Madelyn took the other lookout. She was ninety-percent sure that Gabriel would come from either the deep woods or the path that led up from the stream, so that’s the direction she was covering. She wouldn’t wait for him to fire. More than likely, she wouldn’t even wait to make sure it was Gabe she was shooting at. As soon as she saw something move, it was getting bullets thrown at it.
She lowered herself down to the roof and waited.
The metal roof was warm. The gun was cool. Madelyn existed in the temperature range between the two.
“Tell me what you know about this guy,” Jacob said over his shoulder.
“Talking will give away our position. It’s a bad idea.”
“You said he wouldn’t come until full dark. We have a while, don’t we?”
Madelyn frowned. She hated it when people used her own arguments against her.
“What’s the point? If he’s nosing around here, then he’s desperate. Given desperation, only one of us is going to make it through the night. What do you need to know about a man who’s going to be dead before morning?”
“Maybe if you convince me that he’s desperate, I will be more inclined to shoot him on sight. Then you’ll have an even better chance of surviving.”
Madelyn thought.
It was a compelling argument in a way. She was pretty good at defense, but there was always a chance that Gabriel would win in a firefight.
“Who was that guy you told me about? Christian? You said he was a bachelor?”
“Yeah,” Jacob said. She could tell by his voice that he was squeezing one eye shut and looking through his sight. That was good.
“Why did he cut those people with his machete?”
“Christian didn’t run fast. He knew that the only way he could outrun the others was if they were injured. He cut them so that he could get away while the injured were being collected.”
“Right, but why?”
“Survival.”
“Selfish survival. He didn’t care about the group and he didn’t care about humanity. He wanted to save his own skin for no reason.”
“I suppose,” Jacob said. “Aren’t we all motivated by that though?”
“Not all of us. Some people are motivated to save themselves because they have a family to take care of. Some people will sacrifice themselves for their spouses or their children. There’s a need to protect the ones we love. It’s selfish, but only in the broadest terms. We know that life isn’t worth living without them.”
Jacob didn’t answer. She could hear the fabric of his shirt rubbing as he nodded along.
“Sometimes you get an extreme loner who doesn’t play by the rules. Sounds like your Christian was one. This Gabriel fellow is certainly that way. David once said that Gabe ate his own family to stay alive. I don’t believe that, and I don’t think David did either. But the reason that David was able to exaggerate like that and make it seem so plausible wasn’t a coincidence. With one look at Gabriel, you could tell that it was something the man was capable of. He’s smart and dangerous.”
“So why didn’t David kill him back then if he knew the man was so dangerous.”
“David stopped just short of killing him. The last time I saw Gabriel, David ran him off. Frankly, I would have bet good money that Gabriel did die. I was surprised when I saw him on that screen.”
She heard the metal slide as Jacob verified his chamber.
“There are people who won’t be satisfied with what they have, even though they have enough. When we met Gabe, he seemed healthy and well-fed. Still, he wanted us to invite him in. David saw through it immediately. The guy wanted to get a look inside my defenses so he could see what I had and the best way to steal it.”
“If you had a community up here, theft would be punished with excommunication. The problem would disappear quickly.”
“Unless the thief killed the people he stole from. Then he might get away with it.”
“Cameras that post right to the ether would solve that.”
“You can’t cover the whole world with cameras, and you can’t expect someone to look at the footage.”
Jacob didn’t have an immediate answer for that.
“Gabriel caught me alone one day. I don’t know exactly what he planned to do. He stripped me of my weapons and ordered me to put myself face down on the ground. I hate to think what would have happened if David hadn’t tracked us down.”
“That’s when David ran him off?”
“Yes. Normally, if someone puts a bullet in you, the best thing to do is attack. They’re not going to be stupid enough to fire again. Gabriel and I both saw the same truth in David’s eyes. He would have fired fifty times if Gabriel hadn’t run.”
# # # # #
“Mac!” Jacob whispered.
She blinked and realized what she was looking at. Gabriel was creeping through with woods with his eyes trained on the cabin. The man hadn’t spotted her yet. It was lucky that Jacob had warned her. She might have let him reach the cover of the old outhouse.
“Get out of sight,” Madelyn whispered over her shoulder. “He doesn’t know about you. You can surprise him.”
Gabriel looked up. His ears were sharp to pick up her whisper.
She put her eye to the sight and focused the crosshairs on his neck. She waited for him to dodge. Gabriel was an old man. He might have one good feint in him, but then she was going to put an end to him with her bullet.
When his hands shot up, she nearly squeezed off a round.
Gabriel shook his head.
“Who are you talking to?” he asked. In the still evening, his voice carried easily.
“Nobody. What do you want, Gabriel?”
Her finger twitched. It was time to end the man, but her finger wouldn’t obey.
“I came to tell you that it’s over, Maddie. The world belongs to us again. Everything is fixed.”
“This isn’t one of your better tricks, Gabe. Nothing has changed.”
“It has, Maddie! Check your machine. The ether has been abuzz for weeks. Hell, what do you think I’m doing out here wandering around when it’s almost dark.”
