place up with God, and wound up hosting eight demons instead of one. I keep seeing Gills go that way."
"I hope you're wrong."
"I haven't given up on him yet. But, between you and me, he's starting to scare me."
"Boss, you got a minute?" Stanley Charbonneau asked, after he'd stuck his head in the door of Ott's office.
"Come in."
Stanley shut the door behind him, and settled into a chair facing Ott's desk. "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the cattle herd wandered into view while we were snooping around topside. Puny's found them, and adopted them, and they all seem pretty happy with the arrangement, with the possible exception of Blevins, who appears to be on the outs with some of the cows. The yearling bulls were there, too. It's one big happy family now, from what we can see. Quite a few of this year's calves are still standing, too, so the wolves didn't get all of them."
"That is good news."
"Now for the bad news. Something very weird is going on at the birdwatcher's cabin." He paused, searching for words.
"Such as?" Ott prompted.
"All right, call me crazy. Maybe I am crazy. But if I didn't know better, I'd say that the latest birdwatcher is gone, and the guy who was there before him is back. Crazier than ever, too."
"Crazy in what ways?"
"Talking to people who aren't there crazy. Spinning around to point his gun at stuff we couldn't see crazy. Yelling 'I am more able than able!' at the sky crazy."
"You don't think it's the latest guy, or another new one?"
"Uh, uh. I think it's Renzo. By the way, us not being able to listen in on transmissions or read text messages isn't driving me nuts, exactly, but it's making me feel deaf, dumb, and blind sometimes – and more than I thought it would. Like, why should I care I never got to learn the new guy's name? Seriously, though, it bugs me. You're a busy man, or I'd keep talking on stuff that bugs me. Although, I would mention, what really bugs me more than anything is wondering if any of our guys up topside needed pulling in, and we didn't get them in time. I wish they'd get word to us somehow."
"If they're not dead," Ott said.
"Yeah. Big if. Uhm, boss?"
"Yes?"
"Don't go telling anybody this, but if anybody from topside finds whoever-our-birdwatcher-is when he's in loony mode, they're going to order him starved to death, and we won't know about it, probably."
"Maybe they've done it already, and that's why he's acting insane?"
"Don't know. Doesn't seem quite down that line, but it's been known to get to people in different ways. But that wouldn't explain why he's still using the cabin, or why nobody else has taken over."
"Any sign at all of a new cattle herder today?"
"Not here, at any rate. And the cows seemed pretty much feral. Do you think maybe the 'Everybody Outside Of Urban Areas Gets Moved or Abandoned' policy got kicked in, even out here?"
"It makes you wonder, doesn't it?"
"Boss?"
"What?"
"If I was boss, which I'm not, of course, I think I'd send a team up to capture Renzo or whoever in the world it is up there. If they decide to replace him after that, at least we've saved his skin. In the meantime, we've gotten rid of the hazard of a guy with a gun hanging around near a bridge we'd like to use more than we dare to now. If we're really lucky, we can maybe even convince them that that particular post is more trouble than it's worth, if they haven't come to that conclusion already."
"This is not to mention that the current guy with the gun is acting crazy, which makes him even more dangerous than usual."
"Yeah. Think on it, anyway. I'm game either way."
"I'm seriously considering it, Charbonneau."
"Thanks. And, uhm, boss?"
"Yes?"
"A lot of the guys are still feeling rotten about that cattle herder winding up dead. It was worse with her because she was a woman, but…"
"But they don't know if they could face themselves in a mirror if we lost the only serf we seem to have left in the neighborhood?"
"Something like that, sir."
"You win. Any reason not to aim for tomorrow?"
"Not that I know of."
Stanley's team had no problems until they looked in the cabin window to confirm that the birdwatcher was in bed like he should be – and he wasn't.
The men on the team were experienced, and so didn't panic, but there was a great deal of stealthy snooping around, trying to find the birdwatcher before he found them and opened fire.
Not finding him outside anywhere, they gave the inside of the cabin another look. He still wasn't in bed. Nor was he at the table. Nor was he anywhere to be seen – until one man thought to move around to where he could see the corner nearest the front door. Renzo was asleep on the floor, curled up in a ball.
