Labyrinth (28 page)

“I'm throwing my weapon down,” he yelled to the inhabitants of the shack. He tossed the P-9 aside. It rolled across the dirt. “I'm unarmed now,” he said calmly, still holding his hands high. “We mean you no harm. We only want to ask you a few questions.” A pause. “We can help you.” Another pause. “I'm going to walk slowly forward. Please signal me if it's all right to keep going.”

Dogan started walking, heart in his mouth, ready to lunge to the side at the first sight of a gun barrel. His actions represented a clear violation of every rule in the book. This was the last thing a field agent was supposed to do, but his instincts overruled standard precautions.

Dogan kept walking, his pace slow and measured, until he was within ten yards of the shack and could see that it was haphazardly constructed almost totally of nearly burned wood. There was movement inside, followed by a loud creak. Dogan froze.

The door swung open. Still he could make out nothing inside. He reduced his pace slightly, ready to spring.

When he reached the doorway, he had to bend at the knees to pass inside. His vision fizzled in the darkness. He started to straighten up and something crashed into his back, pitching him down hard to the floor.

“The other one I saw, tell her to come in too!” a voice demanded in broken English.

Dogan looked up. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. Before him was a boy of barely thirteen, dressed in tattered white clothes. His dirty face was all but hidden by his long, scraggly hair. Dogan raised himself to a sitting position slowly, keeping his hands in the air so not to spook the boy who held a shotgun in trembling hands before him.

“I'm going to stand up now. Don't worry, I mean you no harm.”

Dogan rose deliberately and moved to the doorway. He could have stripped the gun away from the boy effortlessly at any time but he needed his trust, and that was no way to gain it.

“It's all right,” he yelled to Marna. “You can come in. And pick up my gun on the way.”

The boy paled at that.

“You can hold it if you want,” Dogan told him. Then he heard the others.

They emerged from the shadows of the makeshift shack—two girls and another boy. The oldest girl seemed eleven, twelve maybe. She held the other girl, three or so years younger, from behind at the shoulders. The second boy was the youngest, about four. The small shack stank of dirt, sweat, and above all, fear.

“Ross, are you—” Marna's eyes bulged in shock as she entered the shack. “Ross, who are these … children?”

“That's what I was about to find out. How's your Spanish?”

“Better than ever.”

“Good. Tell them we mean them no harm. Tell them we're here to help them.”

The oldest girl screeched out words Dogan couldn't keep up with. “What did she say?” he asked Marna.

Marna's eyes showed fear. “She said that's what the others said and they killed her town.”

“Ask her who the others were.”

Before Marna could oblige, the boy with the shotgun spoke in broken English.

“Men,
señor
, many men. Bad men with guns from far away.” Dogan could see the tears welling in the boy's eyes. The contrast between the sweaty hands grasping the shotgun and the scared, vulnerable eyes of youth was bizarre. “My papa did not trust them. When the … bad things started he sent us away. Now we can
never go back
!”

The gun slipped from the boy's hands and he collapsed to his knees crying. Dogan felt for this boy as he hadn't felt for anyone in years. He moved forward to grasp him at the shoulders.

“We will help you, all of you. We will take you away from here, where the men can't get you. But you must tell us what happened. Can you do that?”

The boy nodded, hiding his eyes as though ashamed of his tears. “But my English, it is not very good yet.”

“Speak in your own language. My friend Marna will translate. Try not to get too far ahead of her. My name is Ross.”

The boy slid out of Dogan's grasp and backed away until his shoulders struck one of the walls. Dogan sat again on the cold dirt floor.

“My name is Juan,
señor
,” the boy said in his best English. “But my
padres
called me John because someday I would go to live in
los Estados Unidos
and live better than they.”

“Are these your brothers and sisters?”

“The two girls, yes. The boy is my
primo
.”

Dogan looked at Marna.

“Cousin,” she said.

Dogan looked the boy warmly in the eyes, trying to reassure him that he was not alone anymore.

