The Slab (32 page)

“I notice which one’s in charge,” Melton said.

“Nobody asked you for your opinion, son. You vandalize United States property. You evade our troops, forcing us to spend thousands of dollars and dozens, maybe hundreds, of man-hours, to find you. That money and those man-hours would be better spent keeping America safe from terrorism, but here we are, throwing them away—” He made a sweeping motion with his arms and raised his voice, so that it boomed up the scrub-strewn slope and echoed back to him. “Throwing them away! On you!”

He stepped closer to the prisoner and lowered his voice again. “And do you know what that makes you, Mr. Melton? Do you?”


“A patriot?” Melton asked smugly. Wardlaw wanted to bash his face in with the nearest heavy rock, or maybe with his fists. But he didn’t, because he still had something to find out.

“A traitor,” he explained. “You are guilty of treason, Mr. Melton. That’s a crime punishable by death.”

“Isn’t that up to a jury to decide?”

“We’re at war, Mr. Melton. Rules change. You’re on my turf, you come under my law.”

Melton’s eyes ticked over to where Marcus Jenkins and William Yato were standing, listening impassively. He looked nervous.

“Don’t look at them for help, Mr. Melton,” Wardlaw said. “They’re with me.” He turned to face the other two Marines. “Right, men? You’re with me.”

“Yes, sir,” they both said.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes, sir,” Jenkins said again. Yato nodded.

“Then kill him.”

“Excuse me?” Yato asked.

“If you trust me, then kill this traitor. Both of you, firing at once. Like a firing squad. Then we’re all in this together.”

Neither man moved.

“Do you trust me?” Wardlaw asked again.

Still calm, unreadable, Yato drew his sidearm. Marcus Jenkins did the same. Wardlaw stepped aside, trying to keep his smile restrained, as they took aim and squeezed their triggers.

Melton’s body twitched twice in quick succession as the slugs hit it, then collapsed in a furry, treacherous heap on the dirt. Yato barked out a short laugh, an unfamiliar sound to Wardlaw, who couldn’t remember ever having heard the Captain laugh out loud, and stood over the body, pointing his weapon at the head. He fired again and again, emptying his clip. Melton’s head, pulverized by the onslaught, leaked red and gray all over the dun colored sand. Jenkins joined in then, using a series of carefully-placed shots to cut a strip down the middle of Melton’s chest.

When both guns were empty and the echoes had faded, the desert seemed more quiet than usual. “What should we do with him, sir?” Jenkins asked, in a tone one might use in church.

Wardlaw pointed to the area where they’d been standing. “Just drag him over there,” he said. “Leave him for the mushrooms.” Yato looked questioningly at him, and he didn’t even know for sure what it meant himself.

But it didn’t matter. It would work. That’s all that counted.

It would work.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Penny put her fingertips to the wall, as if she’d be able to feel the writing she could no longer see. I know what I was reading, she thought. It was as clear as anything. Where could it have gone?

She wasn’t willing to believe that it had been a hallucination. Her mind couldn’t make up something as twisted as what she’d seen—she wasn’t imaginative enough for that. Penny had always been the realist, pragmatic Penny, unwilling or unable to wander off the paths that had been established for her life.

Still on her knees before the cave wall, she turned and shined the light on Mick again. He still had the remnants of the freaky glowing mushroom in his hands, and had brought a tiny portion up to his lips to taste. She’d hurl if she did something like that, she knew, taking a taste of what could very well be a poisonous mushroom. Who knew what kind of thing would grow in a cave like this? But Mick knew the natural world a lot better than she did, she realized. She was still a relative novice compared to him. For all she knew, he’d encountered these mushrooms a dozen times before and considered them a delicacy.

But she didn’t like it, and she didn’t like the way he flicked his tongue across the mushroom’s stem and stared at her over the top of it, like some second-rate Don Juan from a low budget romance. She didn’t know what he could see in the dark, since she held the only visible flashlight, but she didn’t care for the way his eyes narrowed as he examined her.

“What?” she finally asked.

“Just watching you,” he said. His voice sounded different—less whiny, more self-assured, than usual. “It looks like you have a little problem.”

