“She sure did. Covered three states with ash, killed fifty-two people, knocked down millions of trees, and blew off half the mountain.”
Jamie was craning to look out of the driver’s side window, as if gouts of red lava might shoot up through the darkness.
“Maybe you’ll see it in the morning. For sure you’ll see Mount Rainier, which is on the other side. That’s a volcano, too, but so far it’s stayed dormant.”
“Man,” Jamie commented, impressed despite its invisibility. A real volcano.
By eleven P.M. they were off the busy freeway, at a motel, locked securely in a room that smelled of cigarettes and room freshener. Again, Allen bolted the door, pulled the drapes, and dropped onto the bed near the door. And again, once the big man’s breathing had slowed, the boy crept over to the leather carry-on and eased the laptop from its interior. The television played on, just loud enough to cover his sounds; Allen didn’t hear a thing.
At last! Jamie thought. For the first time in two weeks he could log on at a time when the good players were on board. Between keeping watch over the Johnson house and being on the road, he hadn’t had a good game session since Sally had met the man. And he could probably count on at least two or three hours of uninterrupted play time, by just keeping an ear out for any change in Allen’s breathing. God knew he’d had plenty of practice listening for oncoming adults.
There were a couple of familiar names, one of whom greeted the appearance of Jamie’s player with a rude message that Jamie took as it was meant, as an electronic high-five. Jamie sent him a similar message, and slipped into the game’s progress as if he’d never been away.
Online games were a community venture, with players you got to know and either liked or didn’t, just like real life. Some of them were diabolically clever, others so clueless, Jamie didn’t know how they managed to boot up their computers in the first place, but that, too, was how things went. Every so often, usually really late at night, when just the right combination of good players were on at the same time, the game took on a life of its own, and became considerably more real than the flesh and blood creatures whose fingers manipulated the keyboards. Hours would flash by, alliances made and broken, electronic creatures blown away, experience points accumulated, and riches hoarded or spent, and Jamie would come out of it bleary-eyed but content with the world.
No danger of that happening tonight. Lord Bane was there, a guy Jamie visualized as six-four, stoop-shouldered, and covered in zits—he was such a perma-newbie, thought with that name was the coolest thing, but a ten-year-old girl could outplay him. His name was probably Seymour or something. And Skidgirl, who wasn’t a bad player but she had a habit of stabbing you in the back after you’d made a covenant, which had gotten her shunned for a while but maybe she’d learned her lesson.
The action wasn’t too bad. The zone had a new player called King Barney who was pretty good, and there was a kind of interesting development between two of the alliances. Then after half an hour one of his favorite rivals logged on.
Silverfish was a hard-core brain. Once when Jamie had asked him why he’d called himself after a bug, the guy had told him, “It’s because they’re ubiquitous.” Jamie’d gone on, left it like he knew what the guy meant, but he copied down the word with care, and later he looked it up. It meant that they were everywhere, and Silverfish sure was. Nothing seemed to get by him, he always spotted the best loot, always slipped in and snatched it up, always managed to outsmart the other players. Ubiquitous.
Of course, the guy practically lived online. It was rare for Jamie to play for very long before Silverfish slid onto the screen—maybe the maniac played two games at once, shifting between one and another. Like yesterday, when Jamie’d logged on in Coeur d’Alene (which he’d spelled Cor dalene) and within five minutes the guy’d been there, asking him where the hell he’d been and then telling Jamie some cool things to do when he got to Seattle on Sunday.
After twenty minutes and a couple of clever moves, Silverfish began to exchange messages with Jamie, whose character for that game was RageDaemon. In between moves, Silverfish went right to the point.
S: you hear anything about a new game coming up, combo of Tolkein and Lovecraft?
RD: gotta name?
S: Death Head, somethin like that. Heard it had some killer graphix. Didn’t wanna put it out to those losers, mite be nice ta have a game only players can get into.
RD: I no what u mean, but sory, never heard of it
S: You been outta touch today, man.
