Alicia slung her rifle and pressed her eyes to the window, her neck straining as she tried to widen her field of vision through the opening.
“He’s right,” she reported. “There’s nothing out there.” She drew her face away and turned toward Peter, her eyes narrowed. “Like … pets?”
He shook his head, searching for the right word. “Like friends, I think.”
“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” Mausami said.
“I wish I knew,” said Peter.
They raised the barricade just after daybreak. All around they saw the creatures’ tracks in the dust. None of them had slept much, but even so, Peter felt a new energy coursing through him. He wondered what this was, and then he knew. They had survived their first night out in the Darklands.
The map spread out on a boulder, Hollis went over their route.
“After Twentynine Palms, it’s open desert through here, no real roads. The trick to finding the bunker is this range of mountains to the east. There are two distinct peaks at the south end, and a third behind them. When the third stands right in the middle of the two, turn due east, and you’re going the right way.”
“What if we don’t make it before dark?” he asked.
“We could hole up in Twentynine if we had to. There are a few structures still standing. But as I remember it they’re just hulks, nothing like the fire station.”
Peter glanced toward Amy, who was standing with the others. She was still wearing the brimmed cap from the supply room; Sara had also given her a man’s long-sleeved shirt to wear, frayed at the sleeves and collar, and a pair of desert glasses they’d found in the firehouse. Her black hair was pushed away from her face, a nimbus of dark tangles flapping under the brim of the cap.
“Do you really think she did it?” Hollis said. “Sent them away.”
Peter turned back toward his friend. He thought of the magazine in the bathroom, the two stark words on its cover.
“Truthfully, Hollis? I don’t know.”
“Well, we better hope she did. After Kelso, it’s open country clear to the Nevada line.” He drew his blade and wiped it on the hem of his jersey. When he resumed speaking his voice was quiet, confidential. “Before I left, you know, I heard people talking, saying things about her. The Girl from Nowhere, the last Walker. People were saying she was a sign.”
“Of what?”
Hollis frowned. “The end, Peter. The end of the Colony, the end of the war. The human race, or what’s left of it. I’m not saying they were right. It was probably just more of Sam and Milo’s bullshit.”
Sara stepped toward them. The swelling on her face had eased overnight; the worst of the bruising had faded to a greenish purple.
“We should let Maus ride,” she said.
“Is she okay?” Peter asked.
“A little dehydrated. In her condition, she has to keep her fluids up. I don’t think she should be walking in the heat. I’m worried about Amy, too.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
She shrugged. “The sun. I don’t think she’s used to it. She’s got a bad burn already. The glasses and shirt will help, but she can stay covered only so long in this heat.” She cocked her head and looked at Hollis. “So what’s this Michael tells me about a vehicle?”
· · ·
They marched.
The mountains fell away behind them; by half-day, they were deep in open desert. The roadway was little more than suggestion, but they could still follow its course, tracing the bulge it made in the hardpan, through a landscape of scattered boulders and strange, stunted trees, beneath a boiling sun and a limitless sky bleached of all color. The breeze hadn’t so much died as collapsed; the air was so motionless it seemed to hum, the heat vibrating around them like an insect’s wings. Everything in the landscape looked both close and far away, the sense of perspective distorted by the immeasurable horizon. How easy it would be, Peter thought, to get turned around in such a place, to wander aimlessly until darkness fell. Past the town of Mojave Junction—no town at all, just a few empty foundations and a name on the map—they crested a small rise to discover a long line of abandoned vehicles, two abreast, facing the direction they had come. Most were passenger cars but there were some trucks as well, their rusted, sand-scoured chassis sunk in the drifting sand. It felt as if they’d stumbled on an open grave, a grave of machines. Many of the roofs had been peeled away, the doors torn off their hinges. The interiors looked melted; if there had once been bodies inside, they were long gone, scattered to the desert winds. Here and there in the undifferentiated debris, Peter detected a recognizable item of human scale: a pair of eyeglasses, an open suitcase, a child’s plastic doll. They passed in silence, not daring to speak. Peter counted over a thousand vehicles before they ended in a final plume of wreckage, the indifferent desert sands resuming.
