Goodhouse (34 page)

“You know, abducting a child carries twenty years in a federal prison,” he said. He raised an eyebrow. “Something to think about.”

“I'd feel right at home,” I said.

He pulled the last of the pictures off the wall and tucked them into the sides of the box. “Are you ready to tell me where she is?” he said.

“I obviously don't know,” I said, “or I wouldn't be here.”

“You had a falling-out,” he said. “But not immediately, I don't think.”

He was too close to the truth. I stood up. I had to lean on the countertop to walk the length of the kitchen, and even then, I was shaking with the effort. From the window over the sink I saw the soybean field where I'd worked with Owen. The plants had yellowed slightly, but I didn't see any work details, which was unusual. “We had a falling-out,” I said, “because I saw someone I recognized. A proctor from school.”

“That would be Timothy,” the doctor said. He lifted the flaps at the top of the box and snapped them closed. “He's a speaker-elect for the Holy Redeemer's Church of Purity.”

His offhand tone surprised me even more than his certainty. “How did you know?” I said.

“I was following up on a tip.” He smiled. “A rumor about inmates in the factory. And I would have been able to do much more, except for one little problem. Do you know what that was?”

“Your daughter,” I said.

“No,” he said. He put the magazine on top of the box. “My patient. Or should I say patients,” he corrected. “They were found wandering around campus. And now I've had to offer my resignation.”

I leaned more fully against the countertop. The idea that I was somehow responsible for this turn of events filled me with the kind of satisfaction that was hard to keep to myself. “Those rooms are illegal,” I said. “Even for us. You can't do that.”

“Quite illegal,” he said.

“And they've shut you down, haven't they?” I felt strength building inside me, determination. “They've confiscated your research.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “An investigation is pending. They've cordoned off my office—the entire basement level, actually.” But his eagerness to confirm his own downfall began to make me nervous. “And poor Robert,” he said, “he was really hoping for an early retirement. But he's had to hold one press conference after another. I'm afraid that it just reflects so badly on him.”

I walked to the kitchen door and looked through the glass panel at its top. It was almost fully dark now. Purple-and-white bunting spanned the front of Vargas. A Goodhouse flag hung from the old clock tower, draped like a pennant. Several civilian cars traversed the main road, and two proctors used glowing orange wands to direct traffic.

“How long was I in the tent?” I asked.

The curved white roof of the pavilion was just visible off to my left. I opened the kitchen door and heard the distant sound of singing, many voices in concert with each other. “What day is it?” I said.

But I already knew the answer. I was looking at a full parking lot. I was listening to the ceremony itself playing out in the distance. It was Founders' Day.

*   *   *

The doctor clicked on a wallscreen, and in my haste to pivot—to turn and see what he was doing—I must have lost my footing. I fell to the ground, legs slipping out from under me, hands clutching at the countertop, but not fast enough to get a grip. I lay on the floor, feeling the weight of my body. I'd been inert for so long, it had left me incredibly weak.

“You know,” the doctor said, “half the people on the planet can't remember a world before Goodhouse.” He stood near the kitchen table, seemingly unaware of my difficulties. “Fifty years,” he said, “is a long time.” He was scrolling through dozens of security videos. Time stamps spooled across the bottom of the display, and I had an accelerating feeling of dread.

“What's happening?” I asked.

“Tanner thought an evening service would be more elegant, more dramatic.” The doctor selected a video and expanded it to fit the screen. “Quite a nice event, really. Though I'm no longer invited.”

The screen showed the interior of the pavilion—hundreds of stadium-style seats packed with people. It was easy to spot the students, that navy-colored stripe at the top of the auditorium—and then, below them, the civilians with their colorful clothing. Little star-shaped lights dangled overhead, all of them suspended at different heights, seeming to float, to obliterate any sense of a ceiling.

“My father used to tell me that every setback was just an opportunity in disguise,” Dr. Cleveland said. He minimized the video, then selected another. A man wearing a blue sash across his suit stood at a podium. “At the time, I thought he was patronizing me—you know, the way adults tell children that everything will be okay when, clearly, it will not. But now I think maybe he was correct.”