RD: yeah, still on the road
S: hope you’re someplace cool
RD: Holiday Inn, god watta dump.
S: Fer a minnit I thought you meant you had a satellite link in your car, that’d be killer.
RD: I wish. we’re talkin laptop and phon line here, the download time sux.
S: They make video players for cars, why not wire in modems?
RD: why not
S: Seriously, they even have those Onstar things, why not just upgrade the link so you can use it for somethin more than asking where the hell you are when you wake up with a killer hangover on a deserted road. Not like I’d know, ya unnerstand, haha. Fords have em I think, the Onstar things.
RD: hondas don’t, not this one anyway. but u gotta great futur ahed of u man, as an invetnor.
S: Yeh right. You seein anything good on your trip, or just drivin to gramma’s with the folks?
RD: screw that, man, no gramma here. ever seen a voclano? they should put one on the game
S: Mt Doom, throw in that ring, Frodo.
RD: that’s what it looks like, steamin and everthing.
S: You serious?
RD: nah, not when we went by. but it does, they say. blew up a few years ago, wiped out a bunch a people.
S: Hey, killer. Yr right, I can just see a nice juicy volcano in the middle of the game, blowin up and everythin.
RD: gotta go, man. lemme know if you hear any more about that Deth Head game.
S: Will do. I’m gonna go crash for a while. Too wired, cant see straight.
RD: see ya
The game after that wasn’t as much fun without Silverfish, but Jamie played anyway for another three and a half hours, until Allen’s breathing changed, ending in a snort. Snatching the phone and power connections from the laptop, Jamie pushed its lid down, shoved it under a pillow, and stared fixedly at the television screen. He waited, eyes glued on the screen, until Allen’s breathing resumed, slow and regular.
However, there didn’t seem to be much happening online, so he shut down the game properly, then went back in to the control panel to wipe out his footprints, resetting the dial-up to get rid of his phone card numbers, wiping out all traces of the game itself. He slid the laptop back into the carry-on, drawing the top shut as Allen had left it. He plopped down again in front of the television, and started scrolling through with the remote.
There was even less happening on that.
Allen woke for real a while later, having slept for five hours. He stretched, and turned over to see what Jamie was watching at four in the morning. It appeared to be a hot-dog-eating contest. Allen shook his head at the antics.
“You hungry?”
“Not for hot dogs,” the boy told him, making Allen laugh aloud.
“It’s a deal.”
Again, Allen went out for the food, bringing back two hamburgers and an order of French toast from the twenty-four-hour restaurant down the road. He’d bought the breakfast for himself, but he offered it to the boy, who shook his head and reached for one of the burgers.
“Thought you might be getting tired of hamburgers,” Allen said.
“I haven’t had hamburgers all summer,” the boy answered around a mouthful.
“Doesn’t Rachel make them?”
“Oh yeah, I mean this kind of burger. Hers are more like steaks, with these big fat slices of red tomatoes and buns she makes herself. She even makes the catsup and pickles!”
“They’r
e interesting people, aren’t they?”
“I guess. I remember thinking one time, if the world got wiped out, they probably wouldn’t even know it for a month.”
“You’d tell Pete, and he’d nod and go milk the cows,” Allen said with a smile.
“They’d have to eat an awful lot of eggs, though, to make up for not selling them in town.”
“Do you want to go back there, Jamie? I mean, if you could choose any place in the world to live, would it be with them?”
Jamie hunched over his half-eaten burger as if this was a trick question concealing a threat of punishment.
“You don’t have to decide now,” Allen hastened to say. “Let’s see what turns up, in the next few days.”
“When will we see Alice?”
“We’re only a few hours from Seattle. I want to stick to the back roads, but even then we’ll be there by mid-morning.”
“Okay.” Jamie finished his meal and, at Allen’s suggestion, brushed his teeth. Showers could wait until Seattle. They went down to the Honda together, and Allen pulled onto the northbound 15, but in a few miles he got off again, to join the smaller road that ran more or less parallel to the freeway.
