Rise the Dark (22 page)

“Nobody's tying me. I gave you what you needed, damn it.” Cantu struggled upright.

“Glad to hear it,” Larry said, and then he stepped forward and swung the slapjack again, and this time he had more than his wrist behind it. The lead-laced leather cracked off the back of Sal Cantu's skull, and the big man dropped to the porch floor. Mark stared as blood dripped down the unconscious man's face. Larry put the slapjack back in his pocket and looked at Mark with challenging eyes.

“You forget how to work a knot?”

Mark bound Sal's hands and feet while Larry opened the cabin door. Then they hauled him inside. Larry found a dishrag, shoved it into Cantu's mouth, and said, “Tie that in there good too. If he wants to breathe, he's got a nose.”

“You believe those directions he gave are worth a damn?” Mark asked.

“Oh, I'm sure they're worth something,” Larry said. “That boy isn't the sort to send you on a wild-goose chase. He's the sort to send you into a hornet's nest.”

T
he recruitment of Doug Oriel had been Janell's primary assignment in Florida. His combination of military-grade demolition skills and full-blown conspiracy-theorist paranoia was enticing to Eli, but his network of like-minded souls was even more intriguing. The problem with Doug was that he had a deep-seated distrust of the Internet, which meant Eli's standard recruiting tactics were ineffective. Thus the decision to approach him in person.

For nine months, Janell had devoted herself to the coddling of this oversize child. In the miles since they'd left Ardachu's house, she realized that it had all been a waste.

He didn't speak for nearly two hours, and when he did, it was to demand that she drop him off at a bus station.

“A bus station,” she said. “That's your idea of where you should go now? Only a few hundred miles from being a part of this, you want to stop and get on a bus?”

“Yes. I don't want any part of this. Not anymore. Not with you.”

She gripped the wheel tighter. “You are not going to a bus station. We are going to finish the journey.”

“You can do what you want. I won't be along for the ride.”

In the hours of silence, he'd managed to locate some confidence to fill in the places where before shock and horror had existed. He was sitting taller, his shoulders back and his big chest filling. Trying to make himself larger, the thing they told you to do if you stumbled across a mountain lion in the woods.

She wanted to laugh.

“No bus station,” she said. “You want out, you can pick your place on our route, but I'm not changing course.”

But she knew she'd have to.

The group Eli was gathering all believed a narrative of nonviolence. That was the great irony of the first strike force—they were mostly peaceful by nature, shepherded together by their opposition to oil drilling, fracking, big business, and pollution, all the tedious minutiae of those who believed the earth was worth saving. Janell's understanding was that, with the notable exception of bodyguards recruited from some meth runners, the tribes, as Eli called them, would recoil at the idea of murder.

Now she was driving Doug and his new story to their doorstep. That could not happen. It would be safer to take him to the bus station as he wished than to deliver him to anyone whose resolve could shatter.

She hated to lose him, though. Through Doug, they had reached dozens of potential players. To a man, they feared the government, believed in shadow conspiracies, and were firmly convinced that the U.S. military was looking for any excuse to claim first the guns and then the freedoms of Americans. Doug had facilitated contact with three different militia groups, an arm of the Ku Klux Klan, and a team of Texas preppers who were better armed than most third-world militaries.

All this energy expended preparing for a nonexistent war, and a single dead man had brought Doug to his knees.

“There are casualties in any worthy mission,” she said. “You've always known this.”

He shook his head. “This is exactly what the police want us to do. They won't even have to lie about us now. You've made it the truth.”

She fought for patience, for the right words. There was no time to waste finding the right words, though. Recruiting days were done. They were in action now, and she had neither the time nor the energy to return to the wars of rhetoric.

“You understand that's all a lie, don't you?” she said.

“What is?”

“Every word we've ever said. Every…single…word.”

She looked away from the road, at his face, and he blinked at her, utterly oblivious, and her frustration swelled to something deeper and darker.

