Badlands (10 page)

Du Pré nodded.

“After that fuckup in Waco” said Pidgeon, “cults make us all very very nervous indeed.”

“I
WOULD DEARLY LOVE
to get in there,” said Ripper. He was peering through Du Pré’s spotting scope. He pulled his head away.

The scope was trained on the largest of the metal buildings. Unlike the others, it did not have huge sliding doors, only wide double-hinged ones. That aside, it was the same featureless cream metal siding as the others. The roof was a middling blue.

Du Pré grunted.

They were hidden in a copse of junipers, the lens of the scope sleeved so that the sun would not flash on it. They had been there since an hour before dawn.

“That,” said Ripper, “is the most utilitarian cathedral I ever saw. Notre Dame for utter shitheads. Up, there they go.”

He bent his head to the lens and he stared.

“They’re filing in there,” he said. “Sunday services I bet. You want to take a look?”

Du Pré nodded.

He looked through the lens. The sixty-power scope was trained on a set of double doors that people were filing through. There were four guards at the doors, young men in the dark-red billowing shirts of the Host. They stood, arms folded across their chests.

The people going into the building halted and were briefly inspected. Well-mannered children stood quietly by their parents.

A middle-aged couple and two teenagers stopped.

Du Pré stared through the lens.

Bud and Millie Eide.

Du Pré looked again, unbelieving.

“Christ,” he said, standing up. “It is them Eide. They are members of this thing.”

“The former owners?” said Ripper. “Well, now we know why they didn’t call Bart.”

“They come to the party we throw for them,” said Du Pré, “and are all sad at leaving. We feel sorry for them.”

“People,” said Ripper. “Shit.”

It took twenty minutes for all of the people streaming out of the prefabricated houses to file into the big metal building. The guards stood together for a moment, talking, and then they went inside and shut the doors.

“Well,” said Ripper, “we got up in the morning too damn early but we know a little more than we did.”

Du Pré rolled a smoke.

“This,” he said, “it is not good.”

He looked up at the golden eagles circling high above.

“Du Pré!” said Ripper. “Look!”

Du Pré followed Ripper’s pointing finger.

A figure was moving near one of the prefab houses.

Du Pré sighted the spotting scope on the place. It took a moment but he finally found her.

A young woman with two small children was tying a pack on the back of a four-wheeler. She put the kids on and strapped them with bungee cords. Then she started the machine and she drove off to the north and east. She dashed down the road and when she came to the gate at the end of the huge pasture she got off and opened it and then she drove through and closed it and she went on.

“We got a runner,” said Ripper. “We had better get after her. They’ll be after her the moment that they know she’s gone.”

Du Pré tried to spot the woman but she had disappeared behind the rolling earth.

Then he saw her. She was driving up a steep track, toward the back fence.

Toward the
malpais,
the badlands.

“Can we drive there?” said Ripper.

Du Pré thought.

“We go round,” he said. “There is a road high there”—he pointed to a faint line on the flanks of the Wolf Mountains—“we go to Hulme’s place, borrow some horses, maybe some four-wheelers.”

“All the same to you,” said Ripper, “I’d like a four-wheeler.”

Du Pré shrugged.

He slipped the spotting scope back in the case and he slung it on his shoulder. Ripper had the cooler and the light folding chairs.

They tossed the gear in the backseat of Du Pré’s old cruiser. He started it and turned round and drove back along the track. When he turned right on the county road he speeded up. It was a good gravel road, good for seventy miles an hour.

Du Pré wound up a grade and he got to the road that ran along the flanks of the Wolf Mountains. It was a bad road and he had to slow to fifty. The cruiser leaped off steep drops and bottomed on its springs.

“Hail, Mary, fulla grace!” screamed Ripper. He was crossing himself.

“You are Episcopalian,” shouted Du Pré over the crashes, roars, screeches, and thumps.

“I am Everything,” screamed Ripper. “I am All.”

Du Pré fishtailed up a wide spot in the road and shot down a flat straightaway. When they got to the end of the flat, the road dropped off the bench. The Hulme place was three miles away, in a little cut valley, in a grove of cottonwoods and firs.