A low-slung rental car pulled out of the motel complex behind him. A car that had been hired by its driver at the Seattle-Tacoma airport late the night before, following his arrival on a flight from Las Vegas, a flight that was booked four minutes after Silverfish left RageDaemon sitting alone in the Coeur d’Alene motel.
In the darkness, Allen did not notice the car.
Chapter 32
Some miles up the dark two-lane road, with the sweet scent of hay coming through the half-open window beside him, Allen glanced in the rearview mirror. Since leaving the freeway, two or three pairs of headlights had ridden there for a while before turning off into a side road or a farm drive. Two cars were back there now, but the drivers did not seem to be in a hurry
Allen was, but he could not allow his impatience to influence the weight of his foot on the accelerator, any more than it had the choice of highway over back roads. Rae would be having her coffee and checking her passport . . . But tickets could be changed, and with luck, Alice would soon take over responsibility for this child sitting beside him. However, until he had Jamie off his hands, he would continue at his pace of three miles over the speed limit, on roads where no Highway Patrol lurked, where a dusty five-year-old Honda was an unremarkable thing.
The boy sat motionless, facing the windshield, radiating patience and innocence. Allen might not be anyone’s father, but he was enough of a parent-by-proxy to sense when a kid was hiding something. There was something the kid didn’t want him to ask about. What that might be, Allen hadn’t a clue. Well, he thought, no time like the present.
“Jamie, I was wondering: Why were you so sure it was your father who took Sally away from the farm?”
After a minute, Jamie gave a sigh. “I guess I never really believed I could get away from him. He always knows everything. You can’t hide anything from him. So when I heard there was a strange man around the place, I just figured it was him, coming to take me back.”
“You don’t think that he’s dead?”
“No.” No hesitation, none at all.
“Why?”
That was more difficult. “Because . . . I think I’d know. Like, I’d feel it. And besides, if he did die, it wouldn’t be because of some dumb plane accident.”
“How would he die?”
“Somebody would kill him. I mean, like shoot him or run him over or something. Not an accident.”
This was getting them nowhere, Allen thought, this glorification of the all-powerful father. “Okay, then tell me something else. Why did it panic you so, when you walked in on Pete Junior cleaning the rabbits?”
That got a reaction: Jamie hunched up as if Allen had jabbed his belly.
“Jamie, I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. I can’t help you unless you tell me. You can wait and tell Alice if you’d rather, but you’re going to have—”
“No!” Jamie said, his voice quiet but sure. “Not her. I can’t tell her that. She’d never understand.”
“I doubt that. But why don’t you give it to me, and if I think she needs to know, I’ll give her the parts of it I judge that she can handle.” Absurd, of course: What Alice had seen by way of atrocity left him in the dust.
“I don’t know. It’s . . .”
“Was it the blood?”
As Allen anticipated, the word set off a response. “I don’t like blood. I mean, even before . . . My mom, she died . . .”
“I know how she died,” Allen said gently. He didn’t intend the child to relive that particular horror—but it was too late.
“There was . . . God, there was so much blood. At first I figured it was a joke, you know? Or an accident, like somebody’d dropped a can of paint or something, it was just all over the room. I remember thinking, Mom’s going to be so mad, it’s got on Father’s favorite chair.” Allen translated this: Father’s going to be so mad. “I was just a little kid, you know? I guess that’s why I thought it was paint. And then I saw that she was sitting there and it wasn’t just on her . . .”
“And the rabbits reminded you of that?” Allen interrupted.
“I wish,” the boy exclaimed, to Allen’s astonishment. “No. About a month later my father took me hunting. I think it was out of season or he didn’t have a deer license, something like that, I don’t know, but it was the first time I’d gone and he really wanted to take me out. Anyway, we went out to this place a friend of his owns up in the hills, and went shooting. The friend has a salt lick—deer like salt, you know?—and he puts out corn in the winter to bring the deer around, but it still took all weekend for us to get one. Father saw it first, and told me to shoot it, but I couldn’t. You know, like its eyes reminded me of Mom or something. Like I said, I was just a kid. So he shot it instead, and made me go up with him and help him bleed it, and clean it.” His voice wavered and climbed, but he went on. “I was sort of crying, you know, like kids do, and that’s when he got mad.”
