The Slab (31 page)

At first he thought the man was dead. He spotted Hal from a hundred feet away or so, his blue shirt plainly visible against the brown earth. But he was under a tree, not moving, and he’d just spent the last afternoon and night exposed to the often-cruel elements. The deserts of the Southwest killed hundreds of people every year, most of them Mexicans crossing over in search of jobs and opportunity, using the empty spaces to dodge
la Migra
. But there was also the occasional Anglo hiker, too, lost in the wilderness without enough water, or too little cover for the cold nights. Anything could have happened to Hal out here. Ken started to run.

By the time he reached Hal, though, the old man had awakened and started to shift his body. Ken called to him, and Hal turned over and opened his eyes, surprised to see Ken bearing down on him. His expression was at first closed off, defensive, but then he opened up.

“Hal, are you okay?” Ken asked him. “You shouldn’t wander around by yourself, you know that. You’ve been out here all night?”

“Think I don’t know that, young fella?” Hal replied. “I may be old but I’m no idiot. When the sun goes down and the moon comes up, that’s nighttime.”

“Are you cold?” Ken asked. “Hungry?” He slipped a canteen off his shoulder and handed it to Hal, who had moved to a sitting position. Hal unscrewed the lid and tipped his head back, drinking deep. After a few moments he pulled the canteen away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ahh, that’s good,” he said, and then he launched into a coughing fit so severe that Ken was afraid he was going to vomit.

“Easy,” he said. “Take it slow. You probably haven’t had any water all night, have you?”

Hal brought his coughing under control, though when he looked up at Ken his blue eyes were teary. “No, I don’t…I don’t think so,” he said. “I guess not, anyhow.”

“Come on, Hal,” Ken said. “Let’s get you back home. Virginia’s worried half to death about you.”

“Virginia?” Hal asked. “Is that my sister?”

And Ken knew that the Alzheimer’s had come back, with a vengeance—probably why Hal had roamed off in the first place, he thought. Poor guy probably couldn’t remember how to get home even if he’d wanted to.

But he thought there was something he could do about that.

He extended a hand to Hal. “Let me help you up there, partner,” he said. Hal reached out and clasped Ken’s hand with his own, and sure enough, it happened again, the magic coursing through both of them like a transfusion of energy and strength and wisdom, like all of his blood had been driven from his body and replaced with trumpet music.

Hal felt it too. Ken could tell by the sudden focus and intensity in the older man’s eyes, the increased strength of his grip, the way he practically lunged to his feet in spite of a night lost in the wilderness.

“What the hell are we doing here, Ken?” Hal asked, speaking with more vigor than he had exhibited just moments ago. “Where are we?”

Ken chuckled. “That’s two questions, Hal. Number one, what we’re doing here is you took a little walk last night and got yourself lost. Number two is, we’re somewhere in the Chocolate Mountains bombing range.”

Hal took a quick look around, as if to orient himself. “Guess I’m lucky I didn’t step on some unexploded ordnance, huh? Or make myself a target.”

“Lucky, right,” Ken agreed. “Just the same, I think it’d be an excellent idea if we got out of here now.”

“I’m with you there,” Hal said. “Lead the way.”

As they walked, Hal told Ken what he remembered about his adventure of the night before, wandering away from the Slab, lost in thought and paying no attention to his course or his destination. When they reached the hole in the fence, the sun now high in the sky and the morning heating up fast, Hal suddenly grabbed Ken’s arm and faced him with a worried expression.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

Ken thought for a moment that Hal’s memory had slipped again. But his eyes were still sharp and his grip strong. “Back home. Virginia’s scared to death about you.”

“No,” Hal said adamantly. “I don’t want to go back to the Slab.”

“But your wife’s there, Hal,” Ken said. “Anyway, my car’s parked there, I have to go back.”

“There’s something bad there, Ken,” Hal said. “Something, I don’t know, wrong about that place.”

Ken held the fence back for Hal to pass through. “What kind of wrong? You’ve lived up there for years.”

“I know it, Ken. But…I don’t know. I guess I hadn’t touched you and had that…well, you know, that kind of electrical charge go through me before. It’s like it opened these shutters in my mind or something. I can hear lots of things—not really hear, but you know…”

“I think I do,” Ken admitted, remembering the strange images he’d been able to call up since he and Hal had connected yesterday.

