Three A.M. (32 page)

He flicked his cigarette butt out into the darkness. I wondered how many of them littered the ground below us, how many times he stood there, smoking in the dark and utterly alone.

Verlassen motioned for me to follow him back into the stairwell and shut the heavy iron door behind us. In the relative quiet, he coughed and then asked, “Well, I guess you want to take your readings now, huh?”

“Sure. I should try, at least. The other guys know a bit more about it than me, though. They should be along tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? They’re gonna spend the night out there?”

“I suppose so. Got to get the helicopter working.”

“Ain’t safe,” he said, shaking his head and turning to lead the way back down the spiral staircase.

“Why not, Hank?”

“What?”

“Why isn’t it safe?”

Verlsassen stopped and turned to face me. “I get that you’re new to this stuff, but come on, Heller. The sickness all over. I’m sure you boys got your pills and all, but…” He trailed off. “Well, you couldn’t pay me to spend a night outside.” He continued down. I was struck by his words and forgot myself, standing perfectly still, one foot raised slightly to continue my descent. They fed the same line to everyone, inside and out. Dead to the world as the world had been dead to us.

Verlassen looked back over his shoulder at the sound of my heavy footfalls echoing off the metal steps. He waited at the bottom of the stairs and held the door to the antechamber open for me. Stepping past him, I made a point of taking the rifle off my back and leaning it in a corner of the room. To show him trust.

“Okay to leave that here?”

“Ain’t gonna be any visitors unless they came with you.”

I nodded and Hank walked over to a control panel set in the wall next to the large sliding door. He turned a key that was already sitting in its slot and then pressed the uppermost of three large black buttons. With a groan, the door began to rise, its metal slats clicking together. A dull hum grew louder as the grate rose into the ceiling. Beyond it, I could see massive machinery.

I followed Hank into the cavernous chamber as the door locked open with a loud clank. He started off across the floor, and I followed at a very slow pace, marveling at the enormous machines before me. They looked remarkably similar to those I had seen in the warehouse. Twenty of them painted bright blue and red and churning and grinding away rather than rotting beneath a veil of cobwebs. Each had a large base penetrated all over by cords and pipes; the upper half of the contraptions was shaped much like a giant top hat, slowly revolving beneath a thick cable that led up to the ceiling.

I didn’t realize Verlassen was standing beside me until he spoke. “Lots of watts, as we always say.” He chuckled to himself. “Lots ’n’ lots of watts. Come on—I’ll show you to control.”

We walked down the row of humming, groaning behemoths toward a thin wooden staircase that led to a small landing. Verlassen led the way up, and past him I could see a wall of windows overlooking the machine room floor. He nudged a door open and stepped into the room beyond it.

I followed him and for a moment could see nothing but flickering lights and pulsing screens here and there. Then Hank flipped a switch and the room was bathed in a cool blue light. There were dozens of monitors, gauges, dials, and control panels. I walked the length of the small room while Verlassen stood back, arms crossed, looking almost paternally out over the instruments.

“Everything’s ship shape, Heller. Always is on my watch. Poke around.”

“I don’t doubt it.” I said, “You know more about this kind of fancy shit than I ever could anyway.”

He nodded and grinned, walking to a small shelf in the corner. There he sorted through some bags and produced a nondescript bottle of pills. I watched askance as he cracked it open and poured one into his palm, pausing before he recapped the bottle.

“You had yours today?”

“What’d you say?” I asked over my shoulder, pretending I hadn’t seen.

“Your dose. Antidote pills. Good for you and good for me to have you nice and healthy while we’re sharing the same air. I got plenty stockpiled.”

“Not a bad idea … It has been about twenty-four hours, I guess.” He walked over and handed me a pill. It was a large clear capsule filled with white powder. Hank walked back to the shelf and replaced the pills in a little satchel, producing a bottle of water. He raised it to offer me some.

