Ruin Falls (28 page)

Fifteen minutes ago, Liz would’ve said that she’d never smile again, but now she felt her lips quiver. “Tim.”

His eyes held a shared flicker of amusement, and a fleeting image came to Liz: of their having met again for a completely different reason, in a world where there were such things as senses of humor and getting to know one another and a deepening connection.

Then Tim was back to business. “So we’ve got some kind of utopia thing going on. That’s why they stole Paul’s books.”

The missing journals from the night the window had been smashed. Liz felt something crowd her throat. “I guess so. And maybe they needed something from the farm, too.”

Who knew what kinds of people Paul had chosen to make his companions in this? Some of them seemed all right—mothers, as Tim suggested—but meeting people online was inherently risky. What were they doing out there, wherever they were? How were her children living?

“Ally didn’t say anything to give you any sense where they might be?”

Liz stared at him, and Tim spoke with a note of explanation. “Sometimes if you ask a question twice, you get a different answer.”

“I don’t have a different answer,” Liz said, her voice small. “I wish I did.”

Briefly, Tim looked away. “Your two main options would appear to be somewhere around here—where Paul works and lives—and his hometown. Junction Bridge, right?”

Liz felt a perilous dip. Junction Bridge. It was the last place she wanted her children to be.

She addressed Tim with a quaver in her throat. “The phone Ally used was out of range when I called back.”

Tim shrugged. “Doesn’t mean anything. There are cell pockets all over Wedeskyull.”

Liz seized on his words. “So you do think it might be someplace nearby?”

Tim hesitated. “Paul is the ringleader, and this is his territory. But when it comes to a search, to any kind of investigation, you don’t want to cut off possibilities prematurely.” He leaned closer, gentling his tone. “Look, you’ve had the strange incidents here at the house. The mother and her child. The fake glass worker.” He paused. “That could suggest proximity.”

Gooseflesh rippled over her, triggered by Tim’s reminder. Voices from PEW were loud and livid in her ears. One voice in particular. Liz ran for the stairs.

Tim joined her as the site loaded, and Liz began to scroll through threads where the Shoemaker had weighed in.

She looked up from the machine. “This might sound like a leap.”

Tim folded his arms. “I’m all about leaps.”

Liz nodded. “Okay. I think this man—his online identity is the Shoemaker—is the same one who came here. There’s something about his voice. It’s very precise. And he seemed to sense things about me, just like he figures stuff out about people on the site.”

Tim peered down at the screen. “What the hell is a shoemaker?”

“Somebody who makes shoes?”

“Other than that,” he said, suppressing a grin.

Liz surprised herself with another small smile back. “I have no idea.”

“Let me give this to Mackenzie, too. See if he discovers anything. Can you get me the link and Paul’s password?”

Liz opened a different window and entered the information, clicking Send and speaking with a bitter clip to her tone. “This email will come from Paul. If he’s checking his account, wherever he is, he’ll know I’m getting close.”

THE SNATCHING

“I
don’t want to go to school,” Cody whimpered.

“Oh, Bun,” Abby said sleepily. She was staggering between the coffeepot on the counter and the cereal box in the cupboard. One kind of cereal. Bill used to have her buy ten.

The scarcity wasn’t only a function of Abby’s reduced standard of living, it was also a feeling of kinship with the people who would soon be housing Cody and herself. Americans were used to staggering numbers of things, Abby included, of course. But when you had to start from scratch as she would soon be doing, growing, harvesting, and ultimately contending with how everything broke down, then one variety was enough. Of cereal and most everything else.

Whether they ate French toast or cereal, however, the morning routine was turning out to be surprisingly hard on both her and Cody. The earliness of the hour, the endless array of tasks it took to get one little boy off to school. Wake him up, impart some form of nourishment, make sure an adequate lunch was packed. Check and see if a permission slip, form, or piece of homework was missing while deciding on an outfit, tracking down the inevitable wayward sock/jacket/shoe, all before getting to the bottom of the hill in time for the bus to come around the corner. By the time Abby had squired Cody up those three ridged steps, she felt as if she had lived four lifetimes.

And now this.

Complaints about the point of the whole enterprise.