“I want you to tell us the story of what happened from the beginning. Take your time.”

The words started spilling out in a flood and Marna began translating them into English almost as fast. Locke knew quickly there would be no sense in interrupting the boy to ask questions; that would only break his train of thought. Eventually he would answer all the questions he could anyway.

“It started many months ago, half a year maybe,” Marna began, and almost immediately her voice matched the boy's so that his words seemed to emerge in English. “There were only a few of the men at first, but then more came. They said they could help us. They said they had a way to make our crops grow faster, stronger, and more plentiful, so the weather wouldn't affect them as much and they wouldn't need as much water.

“The village elders agreed to let them help us, and more men followed in many trucks with much equipment and bags and bags of special seeds. Our old crops were destroyed and the land tilled over. The new seeds were planted immediately. The crops began to sprout the next day or the day after. They were full grown in—”

The boy kept speaking but Marna stopped.

“What's he saying?” Dogan asked her.

“It can't be right,” she said, her face suddenly pale.

“What did he say?” Dogan repeated. The boy was silent now.

Marna took a deep breath. “That the new crops were ready to be harvested in only three weeks.”

“Tell him to go on,” Dogan instructed.

“But
three weeks
, Ross! Doesn't that—”

“Just tell him to go on.”

Marna complied reluctantly and started translating again, her voice nervous now. “The elders started asking about the harvest. In time, in time, the men said. But the crops had reached full growth. Only three weeks, but they were ready for harvest. Everyone could tell. But the men would not allow us to touch them. The village grumbled. Our food supply ran low and there was little to replenish it. We were not even allowed to leave the town. Guards were posted everywhere with big guns. People became angry and scared. Many would sit all day watching the crops that had taken only three weeks to grow to perfection. But we couldn't touch them. It was like a dream. You can see, but not taste or touch. The elders, some of them, protested. They … disappeared.”

Dogan could see the boy was holding back tears. He could almost hear the youth urge himself to be brave, to act like a man. He had seen enough death for any thousand men, though. He had the tears coming to him.

“More men with guns began to arrive, a whole truck full. Suddenly we were treated like sheep. The entire town was herded into the church and ordered to eat and sleep there. We were allowed to wash or use the toilet only in shifts. They started feeding us well, though, and most people relaxed and stopped worrying. Others, the smart ones, feared the worst was coming.” The boy gulped some air and swallowed hard. “My father was one of these. One night he awoke the four of us very late when the crickets' chirp was at its loudest. There were only two guards and neither paid much attention. We crawled across the floor past all the sleeping bodies into a secret room behind the altar. The room had a trap door in it leading into a tunnel. And the tunnel led outside to the hillside on the edge of town.” The boy was crying now, not bothering to hold back. “He made us go! We didn't want to but he made us! He said he'd follow as soon as he could but for now he had to stay with the rest of the family. The guards would miss adults, he said, but four children could slip by them.”

The boy broke down and smothered his head in his hands, squeezing his knees to his chest. He steadied himself as best he could and spoke again through sobs and whimpers.

“The next morning a jeep arrived carrying two men. One was dressed like a soldier but he didn't look like one. With him was a giant with slanted eyes and a white suit. The giant lifted a steel box from the back of the jeep. The new man talked with the leaders of the troops who had become our jailers. A little after that another man came out of the building dressed like a spaceman in a gray outfit that shone in the sun. He was carrying a funny-looking spray gun and he pulled a can from the steel box and stuck it in the back of the gun. Then the spaceman moved off into the fields. He stood where the new crops started and sprayed a gray mist from inside the gun. He sprayed for just a few seconds. Then—”

The boy kept speaking. Once again Marna had stopped.

“Marna,” Dogan prodded.

She rubbed her face with her fingers. They were trembling. “I misheard what he said. I'm going to ask him to repeat it.”

She spoke to the boy in Spanish. He nodded and did as she told him.