“We find people of value,” she said, speaking like a teacher addressing a young child, “and we determine what story they need to hear. It's the story that they're already telling themselves, don't you see? It's the nightmare they believe in. Once you understand that nightmare, you join them in it. Their fear becomes your fear. It's all a shared experience then. And once you have that, once they feel that is the truth, all the way down to their core, then your coping strategy becomes theirs. It's a natural progression. This is the power of the shared narrative. Of the echo chamber. Do you follow that? Can you comprehend what I'm saying?”

He stared at her, his broad face showing all the intellect of a steer who has reached the end of the slaughterhouse chute without realizing where he's been led.

“Infrastructure,” he said stupidly. “That's all that needs to be hit. A man like the one in that house, he might have believed exactly what we believe. You don't know. You didn't bother to ask, you just cut his throat.”

She took a deep, patient breath. Said, “Let's try this once more. Everything you have heard me say is a lie. Take your time. I'll give you a few seconds to figure it out.”

“I don't know what in the hell has gotten into you,” he said. “You're out of your mind. You're right—I don't believe a word you've said. Not anymore. Pull over. I'd rather walk to prison than ride another mile with you.”

She remembered nine months ago, when they'd arrived in Cassadaga, how quickly she'd been able to convince him that he needed to stay away from television and computers. They were the most common tools of brainwashing, she'd explained, and then she'd given him a book about neurolinguistic programming. It had been, admittedly, a risky joke to play, because if he paid any attention to the book at all, he might have had some questions about her, but instead he'd swallowed the story whole. Why? Because it was what he had already suspected. Already feared.

Everyone wanted to believe he or she was the prophet of truth, and when that truth was rooted in fear, the desire was even stronger. Every human response was stronger when it came from a place of fear.

Now the source of Doug's fear had shifted.

“Pull over,” he repeated.

They were driving through prairie country, flat and desolate and entirely empty. She slowed the Yukon and pulled off the road and bounced over the shoulder and onto the grass beyond. She was reaching for the gearshift when she saw the gun in his hand.

“On second thought,” he said, “you'll do the walking.”

She looked at the gun, not his eyes, while she nodded. Then she moved the gearshift into park, let her foot off the brake, and said, “I'm taking the phones and radios. You clearly won't have a need for them, and when you're caught, I'm not letting you get caught with those.”

“You can have your phones. Just get out.”

“Such a waste of potential,” she said.

“Get out.”

She opened the door and stepped out onto the road. The sun put a haze over the asphalt, but the day wasn't warm. Spring in the high plains, a climate of confusion.

As she walked toward the tailgate, Doug shifted awkwardly. He wanted to just slide from the passenger seat to the driver's, but he was too big and clumsy for that. She had the tailgate up when he opened the passenger door and stepped out onto the crunching, brittle grass.

On top of the radio bags was the 12-gauge shotgun she'd stolen from Gregory Ardachu's cabinet. It was loaded with double-aught shells. When she stepped back from the Yukon, he was blank-faced, the pistol at the side of his leg pointed to the ground.

She'd endured this for nine months. It ended in a tenth of a second.

The sound of the 12-gauge echoed across the plains, then faded into their vast spaces. Doug Oriel's body fell in the dirt beside the Yukon, taking the bottom of his head down with it. The top had been separated from it, and now the remains settled in the grass in a red mist. A bad shot, too high.

But in the end, effective.

She walked to the body and looked down. Only one of his eyes remained, and it was staring into the dust, looking away from her. She sighed and shook her head. Eli had harbored high hopes for Doug and wanted to meet him in person. He'd be disappointed by this result, but he would understand. Doug had lost track of his narrative, and once that happened, he was not only of limited value but high risk.

As a dead man, though, he had renewed potential. She would see to it that he fulfilled his own prophecy.

It seemed he deserved at least that much for his service.

She put the shotgun back in the Yukon, closed first the tailgate and then the passenger door, and got behind the wheel, alone.