“No, dry is fine, thanks.” I mimed taking the pill and slipped it into my jacket pocket. Walking slowly from gauge to gauge and glancing at all the monitors in the room, I made little grunts in the affirmative and pretended to study the intricate system that kept the city alive. I had no clue what I was looking at, but at least every dial’s needle was squarely in the center of its circumference and each screen was full of words like
STABLE, READY,
or
NOMINAL
.
Well done, Kirk,
I thought to myself.
Well done.

“Everything looks good to me, Hank.”

He smiled and held up both hands to indicate,
Well, what can I say.
I followed him back down the narrow wooden steps and onto the floor of the machine room. “What are these doors along here?” I asked.

Verlassen kept walking, answering over his shoulder. “That leads down to the penstock, this—”

“The what?” I interrupted.

“The penstock. It’s a big kinda underground tube of water. Gets forced through the main turbine.” He pointed to the next set of steel double doors as he continued on. “Which is down through there.”

“Can I see it?”

He stopped walking and laughed, turning to face me. “Ain’t nothing to see unless you want to swim through twenty thousand cubic feet of water and get chewed up by fan blades the size of a truck.” He continued laughing and pushed hard against the silver blue metal doors. They swung open, revealing darkness within. “There, take a look,” he said as he turned and started off again. “Big empty tunnel next to a big tunnel full of cold water.”

I stepped in front of him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Wait, I want to understand. The water flows through the pen.…”

“Penstock. It goes in a big ol’ intake and down into the penstock to the turbines.”

“So what’s all the water spilling over up top?”

“Out them four chutes? That’s just runoff. Some days there ain’t a drop; some days it comes out like lightning. Depends on the rain, the snow.”

“But the power is always steady?”

He looked at me as though I’d asked which hand was left. “Well, yeah—that’s why the intakes are deep down in the reservoir. Not always, actually, I should say. Hell, you should see the Shasta Dam way up near Oregon. Got its intake spillway in the center of a lake. It looks like God reached down and put a drain right in the middle of the water. Biggest spillway in the world—it’s forty feet across.”

“That sounds like something, all right.”

Verlassen nodded and began to turn again.

“Let me ask you, Hank, just because I’m new to this stuff, I heard some of the other guys talking … Could this thing ever break down? I mean, just one guy monitoring it all … What if there was a fire or something up in that control room?”

“Nah, there’s sprinklers and all. Don’t you worry, Heller—we’re safe.”

“Is there any way you could shut it down? Turn the power off?”

He looked hard at me, his dull eyes flashing for a fleeting moment. “No. Christ, hell no. I couldn’t shut it down if I wanted to—the controls are all redundant, see? Here and far off who the hell knows where else—they don’t tell me for security, I guess. And I don’t ask. This thing provides my power too, y’know? I want my air and water filters plugging away just as much as they want theirs.”

“Theirs … You mean the city?”

“City? There’s nothing but a couple research posts out there, man!” He seemed offended by my question. “Maybe I wouldn’t have come here if not for the money, but I sure as hell hope they find out what the fuck happened out there too. Stop it from happening again.”

He was the lone sentinel of a forsaken world, and he didn’t even know it. I figured I could get nothing further out of him. I just had to come up with a way to get him out of here for a while. We walked back to the small room where he had first surprised me, and I slung my weapon as he shut the heavy grate, sealing off the generator room.

“I’ll walk you out, Heller,” Hank said, flipping a switch next to the line of lockers. The long corridor through which I’d earlier stumbled lit up in a patchwork of shadows and flickering pools of light.

We walked down the tunnel together in silence, the gritty floor crunching beneath our feet and the dull thunder of falling water all around. As we reached the end of the tunnel, I stepped out onto the road and into the cool night air. I figured the one chance I had to keep Hank safe and out of the way was to play upon his fears.

“Listen, Hank, I have to level with you. I wasn’t here for a resupply, and as you may have noticed, I don’t know a goddamn thing about dams or the gauges or any of it.” He eyed me quizzically, and I went on. “Tomorrow we’re going to do some tests in the area. We think it may be safe again around here—safe to be out and about. To live. But to be sure, we have to take some air samples from a lot of places, and one of them is in there.” I pointed back down the tunnel. “So I need you to clear out for a while tomorrow. From sunup to sundown. They weren’t going to say anything, but you seem like good people, Hank, and I don’t want you in any danger. It’s safe out here for a few hours. Just take a double dose and clear out for the day, huh? Take a long walk. Maybe around the reservoir—I don’t know. Might be a nice change of scenery.”