Allen braced himself.
Jamie drew a breath, and on the exhale he said, “He made me wear the skin.”
“The fresh skin?” Allen said, appalled.
“Yeah. It was gross. He kind of, well, he sort of tied it around me and made me walk back to the cabin in it.”
“Ah, Jamie,” Allen groaned, but the boy wasn’t quite finished.
“And that’s when he started the hunting game. Like I was the deer, you know?”
Ice tingled through Allen, and he took his eyes from the road, looking with horror at the boy. But Jamie’s face was calm, now that he’d told it.
“You mean, he’d pretend to be stalking you?”
“Yeah. And sometimes I’d hear his rifle behind me, you know the noise when you slide a bullet in?”
“But he didn’t . . . ?”
“You mean, did he actually shoot at me? Oh, no. Well, once or twice, but only as a joke.”
“Fuck, Jamie.”
The boy laughed, at the unexpected adult obscenity as much as Allen’s reaction. “Kinda creepy, isn’t it?”
“You could say that.”
“So I guess,” Jamie mused, going back to Allen’s original question with remarkable equanimity, “Pete Junior’s rabbits kind of took me by surprise. It was like, the farm was this whole different world, then to walk in on all that blood. It just was sort of a shock. Stupid of me, I know. I wouldn’t do it now.”
Shock’s the word, thought Allen, stunned to momentary silence by the response to his first question. There was a lot more he needed to ask; would all his questions lead them to searing images such as the boy wrapped in a bloody deerskin? He tried to choose his next one. What about, Tell me about the death of your first-grade friend, smiling blond Able Shepherd? Or, How did that scruffy-looking white dog you used to have actually die? And, How did you feel about your mother, before her death? Did
you know how to use a shotgun, when you were seven? And, You say your father was an ignoramus when it came to computers, yet it was his muscle-bound assistant who printed the page from an obscure Web site? And, a big one, the answer to which Allen already shied away from: What went on in that small, windowless room next to your father’s bedroom?
While Allen’s thoughts roiled and Jamie congratulated himself on getting away without revealing the most shameful part of Father’s hunting game, a quarter of a mile back a blinker signaled and the squarish headlights of the Volvo that had been following them slowed to turn. Allen nursed the Honda around a tight S-bend in the road, then picked up speed again as his lights showed a straight way ahead. The smell of manure came strongly through the windows, causing Jamie to stir and comment, “It stinks just like the farm.”
“Cows everywhere—” Allen was starting to say, when high beams filled the back window and a lot happened all at once.
The car riding behind the Volvo had reacted to the open road like a loosed arrow. It shot toward them, a low, fast shape that took the bend at high speed and was now barreling up on the Honda as if it was parked. Allen’s foot jammed onto the accelerator, with no discernible change in the rate the following car was gaining on them.
“Get your head down between your knees,” he ordered the boy. He heard the seat belt catch at the sudden movement, and then unreel as the thin chest curled more slowly down behind the dash. I should’ve put him in the back, passed through Allen’s mind, and then there was no time for thinking.
The low-slung lights came so close to the Honda’s back bumper, they vanished, then emerged in the side mirror as the car moved out over the center line. Allen, too, veered over the yellow line, and then the window in front of him made a slapping noise and cracked into a thousand fine lines that spread with the force of the wind. Two more shots came, Allen cursing and struggling to maintain control of the car, aware that one of the shots had hit him somewhere in the meat of his left arm—but it hadn’t killed him and he would worry about the damage when the battle was over. He let the Honda sway over the center line while its engine climbed to full push, then in a movement that rational thought had nothing to do with, the hand-brake jerked up, the wheel slammed around, the other car swerved around them and into a white picket fence while in a furious squeal of reversing energies the Honda’s smoking tires bit down and catapulted them down the road in the direction they’d come.