When they did reach the main gate, Karl was huffing and puffing only fifty yards behind, and to his relief, they passed it by. A single Jäger stood before the gates, his right arm cocked to bring around the stubby assault rifle slung behind his back. The last of the buses growled past just as Karl broke out of the trees and into the driveway. The Jäger did bring his gun around now, with stunning speed and grace drew down on him and cried out, "Halt, arschloch!"
"Gruss Gott, ich schutze die Bergen!" Karl shrieked back, waving his arms over his head. His own rifle stock bounced off the back of his leg and the barrel jabbed him in the neck. He skidded to a stop on the frozen-over parking lot. The Jäger stood his ground with rifle leveled, unconvinced. Karl recognized him. Tim Werther, outstanding marksman and vicious shitbag, and all of thirteen.
"We never heard you over the radio," Werther barked, his voice cracking. "We figured they waxed your pussy ass, already."
"Dude, they're just sick people, going on a vacation. Relax."
"Don't call me 'dude,' Swinefucker." The kid snapped off a middle-finger salute and turned back to the gate. "I'm gonna have to report this dereliction of duty to the Night Captain, Swinefucker."
Karl backed away from the gate. He was outside. He was truly, truly in a world of shit. He had a gun— "Werther, wait a minute. I'm gonna go after them."
"What?" Werther stopped and turned, half-reached for his gun again.
"They can't be going far. There's, like, a couple hundred people in those buses, and they're sick, like dying, like, with AIDS, or something. There isn't anywhere else for them to go."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm not saying anything, du-just, if there's something going on, and I'm the perimeter guy, then it's my responsibility, right?"
Werther looked confused.
"Do you guys know where the buses are going?"
Werther shook his head. The starlight glinted on his braces.
"Grossvater Egil always says 'I don't know' is a kind of lie, you know?"
Werther sneered, but he knew what kind of game they were playing, now. "Go down the road and see where they're headed. Go no further than the ten-mile marker at the top of the pass, and be back in an hour, or we'll have to send the snowmobiles out for you."
Karl shivered, hopping from foot to foot. "I could make better time if
I
could take a snowmobile."
Werther laughed. He ducked in though the cutout door in the gate and emerged with a pair of cheap plastic-and-nylon snowshoes. He whipped them at Karl in an earnest attempt to take the top off his head and slammed the door. He heard muffled boys' laughter from the other side as he strapped on the ragged wooden snowshoes and clumped up the winding road.
The road above the Heilige Berg compound wound up through the valley in a drunken surveyor's tour of the most forbidding landscape in the state. The road was center-crowned on hairpin turns overlooking the dry riverbed eighty feet below, as if the builders had intended it to express deliver the unwary motorist to a boulder-strewn grave. There were so many wrecks in the riverbed that when the runoff flooded it in the spring, they formed a dam that had to be broken up once with dynamite. The opposite bank was a cruel granite shield wall that only subsided into a string of plateaus along the top of the ridge. At the summit, the road into the Seven Devils range dropped into a gorge so perilous it was closed through the winter. This valley and all of the land around it for five miles in every other direction had been commercial timberland until the Environmental Persecution Agency had tried to annex the land, but, failing in court, forced the logging company to cease cutting down trees in the area. Heilige Berg sprang up a year later. Karl had overheard the Jägers talking about their landlord like he was one of the initiated, and would protect them.
Karl had never heard of any other living souls in the valley, let alone another settlement. No matter who they were, Grossvater Egil would be beside himself with fury. Best not to be the one to tell him about it, but where could he go? He was already tired and hungry, and having a hard time trudging in a straight line from the hard liquor's impact on his empty stomach. Even from the foot of the valley, it was seven miles into White Bird and the outside world, and out there he was just a teenage runaway skinhead. For all he knew, the Jew-ruled local police force really might shoot him on sight.
