The Secret: A Thriller (21 page)

“Yeah,” he said. Sounding a little tense. Scared maybe.

“Don’t worry about what you said,” I said. “I won’t mention it.”

“Excellent,” he said, sounding totally satisfied there in the dark. Or not. “Why don’t you get some sleep, Ash? I’ve got some thinking to do anyway.”

I was a lot more awake than I’d been at any time since Jerry woke me. But I didn’t want to argue with George. Was he doing what I told him to do, against his will?

Or was I deluding myself? Maybe all the stress was making me lose my mind.

I grinned at the thought after a moment. Well, what the hell. The damn thing didn’t seem to do me all that much good anyway.

I settled back on the couch. I heard George get up and walk into the kitchen.

* * *

D
aylight coming in through the windows. I wondered where I was, then realized a hand was shaking my shoulder. I squinted—it was Jerry—and wriggled away from him. Man, I was sleepy.

“What’s—”

“George is gone.”

I blinked, and looked back into Jerry’s face. Tim stood behind him. “Did you fall asleep,” Tim asked, “or…”

“George got up,” I said. “Thunder woke him up. Told me he’d take over.”

Tim sighed. “Either of you know where he’d go? He might be working for Eisler or Bob, or both. Or someone else.”

I sat up. Jerry looked…thoughtful. He didn’t volunteer any ideas.

Had I
really
pushed George into saying things he hadn’t wanted to, last night? Or had that been either a dream or an artifact of a confused and sleepy mind—meaning mine?

Had he left to keep me from doing it again?

“Maybe it’s about his brother,” I suggested.

Jerry shook his head. “He could have said. If that was it.”

* * *

“T
his is where it happened,” Jerry told us. “Where they started shooting at us. Doc, you were right over—”

“Between those houses,” Tim said testily. “I didn’t forget.”

I pursed my lips. The two of them had been sniping at each other all morning. It was beginning to remind me of dealing with teenagers.

Though that probably meant something entirely different, these days.

“Bag’s in those bushes. I hope,” Tim said, pointing with his left index finger.

I sensed Jerry moving away, and glanced to see what he was up to. He was staring at Tim’s right hand. Which was busily scratching above his right hip.

“Got an itch?” Jerry asked, too casually.

“Yeah,” Tim told him. Waited a beat. “I don’t like it any better than you do.”

He walked over to the bushes and started moving branches out of the way.

For some reason Jerry seemed to have calmed down. Maybe he’d liked Tim’s answer?

Whatever. I decided I was as happy as I was going to get, as long as they weren’t going to shoot each other.

“Got it.”

* * *

W
e saw no sign of movement from the house Tim led us to. The screen door was off its hinges, and there were bullet dents in the main door. It’d been built stronger than I would have guessed. Then again, this had been a high crime area.

I sighed. I’d begun to get very tired of these situations.

“How many people were we supposed to find here?” I asked Tim.

He shrugged. “More than five. If this is the house. If it’s even the right street.”

I frowned at him. “Not sure about the address?”

He gave a short laugh. “None of them could tell me the address. Or even street names. I tried to ask them, but I got stuff like ‘turn just past where Leticia lives, you know, her house, then you just look for the black Jeep.’”

“Do you think…the rash, I mean whatever it is they had…was affecting their minds?”

Tim laughed again, louder this time. “Ash.
All
of our minds are affected lately, by one thing or another. Haven’t you noticed? But those guys probably hadn’t lost much capacity. Only one of them could read at all, at least in English, and I don’t think he’d be able to handle much more than that Dr. Seuss book you were staring at last night. The one just like Abby’s.”

Oh. I hadn’t realized I’d been that obvious. I inclined my head toward the house. “So, there’s a black Jeep in the driveway.”

“Yep. Only one I’ve seen. Wait here, will you?”