Stanley took a look from a few angles, and decided that, given the choice between opening the front door just enough to squeeze through, and bursting through even though it might break the man's nose, all in all he liked the idea of bursting in, preferably yelling to shock the target into cooperation. After that, things went smoothly enough, from their perspective. From Renzo's, however, hell broke loose. Demons masquerading as men materialized out of nowhere, yelling diabolically. They tied him up, blindfolded him, and carted him off. Shortly after that, he smelled hay, and then he felt like he was being lowered into the bowels of the Earth. It wasn't quite as terrifying a nightmare as he'd become accustomed to having, but it somehow seemed more real, which made it worse.
Harvey was a bit alarmed when Lt. Ott showed up to take the nurse into the next room for a conference. When they came back, the nurse shot him a 'be careful what you say, hot shot' look, which made him even more nervous.
Ott sat in a chair facing Harvey. He seemed to be weighing his words before he spoke.
"Oh, for crying out loud," the nurse said. "Don't baby him. Harvey, the birdwatcher got brought down and needs nursing care as well as guards, and I suggested they bring him down here, at least for the time being, so we could team up on him. But Lt. Ott's afraid you're not up to having guards and a lunatic topsider around."
Ott's eyes did funny things.
No wonder, Harvey thought. It was never a good idea to try to glower when your eyes were bugging. He'd learned that as a kid, trying to look tough, but getting laughed at instead.
Harvey put on a good mask, suited to the occasion – he'd had lots of practice inventing and wearing masks topside – and looked Ott in the eye. "Boss, how about I promise to tell you if it gets to be too much for me, and we give it a go in the meantime?" he said, in a voice so calm it almost startled Harvey himself.
The nurse smiled in a way that said she was proud of him.
Ott, however, looked at him like he was trying to decide if he'd gone nuts.
"Unless you're counting on me to be one of the guards, I'm game, really," Harvey assured him. "Give me another week or two before you decide to assign me to guard duty, though, all right?"
Ott muttered something under his breath about cocky airmen being the bane of his existence, but agreed to let them have the birdwatcher for a while. He left.
The nurse looked like she was going to give Harvey a hug.
"My dear Mrs. Chan, do I want to know what's really going on?" Harvey asked.
"It's a bit complicated," she replied.
"No doubt. Give me a few key threads, though. Please."
"Officially, we're just being smart about teaming up during a shortage of skilled nurses. Having both of my hardest cases in one place instead of making me jog back and forth down the tunnel all day and night is decidedly a good idea, from my point of view," she said. "It's also a good deal for the guards, because they don't have to jog down the tunnel to get me if they have a problem, or a question."
"Or, worse yet, if they have a question or a problem and decide that perhaps it's not worth the bother of jogging down the hall?"
The nurse smiled weakly, letting him know he'd hit on an ongo
ing problem with at least some of the guards.
"So, unofficially, what are the additional reasons?" Harvey asked. "If I may be so bold to ask?"
"Where he's at, Renzo's at the mercy of the guards who mocked Gills when he was entertaining the idea of getting to know God, and who made him feel like a good boy when he went back to blackhearted, blind scorn. Here, even if they get a rotation – and I'm trying to see that they don't – even if they get a rotation, we're in a better position to offer some counterweight."
"'We,' meaning who?"
"Me, some of the Christian guards, and you, if you feel up to it."
Renzo couldn't bring clearly to mind the first days of his captivity – they were perhaps lost permanently behind a wall of shock-fog that had prevented details from properly registering in the first place – but his head was beginning to clear enough for him to notice his surroundings, and start to make some sense of it. Much of it didn't make sense, though, no matter what he did. He'd never met people like those who were around him now. Not only did some of them not look like any breed he knew, their manner of interacting with each other was quite odd. They relaxed too much, for one thing. They laughed a lot. And they were always offering to help somebody. On top of that, whatever the hierarchy was, he hadn't been able to figure it out.
He was, at the moment, most fascinated with the man with the pilot brand who spent part of the time sitting in a chair with wheels, and part of the time inside a frame of some sort, walking jerkily around. He was in the