Verlassen’s eyes studied my face. His lips tightened behind his beard. He didn’t believe me—he was going to radio this in.…

“Take a walk?” He slowly stroked the long whiskers on his chin. “Well, that sounds just fine, Tom. I ain’t spent more than fifteen minutes further than just right here in four goddamn years!” He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “Four years,” he repeated softly.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding and reached out to shake his hand.

“Hey, where are you from, by the way?” he asked.

“I was from around here, actually. I had to go away for a while, of course, but I was from here.” He frowned knowingly and then bade me a safe trek back. I thanked him and set off down the road, searching the sky for my beacon of stars, wondering how far they’d slid across the firmament. Hank Verlassen stood in the mouth of the tunnel—the door to his world—for a long time, framed by pale gray light from within. As I crossed the bridge, I looked back once more and he was gone.

I set out across the fields, coughing and wheezing in the cold air. I rubbed my hands together to warm them. Then I remembered something I had noted to myself earlier. I stopped walking and pulled out the pill Verlassen had given me. Rolling the capsule in my fingers, I gently separated the two halves and poured a bit of the white powder into one palm. The little mound shone starkly against my flesh in the moonlight. I took a pinch and put it on my tongue. Sugar.

15

I switched off the engine and stepped out into the cold night air, stretching my legs and back. I slung the rifle over my shoulder and leaned against the warm hood of the truck, looking across the low valley between me and the Ayers home. With the same sense of fatality that had led me to Science and Research before, I started off down the hill. There was no other choice to choose. Following a route directly across the grassy fields that would give wide berth to the wreck and the soldiers’ bodies below, I made my way toward the house. The windows were dark. All was silent; not the slightest breeze stirred the cold night air. I had no idea what to expect—the best I could hope for was nothing. Well … maybe not the best I could hope for, but hope had never helped me out that much.

The house seemed quiet. I circled all the way around it once and was crouching in the tall grass below the manicured yard. There were no lights, no sounds, no vehicles, and no fresh tracks. Finally, slowly, I began to ascend the hill. I kept my rifle at the ready, cocked and with the safety off, my finger resting on the trigger guard, but I felt no fear. The night had gotten colder as it wore on. Icy air sneaked in between my clothing and skin. I shivered and picked up the pace; I had spent too long sitting still, observing the house, and was chilled to the bone.

As I crossed the threshold from rough, wild grass to the trimmed yard—just now beginning to grow out of control—I slowed again, peering carefully into every window I could see. The glass panes reflected starlight. I hurried across the open stretch of land between the last hedges and pressed my back up against the wicker siding of the deck. Maybe it was all paranoia, but if there was actually a visitor, I wasn’t going to be caught relaxing now.

Bent low, I approached the front of the house and eased up the wooden steps onto the porch, ending up with one leg firmly on a step, the opposite knee on the deck. Once more I waited for a good, long time, gun at the ready. Then I rose and moved to the door. Gingerly, I tested the knob and it twisted in my hand. The door clicked open and swung inward with a quiet sigh.

It was still within. Silent. I entered the house, sucking in a breath as the floorboards creaked beneath my feet, and began to sweep through the main floor. The living room was clear—exactly as we had left it. The dining room and halls showed no signs of disruption. I could hardly see a thing in the gloomy, windowless study, but sensed no intrusion. I padded up the stairs and stuck my head and gun barrel into every room and then every closet. Finally I was content. I turned on a few lamps—one at the top of the stairs and one in a downstairs hallway—that would cast little or no light through the windows, and then walked back to the front door, easing it closed.

I stopped dead. I heard a noise. Something between a distant breeze and a muffled whimper. I took a few painfully slow steps toward the stairs. For a minute all was silent, and then I heard it again, more distinct. Gentle weeping. Rebecca. Foolishly, overjoyed and not thinking of the shock it would give her, I cried out her name.