I
t took Mark and his uncle nearly an hour to reach Byron, and during the drive neither of them said much. Mark was thinking of the way Sal Cantu had smiled when he'd looked at Larry and said,
You actually think your sister matters?
It reminded him of the amusement Janell Cole had shown over the idea that Mark believed Lauren mattered. Yet Lauren had known the phrase
rise the dark,
which mattered to all of them, and certainly mattered to Lynn Deschaine and Homeland Security. How had Lauren heard of it? He was beginning to wish they'd gotten in a few more questions before Larry had knocked the man out.

“This would be the place,” Larry said, slowing. “The warehouse Cantu described. That's it, right?”

Calling it a warehouse was lipstick on a pig—the place was just an oversize old prefabricated barn in a gravel parking lot surrounded by a high fence and a gate with a keypad. There were no vehicles in the lot, and the property looked beyond empty. Desolate.

Larry was pulling in when Mark felt the sensation that had come over him in Cassadaga—that soft, rubber-band sound, and suddenly he was tense, hand drifting toward his gun.

“Drive past.”

Larry obliged without comment, cruising down the lonely road for another mile, until the barn was out of sight and they were facing a sign for the Byron oil field, which loomed just to the north.

“Okay, chief,” Larry said, pulling onto the shoulder and turning off the car, “what's the master plan?”

“We go back on foot. It's so damned empty that they're going to hear anybody in a truck, particularly this abomination of an exhaust system.”

Larry looked wounded. “I had Blue tuned up not five years ago!”

“There's only so much a mortician can do to improve a situation, Uncle.”

“It was a mechanic.”

“Uh-huh. Regardless, I'd like to go in quietly. It's not much of a walk.”

“It's a damned empty one, though. A truck pulled up outside of that place looks like it belongs, maybe. Left here? It's abandoned. It draws the eye. If anyone
is
in the place, they'll see us coming ten minutes before we get there instead of thirty seconds. And if anything goes wrong, we've got a mile of empty highway to come back up, with nowhere to hide.”

He pointed at the surrounding countryside, bleak and barren, looking more like West Texas than Wyoming. There was no snow here; the earth was dry and fissured, like the palm of an old man's hand. Until the Pryor Mountains rose up in the north, red-baked and uninspiring, there was no shelter. Fleeing on foot would mean covering a long stretch of open land dotted with scrub pines and brush. Larry was right—if it came to that, they'd wish the truck were a hell of a lot closer.

“All right,” Mark said. “Just make it fast. This wreck sounds like a steam locomotive.”

“Don't you listen to him, Blue. Don't you listen.” Larry started the engine. The exhaust fired like a cannon volley, and then they were in motion. Mark's mouth was dry, and the strange, echoing pops were back in his skull. He was aware of a single bead of sweat trickling down his spine.

What's the matter with you, Markus? It's an empty pole barn, nothing more. What in the hell is the matter with you?

He'd felt this way before; that was the problem. His body had trapped the memory of the house in Cassadaga and was throwing it back at his mind.

But why? The house in Cassadaga was straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. This is an empty barn in wide-open country. There's no similarity.

Still, the feeling was there.

Where's that strange boy when I need him? Or, better yet, Walter, the dead man who apparently took a shine to me. I could use his advice right now. Tell me, Walt, what's the issue up ahead?

Mark forced a smile as the fenced-in barn came back into sight, looking as if it had been abandoned for months. Beyond the fence was sun-and-wind-blasted soil with a few thatches of brush clinging to whatever groundwater there was to be found.

“I'll drive right up to the gate and we'll climb again,” Larry said. “Ain't no point in jacking with that security box.”

The box he'd referenced was a curved metal pole with a keypad. High-tech for an isolated barn. A deep ditch ran between the road and the fence, ready to drain runoff and snowmelt out of the mountains, and you had to cross a massive cattle-guard grate to get across that and onto the last thirty feet of dusty drive. Larry was scanning the property, searching for watchers, and Mark knew he should be doing the same, but for some reason he was fixated on that cattle guard. It looked new, the stainless-steel gleaming in the sun, high angled pieces that rose on each side, allowing for heavy equipment to lower the grating into place easily. Cattle guards were common in this part of the world, so why this one held Mark's eye made no sense, and yet he couldn't look away from it, and the echoing, popping noise in his head was back and louder, closer to the surface.