Du Pré wound through the tight narrow road. He turned into the ranch track and accelerated, then braked when he got to the main house. He jumped out and ran toward the door.

Mrs. Hulme came out, drying her hands on a dishtowel.

“Mr. Du Pré!” she said, smiling. “Whatever is the matter?”

“There is some trouble,” said Du Pré. “We need horses, or maybe them four-wheelers, you got any.”

Mrs. Hulme dropped the towel on the porch. She motioned for Du Pré to follow and led him to a low machine shed and pulled open one of the wide sliding doors.

Three four-wheel ORVs sat there.

Mrs. Hulme opened a gas tank. She shook her head and put the cap back on, then got on the ORV and started it and ran it out to the gasoline tank, set up on its timber frame. She filled the tank.

Du Pré brought another one and she filled that, too, and then she lifted a five-gallon plastic gas can and filled it. She found a blue one and filled that.

“You’ll need water,” said Mrs. Hulme.

She drove the ORV to the cruiser and Du Pré followed with the other one. Ripper was sorting things. Food, a medical kit, a few extra clips for his 9mm.

Du Pré got the .270 from the trunk. He lashed it, and the spotting scope, to the rear of the ORV.

Ripper looked at the nasty little machines.

“Fine-lookin’ stock,” he said. “What’s this one’s name? Whoa, boy.”

The woman came out of the house with another blue five-gallon jug. She set it on the back of Ripper’s machine and strapped it on with bungee cords.

“You going to the badlands?” she said.

Du Pré nodded.

“Drive over there to that ramp,” she said. “I’ll get the truck.”

Du Pré and Ripper started their machines. Du Pré drove over to the loading ramp, a long tongue of earth with a sheer face of thick timbers. Mrs. Hulme came around the barn in a big old flatbed truck. It had no side skirts on the hood. The engine roared and spat. It had no muffler.

They drove the ORVs on to the flatbed and locked the brakes and the woman drove out of the main gate and turned left, went a mile and turned right. The road became a track and went through three dry watercourses and then over some sagebrush flats to a fence. There was a sagging gate in the fence.

And another loading ramp beside it.

Mrs. Hulme backed the truck up to the ramp and Ripper drove off and Du Pré followed him. The ramp was fairly steep and Ripper nearly went over backward at the bottom, from punching the gas too hard.

Mrs. Hulme stood by the open gate.

Du Pré stopped.

“Thank you,” he said.

“It’s those Host of Yahweh bastards,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Du Pré nodded.

Du Pré drove on.

The badlands began.

They were colored, he thought, like rotting flesh and stinking bones.

D
U
P
RÉ SIGHTED ON
Merritt Peak. He would use it to calculate where he was. He drove to the right of a small butte and roared on.

Cut her track five miles maybe.

But I do not know where she is going.

Can’t go far fast, got them kids.

Got to get between her and them, they come after her sure.

The track was dust and then it was clay and then it was stones, round and polished by the wind. They could not go very fast. The land was broken and twisted by the wind and waters long gone.

They came to a rise that went to a knife ridge and at the top Du Pré stopped. He looked back at Merritt Peak, and then ahead at the strange jumbled rock.

Like a city ten thousand years old.

Some melted.

He looked off toward the Host of Yahweh ranch, but it was impossible to tell just where it lay.

Du Pré drove on, on dead reckoning.

Down in the bottoms it was impossible to tell where he was, and in a few moments he lost all sense of the landscape but what he could see left. Du Pré felt a prickling on the back of his neck.

It was a place of fears, a place unlike any other.

They came to a wide open cut in the land that led south and west. Du Pré stopped and he looked down.

Tracks of the wild horses.

Other tracks.

Cattle. A coyote.

Du Pré shut off his machine. He motioned to Ripper to do the same.

“God,” said Ripper, “this is a miserable thing to drive. People do this for
fun?”

Du Pré put his fingers in his ears to stop their popping. He swallowed and his right ear popped.

Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Du Pré cocked his ear.

The neeeeeeeeeeeeee sound was getting closer.