“You came last time in the dark. You might be smart, but you prefer to act dumb.”
“Maddie, don’t take my word for it, but go check your ether. You can watch a documentary about the process. People have been trapping the Zumbidoes for months. They drew them down out of the woods into Fairbanks and buttoned them all up.”
That movie had initially struck her as real. It seemed preposterous that people would have the time or energy to make a fictional movie these days. Everyone was too focused on survival. Jacob was the one who had convinced her that it wasn’t real.
“Jacob?” she whispered. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”
Her nephew didn’t answer. She glanced over her shoulder. The gun was there, propped up on her second lookout. The young man wasn’t.
“Look, Maddie,” Gabe said while he did a slow spin, “I’m unarmed. I’m camped down at Circle Poke. That’s as far as I could get my truck up here. I know I did you wrong before, and that’s why I climbed all the way up here to make sure you had the good news. Please take my apology and check your ether. If you want a ride down into the city, I’ll stay at the Poke for three days. I won’t bother you again.”
She let him back away.
When his face was hidden by the bough of a pine, and all she could see was his legs, she had the urge to ventilate his leg again in David’s memory. Something inside her was broken. She couldn’t find the strength to pull the trigger.
Regardless of what he had said, she was going to have to spend the night up on the roof, watching. Caution dictated it.
# # # # #
Madelyn had a cramp in her leg that wouldn’t go away. She flexed and released, over and over. Her brain found the worst-case scenario and fixated on it. There was a clot in her leg and it was sending off little clusters of cells into her bloodstream. Any second, one wou
ld lodge in her brain and take her life.
The sound of a distant shot made her suck in a surprised breath.
It was far away.
As she was still processing, the shot was followed by two more quick shots. She turned her head.
Jacob said what she was thinking.
“That’s the direction of Circle Poke,” he said.
Madelyn blinked and rolled to her side. She studied him in the starlight. He was sitting right there, holding the rifle. He was exactly where he should be, and exactly where he wasn’t the last time she had looked.
“How do you know?” she asked. She cleared her scratchy throat. The night air had been hard on her old body.
“I have seen maps,” he said. “And I heard what Gabriel said about where he was camped.”
“Where were you?”
“When?”
“When I was talking to Gabe.”
“You told me to hide. I slipped over the side and hid behind the cabin. I thought you knew.”
“And how did you get back up here?”
“The ladder!” he said with a laugh. “What did you think?”
“Why have you been lying to me?”
“What? I haven’t… What do you think I’ve been lying about?”
“You knew they were gone, didn’t you? You’ve been trying to trick me into staying up here all alone when the world is safe again.”
“Why would you believe him? You said yourself that he’s smart, and devious, and he just wants to find a way to steal what you’ve got. Just because he made up a story, you’re going to ignore what you heard with your own ears last night?”
Madelyn took in a slow breath and held it for a second before she let it out. Someone was lying. If it was just a decision between Jacob and Gabriel, it would be a simple problem to solve. One man was a slippery old codger who had tried to trick her before. The boy was the spitting image of her brother when he was young, and he had no reason to want to trick her. She had invited Jacob in and then chased him down to get him to accept the offer.
If the choice was just between Gabriel and Jacob, it was no choice at all.
The problem was, there was a third person in the equation whom she couldn’t trust.
That person was herself.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ve got work to do.”
# # # # #
“I don’t understand,” Jacob said.
To his credit, he was helping her roll up the sod despite the fact that she hadn’t explained.
“He shot his weapon three times,” she said. “It was either the same gun that went off, or it was a remarkably similar gun with the same rounds. Did you hear the way all three echoed in the same way?”
“Sure?”
“He didn’t move between the shots. This time of the evening, that’s a suicidal thing to do.”
“Is it any worse than dragging these big slabs with a winch?” Jacob asked. He was looking down at the big hunks of concrete that covered her incinerator.
“They’re both stupid things to do.”
“Should we wait for morning?” Jacob asked.
“Can’t,” Madelyn said. She moved the last of the sod and attached the hook to the ring on the slab. “I can’t afford to wait until tomorrow to find out if I’m crazy.”
Jacob just stood there.
“Move,” she said. “You need to move unless you want to fall into the pit.”
Jacob moved reluctantly. Madelyn activated the winch and pulled the slab. The grinding sound was louder and more ominous at night. It was the sound of a crypt lid being pushed away by a vampire. It was an undead sound.
The slab revealed a black rectangle in the ground. For a second, there could have been anything down there.
Madelyn pushed the button on her flashlight.
A bright beam leapt into the hole. Jacob took a step back from the light.
She saw only white powder down there.
Madelyn crouched and moved her light around.
“What are you looking for?” Jacob asked.
“Bones,” she said. “It takes two cycles to reduce the bones to dust. Noah’s bones should be in there. I don’t see anything.”
“He was sick,” Jacob said. “We knew he was going to die because his bones were being eaten from the inside out.”
