The Remnant (11 page)

Ashley kissed Marie goodnight, leaving the
girl’s bedroom door open a crack.

She checked all the door and window locks,
then tested to make certain there was a dial tone on her phone. She
had a cell phone for backup, but unlike many of the other Brethren
she seldom carried hers. Certainly it made sense to stay in touch,
but in the five years she’d had the phone she had never used it and
so had simply gotten in the habit of leaving it plugged in on the
reading table in the den. She also had a VHF base station on the
desk by the window on the same frequency as the crossing guards.
She adjusted the squelch and picked up the mike.

"Ash, over," she said, giving her call
sign.

After a moment a male voice answered.
"Cole."

Even though she expected his answer-she was
his replacement tonight after all-she frowned. She and Cole had a
history. If not for him she would never have escaped from
California City the second time. But since arriving in the valley
he had made numerous advances she had struggled to deflect. In a
tight-knit and closed society such as the remainder of the Brethren
represented she could understand his attraction to her, but she did
not return it.

"Be there in two shakes," she said.

"Bringing that killer dog?"

Ashley frowned. "You know he stays with
Marie."

She replaced the mike and grabbed her jacket
off the hook and the handheld radio beside it. Maxie followed her,
but she shook her head, and he eyed her sadly until she closed and
locked the door in his face. She stood for only a moment,
listening, but the bees were gone, and she climbed into her car
with an indefinable feeling that she had once again lost
something.

The winding valley road was empty as it was
most times of the day or night. Because only a couple of husband
and wife pairs had survived the
Killing
the majority of the
Brethren lived almost hermetic lives, and it wasn’t like they had
anywhere to go. The valley was their home and their prison.

Paulie had discovered the valley years before
the attack during a vacation in New England with Clara.

"Darndest thing you ever seen," Ashley
recalled him telling her one night as they sat around the table in
Mexachuli. "It’s way up in the foothills of the White Mountains,
and it’s empty of people as a church on Monday morning. Houses
still there. Old chapel still there. I asked around at the town up
the road, and it turns out the whole place belonged to a big family
of loggers back around the Depression. One day, when the timber was
mostly stripped away, they just all up and moved away. Now, of
course all the trees have grown back in, and the houses are pretty
rundown."

"They left everything there?" asked Ashley,
trying to picture such an odd ghost town in the hills of Maine.

"Nothing but the buildings."

"How come no one else moved in?"

Paulie shrugged. "Got me. After a while the
land and everything went back to the town for taxes. I bought it
for a song."

"You bought it?"

"Yeah," said Paulie, smiling. "I just
couldn’t pass up the deal they offered, and you never know when a
hole in the wall like that will come in handy."

Ashley wondered if he’d ever stopped to think
just how prophetic those words turned out to be.

The sky-although clear-seemed darker than it
should have, the stars not gleaming as brightly as usual, as though
some indefinable haze hung high overhead. Ashley followed a couple
of tire ruts off the road and parked in between tall oaks next to
Cole’s Ford pickup. She snatched a set of night-vision binoculars
off the seat, then followed a narrow trail up to a small bluff.
Cole slipped out of the shadows wearing his own head-mounted,
night-vision monocular.

"Pete’s on the other picket," he said,
nodding across the valley road into the trees on the slopes.

Only because she knew where the picket post
was, Ashley could just make out the shape of a human head and
shoulders inside the distant bunker with her binoculars. She nodded
at Cole.

"I’m off," he said, hefting a small backpack.
"Who’s your relief?"

"Annie."

Cole nodded.

"Ashley," he said, "I thought maybe you and
I-"

She shook her head. "No, Cole."

"You didn’t even let me finish. I was just
suggesting a walk tomorrow. Maybe a picnic."

"How many times do I need to tell you, we’re
just friends?"

"I don’t want to be friends."

"Then we can be acquaintances," she said,
tired of the useless banter. There was a time to be polite, and a
time to be done. Cole had driven her to that point.

