Captives (44 page)

He pocketed his laser and scrabbled up the slats. An explosion burst from just ahead of them, washing the cart with heat. The horses screamed and pulled away from the flames. Their wheels clunked off the road onto the gravel shoulder. The wagon skidded and veered toward the canyon yawning beneath them. With Walt clinging to the top corner, the vehicle began to tip.

Everyone inside screamed. Trees and rocky spurs projected from the near-vertical slope. Walt felt his center of balance tip past the point of recovery. Ahead, a tree projected from the canyon wall. He flung himself at it.

He no sooner left the wagon than the wagon left the road. He hurtled toward the branches and the vehicle soared overhead, spinning on its side, horses tumbling along with it. Walt turned his face and smashed into the branches. He scrabbled for a hold, twigs and bark furrowing his arms. The wagon struck the tree and the trunk yanked sickeningly. A man spilled past its branches and tumbled head over heels toward the ground sixty feet below. The wagon bashed through the tree and followed him down.

Above on the road, the riders rushed past, firing at Liss' carriage as it thundered up the hill. Below him, falling men, women, and horses screamed. The wagon impacted with the smack of meat and the clatter of lumber. A crescendo of gunfire crackled across the heights. A boy cried out.

Walt hung in a tangle of half-broken branches. The tree these were connected to slanted from the canyon face. Its upper heights grew above the level of the road. If he climbed to its far boughs, he'd be able to drop lightly to the ground. He let go with his right hand, dangled to the left to give himself a bit of momentum, then swung to the right, grabbing for the branch.

With a shuddering, groaning crack, the wagon-damaged branch split, peeling away from the trunk.

The branch was a large one. Could have passed for a tree in its own right. It sailed down, leaves flapping. As Walt fell, the canyon wall extended nearer until sub-branches snapped against its rocky face. The bough struck another tree and rolled down its branches, the scent of pine exploding in the air. Walt grabbed a knobby branch. This snapped, too, but not before temporarily arresting his fall; as he began to tumble anew, it was with zero initial velocity. Dry branches busted beneath him. He twisted for a look at where he was just as he hit the ground.

Things. Things around him, and parts of him that hurt, and he had been asleep, except it really hadn't been sleep at all. Lots of him ached. Too many parts to differentiate. It seemed important that he try to wiggle his fingers and toes. He did this and felt highly accomplished with the results. So accomplished, in fact, that he felt like he deserved to lie there a while.

Crickets sang around him. After a minute, hooves approached above, then began to fade. His consciousness emerged from the nest it had built for itself and he was suddenly very afraid that he had been impaled by a branch and was in shock. Fully expecting to feel intestines looping over his lap, he sat up. It hurt, but far less than he had reason to expect. He found he was able to stand.

Snapped branches carpeted the ground. He was on a small shelf of rocky dirt overlooking another downward plunge. At its bottom rested a big lump that might have been the motionless wreckage of the wagon. The road was forty feet above him. The shelf he and the pine tree were on climbed upward, narrowing as it went. With no better option, he walked up it, keeping a hand on the rocks. The path ascended further than it had looked on first blush, but terminated fifteen feet below the road. As he gazed up, wondering what to do next, a head poked over the edge to his right.

"Walt?" Carrie said. "Oh, come on."

"Is that
disappointment
?"

"More like when you're playing a game of Mario and the second player keeps stealing your extra lives. Are you okay?"

"I think so," he said. "But I might be stuck."

"Hang tight, okay?" She smiled, then withdrew her face from the cliff. Shoes crunched through gravel. A minute later, they returned, shuffling about. A rope unfurled, smacking against the rock wall. He gave it a tug. Carrie leaned over the edge. "All set."

He discovered it hurt to lift his left arm above his head, or to put too much stress on his right ankle, but he was able to climb his way up to the top. There, he sat in the gravel to catch his breath. "What about the carriage?"

Carrie shook her head. "They shot Liss. The driver, too."

"The kids?"

"Taken."

"But alive." He pressed his fingers against his eyes. "Why didn't I fucking shoot her?"

"Liss?"