“I call ‘em magic days,” Hal said. “When I think about ‘em at all. And these last few days, they’ve been magic days, for sure. But since you and I touched over there, on the Slab, the magic’s been even stronger than before. If I’m not careful I can hear all the things my neighbors are thinking about, and what they’re thinking, well, I don’t want any part of it. It’s foul, Ken, it’s evil. They’re thinking about killing each other, hurting each other, they’re full of anger and fear and misery.”

“Seems like that’s true of most people,” Ken suggested.

“No, more than that, though. Way more. Like wading through some kind of cesspool, barefoot and with open cuts on my feet. I can’t go back there.”

Ken thought for a moment as they walked. The hike back hadn’t felt strenuous at all—he actually felt refreshed, as if he’d had a good night’s sleep and a shower. “Okay,” he said finally. “I left the car near Virginia’s place—your place. I’ll pick it up and I’ll stop in to tell her that I’ve got you but I’m going to take you to a doctor just to be checked out—that you’re fine but as a precaution I want someone to take a look at you. That way she won’t worry about you so much, and I’ll be able to come and pick you up in the car.”

“If she wants to come with you, Ken,” Hal said, his tone somber, “don’t let her. I don’t want to see her right now either.”

Ken was surprised by this news—Virginia Shipp was one of the sweetest women he’d ever known, the kind every kid wishes his grandmother could be, or believes she is. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure,” Hal replied. “I can’t trust her. I know it’s not her—it’s that place. It’s the Slab. But she’s, she’s under its influence, I guess. That’s the only way I can put it. That place has an evil influence, and she’s fallen under it.”

“What about taking her away from it?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Hal said. “But I don’t think that’ll help. I think once it’s in someone, it’s in there.”

“Okay, Hal,” Ken said. “I believe what you’re telling me.”

“Are you sure? Because if I didn’t know myself I’d think I was completely insane.”

“I’m sure, Hal. Because I have them too. The magic days. Like you. And like you, since we touched yesterday it’s all been different. I don’t hear things, but I can see—strange things. Like I’m looking through someone else’s eyes. That’s how I found you, out there. Seeing through your eyes.”

“Figured you just followed my footprints,” Hal said. “I wasn’t exactly hiding ‘em.”

“I did some of that too,” Ken confessed. “But it was a little tough in the dark.”

They had approached the Slab now, it was just on the other side of a battered dirt path and the next little rise, and Hal stopped, planting his feet in the sand. “No farther,” he said. “This is an old Jeep road you can take from the edge of the Slab, you know the one?”

“I know it,” Ken said.

“It’s pretty passable, even with a passenger car. Pick me up here. I’m not taking another step closer to that place.”

“All right, Hal,” Ken said. “It’ll be a little while. Twenty minutes, half hour maybe. You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Hal said.

“And Hal? How’d you know I was driving a passenger car and not the Bronco?”

Hal Shipp smiled. “Like I said, I can hear things.”

Ken laughed and turned away from the old man, heading toward the Slab—a place he had always thought of as off-beat, a little strange, but never particularly evil. He trusted Hal’s judgment, though, especially now, in the wake of the magic that had enveloped them both. That, he accepted without hesitation, since he’d felt it himself. As he walked, peeling off his jacket as the day warmed, he still had a spring in his step that was unexpected considering how long he’d been on his feet. He didn’t necessarily feel younger, but he felt stronger, more composed, more optimistic somehow.

And immediately, Mindy Sesno flitted into his mind. She would go out with me, he thought. He couldn’t actually figure out why he had believed that she wouldn’t, or that there would be any harm done in asking her. So he decided that he would, as soon as he finished dealing with Hal Shipp.

Today, though. For sure. Before it was too late and she hooked up with some other guy.

But then, as he stepped up onto the first of the many cement slabs that made up the community called the Slab, he put her out of his mind. If there was any basis to what Hal had said, he’d have to keep a close watch while he was here.

***

“Do you trust me?”

Colonel Franklin Wardlaw looked at William Yato and Marcus Jenkins as if he could see all the way through their uniforms, through their bags of flesh, through their interwoven masses of muscles, through the skeletal structure that gave them shape, to the faint blue outline that he believed was the embodiment of the human soul. They were strapped into their seats in the otherwise-empty belly of a Bell UH-1 Iroquois, a Marine Corps utility helicopter that could transport twelve, currently buzzing across the range at a speed of around one hundred knots. The chatter of the rotor and the buzz of the interior made conversation hard, but not impossible, if you shouted. Wardlaw was used to shouting. You didn’t make Colonel in the USMC with a soft voice, he thought. A man needed to make himself heard.

