01. Labyrinth of Dreams (17 page)

"You got any idea where we're heading?" I asked her.

"South is all. We can't stay around here, can we? Nothin' to eat but grass. South's as good as any."

I had to admit that much. There was no reason
not
to head south. We entered the trees and kept walking, but I still couldn't feel like this was all real. We'd gone from the bottom to an assignment to find a guy who skipped with mob money, trailed him to the house of some dame that looked like his identical twin, right down to his fingerprints, tracked them to a redneck town in rural Oregon that was the headquarters for a company that supposedly sold junk to TV ads and had a plant that was run with no workers, then saved our quarry from a gunman who turned out to be another twin, got taken to the cleaners by the town for our pains, and then we'd broken into that damned plant and wound up communing with Mother Nature in our underwear.

We reached a streambed that was still somewhat swollen from the results of the previous night's storms, and Brandy started walking east along it. There was no way I wanted to risk crossing that thing now, not at this point, anyway.

"This stream look familiar?" she asked me.

I shrugged. "I'm a city boy. See one stream, one forest, you see 'em all."

"There was a stream running alongside them railroad tracks. Looked kinda like this one."

"Yeah and we're gonna hit a road down to town just through here, I suppose."

"I doubt it. I really doubt it."

"So what's the point? What do you expect to find?" I asked her.

"Something. Anything. Something like—that area over there. See where it's sorta cut out by the stream?"

"Uh huh. So?"

"See that big rock there, stickin' sorta out of the bank? Look familiar? Use your imagination a little."

"It's been overworked the past week." Still, I did see her point and I didn't much like it. That rock was almost a dead ringer for the one jutting out across from the picnic table where we'd had that first meal from the cafe. There was also a kind of dip, or fold, in the land, more than a valley, that went off beyond it to our right and curved around and down a little, and the fold continued up something of a slope to our left. If I were going to build a road, it'd be along that fold for sure, even though it was a little creek of its own to the left and had been cut dry by the stronger stream to the right.

I stopped. "All right, I admit it looks a lot like the same place, or the same place if people had never been here, but what's that prove? I bet there's a ton of places that look just like this all over these hills."

"Sam—when we took the walk up the tracks last night, I paced off the distance. You know I'm always just doin' that kind of thing in my head."

"Uh huh."

"Well, this is about three hundred and eighty standard paces from where we came down. That gate and sidin' was less'n four hundred yesterday. Face it. This place here is just where it would be if we were still in the same place, and that's too much for coincidence, 'specially with that big cleared area just up there right where it should be—only it ain't cleared, it's natural. There may be a ton of places around that ain't developed, but I betcha not a one has just this way."

I sighed. "So what are you saying? They didn't send us anyplace, they sent us back in time or something, before there were people here?"

"I don't think so. You ain't noticed nothin' queer about this whole place? Think about it."

I thought. "What do I know? I'm from the city, remember, and so are you."

"Don't have to be off the farm to see this. No birds, Sam. No birds, no squirrels, no animals or sign of animals around. Bugs, yeah—and I couldn't tell one bug from another, so I can't say if they're funny lookin' or not—but no birds, that I can see."

I looked around and up at the trees and the patches of sky, and I knew she was right. There were insects, yeah—crawling, buzzing around, all sorts of bugs, but if they didn't look like roaches, wasps, or bees, I was no better at telling one from another, either.

"Well," I said slowly, not really wanting to think much further on this, "we have to decide what to do next, then. We can say this is some kind of limbo where there's no company, no people, no animals, go back up to the clearing and hope that old Monocle-and-Moustache sent some kind of message and they'll come and pick us up before we starve to death, or we figure they aren't coming for us, and try and find some food someplace before we starve to death."

"Well, if they didn't come for us last night, with our pants hung out there like signposts and us not far away, then we can't count on them comin' any time soon. I figure we see if we can find some food or something, and if we can, we figure they'll be able to track us and come to us. Sure ain't much here to lose a scent 'cept maybe another big storm. I mean,
they
sent us here, so
somebody
knows and can find us if they want, but we can't count on it."