“You told Tanner,” I said. “Right? You told him about Tim?”

But the doctor was distracted. “Told him?” He frowned at me. “James, you don't look well.”

I'd managed to sit up, but I was leaning against the cabinets, unable to do much more.

“Maybe you'll feel better,” Dr. Cleveland said, “if you tell me where Bethany is.” He hefted the box he'd packed and then stood over me. “Give me the truth,” he said, “and I'll take you with me. Out into the world, like a real citizen.”

“And if I don't?”

On the screen behind the doctor, the man with the sash was smiling, lifting his hands, clapping and turning—he'd been giving an introduction of some kind.

“You once asked me if I was helping the Zeros. Well”—he shrugged—“it turns out, they're helping me.”

“Helping you with what?” I said.

“There isn't going to be a scandal,” he said. “There isn't going to be an investigation of my methodology. You know, cleanup is part of any experiment,” he said. “You wash out your glassware. You incinerate your trash.”

I shook my head, trying to understand him fully.

“You shouldn't have run out on me, James,” he said. “You shouldn't have opened the door.”

“I didn't,” I said.

“I could have helped people,” he said. “I could have saved lives.” And here he actually looked pained. “But you forced my hand.”

I heard a sound, a percussive boom that made the cabinets rattle, that seemed to shake the floor beneath me. The video screen turned white. The doctor did not react to this noise, did not flinch or look around. He just stared at me, gauging my expression.

“I hate to cut this short,” he said, “but you need to make a choice. You can die here with your friends or you can tell me where my daughter is.”

I couldn't pull myself up, but I used what strength I had to strike him, to kick at his leg. He merely grunted and took a step back. “I can't say I'm surprised,” he said, “but it was worth a try.” He balanced the box on his hip and spoke into a handheld. “I need some cleanup at the house,” he said.

“Copy that,” a voice said. The words were faint, seemingly distant.

“Don't put your faith in the police,” the doctor said. “They won't be here anytime soon.” And then he turned to go.

“Bethany knows who you are,” I said. I was reaching for a way to hurt him. “She knows you and rejects you.”

The doctor gave me a weak smile. “But I will be there when she outgrows her adolescent infatuations and misconceptions. And you,” he said, “will not.”

*   *   *

I managed to get to my hands and knees. The image of the pavilion disappearing—that starlit auditorium, with its rows of students and administrators and civilians—filled me with terror. This terror gave me strength that only moments ago had been impossible. I crawled through the kitchen door. The doctor was already in his van, backing out of the driveway. I watched his red taillights disappear down the street. In the distance, an alarm throbbed, a computer-generated voice repeated a message that I couldn't quite make out.

Pushing for some reserve, I summoned the strength to walk into the backyard, to stumble over to the chain-link fence and look out at the campus. There was a tower of black smoke where the pavilion had been. I strained to see through it to find the familiar curving roofline. I hoped the building had been damaged and not obliterated. But I saw only smoke, a thick, shaking blanket in the floodlit sky.

I tried to scale the fence, to make hand- and footholds out of its little diamond-shaped openings. I slid repeatedly to the ground. I kept looking over my shoulder, afraid that someone would materialize just behind me, a Zero, a man in a red mask. It would be smarter to hide, to wait out the attack. But every student who was not participating in the ceremony would be locked in his room. They would be beating on the doors, terrified and trapped.

The barbed wire had been removed, and when I reached the top of the chain-link fence, I sat there straddling it, trying to catch my breath, certain that I would simply fall when I tried to descend. I glanced behind me and saw the neighbor woman standing on her porch, her handheld pressed to her ear. All of a sudden a series of explosions detonated near the heart of campus, far to the south. The sound was so deep and disorienting that I didn't immediately know I was falling. I slammed into the ground and lay there, unable to draw a breath, the wind knocked out of me. I tried to roll onto my side, but there was something wrong with my left arm. At first I thought I'd reinjured the elbow, but then I realized that the whole arm was useless and limp. The pain was so intense that I just sat there, heaving on an empty stomach, unable to focus.