You've seen it before.

Of course he had. He'd seen a million of them, old and rusted and dusty, while this one was new.

It shouldn't be new, nothing else here is new—

There was nothing strange about it, nothing threatening; it was a straightforward device for livestock and drainage and—

You've seen it before!

The voice in Mark's head didn't seem to be his own, and the light reflecting off that polished, clean steel pierced his brain like an ice pick through the eye and he was just about to look away when a memory finally broke the surface like a drowning man fighting a riptide.

The basement in Cassadaga. The trap on the table. It was a model. It was a scale model and that means this one, at full size, is—

“Uncle, hang on,” Mark said, and Larry glanced at him but kept driving. As the front wheels bounced off the gravel road and onto the cattle guard, Mark grabbed his uncle by the back of his neck and jerked him down, away from the windshield and the window, pressing their faces together and slamming their heads against the gearshift. For one blissful instant, a tenth of a second, he thought,
I was wrong, and I am going to look like a fool.

Then the truck rocked like it had taken a direct hit from a howitzer, and glass exploded all around them.

Just like the tiny one. That was a model for this. Turning a standard bit of equipment into a bear trap. That is what they were working on.

Larry was struggling against him, swearing and fumbling for his gun. Mark held him down for a few seconds, but there were no more impacts, so he released him and they both rose shakily to look at the damage.

The windshield was spiderwebbed with fractures, and all of the windows had blown out. Larry's cheeks and arms were laced with small cuts, and Mark's showed the same damage. As they looked at each other and then the truck, Larry whispered, “Mother of God, what is that?”

He was looking at the doors. Pieces of metal each as big as a man's fist but filed down into shark's teeth had punctured the doors, slamming shut on the truck with such incredible force that they'd bitten clean through. The doors themselves had buckled inward, and on a newer vehicle, a smaller one with less solid metal in the frame, the damage would have been even worse. A compact car would have been crushed. In another car, the airbags would have deployed, but Blue had come off the line long before airbags. Mark twisted in his seat and opened the latch on the bedcover window.

“We gotta get out.”

He wormed through the narrow opening and fell into the corrugated bed, landing hard, bits of glass biting into his hands, and again he thought of Cassadaga, of his crawl out of the basement while the house had burned around him.

He climbed across the truck bed, noticing for the first time that Larry had a trio of long guns—two rifles and a shotgun—hidden under a roll of old carpet, and he found the latch to the tailgate and opened that and pushed out, stumbling into the dusty road, shedding pebbled glass and drops of blood. He turned back and saw Larry following suit, swinging down to the road.

“You okay?” Mark asked.

“Fine. Thanks to you, that is. If you hadn't pulled me in like that, that fucking thing would have taken my head off. Damn sure it would have broken my arms and ribs, probably my leg. How in the
hell
did you see that coming?”

“Walter,” Mark murmured.

“Who?”

“Nothing. I saw a version of it in Florida, and I nearly lost my hand to that one. It was so small I didn't understand what it was a model of. I finally recognized the shape. Almost too late.”

“Just in time, that's for sure.” Larry stepped away, looking at his beloved truck from the side. The hood and the cab were demolished, smashed and ravaged by those massive steel teeth that had been welded onto the angled side of the cattle guard. The design could not have been simpler—it was an old-school trap, springs responding to pressure, but Lord, they were powerful springs.

Why use springs, though?
Mark wondered. An explosive and a pressure sensor could have incinerated the truck and killed them both in the time it took to blink. The technique employed here was far more labor-intensive, resulting in far less damage. It was a step backward in the art of war.

It fits Pate's preaching,
Mark realized. Pate needed to sell the idea of the dangerous world of modern technology. He would, therefore, go to war with old weapons, or at least old theories.