"That’s cold."

She shrugged. "It’s all I have to offer,
Cole."

"You can’t live in the past forever."

"All we do here is live in the past," she
said, feeling bile rising in her throat.

That was the terrible truth of it. They were
lost in their past more than any other human beings anywhere,
suffering for events over which they had never had control. Even
old memories had more of a life than they did.

Finally Cole turned and stomped off down the
trail

She glanced around in the starlight, barely
able to make out the dark steps leading to the bunker. Each picket
post gave shelter from the weather and held a small kerosene stove
for those long winter nights. But the night was warm and dry, so
instead of entering the tight little space Ashley slid her back
down a tall maple and lifted the Mac-11 machine pistol Cole had
left there. Beside it was a fully automatic M-16 with a night
scope. Beside the two guns she placed her radio.

For emergencies Stan and Paulie-and several
others in the valley like Ashley—kept their home monitors tuned to
channel 17. The handheld was on 16, as was Pete’s. The two guards
could chat, but if they needed to send out a warning all they had
to do was flip up one channel. So far, in five years, Ashley had
only been awakened twice by a nervous guard. Once a drunk had
accidently turned up the valley road and was stopped near the
meeting house by awakened residents. The second time it was a lost
hiker.

Not that the Angels weren’t out there.

Ashley had seen them often enough, driving by
in their dark sedans wearing their mirror glasses. Once they
dropped off a pair who took up residence in the woods across the
highway and set up their own monitoring post. But when one of them
tried to cross the road into the valley at three in the morning
Ashley had put two bullets between the man’s feet. The shaken Angel
stood frozen for only a moment, then turned and trotted back across
the road. The next morning another black sedan arrived, and the
pair was spirited away.

After that they tried more surreptitious
patrols. But eventually the guards learned to spot them even when
they were driving bread trucks or riding mountain bikes. A man born
and bred to stiff-backed, crewcut self-righteousness had a hard
time disguising himself as a slogging, nine-to-five, hard-living
Mainer. It was like a Marine captain trying to pass himself off as
a college radical. But that didn’t stop them from
being
there
. Hardly a week went by that someone didn’t spot one of
them. Sometimes in a vehicle, sometimes afoot or even on horseback,
sometimes in the woods again, across the highway.

For five years-since the
Killing-
a
tense truce had held between the surviving Brethren and the Angels.
But Ashley knew that wasn’t because of a pair of crossing guards
with a couple of hundred rounds of ammo or any number of police
dogs, no matter how vicious or watchful. The Angels knew that if
they started the war again the Brethren would bring down the wrath
of their own God upon them. All that had saved those who had
survived the
Killing
had been the truth, and they clung to
it now. They could not leave the valley, except for the most
essential supplies, and the Angels could not enter. But both sides
would see that the truce was maintained to the letter, so both
sides maintained a constant watch.

Once again as the night settled around Ashley
she noticed how extraordinarily dark it seemed. She rubbed her
eyes, wondering if it was her own vision, but that improved
nothing. It was then that she noticed how utterly quiet it was
after Cole’s footsteps had died away. Not even a cricket chirped,
and the last of the breeze seemed to have passed. She lifted her
binoculars again and found Pete, who happened to be looking for
her. He waved, and she waved back. Pete was a crotchety fellow,
almost as old as Paulie, but he was also funny, and the
Killing
hadn’t broken him completely the way it had some of
the others. She saw him lifting his radio, and she picked up her
own.

"Maxie guarding the house?"

She nodded. It was strange carrying on the
whispered radio conversation almost as though they were face to
face.

"You hear the one about the Angel who walked
into a bar and found an elephant bartending?" asked Pete.

Ashley smiled and shook her head.

"The elephant takes the guy’s order, then
says
I notice you keep staring at me. You probably haven’t seen
a lot of elephants tending bar."

