No Man's Land (31 page)

The terror in her gaze sent his hand traveling toward his
revolver. Unfortunately, the move was about five seconds too late.
Before his hand reached its mark, a smashing blow to his face sent
him reeling sideways; he felt his nose explode, felt teeth fall onto
his tongue, felt the rush of blood to his head, then before his
roaring senses could regroup, another blow struck him, this one to
the side of his head, dropped him to his knees, coughing blood. The
third blow nearly broke his neck.

He fell over onto the ground in the fetal position and did not
move.

Kenny looked over the pair of concrete dividers blocking the Joe
Road entrance to old Route 180 and got back in the truck. “Ain’t
nobody moved those things lately. Not since last winter anyway.”

He slammed the door and threw the truck into reverse. “We can
skip the one by the Tolbert house and the other one by the café.”

Corso was grim. “We’ve got to be sure.”

“They’d have to have a backhoe,” Kenny said as they rocketed
across a gravel turnout and bounced out onto the highway.

“Road Department bulldozed up a quarter mile of pavement and
just left the pile in the way. It ain’t all that easy to get my ATV
in there.” He shifted into third and floored it. “Besides . . .
they’re all grown over. You got to be careful you don’t break
your damn neck. No way you’re getting any kind of big rig into
either of them.”

They’d decided to start at the bottom on the west side and work
their way to the top. First two they’d tried had been open. Kenny
thought they were still open from last winter, but they had little
choice but to have a look anyway. First one ran maybe a quarter mile
into the bush before the entire roadbed disappeared down a steep
embankment. From where they sat, they could see more of the road
about a hundred feet in front of the truck, but short of wings there
was no way to get over there. The second stretch of old 180 they’d
tried had been in a lot better condition. They’d covered the better
part of four miles before they found the road blocked by a landslide.
Tire tracks in the dirt showed where people had squeezed motorcycles
and ATVs around the edge of the slide, but, once again, nothing the
size of an RV was progressing beyond that point. It had taken them
twenty minutes in reverse to back their way down to the highway.

“What’s next?” Corso asked as they roared upward.

“Burnt Meadow,” Kenny answered. “That one’ll be open for
sure.”

Bob Temple opened his eyes. Blinked. His nose was completely
stopped up. His mouth felt as if was full of soup. He hawked once and
spit. The metallic taste on his tongue told him it was blood. The
tooth sticking through his upper lip told him it was his. Reason he
could see the tooth in his lip was that the lip was swollen up the
size and color of an eggplant. He tried to look from side to side but
couldn’t move his head.

“Paralyzed?” he wondered. “Am I paralyzed?”

He reached . . . or tried to. His hands wouldn’t move. He moved
his eyes down to his hands. They were on the steering wheel. He
rolled his eyes around in his head. He was in his truck. His hands .
. . his hands . . . his hands were gray and shiny. He was like the
lizard man or something. And then it came to him. Duct tape. His
hands were duct-taped to the steering wheel. As a matter of fact,
nearly every part of him was duct-taped to something, His ankles were
duct-taped to each other, then to something under the seat. Same
thing with his head. Taped to something behind the seat. And his
torso. And his waist. No matter where he sought room to wiggle, he
found himself taped in place. He spit again and tried to remember.
The RV. He remembered G.M. Ford the woman and the look of terror on
her face. The fear in her eyes. Recalled the sound of a twig breaking
and how he’d turned his head just in time to take a blow to the
face. After that it was fuzzy. He tried to lean forward. Gave it
everything he had with the biggest muscles in his body. His bonds
gave a metallic twang, relented slightly, then pulled him right back
into place. The noise told him somebody had slit the seats and
attached him to the springs inside the padding. His head throbbed.
Felt like somebody was pounding nails in his forehead. He sobbed
twice but forced himself to stop.

He tried to yell. To call for help, but his ruined mouth could
form no syllables, only long, drawn-out O sounds like a wolf or a
howling dog.

Bob Temple howled for all he was worth.