Still Marna remained silent. “I've got to be hearing this wrong,” she said finally.

“What did he say?”

“He said a few minutes after the mist was released, the crops started … dying, crumbling into the ground. Ross, what the hell's going on?”

Dogan fought back the chill of fear. “What else? What else did he say?”

“They fell row by row, one after another,” Marna continued, “like something under the dirt was yanking them back down.” Her eyes flashed wildly. “Ross, you've got to tell me what's going on!”

“Oh, my God,” Dogan muttered, rising to his feet. It was worse than he possibly could have imagined, much worse. The missing piece had finally been added. Not only had the Committee discovered a way to genetically alter crop growth, they had found a means of killing crops on contact. The boy said the destruction started after only a slight amount of the gray mist had been sprayed. It was incredible. No wonder San Sebastian had to burn. All evidence of what the Committee had done there had to be wiped out. Suddenly the massacre made very clear sense. Everything made sense.

The Committee was going to kill all of the U.S.‘s crops and replace them in the marketplace with genetically accelerated crops grown on the South American lands they now owned!

Just considering the prospects brought the chill of fear back to Dogan, and this time he couldn't suppress it.

“Have the boy go on,” he told Marna.

“Ross, it's true what he said, isn't it? You've got to tell me what's going on down here.”

“Later,” Dogan said firmly, sitting back down. “I've got to hear the rest of his story.”

The boy was trembling harder but still he went on. “Less than an acre of the crops was still standing when the trucks arrived.” His voice became frantic. Marna struggled to keep up with him. “Men climbed off, soldiers with heavy guns. They took them from their shoulders and spread out. The people inside the church were forced outside. I remember seeing them shield their eyes from the sunshine. I tried to pick out my parents but everyone was dressed almost the same. I tried and tried. It was so important to me but I couldn't find them.

“More of the soldiers came down the street pushing the townspeople who had wandered off or tried to hide maybe. People were screaming and crying. It was horrible, horrible!

“The soldiers fired their guns over and over again. All I could hear were gunshots. The people kept screaming but the screaming made less and less noise as they fell dead and the blood ran everywhere. I wanted to cry but I couldn't. It felt like I was forgetting how to breathe. They left the bodies piled on top of each other. Some of the bodies fell off the top, and it was then that …”

The boy stopped suddenly. His eyes grew glazed and distant. When he continued, his voice had turned maddeningly calm.

“… I saw my parents. They were lying next to each other, their arms touching. Their eyes were open but they couldn't see me. I made myself be brave like my father would have wanted and took the others far up the hillside, as more of the soldiers soaked the fields and the town. They were going to burn everything, I knew it, so I led us high up into the wind so the fire would stay away. It burned for three days, turning our skin red and hot. But then the rains stopped it and we built this shack farther down the hill so we could see the place where our town had been.” He took a deep breath, started shaking all at once.
“Their eyes were open but they couldn‘t see me!”

The boy's voice had turned hysterical and so loud that Dogan barely heard the gunshot fired through an opening in the shack. It splintered wood just above his head and he spun quickly toward Marna, thinking of his pistol still tucked in her belt.

She already had her own gun out and was firing from a crouch when three bullets pounded into her, shredding her chest and turning her face into pulp with a huge crater where the nose and eyes had been. She rocked backward to the floor, writhing in death throes.

Dogan felt a scream of rage rising in him as he dove across the room, reaching for Marna's belt and his P-9. A bullet exploded in the area he had vacated and the boy screamed in agony. Dogan feared he was dead too. The other children were screeching now, drowning out the other shots that sent dirt and wood chips everywhere. Dogan gripped the P-9 hard and, still rolling, came up to his knees in firing position facing the area the shots were coming from.

A flurry of bullets punctured the wall, and a large figure smashed through behind them. Dogan pumped three bullets into him. Two more figures rushed forward. Dogan took the first out with a head shot and the second with a bull's-eye to the heart. The two bodies toppled over backward, their blood splattering the walls.