“Look what they did to Blue,” Larry said. The look on his face made any expression he had shown at Sal Cantu's seem positively kind. “Do you have any idea how many miles I've covered behind the wheel of that—”

The gunfire that interrupted him was a sustained burst of shots, rapid and fired from a semiautomatic. The bullets lit up the truck, taking out what was left of the windshield and pocking the hood like hail. The shooter wasn't armed with a large magazine, apparently, because he ran out of ammo almost as soon as Mark and Larry managed to react, and they were pressed against the back bumper, guns drawn, during the brief respite where one magazine was dropped and another inserted. Then a second burst fired. More glass and metal flew, but the bullets weren't penetrating, and many of them were sparking off the steel cattle guard.

Mark dropped to the gravel and rolled sideways as Larry hissed, “Markus, don't go out there!”

Mark had his gun raised but wasn't about to return fire with the .38. That was like bringing sparklers to a fireworks show. He just wanted to see where the shooter was.

He wasn't hard to locate—there was a pedestrian door on the east-facing side of the building, toward the front gate, and a man stood in front of it with a rifle, probably an AR-15, at his shoulder, spraying bullets at the truck.

Mark ducked down and said, “What kind of rifle do you have back there?”

“A thirty-aught-six and a three-hundred Win Mag.”

“Give me the three-hundred and I'll own this guy.”

“I'll do the shooting.” Larry rose high enough to fumble the folded carpet out, then dropped with a shout when another burst of gunfire rattled the truck.

“You hit?”

“No, but it was closer than I'd like.”

Mark pressed up against the rear passenger-side tire, holding the .38 and feeling impotent. He was a fine pistol shot, but the distance rendered that meaningless.

“I think he's shot himself out of bullets,” Mark said. “Hurry!”

Larry grabbed for the rifle and instead caught the roll of carpet and dragged the whole mess out, flopping it into the gravel. The shooter took a few steps farther from the building, as if considering coming all the way out, then stopped, and Mark caught his breath.

Garland Webb.

“It's him,” Mark said, though his uncle had no idea who he was talking about. “He's here.” He swung around the truck, rose to his knees, and shot the cylinder on the .38 empty. None of the bullets came close, and Garland Webb turned and fled into the shadows of the building.

“Shit!”
Mark looked at Larry, still fumbling through the rolled-up carpet for the right rifle case, and shouted, “Give me your pistol!”

“Pistol, hell! We've got to make up the distance!”

“Give me the pistol!”

Larry looked up at him in shock, saw Mark's face, and handed over the gun. It was a Colt .45. Mark checked the load and took off at a sprint while his uncle screamed at him to stop. If Webb had more ammunition or another weapon, it was a suicide run, but Mark couldn't think clearly enough to care. Webb was there, and Mark had a gun in hand.

He'd waited two agonizing years for this moment.

He ran down the ditch and scrambled up the other side and then hit the fence and climbed. There was barbed wire along the top, and he felt it shred his stomach as he flipped over and then landed in the gravel on the other side, but he didn't pause, just stumbled forward and then ran hard once he had his balance, praying that Webb would show himself again, step out of the darkness and into the daylight. Into shooting range. For too long, he'd been hidden just like this—behind high fences and thick walls, locked inside dark, inaccessible rooms.

Now, though, he was right there.

Mark was halfway to the building when he heard an engine start. He pulled up short. Then he realized that the engine was coming from behind the building, and he began to run for the closest corner of the barn. He was halfway there when a truck came into view from the opposite side, a white Silverado with mud spattered along the side. Instead of driving toward the gate, it angled across the empty parking lot and toward the fence, gathering speed. Mark took two shots at a run—foolish, wasting bullets—and then forced himself to stop and take careful aim, going for the tires. He squeezed off the rest of the rounds in the gun, hitting the tailgate but never the tires. Meanwhile the truck was still accelerating, heading right for the fence. On the other side of the chain link, the land was rough but flat enough for driving, and the road was only a hundred yards away.