Neither of them answered, so he asked the question again. “Do you trust me?”

Marcus smiled. “Yes, sir,” he replied eagerly. He was young, and not particularly bright, but he was eager and that was something.

Yato only watched, but didn’t answer. He’d take some observation, Captain Yato would, Wardlaw thought. Some testing. If a man needed to make himself heard, which he did, a man also needed to know where he stood.

“We’ll know, soon enough,” Wardlaw shouted, settling back into his seat. The chopper roared to the west, away from the rising sun. Ten minutes later, it had deposited its passengers, picked up nine new ones, and headed back to Yuma.

And on the ground, Franklin Wardlaw and his entourage had taken over custody of the prisoner. Larry Melton had been located during the night, near the southern end of the Impact Area, not far from the border with the gold mining operation that capped the bottom of the mountain range.

Melton himself was not much to see. He sat on a rock, hands cuffed behind his back. He was a furry thing, with long wavy hair that billowed out from his head, a thick beard, and a hairy neck, back, and shoulders, all growing together so thickly that one couldn’t really tell where the hair from one left off and became something else. He wore a plain red tank top, as if to expose more of his fur to the morning air, with faded blue jeans and hiking boots. His eyes were small, pig-like, Wardlaw thought, as if the man were only part human and still trying to overcome some animal past. A fugitive from Moreau’s island, maybe, with all that fur and those small bloodshot eyes.

“So your name is Larry Melton,” Wardlaw said to him. He paced in front of the prisoner, back and forth, back and forth, as they talked. Marcus and Yato stood off to one side, at ease but alert. Weird red and white mushrooms poked out of the ground near their feet. “What else can you tell us about you, Mr. Melton? Your driver’s license says you’re from Indiana. Is that a fact?”

“Yes.”

“A Hoosier And what would a Hoosier be doing out here in the extreme desert Southwest, I wonder?”

Melton didn’t answer, so Wardlaw tried a more direct question. “What are you doing on my gunnery range?”

“Working for peace,” Melton said simply.

“‘Working for peace.’ That’s precious, really it is. And to you, arranging rocks into clever little messages like ‘War No More,’ that’s a form of working for peace?”

“Yes.”

“In what way?” Wardlaw demanded.

“It works to raise public consciousness.”

“What about flying airplanes into skyscrapers? Did that raise public consciousness too?”

“I guess, in a way.”

“You guess. Don’t you think that raised the public’s consciousness to the idea that not all war is bad, that sometimes it’s a necessary response to global conditions? You do know that the American public stands firmly behind the idea of a war against terrorism, don’t you?”

“I don’t find it surprising, given what happened. But I don’t think the public really knows what it’s asking for.”

“Maybe not. Maybe not.” Wardlaw stopped pacing and faced the young man directly. “If the public ever really knew what war was like, maybe they wouldn’t support one under any circumstances. Do you think that’s true?”

“It probably is,” Melton agreed.

“Which is why the public has to be left in the dark about some things. Because some wars are just, some wars are necessary, and some wars have to be fought and won. We’re a nation forged in war, built by war, protected by war and enriched by war, Mr. Melton. But you come into my Impact Area, in the midst of one of the greatest national crises our country has ever faced, and you try to disrupt our mobilization efforts, try to turn public opinion against us. Do you think you speak for the people, Mr. Melton?”

“I think so, yes.”

“When I look at you, do you know what I see? A spoiled, middle-class white kid. Your friend Dieter—ex-friend, I should say, may he rest in peace—” He watched Melton’s face as he dropped this news tidbit; to his credit, the young half-man barely flinched. “—he wasn’t even an American, he was a German. Middle class white kid, just the same. Your rich and your poor, they don’t have time for such nonsense. The poor are too busy trying to scrape out a living, and the rich are too busy building a great nation. It’s the middle-class, with too much time on their hands and not enough to do but watch TV, that are always out causing trouble. Look at us!” He thumped his own chest. “A white man.” He gestured at Yato and Jenkins. “An Asian man and a black man. The few, the proud, the multicultural. We’re America, boy. We represent America, not you!”