I
was pretty sure this part of our journey was going to turn out pointless before Tim even got into the house. He’d raised his shirt to cover his mouth and nose. Maybe it was to try to protect against infection. But we were talking about a rash here. And anyway, he’d jerked a little and I was fairly sure he’d caught a whiff of—never mind; he came back out, leaving the front door open behind him, and I could smell the story for myself.

“How many?” I asked when he got closer.

Tim just shook his head. And walked away.

* * *

“Y
ou go in there right after I shoot you in the head,” Jerry said. “Not before.”

Tim, standing two feet away, shrugged without looking away from Jerry’s eyes. “I have to go in. If you shoot me, you shoot me.”

“Nobody’s shooting,” I said…and I
pushed
that a little bit.

Jerry shifted his weight, as if startled—and I could feel the tension draining from both of them. A little spooky, but at the moment I’d take it.

“Tim has to go back there,” I said. “It's his daughter.”

Jerry turned his head to the right and spat a yellow-brown gob onto the ground. “His daughter? She’s not even
here
. We haven't seen a single kid all day.”

We stood in the backyard of a house across the highway from the high school. We'd been taking turns watching through a knothole in the pine-board privacy fence.

“They might be inside,” Tim said. “Anyway, Bob is always here. He's the one who said he'd kill them if I didn't come back in four days. It's been three.”

“So we've got a little time,” I told him. “Let's just keep watching for a while.”

Tim shook his head. “I'm heading in when it starts to get dark. Don't want to take a chance on how Bob decides to count the days.”

“Deal,” I told him, giving him a light shoulder-punch. He met my eyes, saw I meant it, and nodded.

Jerry blinked and looked away. I'd have felt better about that if I could convince myself what I was doing was ethical, even in what I thought was a good cause. And if I hadn't noticed he was absently scratching himself under his left armpit.

* * *

A
fter Tim left us, Jerry and I holed up in another empty house. One thing about Bob's control-freakery that was kind of nice: we didn't worry too much about people shooting us as we entered their homes. Or shooting us in general without a damned good reason. If anybody was hiding from Bob's patrols out here, they'd be as careful as we were about drawing attention with gunfire.

Though…we did have to worry about the patrols themselves. At least a little. So far they'd seemed to confine themselves to the middle of the street, though.

I wondered about that. How had Bob moved Henge's citizenry out of their homes, if his patrols weren't searching homes? Did they have some way of knowing which houses had people inside?

Or. Could they really, as Jerry thought, get that kind of information directly from the bug swarms?

On the other hand, maybe people had in general decided it was better to be in a group than alone. And Bob's group was the one they had.

It made a certain amount of sense.

I didn't like it.

* * *

T
he next morning Jerry got skittish about using the same route we'd taken before, and also insisted on moving very carefully as we approached the houses on the far side of the road from the high school.

I could see his point. But I didn't really think Tim would have gone in there and told Bob—or Eisler, or anybody else—that we were out here.

If pushed, and with his daughter’s life on the line? Then, yeah. Probably. But we'd talked about it beforehand. We didn't know whether someone in our mountain home had reported that Tim and his three companions had been brought to us. So Tim planned to tell the truth about that—and everything else, except that he was going to say he'd woken up the morning before and noticed the rest of us were sleeping, so he'd taken his chance to escape and come back to his daughter.

And anyway, who was I to say our lives were more important than Tim’s kid? He’d do what he needed to do.

Meanwhile I needed to check the school windows, again. Tim had promised to put a white square of cloth or paper in a window facing us if Robbie was in there.

I squinted and waited. No matter what I did, though? No white square. It took a while to be sure, because the windows were reflecting sunlight in the early morning—which we should have considered before coming over here—but eventually there was no way for me to keep telling myself I just hadn’t found Tim’s signal yet. It wasn’t there.

Jerry had quit looking at least an hour before I did. He sat, his back to the house we were hiding behind, and waited patiently.

“Nothing there,” I said eventually.

“Nope. I figure we should check out the VA hospital.”

I looked at him. “How come?”

He shrugged. “Heard from some military guys—they didn’t see me listening—that the organized folks in town actually have two strong spots. That’s the other one.”