Keeping just within earshot of the buses took all Karl's strength, as the road above the compound hadn't been plowed all season, and he was knee-deep in powder, despite the snowshoes. Although he had no watch, he knew his hour was probably up and he was thinking seriously about turning back when he staggered around the last bend before the pass to find the road empty. The broad wake of crushed powder ended in a splattered bank beside a stand of trees. He thought he could hear the growl of the engines fading into the soughing of the wind in the pines. He scratched his head through his wool cap and pressed himself against a tree as he surveyed the mysterious new road. A stout iron gate spanned it, and a chain-link fence reached out in both directions, almost invisible behind a curtain of old-growth trees. Beyond it, the road curled out of sight into the dense forest, but Karl noticed a fleeting spark of red taillights within, like a beckoning will o' wisp.
This was it, then. He knew where they were going, and could go back to report, and go to bed. This was the least that was expected of him. But doing the least over the last thirteen months had gotten him nowhere, had made him less than a man in the Berg hierarchy, had made his family a figure of fun to the Jägers, most of whom were younger than him. For once, he would do more than anyone expected, and make someone proud of him.
Karl could climb much better than he could shoot, and the fence offered little challenge once he threw his parka, turned inside-out, over the barbed wire. The chain link was new, heavy-gauge steel, the links curiously woven together like chain mail armor. Even if the posts were blown out, it could easily stop an M1A1 Abrams tank. This was out of Heilige Berg's league. They had only barbed wire, skinhead teenagers and a few jury-rigged boobytraps for perimeter defense. He thought of Grossvater Egil's probable response when he learned they shared the valley with an ultrasecret government or corporate installation, and wondered if it would be wise to go back, after all.
Straddling the top, he could see freshly hewn tree stumps along the inside of the property, the dense pine stand chopped back twenty feet away from the fence. There was no such clearance on the outside. What were they afraid of losing? The feebs he'd seen in the buses had looked half-dead, hardly capable of holding onto a tree, let alone climbing one and leaping over the fence. Now, his reasons for going further had nothing to do with Grossvater Egil, or his family. He would see with his own eyes before anyone else.
He dropped to the ground, leaving his parka on the fence. He was more than warm enough from the hike, and he would need it in place if he had to go back over it in a hurry. It occurred to him that a perimeter guard like himself would not fail to see it, but fuck it. He skulked from tree to tree, trying to keep the road in sight. He was watching the road as he ran from one tree to the next when he ran out of trees and stumbled backwards away from the lip of the river gorge.
The road dropped into a chute, switchbacking twice before crossing a bridge that hadn't been there last summer. The gorge was only about a hundred feet across, but the bottom was twice as deep. On the other side, the road ran ruler-straight across a graded field for a quarter mile. At the end of it stood a little town. A brand spanking new town in the middle of the Snake River badlands in the middle of winter. The other buses were parked in front of a four story steel and glass tower, and a crowd of people was helping them inside. It looked like a hospital, but there was a whole park's worth of single-wide trailers surrounding it, like the retirement village in California his Grossmutti lived in. There were snowmobiles and a plow and a small fleet of vans with massive snow tires parked in a lot on the edge of the place, but no military vehicles, no black helicopters, not even a construction truck. The whole place had dropped out of the sky or sprouted up out of the ground while Heilige Berg slept. How could Grossvater Egil not know about this place? What if he already did?
The last bus was stopped at the bridgehead, and a guard climbed up onto the running board as it crawled across the bridge. Three more guards stood on Karl's side of the bridge, and they carried the biggest, baddestassed guns he'd ever seen, and they were harder than a brigade of Jägers, harder even than the Teutonic Knights who sometimes sought sanctuary at Heilige Berg. They wore shaggy animal pelt suits that covered all but their faces, which gleamed ruddy purple under the magnesium lights posted along the bridge.
Karl did not place any false sense of confidence in his skills as a soldier, but it simply didn't occur to him to leave. He stood behind a pine tree on the edge of the gorge, straining to make out more of the distant doings in front of the hospital through his crappy 20X binoculars. It looked like a wheelchair derby at the Special Olympics. The attendants helped each living skeleton out of the bus like they were made of eggshells, and then rushed them up a ramp and into the building, where more guards flanked the doors. The windows were all tinted to the shade of newly minted pennies, so he couldn't see inside.