It was midafternoon when Hollis announced that it was time to leave the road and turn north. Peter had begun to doubt that they would ever make it to the bunker. The heat was simply overwhelming. A blazing wind was blowing from the east, pushing dust into their faces and eyes. Since the line of cars, no one had said much of anything. Michael seemed the worst off; he’d begun, discernibly, to limp. When Peter questioned him, Michael removed his boot without comment to show him a fat, blood-filled blister on his heel.
They paused to rest in the sparse shadow of a yucca grove. “How much farther?” Michael asked. He’d taken off his boot for Sara to attend to his blister; he winced as she pierced it with a small scalpel from the med kit she had found at the station. From the incision came forth a single bead of blood.
“From here, about fifteen kilometers,” Hollis said. He was standing away from them, at the edge of the shade. “See that line of mountains? That’s what we’re looking for.”
Caleb and Mausami had fallen asleep, their heads propped on their packs. Sara wrapped Michael’s foot in a bandage; he wedged it back into his boot, grimacing with pain. Only Amy seemed little worse for the wear. She was sitting apart from the others, her skinny legs folded under her, watching them warily from behind her dark glasses.
Peter went to where Hollis was standing. “Will we make it?” he asked quietly.
“It’ll be close.”
“Let’s give everyone half a hand.”
“I wouldn’t go longer.”
Peter’s first canteen was empty. He allowed himself a sip from his second, vowing to hold the rest in reserve. He lay down with the others in the shade. It was as if he’d only just closed his eyes when he heard his name and opened them again to find Alicia standing over him.
“You said half a hand.”
He rose on his elbows. “Right. Time to go.”
Another hand had passed before they saw the sign, rising out of the wavering heat. First a long line of fencing, tall chain-link with coils of barbed wire at the top, and then, a hundred meters inside the open gate, the small sentry house and the sign standing beside it.
YOU ARE ENTERING THE TWENTYNINE PALMS
MARINE CORPS AIR GROUND COMBAT CENTER.
DANGER. UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE.
DO NOT LEAVE THE ROAD.
“Unexploded ordnance.” Michael’s face was compacted in a fierce squint. “What does that mean?”
“It means watch your step, Circuit.” Alicia directed her voice to everyone. “It could be bombs, or maybe mines. Single file, try to step in the footprints of the person in front of you.”
“What’s that?” Mausami was pointing with one hand, the other held over her brow against the glare. “Are they buildings?”
They were buses: thirty-two of them parked in two closely spaced lines, their yellow paint almost entirely rubbed away. Peter stepped toward the closest bus, at the rear of the line. The breeze had died; the only sound came from their footsteps on the hardpan. Below windows covered in heavy-gauge wire were the words DESERT CENTER UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT. He clambered up the dune of sand that was pushed against it and peered inside. More sand had blown through, subsuming the benches in wavelike drifts. Birds had roosted in the ceiling, staining the walls with the white paint of their droppings.
“Hey! Look at this!” Caleb called.
They followed his voice around to the far side. Tipped onto its side was the shell of some kind of small aircraft.
“It’s a helicopter,” said Michael.
Caleb was standing on top of the fuselage. Before Peter could speak, Caleb had pulled the door open, like a hatch, and dropped down inside it.
“Hightop,” Alicia called, “be careful!”
“It’s okay! It’s empty!” They heard him rummaging around the interior; a moment later, his head popped through the hatch. “Nothing here, just a couple of slims.” He chinned himself up. He slid down the fuselage and showed them what he’d found. “They were wearing these.”
A pair of necklaces, tarnished from exposure. To each was attached a silver disk. Peter used some of his water to rinse the tags clean.
Sullivan, Joseph D. O+ 098879254 USMC Rom. Cath. Gomez, Manuel R. AB– 859720152 USMC No pref.
“USMC—that’s Marine Corps,” Hollis said. “You should put these back where you found them, Caleb.”
Caleb snatched the necklaces from Peter’s hand, clutching them protectively against his chest. “No way. I’m keeping these. I found them, fair and square.”
“Hightop, they were soldiers.”
Caleb’s voice was suddenly shrill. “So what? They never came back, did they? The soldiers were supposed to come back for us, and they never did.”
For a moment, no one spoke. “That’s what this place is, isn’t it?” Sara said. “Auntie used to tell stories about it. How the First Ones came from the cities, to ride the buses up the mountain.”
Peter had heard these stories, too. He’d always thought of them as just that, stories. But Sara was right; that’s what this place was. More than the buses themselves, or the fallen helicopter with its dead soldiers inside, the stillness told him so. It was more than the simple absence of sound; it was the silence of something stopped.