Madelyn moved her flashlight from the pit up to Jacob’s face. He was being serious.
“That’s convenient,” she said. She returned her light to the pit and got down on her knees so she could see every corner. There was no need to move the other slab—there was nothing there.
“Convenient or not, it’s true.”
“Maybe,” Madelyn said. She stood up and wiped her hand on her pants.
“You have a different explanation?” he asked.
“Yeah. Maybe his bones aren’t there because I imagined him. Maybe some part of my brain was so desperate to survive that it invented the idea of my brother showing up right at the moment I was going to commit suicide. His arrival gave me an excuse to stay alive.”
“You didn’t imagine him. I came with him.”
“Which means that I’m imagining you too,” she said. It was obvious. She had been thinking it for a while. She hadn’t been able to admit it to herself until that moment.
“That’s stupid,” he said. “I’m here. I am physical proof of myself.”
“The brain is an amazing device,” she said. “I could be imagining everything. After all, Gabe didn’t see you. The computer at the camp didn’t respond to you.”
“Your control panel responded to me. I’m not imaginary just because I don’t know how to use some antiquated voice interface thing. Besides, why would your brain be able to invent some physical evidence and not all?”
“What do you mean?”
She clicked off her flashlight and put her hands on her hips.
“Why would you imagine me, right here in front of you, and not be able to imagine my father’s skeleton down in that pit? What’s the difference?”
She blinked and thought about it. No reasonable argument came to mind. She had intended to open the pit and prove it one way or the other, and that’s exactly what she had done.
Madelyn shook her head.
“You’re not real,” she said. “You’re a figment of my imagination.”
“Maybe you’re the one who isn’t real,” he said. “Maybe you did shoot yourself and this is your version of purgatory.”
“Which would still mean that you’re not real,” she said.
“You’re impossible,” he said. Jacob headed for the cabin.
“Wait! Help me cover this thing back up.”
She heard the door slam.
Chapter 13
{Joining}
Madelyn made no effort to sneak up on his camp. She spotted the truck and walked right into the center of Circle Poke. She held her rifle under her arm and turned through the compass, regarding the old buildings there.
“Gabriel,” she called. “Gabriel Saxon, come on out.”
She turned at the sound of rusty hinges.
“Hold on. Hold on,” he said. He came through the door, pulling his suspenders up over his old shoulders. He laughed when he looked to her. “Don’t shoot,” he said. He put his arms up and then lowered one to the railing as he came down the porch steps.
She raised the gun to her shoulder.
“Throw down your weapons,” she said.
He stopped and gave her a serious look.
“All I have on me is this old buck knife. Everything else is in the truck.”
She put her finger on the trigger when he reached around his back. His sharp eyes caught the movement and his arm stopped mid-reach.
Gabriel turned enough so that she could see him pull the knife from its sheath. He tossed it to the ground between them.
“Lose the clothes,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Take it off. Right down to your skivvies.”
“Th
ere are more polite ways to get me undressed, madam.”
“Save the banter and strip.”
She debated putting a bullet in the ground next to him to urge him on, but rejected the notion. She still wasn’t settled with the idea of all that noise.
Gabriel was slow to get undressed. He was clearly accustomed to having a bench to sit on while he removed his pants. She was doing him a favor. He was getting a good lesson in how bad his balance had become. The old man almost fell over when it came time to remove his socks. Madelyn pointed her rifle at the hollow where his neck met his shoulder. She imagined the bullet ripping into that delicate flesh and carving a channel down the center of his ribcage, through his heart, and then making a mess of his guts. He would be dead before he hit the ground.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. He coughed up phlegm from his bent-over lungs.
“You apologized,” she said. “This is me accepting your apology. Now step back from the pile.”
She kept her gun pointed at him while she knelt and dug into the pockets of his still-warm jeans.
“Where are the keys to your truck?”
“They’re in it,” he said.
She nearly shot him when he pointed at his truck. His arm had moved too fast and startled her.
Gabriel sensed how close he had come to losing his life. He crossed his arms in front of his sagging chest. The puffy white hair between his breasts matched the hair poking out from his boxers. Madelyn spat at the thought.
“Where’s your gear?”
This time, he pointed only with his eyes. “Truck,” he said.
“Good. I gather you still know where my cabin is. You hike up there and you may or may not find a young man who may or may not be my nephew. He might just be the ghost of my younger brother. Regardless, if he’s there, he might take you in. He might shoot you.”
She picked up his clothes with one hand and backed towards the truck.
“You’re not making sense, Madelyn.”
“I know,” she said. “If you’ve been paying attention, you might notice that the whole world doesn’t make sense.”
He tilted his head and acknowledged her statement with a tiny nod.
“I’ll be back for you before long. Or maybe not. Help yourself to what’s left of David’s clothes.”
There was a dangerous second while she took her eyes off of him to open the truck door. She tossed his stuff inside and reached in to start the engine. It was a strange sound after all those years. A combustion engine was an impossible relic. She could hardly believe that she was taking a chance on something that loud, or something that produced that much heat.