I nodded. "Okay, then—which way?"

"You pick it. I haven't had much luck lately." I thought a moment. "Well, let's assume for the sake of argument that this
is
somehow the same place as we were, although how that can be I can't imagine. If we go across the stream and down
that
way, we'll have miles and miles of ups and downs and forests until we hit the river valley. That might be the place to play house, but it's ninety, a hundred miles, maybe. We won't make that without something to eat. Still, I remember the map enough. If this fold holds true for the road, going north is more of the same until we hit the river valley, only it'll be mostly uphill for a while. These are only baby mountains compared to the big ones around, too."

"So?"

"Well, no matter what, we curve around and get back to that river valley, right? That means the river runs north and south. You got to figure the shortest route down there is by going
west,
along this big stream, here. We've been thinking road, and we don't have a road to travel."

"Sounds good to me, but I sure hope we find something to eat real soon, or I don't think either of us will make it all the way."

We headed back up, and now that I'd come to accept her theory, at least as a working model, I could actually almost visualize building that railroad through here.

About a half hour beyond the big clearing, the slope started down, and the whole thing widened out. Suddenly, we weren't in forest anymore, but in a thick grove of very different-looking trees. I stared at them. "I'll be damned! Apple trees!"

They
were
apple trees, and while some of them were better along than others, there were some there with apples as ripe as you could want. We ate a few each, throwing caution and possible bellyaches to the wind, since they were either all right or they weren't. At least they were enough to give us some energy to keep walking for a while.

"Funny about those trees," I commented. "They're really kind of out of place here. I don't remember much about farming stuff, I admit, but it also seems kind of hot here for apples, and it always seemed to me that red apples were picked in the fall, not the middle of the summer."

"You think they
were
planted? To keep people like us alive?"

"Maybe. Let's go on a little and see. People can't live on apples alone, or at least I don't think they can."

The valley dipped down and widened out still more, and it was clear after a while that in fact this whole area wasn't totally natural. There were pear trees, and peach trees, and huge wild-growing clumps of grape plants, and while they weren't all ripe, some of each were. There was stuff there that shouldn't be ripe and there was other stuff there that I would swear shouldn't be there—the grapes, for one, and a whole grove of trees dropping walnuts by the score. Equally odd was the fact that only a small amount of each was ripe, with others clearly in a kind of line, going east, from ripe down to not ready for a long, long time. If you didn't pig out, maybe up to a dozen or so people could live here for months, maybe indefinitely, so long as nothing spoiled the crops.

"They shoulda put up signs," I noted. "Not everybody would come east."

"Maybe there's one like this in every direction," she suggested. "It might be worth finding out. If they have this stuff here to stash people who get into their system or whatever, there might even be others here, or there might have been others here."

Except for the sound of rushing waters and the buzzing of insects, I couldn't hear any sign of anybody else. "If there are others, we'll find them soon enough, if they haven't taken some of these and moved on. I almost doubt there's anybody else here, though. Doesn't look like there's
ever
been anybody in this place, except the ones who set this up." I sat up. "However, they can't keep a place like this up without some attention. Somebody's
got
to be by, if only to check it out and correct anything that's not right, sooner or later. Trouble is, that may be weeks, even months from now, unless old Monocle reported us and it wasn't filed for attention someday in the future."

"I'm sure we were reported, and I'm sure they know we're here, and just who we are by now. I think we're just stuck on a siding in the middle of nowhere. Face it, Sam—who are we to them, anyway? So they have our IDs and the cards and stuff like that. How long would it take
you
to have our life history if you had your wallet?"