A feeling jarred him then, a prickling alertness. Something was wrong.
“Where’s Amy?”
They fanned out through the lines of buses, calling her name. By the time Michael found her, Peter was completely frantic. He had never considered that she might wander off like this.
Michael was standing beside one of the sunken buses, peering through an open window.
“What’s she doing?” Sara said.
“I think she’s just sitting there,” said Michael.
Peter clambered up and pulled himself inside. The wind had pushed the sand to the rear of the vehicle; the first few lines of benches were exposed. Amy was sitting on the bench directly behind the driver’s seat, holding her pack on her lap. She had removed her glasses and hat.
“Amy, it’ll be dark soon. We have to go.”
But the girl made no move to leave. She appeared to be waiting for something. She glanced around, her eyes pulled into a squint, as if noticing for the first time that the bus was empty, a ruin. Then she rose, drawing her pack onto her shoulders, and climbed out through the window.
The bunker was just where Hollis had promised.
He led them to a spot where the third mountain stood between the other two, turned east again, and in half a click he stopped. “This is it,” he announced.
They were facing a wall of rock. Behind them, the setting sun cut a final sliver of light across the horizon.
“I don’t see anything,” Alicia said.
“You’re not supposed to.”
Hollis slung his rifle and began to scramble up the wall. Peter watched him with a hand over his eyes against the reflected glare. Ten meters up he disappeared.
“Where did he go?” Michael said.
The face of the mountain began to move. A pair of doors, Peter realized, made to blend with the surface as camouflage: they backed into the face of the hillside, revealing a dark cavern and the figure of Hollis standing before them.
It took Peter a moment to absorb the full dimensions of what he was seeing: a vast vault, carved from the mountain itself. Rows of shelving extended into its dark recesses, stacked with pallets of crates that reached high above their heads. A forklift was parked near the entrance, where Hollis had opened a metal panel in the wall. As the group moved inside, he flipped a switch and the room suddenly thrummed with light, issuing from a network of glowing ropes on the walls and ceiling. Peter heard the airy hum of mechanical ventilation coming on.
“Hollis, these are fiber optics,” Michael said, his voice lit with amazement. “What’s the power source?”
Hollis flipped a second switch. A yellow warning beacon sprang to life, swiveling with a mad urgency over the doors. With a clunk of gears engaging, the doors began to slide from their pockets, dragging blades of shadow across the floor.
“You can’t see them the way we came,” Hollis explained, lifting his voice over the racket, “but there’s a solar array on the south face of the mountain. That’s how Demo found the place.”
A hard bang as the doors closed, the echo ricocheting deep within. They were sealed away now, in safety.
“The stack won’t hold much of a charge anymore, but you can run straight off the panels for a few hours. There are some portable generators too. There’s a fuel depot just a short walk north of here. Gas, diesel, kerosene. If you bleed it off right it’s still usable. There’s more than we could ever use.”
Peter advanced into the room. Whoever had constructed this place, he thought, they had built it to last. The room reminded him of the library, only the books were crates, and the crates contained not words but weapons. The leftovers of the last, lost war, boxed and stored for the war to come.
He moved to the nearest shelf, where Alicia was standing with Amy. Since the incident at the buses, the girl had stayed close, never venturing more than a few meters away. Alicia had pulled the base of her sleeve over her wrist to wipe away a layer of dust from the side of one of the crates.
“What’s an RPG?” Peter asked.
“I have no idea,” Alicia said. She turned, smiling, to look at him. “But I think I want one.”
FORTY-FOUR
From the Journal of Sara Fisher (“The Book of Sara”)
Presented at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period
Center for the Study of Human Cultures and Conflicts
University of New South Wales, Indo-Australian Republic
April 16–21, 1003 A.V.
[Excerpt begins.]
Day 4
So I guess I’ll just begin. Hello. My name is Sara Fisher, First Family. I am writing to you from an army bunker somewhere north of the town of Twentynine Palms, California. I am one of eight souls traveling from the San Jacinto Mountains to the town of Telluride, Colorado. It’s strange to say these things to a person I don’t even know, who may not even be alive when I’m writing this. But Peter says someone should keep a record of what happens to us. Maybe someday, he said, someone will want to know.