Ashley stared through the binoculars,
wondering if that was supposed to be the punchline. She didn’t
always get Pete’s jokes, but she tried to laugh at the right spot
if she could. She gave him another second to continue.

"The Angel sips his soda and shakes his head.
No,
he says,
I just never figured the parrot would sell
the place."

Ashley keyed the mike and gave Pete a real
laugh. He nodded and smiled.

She spotted headlights approaching down the
highway first, but Pete had already seen her look up. He spun in
his bunker and hunkered down. Of course hundreds of cars passed on
the highway every day, even this late at night they weren’t that
uncommon. It was almost certainly just someone headed to Canada.
Only one day everyone knew it wouldn’t be someone just passing.

Is this it?
wondered Ashley.
Is
this the one that starts it? Everyone knows the truce can’t go on
forever. Sooner or later the Angels will get impatient. They’ll
want it over and done with, and they’ll think they’ve figured out
some way to get around getting hurt.

They all dearly wanted to believe that they
were safe as long as the threat of mutually assured destruction
held. The Angels were a lot better funded, armed, maybe trained.
And yes, they thought they had God on their side, which made them
doubly fearsome. But the Brethren still held that trump, and as
long as they did the local wisdom said that the Angels would never
risk another open attack upon them. That was the one truth that
allowed most of the Brethren to sleep at night. Still, Ashley
couldn’t get the image of the shadowy figure in the woods in front
of her house to fade from her mind.

The approaching car slowed, and she held her
breath, dragging the M-16 into her lap. As the vehicle drew near
the valley road she could see that it looked to be a late model
Jeep Cherokee. It was hard to tell looking into the headlights how
many people were in the car, and in the glow of the beams the night
scope would be useless. When the car stopped at the intersection
Ashley let out a slow breath, gripping the radio in her free
hand.

The Jeep sat for long moments parked in its
own lane. Finally Ashley keyed the mike and whispered into it.

"Can you see how many or what they’re doing?
Over."

"One driver, one passenger," Pete whispered
back. "Seem to be arguing."

That didn’t sound like Angels. Angels always
acted as though they knew what to do. Angels had a firm hierarchy.
They didn’t argue.

"Should I wake Stan and Paulie?" she
asked.

There was a pause. "Give it a second. If they
turn into the valley road, then shout."

But that might not be good enough. Stan kept
assuring them Paulie’s plan was fine, that the Angels were held at
bay. Over the past three years the Brethren had even altered their
initial procedure of having a wandering group of patrols along the
ridgelines in favor of two others on call and an electronic warning
system on the ridges. But if there was a real attack, by the time
the valley was aroused there might be untold numbers of Angels
infiltrated inside, and it would be hell to pay rooting them out.
Once again they were placing all their faith in their trump.

Ashley raised the carbine to her shoulder.
More than likely the pair in the car was lost and just debating
whether or not to turn around here at the intersection. When the
car rolled forward and then began a sweeping u-turn she began to
relax. Then the Jeep stopped again, pointing up the valley road
this time.

She could see both occupants now, and they
looked to be men in their twenties. The driver wore a ball cap. The
passenger was bareheaded, with long shaggy hair and a thick beard.
They definitely weren’t Angels, and she relaxed a little again, but
she was still prepared to call for backup if the pair proceeded up
the valley road.

Then the passenger began to point excitedly
toward the front of the car. The driver stared in the same
direction, nodding as the passenger shouted at him.

What the heck were they looking at?

She lifted the rifle and swept it up the
road, realizing her mistake instantly. As soon as the scope lowered
across the headlights it flashed bright green in her eye, and she
was temporarily blinded. She raised the weapon skyward and stared
into the darkness around her, blinking, trying to get her vision
back. Fumbling for the radio she managed to key it.

"Can you see what they’re so interested in?"
she asked.

"The trees and the slope are in my way. Hold
on. I’m moving closer. Over."