Ray Lofton leaned on the compactor handle. The old truck moaned
and groaned with the effort. He stopped, peeked inside and still
didn’t like what he saw. The Lodge at White Lake had severely
underestimated the amount of trash they needed hauled. By the time he
got all of the crap in the truck he’d be lucky to have room for the
rest of the stops on the way back home. If he’d had any idea they
had this much trash he’d have brought one of the newer trucks,
something he didn’t have to baby up the hill. Hell, he’d have
been done by now. Sitting on the couch in front of a football game,
working on about his third beer. As it was, he might have to unload,
then come back for the bottom half of the run. He leaned on the
handle until the truck began to shake. Coupla wedding parties, they
said. What a bunch of shit. How could a pair of nuptials generate
this much trash? It was unbelievable. And the bottles. He hadn’t
even started on the bottle bins. Must be hundreds . . . maybe
thousands of bottles of every color and shape imaginable. Beer
bottle, booze bottles, enough Cristal to float a canoe. Must have
been a hell of party. Some kind of celebrities or something. Maybe a
movie star . . . or a rock star. Hell, they get married the way other
people change their socks. He wheeled the empty Dumpster over to the
army of bottle bins and began, one by one, to empty the smaller
containers into the Dumpster. Must have been twenty of them, filled
to the brim and heavy as hell. His back ached by the time he
finished. He changed the setting on the hydraulics and lifted the
Dumpster from the ground. The glass bin was forward, over the
passenger compartment. He feathered the handle carefully, just in
case there wasn’t enough room left in the bin. Didn’t matter
though. Despite his best efforts, the glass came out in a rush,
crashing down into the bin with a clamorous crash. He held his
breath. The way things had been going today, he figured it would
spill over and he’d have to spend the next hour picking up broken
bottles.

He got lucky. It all fit. Two more stops and he was home free. He
could taste that first cool one already.

“Up or down? Whatta you think?” Kenny asked.

“What’s down?”

“Blue Creek Road takes you all the way down to the bottom of the
canyon. It’s where the Forest Service does water samples. They got
a shack down there. It’s where they test the water table for ground
pollution, so they keep the road open.”

“And up?”

“Up is the Angel’s Mountain Lookout. You know . . . keeping an
eye out for fires in the summertime. Up they also maintain in the
summertime.”

“Let’s try up,” Corso said.

Kenny threw the truck into gear and nosed out onto the highway.
“Gotta be careful here,” he said, “from the top the curve is
blind.” He inched another yard forward, then gave it the gas. On
the far side of the road, three giant piles of gravel filled the
turnout. “What’s with the piles,” Corso asked as they darted
across the highway.

“Road Department,” Kenny explained. “Right here’s about
halfway up, so they leave it here, spread it on the roads when they
need it.”

They bounced across the pavement and looped around the back of the
gravel piles. A pair of concrete posts marked the opening. “Wide
open . . . ,” Kenny said, “. . . which it usually ain’t. Looks
like we ain’t the first one’s been up here lately neither.”

Corso felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. “Let’s go,”
he said.

They rolled across an open meadow and entered the forest. Unlike
the previous forest tracks they’d been down, this one had obviously
seen a brush cutter from time to time. They circled the mountain in
silence for ten minutes, until Kenny broke the spell.

“Coupla corners now,” he said.

The air seemed lighter and less oppressive. Kenny rolled down his
side window. Corso followed suit. The air was damp and smelled of
loam. The bank was covered with thick green moss. Small yellow
flowers poked their heads from between the rocks. On Kenny’s side,
the mountain sloped away to oblivion. The trees were thinner here and
you could see that the mountainside was mostly shards of rock and any
illusion of greenery was to be credited to hardy lichens and mosses
that had managed to find purchase in the irregular nooks and crannies
of the rocks. The truck skidded to a stop. Kenny pushed in the clutch
and stuck the top half of himself out the side window. The rig began
to roll backward, around the last corner, to a long straightaway,
where Kenny could wedge the rear tire up against the bank. Kenny
turned off the engine.

“What?” Corso asked.

“It’s up there,” Kenny whispered. “I seen the front of it.
Big old brown-and-white thing.”

Corso nodded, grabbed the door handle and clamored down to the
ground. Kenny’s cowboy boots clicked on the pavement as they moved
uphill. Corso worked on his breathing, keeping it steady and even as
he contemplated the fact that his planning had run out. That he
didn’t have any idea what he was going to do if and when they found
the RV. He reached out and grabbed Kenny by the shirt.