“What is it?” Penny demanded. “What’s my problem, Mick? I’m sure you’ve catalogued all of them.”

“Well, since you ask,” Mick replied. “Your immediate problem is that you’re seeing things on the wall that clearly aren’t there. That’s just a little scary, don’t you think?”

“Sure, a little, but—”

“But your bigger problem—the mother of all your problems, I believe, is that you’re just too uptight. You need to get laid once in a while.”

She clicked the flashlight off, but found that there was still enough light—from the mushrooms? she couldn’t tell—for her to see Mick clearly. His expression hadn’t changed, though he’d taken the mushroom away from his lips. “Don’t start, Mick, for God’s sake not now.”

“Yes, that’s definitely it, Penny,” he said, continuing as if he couldn’t even hear her. “A little nookie, a little horizontal bop, bit of the old in and out. Straighten you right out. Right out.”

Penny had been annoyed but now she started to feel genuine fear. This wasn’t Mick—wasn’t talking like Mick, didn’t look like Mick. The body was still Mick’s but he was holding himself differently, somehow more composed, less gangly and awkward, than she was accustomed to.

“So whaddya say?” he went on. “Give a little up to old Mick, why don’t you?” Saying this, he dropped the mushroom fragments and lunged at her. She tried to back away but the wall was right behind her and she was still down on her knees, so all she succeeded in doing was slamming her own head into the hard rock. Bright flashes of light blinded her momentarily—long enough for Mick to grope, seemingly everywhere, hands pawing at her breasts, her cheeks, her crotch. He clamped his lips over hers and she breathed in mushroom-fouled breath.

Trying to get her footing, she writhed, twisting her head away from his, and hit him on the back with both hands. She couldn’t get any leverage, though, any momentum for her punches, and he kept up his assault. His hand rubbed her groin through her jeans, rough and fast, in time with his own rapid breathing.

But Penny had survived basic training and hand-to-hand combat training and a fucking war, for Christ’s sake, and she wasn’t going to let some ‘shroom-addled adolescent asswipe have his way with her in his idea of a tunnel of love. She gained her balance, brought her arms together inside his grasp, and threw then up and out, breaking his grip. Then she shot to her feet and aimed a snap-kick at his groin, connecting with a satisfying impact. The breath blew out of him. He doubled over in pain. She pressed the advantage, locking her fists together and swinging, baseball-style, as his head drooped toward her. Her balled fists rammed into his nose, with more force than she had expected, and his head snapped backward.

When he bounced off the other wall, it was much harder than she had hit. Blood and spit flew from his suddenly slack mouth and he dropped to the cave floor.

Oh God, Penny thought, scrambling for the flashlight she’d dropped when Mick had first attacked her. Oh God, oh God. She found the light and clicked it on. A dark pool was already spreading from beneath Mick’s head. “Mick?” she asked hesitantly. But he was still and he wasn’t breathing and when she pressed her hands against his neck and his wrist and his chest, she could find no heartbeat. She felt his head and the tip of her finger slipped into a deep indentation, which gave beneath the pressure like an overripe cantaloupe. Her hands came away sticky with his blood.

She fought back panic. He’d been attacking her, ready to rape her. But she hadn’t meant to kill him. That was not part of her plan, at all. She just wanted him off her, away from her. Not dead.

She even asked herself if she was lying, if she had been trying to kill him. The answer remained no. He was dead, but it was an accident, not a purposeful act.

He was dead, though. No changing that.

She had to get out of there.

Before she went—and if she’d ever had to do anything more difficult in her life she couldn’t remember it—she patted down his pants pockets and found his keys. She’d need the van, she figured.

Penny took a last look at Mick—just in case, she thought, though if he got up now she’d be even more terrified than she was already—and turned to go, the powerful flashlight’s beam sweeping across the far wall as she did.

And illuminated there, as clearly as it had been earlier, was the graffiti of those who had been here before. She took a moment to scan the wall as it led farther and farther back into the cave, and she saw that the writing extended as far as the light’s beam could shine.