"The kids' maid. I didn't want to hurt her with them right there. She must have decided I was lying about their mom. I swear the asshole in charge of that place has everyone brainwashed."

"Can you walk?" She offered him a hand and helped him to his feet. "We should get off the road and get you patched up. Long walk ahead of us."

"Home?" He hung onto her hand. "Carrie, we can't go. Not without her kids."

"Here's an alternate suggestion: yes, we can."

"Liss is the only reason you're out of that ship."

"And now she's gone. They're not going to hurt these kids. The only thing we're likely to do if we try to get them back is get ourselves killed."

"You're right," he said. "But I have to go back for them. Liss might be dead, but my deal with her isn't."

Carrie regarded him, expression unreadable. "Since when were you so sentimental?"

"Since I had someone else's help. Someone who played fair with me."

"Did you hit your head in the fall?"

"Yeah. But that's beside the point. I'm not asking you to come with me. You probably shouldn't."

Her brows bristled together. "This is a real dick move."

"That seems to be what I do." He took a step downhill, but his right ankle threatened to buckle.

"You're not going anywhere." Carrie grabbed his elbow. "Not until you get healed up."

* * *

"Well?" she said. "What are you waiting for?"

He pulled back from the binoculars to watch the gates with his naked eye. "For my brain to figure out what to do."

"Wait until nightfall, climb over those dinky walls, go grab the kids. How hard can it be?"

"They've got motion detectors inside the walls. Alien ones. Why do you think it took me so long to get to you?"

"Incompetence?"

"Furthermore, if the maid tipped them off, they might have moved the kids. Maybe to another building. Maybe to another site altogether."

"That would make a lot of sense," Carrie said. "Well, good luck."

He muttered something obscene. It had only been a day and a half since the failed jailbreak and the disaster at the canyon. It turned out he'd suffered remarkably few injuries in the fall: a bunch of scrapes, a number of bruises, one cut on his upper arm that had required Carrie to close with five stitches. His ankle was still sore, but he'd tested it and knew he could run on it. As he'd rested up, Carrie had foraged up the basics of survival and sneaking around.

In the meantime, he'd tried to come up with a proper plan, but nothing had gelled. He'd thought coming here would jar loose an idea. He'd been wrong.

"Know anyone inside?" she murmured.

"One guy. But he's so reliably untrustworthy I tricked him into getting me sent to the ship."

"That's everyone? Weren't you in there for weeks?"

"Making friends wasn't high on my list of priorities." He fit the binoculars to his eyes. "Let me know if you decide to become useful."

She snorted softly.

Birds chirped from the trees. Whoever had been manning the gatehouse that night would know whether the kids had been brought back inside. He could scale the tower at night and beat it out of him—except for the part where the man could foil everything with a single yell. Alternately, Walt could try the simplest route of all: walk back up to the gates and claim Abyss had shanghaied him into their little jailbreak. But if the maid had betrayed him, that story was dead in the water. Even if she'd kept mum, and it was one of the Sworn who'd noticed the escape, Walt had already been up to enough shenanigans to make anything he said worthy of scrutiny. He wouldn't be allowed around Serah and Ethan again, that was for damn sure.

And… that was it. That was all he had. He knew he should be capable of coming up with more—dig a tunnel? Build a hang glider to soar in past the motion detectors?—but he was all planned out. Mentally exhausted.

He waved at a fly buzzing around his neck. "Seriously, got any other ideas to bounce off me?"

"Turn around and go home?" She laughed lightly. "Could try to bribe someone."

"With what? The brick of gold we don't have and no one would want?"

"A lot of people would kill for that laser."

He bristled at the thought. Which meant she might be on to something. He should even be able to replace it if they swung through Vandenberg on the way home, assuming the aliens hadn't repopulated the base. Finding the right person to bribe would be a challenge, but probably not as big as it felt. People were greedy. That was a fact of life. Most of the time, it sucked. Every now and then, though, it made things a hell of a lot easier.

He let that idea simmer; it involved working with other people and that was always a drawback. Over the next couple hours of observation, people came and went. Including a mule team. After it departed, fresh ideas began to accrete inside his head.