“You got a gun anywhere in that truck?”

Kenny looked at him like he was crazy. “It’s outta season,
man,” he said.

“Let’s be real careful here,” Corso whispered. “This is a
real dangerous dude. He sees us, we’re dead.”

Corso took the lead now, covering the last fifty yards in a series
of carefully placed footsteps. At the corner, he leaned his back
against the bank and peeked around the blind bend in the road. Kenny
was right. The RV stood in the middle of the clear-cut. The fire
station rose above the barren ground like a giant waterbird. A dark
green pickup truck was parked in the middle of the road about twenty
yards short of the RV.

Kenny’s hand pulled his back around the corner. “That’s Bob
Temple’s truck,” he whispered. “He’s our local Ranger Rick.
Looks like he’s just sitting there waiting for something.”

Corso peeked again. Kenny was right. Somebody was in the driver’s
seat.

“We better call the cavalry,” Corso said, pulling out Marty’s
cell phone. He flipped it open. The words “No Service” blinked in
front of his eyes. He tried dialing Rosen’s number anyway . . .
nothing.

He handed Rosen’s business card and Marty’s cell phone to
Kenny. “Take the truck,” he said. “Get down somewhere to where
you can get some phone service. Call that number. Tell him we found
it. You can’t get him, call nine-one-one.”

“You sure?”

“Hurry now.”

“Gonna take forever to back down.”

“Go.”

And then the noise began. Like the bellowing of a moose or maybe a
cow or something. The breeze seemed to swirl the sound around them,
like it was coming from all directions at once.

“Hurry up,” Corso said.

Kenny started for the truck, when the noise came again. The sound
spoke of fear and agony. Kenny stopped. Corso pointed at him. “Go,”
Corso mouthed. Kenny went.

First thing he heard was a hoarse voice. Then the sound of the
door banging against the side of the RV. The sounds sent Corso
skittering downhill in search of cover among the rocks. He moved on
all fours, fighting for traction on the steep incline, working at
moving laterally, not down, so as to maintain his view of the road
and the vehicles.

He’d just settled into a mossy crevice between a pair of angular
boulders when Marty Wells came into view. He was naked except for his
shoes, limping along with a TV camera strapped to his chest. Some
kind of head wound had painted a trail of blood down the right side
of his face. The sight of Marty Wells naked in the forest was
testimony to how far mankind had come since their days as
hunter-gatherers. The exact evolutionary direction, Corso decided,
was purely a matter of interpretation. Driver and Melanie came out
from behind the RV together. She was naked. Not even shoes. Driver
had the carbine strapped across his shoulders, military style. His
right hand was entwined in Melanie’s hair, dragging her along as
she squealed like a stubborn puppy. She tried to dig in her heels,
but Driver was far too strong.

Thirty yards in front of the pickup truck, he threw her against
the bank. She slipped and landed on her behind in the dirt. Driver
pointed at her. “You stay right there,” he said. “You move I’ll
take it out on him,” he said, inclining his head toward Marty. “I
get through with him, I’ll find you and kill you. You understand?”

Driver didn’t wait for an answer. He used the flat of his hand
to prod Marty down the road another thirty feet. “You ready?”

“I need to refocus,” Marty said in the voice of a child. Corso
watched as Driver pulled the radio microphone from his pants pocket
and used his thumb to switch it on. He waited an impatient thirty
seconds.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Marty fiddled with a couple dials, then looked up. “I don’t
have a specific frequency,” he said.

“Pick a midrange band. Something a lot of stations are going to
pick up.”

Marty made a couple of adjustments. “Try the mike,” he said.

“Testing, testing,” Driver said.

Marty nodded that he was ready to go.

Driver walked to the front fender of the truck and lifted the
microphone to his lips. “This is Captain Timothy Driver, U.S.
Navy.” A smile crossed his lips. “Retired,” he added. “As ABC
affiliate KYOK in Los Angeles had seen fit to ignore my ultimatum
regarding airtime on its affiliates, they have left me no choice but
to follow through with my threat.” Driver reached over and plucked
something from the hood. It was a wallet. Driver flipped it open and
began to read. “This is Robert Hayes Temple of . . .”