The campus had gone completely dark. There were no backup lights, no sirens, and somehow this darkness created a terrible kind of intimacy. Voices floated over the soybean field, people screaming, people calling to each other. Everything seemed very close now. Several cars pulled out of the parking lot. They were small civilian vehicles, and as they sped toward the main gate, they were met with a burst of gunfire—little green tracers that arced through the air, coming from the guardhouse itself. At first the shots fell short of their targets, but then the lights seemed to adjust themselves, they lifted and lengthened their trajectory. The tracers swept through the line of cars, entering one windshield and then another. One of the cars flipped, and made an awful crunching sound as it spun through the field beside me. The others just swerved into each other, blocking the road. And still, people were leaving the parking lot and driving toward the exit, almost as if they didn't know what else to do.

A large tour bus tried to clear a path, tried to ram its way through the pileup, but now the tracers were coming from other locations, too—the parking lot itself, the field opposite my own—beautiful arcs of light, graceful as spirits. They found their mark and the bus crashed into the knot of vehicles, swerving, then nosing to a stop.

And then there were no more cars, no more attempts at an exit. I saw a group of masked men running down the main road. Without a word they broke into three groups and disappeared onto the campus. I was still leaning against the fence, sitting exactly where I'd fallen. It had been only a few minutes, but the amount of destruction was staggering. Someone in a nearby car began to moan, and in the distance, two thick columns of smoke rose into the sky, smudging the stars, bending slightly in the wind, until they had the look of some inverted rainbow, corrupted and colorless.

This was beyond anything I'd ever experienced, and only the thought of Owen could compel me to my feet. I clutched my injured arm to my chest and staggered forward. One of the wrecked cars had its headlights aimed at the field in front of me. I would have to go around the beam or step through it. To save time, I decided to cut closer to the main road.

I doubled over as I approached the wreckage, my eyes scanning the darkness, alert for any kind of movement. Every step sent a little spike of agony through my shoulder, and I struggled to keep my breathing quiet and my footsteps soft. One of the windshields ahead was smeared with a dark liquid and had what appeared to be a mat of hair pressed against the inside of the glass. I looked away.

I crept past the bus. The damaged engine chuffed slightly. A little tendril of smoke leaked from its hood. That's when I saw the word
UTAH
on the vehicle's license plate. There was a picture of a rock formation and then the words
SALT LAKE CITY
underneath. I stopped. The dormitory that I'd helped to prepare, the one that was meant to house the choir, they were coming from Salt Lake City. Some piece of that alternative life had found me—it had rolled to a stop right here.

The door wasn't locked. It was a bifold, and it was loose, just pulled halfway across the entrance. I took a few steps inside, careful to stay below the windows and out of sight. The bus was partway in the field, its back end in the dirt, its front tires on the road. I thought it would be full of people, but I saw only one—a student lying prone in the aisle. There was blood on the floor underneath him and a trail of blood leading from the driver's seat. The boy wore a uniform like ours, only his was beige in color. I touched his shoulder. He didn't move.

I got behind the wheel and put the transmission in gear. I located the switch for the lights. It was in the same location as it had been in the camp trucks I'd driven in Oregon. As I gunned the engine and cut the headlights, the bus roared up onto the road with much more power than I expected. I'd never driven anything like this before, and with one arm I could barely steer. Warm blood soaked into my pants. It was his blood, that boy in the aisle, that boy who was the same size and shape as myself.

I tried to stay low in the seat, but this was almost impossible. I was headed toward Vargas, which appeared intact, though it looked like one of those ancient historical photos, something from its days of decline—black windows, with a full moon over its shoulder. And beyond Vargas, I saw the lights of Mule Creek, a bright wall in the distance. Two civilians tried to flag me down, arms waving over their heads, but I couldn't stop. I'd never make it otherwise. I cut the wheel hard to the right and pulled across the lawn at the back of the building. I'd wanted to take the main road. It would be much faster, but it was probably full of Zeros.