followed his gaze out to sea. "Zone Zero? There's another place like this?"

"Not exactly." The man sighed like a set of air brakes and picked up his gloves. "Everybody's watching us, man. No more questions, no more complaining. Keep your head down and do work."

It didn't take a keen psychological mind to understand the man was done talking for the day. Walt did his work, plucking weeds, then coming back around to collect them. Watching the other workers all the while. There weren't many: a dozen-odd other farmhands, stooped around the rows; another ten people engaged in general manual labor, patching roofs and digging ditches between the lake and the fields; fifteen household servants attending to the spry-looking, weapon-carrying men and women who spent a lot of time by the north side of the lake, where a large, square building was surrounded by an eager throng of smaller houses.

All told, he pegged the population of the Heart at somewhere between one and two hundred, depending on how many people were holed up in the structures. That should have been encouraging—fewer people to sort through—but by the end of the first day, he'd seen half of them, if not more, and none of them were Carrie.

But finding Carrie was only one half of the equation. After that would come the small matter of getting them out.

He and Harry shared a room that barely had space for the beds. Bunk beds, no less. If they'd been siblings, the older one (i.e. Harry) would have opted for top bunk, but kids rarely if ever were forced to deal with the practicalities of climbing into bed while wearing rubber leg fetters. Harry, then, had opted for the lower bunk. That left Walt to struggle up the ladder at the foot of the bed, clinging to the mattress' edge like an overweight cat.

"Hope you had a good day," Harry said from the darkness. "'Cause they're all like this."

Walt muttered something in reply, uninterested in extending the conversation. After some shuffling of bedsheets, Harry went silent. Soon, he snored.

Walt reached into his pocket and withdrew the rock he'd taken from the field. It was wedge-shaped, and while its thin edge wasn't exactly razor sharp, it was a hell of a lot tougher than rubber. He sat up, drawing in his feet, and began sawing at the middle of the tether.

He didn't intend to do much. Just confirm he could shred through it in a reasonable amount of time. After a few seconds, he set down the rock and felt the cord with his thumb. It was smooth, unmarred. He tried again, rubbing away for half a minute. Still nothing. Beyond vexed, he sawed vigorously, getting so lost in the work he didn't realize how his mattress was bucking until Harry cleared his throat loudly from the bed below.

After a suitable amount of time had elapsed, he set to it again, considerably more subtly. Ten minutes later, he'd inflicted nothing deeper than a scratch. And that might only have been his imagination.

In the morning, a visual check confirmed he'd done no appreciable damage to the cord. He went out to the fields feeling rather less plucky. Maybe he could steal a chainsaw later. In the meantime, he kept his eye out for Carrie, straying whenever he had the excuse to dump weeds in a midden pile or go back to the cabins for water.

On one such trip, he took a detour toward the fence to put the eyeball to a pair of women using a mule to plow furrows through the dirt. One had the right hair, but as she turned for a look at Walt, she revealed the wrong face. He smiled and walked past.

As he glanced away, his gaze snagged on the fence. The nearest post was blue. Taller than the one outside the orange grove and those on the highway, but the same lemon peel texture. He continued to the water fountain outside the shacks, then made his way back to the field. Harry watched him from a long way out.

The next day, they were assigned to plant seeds and flowers around the houses beside the lake. The moment Harry stepped away to the outhouse, Walt knelt, pretended to fiddle with his shoelaces, and hacked at the tether with his trowel. He produced a few scratches, no more.

After they finished, they were allowed to scrub off in the other side of the lake, hidden from the eyes of the residents by a canvas screen. A guard removed Walt's fetters, then moved a short ways off, keeping the two men in the corner of his vision. Right then, Walt was too happy to get the dirt off to give a damn about privacy.