She couldn’t take the time to study it now, though. With any luck at all, she would never come back here and never look at it again. She hurried back through the cave toward the entrance. When she got to the place she and Mick had spent the night, she snatched up her own backpack. As she picked it up, she remembered the cell phone inside, the way to contact Dieter and Larry, and they had to be told what had happened, they needed to be warned to get off the bombing range and to some safe ground where she could find them. She was frantic now, hands shaking as she dug through her pack. Finally she found the phone, in an inside pocket. It slipped through her fingers twice as she tried to extract it, but then she finally had it. She shouldered the backpack as she rounded the corner, heading for the light. As the cave’s ceiling lowered she dropped to her hands and knees, crawling through the mouth and into the blistering heat of the day.

A quick glance around assured her that the soldiers had not found this place yet, though certainly they would have found the campsite last night. They couldn’t be too far from here, though—in the dark and their haste, she and Mick hadn’t done a very good job of concealing their tracks. It didn’t matter now, though—if she could just stay ahead of them long enough to get out, she’d be okay. All she wanted was out, now.

As she hiked, she scrolled through the speed dial menu and punched the button for Dieter. His phone rang twice, and then a male voice answered it.

“Hello?”

But the voice wasn’t Dieter’s, didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to his rather high-pitched German accent. She hit the END button immediately and scrolled again. This time, she saw Mick’s number, and a flash of guilt struck her. She bit it back and scrolled down to where Larry’s name was and pushed the CALL button again. And again, two rings, followed by the same male voice. “Who is this?”

She hung up and reached around to stuff the phone back into her backpack.

She had thought she was in trouble before, but now she knew that her worst fears were true, and then some.

***

Lucy sat in the stolen car looking at the house where Kelly Williams lived, according to the address list Ray Dixon’s wife had given her. It was on Lotus Lane, in what passed for the wealthier neighborhood of El Centro, a street of big stucco houses with red tile roofs and fenced back yards. Through many of the fences she’d glimpsed pools.

She was pretty sure that Kelly Williams was the guy with the curly silver hair, the one who had seemed like the leader of the group that had kidnapped her. She was also sure there was no one at home. She’d been sitting here for twenty minutes and there hadn’t been so much as a flicker of movement in any of the windows. At one point she had walked up to the door and peered in through the full-length window beside it, and inside there was a wrought-iron table with a metal surface piled high with several days’ worth of newspapers, as if someone brought the paper in for him each day. Today’s paper still sat in the yard where it had landed when the paper carrier tossed it. She remembered no wedding band on his finger, or pale line on his darkly tanned skin, so she didn’t think he was married. She didn’t know what a single man would need with a house this size, though. She guessed he just had the money to spend, so why not?

Lucy suspected that she was extremely conspicuous, sitting in a stolen Altima outside an empty house on a relatively quiet street. The occasional vehicle passed her—a gardener’s pick-up truck, laden with workers and equipment, long-handled rakes turning idly in tubes as it rumbled past; a brown UPS truck, its doors open, driver clad in brown shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and visibly sweating anyway; a Hispanic woman, a maid, Lucy guessed, driving a Mercedes with two blond preschoolers in their safety seats in back. Sooner or later, if she stayed here, she was going to see a police car show up behind her. And she didn’t want that to happen until after she’d done what she needed to do.

She ate a few of her precious Cheez-its and chased them with some water. Her supplies were getting low, and at some point she’d have to replenish. She had no cash, though; her purse with her wallet and ATM card and checkbook had been left back at the cabin. So she’d have to steal again, or she’d have to go home. Going home would almost certainly entail turning herself in.

There would come a time for that, she knew. There would be an aftermath to all this, some kind of fallout. She didn’t want to think that far in advance. She didn’t want to think beyond the moment when she found the men who had taken her. She was already pressing her luck, sitting here outside Kelly Williams’s place, and it was obvious that he wasn’t home yet. She cranked the engine and drove away, headed for the next place on her list.

***

Hal Shipp was uncomfortable this close to the Slab. Once, he thought he heard the voices again, whispering their evil thoughts, but it turned out to be simply the susurrus of the wind whistling through creosote. Another time, what he believed was a litany of horrors turned out to be the skritch skritch of a yucca leaf, the point of which inscribed a semi-circle in the sand as the breeze blew it and then ceased, blew and ceased.