The town suddenly got a whole lot brighter.
When it started to happen, Karl thought it was the moon breaking out of the clouds, but then it hit him. This was a new moon, and the light wasn't falling on him. He looked up, expecting to see a helicopter, though he heard nothing. The Zionist New World Order shock troops would drop out of the sky in whispering black helicopters, so it was foretold, and so Karl raised his rifle, but there was nothing to shoot at. The light was pouring down from the sky through the clouds. It was like moonlight, but wrong, perverted in some way Karl couldn't explain even if he had stayed awake in Physics. The silvery blue light twisted and writhed down to the earth, like the tentacles of a Portuguese man o' war, or curdled milk, or smoke from burning plastic. It reached down from Heaven and touched the town, penetrated it so that he could see each building lit from the inside out by the levitating human embers within.
The trees all around the town shuddered and shook off their coats of snow, and waved like an ocean of charmed cobras to the undulating pulse of the unholy, heavenly light.
His walkie-talkie snarled and screamed so loud his ears popped. It was a sound like fax machines make when you pick up the phone while they're sending, but as it opened up, it sounded like people screaming, and talking and laughing, millions of them, but they all had the same voice. He jumped back and crashed into another tree. He tried to switch the walkietalkie off, but it already was off, and then the receiver blew out with a hollow crackle, and Karl was running. Sure they heard that, sure they knew he was here, and they were coming.
He ran in great bounding leaps, the snowshoes squeaking on the thick carpet of powder underfoot. He crossed the road several times without noticing. The only sensation he was aware of was the tingling down his back like swarming bees were crawling down the collar of his thermal underwear, and he wanted nothing more than to be back inside Heilige Berg, to get naked in the snow and scrub himself clean of the memory of this place and the false pride that had driven him here. The fence appeared so fast he crashed into it and scrambled halfway up before he remembered the barbed wire and his parka slung over it, somewhere.
He backed up, the bees beginning to bite as every second passed without so much as a siren from the unholy secret Martian trailer park on the other side of the riverbed. He looked around, but there was sweat streaming into his eyes, Grossvater Egil wouldn't even let him keep his eyebrows, hair is vanity, he always said.
There it was. He ran to it and hurled himself at the fence without taking off his snowshoes. The steel links gouged his fingers through his thin wool mittens, but he couldn't get purchase with his comically large duckfeet, but his back was smoldering, he would burst into flames on this side of the fence, whether or not they came for him. He threw himself across the parka and rolled over, realizing as he did that he'd picked a pisspoor spot to come over, because there was a tree on the other side that he was likely to dash his brains out against, but it was too late to do anything but fall.
When the tree seemed to step up and reach out great arms to catch him, he thought for a moment that he must already be unconscious, but there it was, arms outstretched, and then they enfolded him, but when he struck there was no give, he might have fared better against a redwood. The wind whooshed out of his lungs and his head jerked and smashed something hard as stone. The cold, dim celestial light reflected off the snow shone on row upon row of teeth, each the size of his fist. "You look lost, little camper," a voice purred from behind those teeth.
"Shitbird hopped the fence coming and going all by his ownself," another voice, harsher by half than the first, said. "Told you these defenses were for shit, LT."
"Why we're here, Tuck," growled the tree that held Karl in its arms. "You got anything to say for yourself, boy?"
His captor relaxed a little, just enough to let Karl draw breath, but his arms remained pinned to his side, the rifle dug into his back. "Who are you dudes?" he managed at last.
"We're your new neighbors, little camper."
The arms unwrapped him, dumped him to the ground. He scrabbled to his feet and got five paces away before he remembered his training. He whirled, ripping the rifle off his shoulder and bringing it across his chest, up to his other shoulder, drew a bead at the shadowy tree-thing's center of mass and fired twice. The shots were like twig snaps in the forest, and they might've been, for all the effect they had. The tree brought its massive arms up level with its shoulders and something that might've been a head looked down and wagged from side to side.