I thought a moment. "About two hours, tops. Yeah, I see what you mean. They got more resources than we have by a long shot. So they find out we're both bankrupt detectives with no assets and no close family, nobody to even miss us, and that we got overeager, thanks to Little Jimmy. We're nobody back home, but to this company or whatever it is, we stuck our nose in and we know too much. If we didn't before, we sure as hell do now, although I can't think about what it is we really know. I mean, did we stumble into some deal where the Martian Mafia is trying to muscle into the Philadelphia drug trade? It's still crazy."

"Yeah, you're sure right on that." She undid her bra and panties and tossed them away.

"What'd you do
that
for?"

"I don't know. We had nothin', Sam, and we still lost what we had. Might as well be totally nothin'. I mean, face it—I think we're here, and here to stay. I always had a kind of fantasy to be stranded on a desert island or something, just me and men—a man—you—oh, all right. If we're stuck, we're stuck in a pretty place with a lot of food and water, and maybe we got a whole world to ourselves. I can keep washin' them things out, and weeks or months from now they'll fall apart anyway. Then what do we wear? Skins? There ain't no animals here, Sam, and even if there was, I wouldn't know how to trap 'em, kill 'em, skin 'em, or make what I needed to make into something that wouldn't feel and smell like rotten, dead animal. And if somebody comes, it ain't no more embarrassment to be naked than to be in a bra and panties. The hell with it."

"You're probably right," I agreed. "We're both city born and bred. I wouldn't know what part of what to even plant, and we're still guessing on what's ripe and what isn't. Fact is, we aren't just stuck, we're stuck
here,
unless they planted these groves all over the place. The damned thing is, we can't even get too adventurous. If we break a leg, or worse, there's no treatment here, no doctors, no phones or ambulances or cops. It's just you and me sitting around the garden, kid, depending on good old G.O.D., Inc., to keep us fed."

Brandy gave a little gasp. "Not if they leave us here forever, we won't be alone. My diaphragm's back in a room in a motel that just don't seem to exist no more. I always thought 'bout us havin' kids, Sam, but not caveman style."

I hadn't really thought about that angle, and, out here, there really wasn't anything else to
do.
Me, I was still trying to figure out how we could go to the bathroom without becoming real messy real fast. Shows the difference in the two of us, I guess.

I always dreamed of leading a life of idle luxury, but the fact was that this wasn't exactly my idea of things. I'm now convinced that Eve was easily seduced by the serpent because she was incredibly bored, and that Adam ate that apple willingly because there was nothing left to do. We didn't even have that way out, so there was no alternative to some careful exploring.

My boots finally dried out, and while it seemed kind of nuts to go tramping about the wilderness wearing boots and nothing else, the fact was that with the rocks and other unknown things in the ground, they were something of a necessity. We retrieved the clothes anyway, and fashioned some of them into crude sacks in which we could carry small amounts of food. It didn't give us much range, but it gave us some, meaning at least that we didn't have to plan on getting back to that little garden spot before dark.

Just
where
we were still bothered me. The best idea was that we somehow got flung back in time to before there were animals or people, but that didn't really wash when you thought about it. The land was just too closely shaped to the land we'd seen when it was civilized, even to that big exposed rock and this stream. If we were in the distant past or something like that, things would have to look very different.

We managed to cross that stream and then walk into town, or where town would have and should have been. Just beyond it was another of the groves, proving Brandy right again in guessing that it really hadn't mattered which way we'd gone. It was pretty clear now that old Monocle had in fact stashed us on a "siding," a place where you put people when you knew they shouldn't be riding your railroad but you didn't exactly know who or what they were. The real question was whether we'd eventually have an engine sent to move us or if we were on one of those abandoned sidings. The other question was how the hell you could move, or have sidings, when you didn't move, as it were.

The first night, both of us had muscle cramps and some blisters, but we'd managed to survey some of the area and we were learning to accept the situation a little. We had no trouble sleeping, huddled together on soft grass under the edge of the trees, although we did have a couple more little thunderstorms in the evening. Noisy and wet, but nothing like that tremendous storm that had hit us that first night.