He started his machine and drove it down out of sight in a dry watercourse. Ripper followed.

They shut the machines off.

“She gets past,” said Ripper, “you go after her. I will stay here and … discourage anyone who might wish to offer her assistance.”

Du Pré snorted.

“So,” said Ripper, “if you’ve no plans for that there rifle.”

“It is not illegal,” said Du Pré, “them drive in the badlands.”

“Gabriel,” said Ripper. “Two minutes after you find that woman it will be illegal for those bastards to be outside iron bars. I doubt she fled with her wee ones because she was forbidden to let them watch
Sesame Street.”

Du Pré took the rifle case from the back of his machine. He handed Ripper a box of twenty cartridges for it.

“Crosshairs they are dead on at two hundred yards.”

Ripper nodded.

“That would mean an inch and a half low at three hundred and four at four hundred,” he said.

Du Pré nodded.

Ripper opened the case and took out the rifle and filled the magazine and the chamber. He flicked the safety on and put the strap over his shoulder.

They looked through a cleft in the rocks.

The woman was driving fairly fast, and she had lost her bonnet and her long red hair whipped in the wind. She slowed and stared up at Merritt Peak for a moment, then she drove on. She passed within fifty feet of Du Pré and Ripper and then she was out of sight past a low cake of rock that stretched for a hundred yards to the northeast.

Du Pré nodded to Ripper.

Ripper touched his arm.

Engines, back to the south and west.

“Dirt bikes,” said Ripper. “Some anyway. Faster than these things.”

Du Pré nodded. He got on his machine and started it and drove up to the track the woman had gone down, turned and put the throttle all the way up.

In three minutes he could see her up ahead. She was driving as fast as she could. The children strapped on the back of the little machine were screaming and crying.

God damn, I wish she would blow a tire.

Engine seize up.

Du Pré followed, not knowing what to do.

The wide way narrowed down and the ground got rocky and the ORV bounced over the stones. Du Pré was only fifty yards behind the woman now.

She never looked back. She did not dare take her eyes off the ground right in front of her.

Du Pré kept the same distance.

They drove on deeper into the badlands.

She slowed down and stopped. She had come to a deep cut in the earth. She looked to the left and the right and then turned and drove right and she went down and then up and was moving fast again.

Du Pré went to the same spot and he dipped down and came up and opened the throttle.

She slowed again and this time she moved her head round far enough to spot Du Pré.

She turned immediately and gunned the engine, shot off a bank and disappeared from sight. Then she reappeared, a cloud of white dust marking the spot where she had landed.

Du Pré went the same way. He flew off the bank and landed on the dusty floor of the watercourse and he gunned the machine and shot up the grade.

She was fifty yards ahead again.

She looked back and speeded up.

Du Pré dropped back.

She was going too fast for the land.

She looked back again and slowed a little.

Du Pré waved.

She waited while Du Pré drove up to her.

The woman got off the ORV. She went to her babies and pulled the bungees from them and picked them up, one in each arm. They were perhaps four and two. Boys.

“We will help you,” said Du Pré.

The woman looked at him with her wide brown eyes.

She put her children down.

She made a motion with her hand, like she was using a syringe.

She pointed to her mouth.

She stuck the imaginary needle in her tongue.

“You can’t talk?” said Du Pré. “They give you a shot, your tongue?”

She nodded.

She knelt to comfort her children, who were crying. They were scared and hurt.

Du Pré looked on.

Numb her tongue up why?

So she can’t talk.

The children blubbered.

She wiped their faces with a kerchief.

Du Pré heard a motorcycle engine. It was near.

A man on a dirt bike came out of a side cut, seeming to appear from the land.

The woman looked at him.

He was dressed in the baggy dark red shirt of the Host. He had on a black helmet with a dark visor.

The woman looked at Du Pré.

Her eyes looked tired and sad.

The man on the motorcycle gunned his engine and drove toward them.

The woman backed away, leaving her children crying, sitting on the ground.

Du Pré took out his 9mm. He raised his hand.

The man on the motorcycle stopped.