I pondered this while looking at the back of his head. “You haven’t mentioned this before now?”

He shrugged, scratching his back and not looking in my direction. “I would have, as soon as it mattered.”

I sighed. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

He shrugged, stood, and took a quick look through the fence. Then froze. “Yeah, Ash. Actually—you ought to go find another hole and watch this. I think that’s McDermott himself pulling up.”

McDermott, huh? I wondered what he looked like—if I’d seen him at some point. I walked a few feet down the fence, lowered myself a few inches, and peered out across the street.

A couple of obviously military vehicles had driven up to the school. Hummers. Not the civilian model.

Several men in what looked like some sort of urban camouflage stepped out. One was clearly in charge—he gave instructions to another, who picked out a group to follow them inside and another to remain by the Hummers.

I wondered just how good at their jobs these guys were—none of them so much as glanced in our direction. There were no obvious insignia on their uniforms, at least none I could see from this distance, but it was still pretty clear which target should be taken out first—if they had enemies around, which fortunately for them we weren’t. Quite.

On the other hand, maybe worrying about snipers wasn’t so important under the circumstances. There were other dangers, now.

They didn’t do anything very interesting. One group went into the school, and the other stood guard—focusing most of their attention in the direction of the school, which I figured meant either that they weren’t worried about being attacked or that they figured the school was the biggest danger around.

“Didn’t think the old man would come in like this,” Jerry said. “He’s all about picking his ground and making people come to him when he’s ready for them.”

I quit looking at the high school and considered my companion. “Know him well, huh?”

He shrugged, still not pointing his eyes in my direction. “I used to. Not anymore.”

I wondered if I could make him tell me the story there. Decided he was already giving me the information he thought was helpful, and he had to know he was revealing himself, so…two choices. Either forcing him to talk with my spiffy new brain-powers was ethically iffy at best, or I was delusional and couldn’t do it anyway.

Whichever, I’d had enough of staring at the school. “No kids. Not much movement. Want to hang around and see if this McDermott guy does anything cool?”

“Nah. We already knew he was talking to the town people. I guess they might try to hold him, but it’s not likely. So all we’d see is him leaving again. Eventually.”

“Unless the rest of the military are all coming in,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. Unless that. Look, I didn’t want to say anything about the VA hospital if the doc was going to hear it. And I’d feel better if I didn’t think he knew
exactly
where we were, you know? Since he went inside. Alone. How ’bout we go look for your kid instead of hanging out around here?”

I nodded slowly. That sort of made sense, if you ignored the fact that Jerry hadn’t mentioned the VA hospital
before
Tim arrived on the scene either. But maybe he was worried about how people would react if they knew he was a deserter—or even if word that we had a deserter somehow got back to this McDermott character.

“Deal,” I said, already moving toward the fence on the other side of the yard—there was a hole we could get through, and from there we’d get out to Third Street through via a house that couldn’t be seen from the school.

And maybe take a creek. With only the two of us, I didn’t feel quite as comfortable walking down the streets of Henge as I had when Tim and George had been with us. Also with only two of us, there was a better chance we’d be able to pass through town via creek beds and backyards without getting noticed. Assuming there was anyone left to notice us.

I looked back over my shoulder. “You coming?”

* * *

W
e’d headed away from the high school, then circled back toward the highway that ran by it, figuring it was better not to cross the wide-open road anywhere near either Reverend Bob’s or McDermott’s people.

Here, at least a mile from the school, I stopped Jerry when he started to follow a road. “If we head southeast into the mountains we can circle around nearly to the hospital,” I told him. “Through woods, mostly.”

He glanced at me. “Means we’ll take hours to get there. It’s only about four miles by road.”

I figured it was more like five. “So, which way is less likely to get us shot or spotted?”

I got a shrug. Once we were in the woods—where I
still
felt more comfortable than I ever had in the town, and what was that about?—I found a good log and sat on it.