"Next carriage that comes in, get ready to move," he said. "We follow it back to the stables. There, I'll stow away inside a carriage. After it delivers me inside the Heart, I can skulk around with impunity."

"I like the sound of this." Carrie shifted her weight to her other knee. "Except that leaves me out here sitting on my thumb."

"Lucky thumb. Look, it's not about keeping you out of harm's way. It's that an effective skulk is best accomplished alone."

"I know. I'll find a way to keep myself occupied."

Walt grinned to himself, picking over the idea in his head. It felt right. As much as he enjoyed chilling on the beach drinking scotch, eating crabs, and not doing dishes, he missed moments like this. Not so much the exposing himself to being shot and/or hanged. But this moment of conjuring the right solution to a problem. As terrible as the human brain was at everything else, it felt like maybe moments like this was what it was built to do.

Within another hour, a carriage rattled up the hill, followed the path ringing the fence, and stopped at the gates. A woman walked out from the Heart, sunlight shining from the lenses of her glasses. Electricity fired down Walt's spine.

"We've been thinking about this all dumb," he said. "We don't have to go in. All we have to do is make Anson come out."

"How do we do that? Kidnap
his
kids?"

"That's even worse than what I've got in mind," he laughed. "That woman there? That's his girlfriend or wife or whatever. We take her, then swap her for Liss' kids."

"You're sure he'll go for that?"

"He should. With Liss dead, he can no longer use the kids as leverage over Abyss. I think he'll give them up for Eva Braun there."

"You like this better than trying to sneak in?"

"Sneaking in is only a good idea if Serah and Ethan are in the Heart. Even then, it could take me days to find them. If we take the woman, he'll deliver the kids right to us."

"This won't be my proudest moment," Carrie said. "On the other hand, they're alien-dealing slavetraders. Fuck them in the ear."

"Pretty much." Up at the gates, Reeds climbed inside, slamming the door. Walt put away the binoculars. "Let's get moving. I don't want to ambush them within sight or sound of the Heart."

They withdrew from the brush, put a line of houses between themselves and the fence, and ran downhill. His ankle began to throb. They'd watched the carriage's route in and he beelined for a spot along it several blocks away. By the time he and Carrie made it to a juniper bush in the front yard of a three-story concrete and glass home, hooves clapped uphill. Walt drew his laser. Carrie had a pistol she'd found among the dead after the incident in the hills, but it had no ammunition.

The carriage rolled near. When it was forty feet away, Walt ran from the bush, gun in hand. "Stop right there!"

The driver took up the reins. The pair of horses whinnied, pulling up. Carrie circled to the side of the carriage and pointed her gun at its interior. "Get out. Hands up."

Reeds popped the door and stepped into the sunlight. "You may take whatever you want."

"I know that," Walt said. "So come with me, loot."

"This is a kidnapping." The woman's affect remained as flat as a flounder. "And it will fail. You have nothing to threaten me with. If you shoot me, they'll hear the shot."

"Not unless you're manning the barricades with owls." Walt brandished his gun. "This is a laser. The only sound it makes is me saying 'pew pew.'"

For a moment, no one moved. Then Reeds walked forward, continuing to hold her hands above her head. Carrie glanced at Walt, then made eyes at the driver. Walt tapped the side of his pistol. Might not need to shoot him. Could hang onto him for a little while, use him as a messenger.

The man ducked, scrabbling for something beside his seat. Walt fired. The laser slashed across the man's chest, then struck his throat. He jerked, superheated air leaving his body in a whoosh not unlike the lighting of a gas stove.

Carrie bound Reeds' hands with the same rope she'd used to help Walt up the cliff. Walt swung up beside the dead driver. Once the two women were inside the carriage, he drove the horses forward. He was inclined to ditch the vehicle somewhere out of sight, but on second thought, it seemed like the perfect conveyance to bear two of them and two children two hundred miles up I-5.

He took a meandering route into the hills and looped back around through the cool greenery of Topanga Canyon, disposing of the driver along the way. He did some scouting, too. Once he located the spot—not perfect, but adequate—he stopped the carriage and gestured Carrie outside.

"You okay wrangling her while I send the message to Anson?"