The complaints seemed to be increasing in volume and duration. By the end of the week, Abby had a feeling she’d be limp, sweating with her attempts at persuasion.

Unless they were gone by then. Please, let them be gone by then.

The nail-gun precision of Bill’s routine would’ve prevented any such arguments. But then, the nail-gun precision had also left them both punctured and bleeding.

“Mama?” Cody was shaking more flakes into his bowl.

“Yes, Bun?”

“I’m supposed to get dressed now.”

Abby looked at the clock on the thirty-dollar microwave. Cody was right.

Wicket Road was mean and curving, and Earl had always hated it. They included it on his route because he was the most experienced driver in the fleet—a nice way of saying he was the
oldest
driver in the fleet—and so they figured he could handle it. And he could. But that didn’t mean he liked it. It was September now and frost laced the shoulders most mornings. Earl kept to the middle, which meant that whenever a car appeared he had to edge over onto one of the sharp bends. He liked to be courteous to other vehicles; besides, he’d never get into a game of chicken with kids on board. Earl used to feel completely in command of his ride, keeping it steady at the steepest juncture of a switchback like another man held the reins on a stallion. But that feeling had been receding on him. Now Earl was weightily aware of what he held in check. An eleven-ton vehicle that could go hurtling down the mountain as easily as a leaf blew away in the wind.

He wasn’t sleeping well these days. Woke up sweaty and gasping, the missus stirring beside him. He had to make water, but he couldn’t make water, and it kept him awake all night after that. He and the missus were both tired out. For the first time, Earl began to consider retirement. He’d always said he would drive his route one day, die the next. But he didn’t have a good feeling about this year. He started bargaining with something he had never believed in.

Let us make it through this year. Me and the kids. And then I’ll let one of the young bucks take over my route, and the hellish Wicket Road
.

He didn’t want to let the missus see him uneasy so he stopped going home between runs. The middle of the day used to be the best part of his job, that and getting to know the children. When they were young, kids themselves really, he and the missus would make love right in the afternoon. And even once they were older, and neither of them had the appetite anymore, the core of Earl’s day gave them a chance to talk, catch up before the exhaustion of the evening was upon them.

“Refill, Earl?”

The waitress behind the flecked countertop paused by his cup.

Earl brought a napkin to his mouth. “No, thanks, Audrey. Time for me to be going.”

Audrey looked at the round clock on the wall. “School day over already?”

“Seems it gets earlier every year, don’t it?”

“I’ll say. If my Petey had been let out now when he was school age, I wouldn’t have earned enough to feed him.”

Earl made sure to leave a generous tip by his plate. He went to the lot behind the Crescent Diner and started up his bus.

The bus was loaded; they were on their way. Behind Earl’s seat, the noise was reaching headache level. Afternoons were loud, mornings quiet, the kids disbelieving that another day had come around.

“Hey, hold it down back there, okay?” Earl called out good-naturedly.

No one answered, of course.

Earl thought to ask the kids sometimes,
How do you think this bus gets you where you need to go?
Most of them wouldn’t have a reply. But that was his job. To get them to school and back home so seamlessly they didn’t even have to think about it.

He didn’t mind the volume actually. He tried to do his part in keeping everyone to the code of conduct the board had set, but in truth, the noise faded into the background for him. Engaged in the act of driving, Earl’s doubts tended to ebb away, drowned out by the engine
and the laughter. The children’s shouts and cries told him that life couldn’t be the dread, lonely battle he had started to picture, not if the kids were this happy and unseeing.

Although maybe they were happy
because
they were unseeing. That hadn’t occurred to him before, and it didn’t help his mood. For all of his adult life, Earl had been the unseen, unheard companion to children, most of them now grown and in the muddy midpoints of their lives. Where did that leave him?

He made the turn onto Wicket Road.

A kid hurled a balled-up jacket; Earl caught sight of it in the mirror.

“Uh-uh,” he called out as the owner of the jacket started to stand up. “Sit. You can pick that up when you get off the bus.”

The kid obeyed.

The switchbacks were upon him now, but a car was coming around the bend. Earl pulled over to the side of the road. At least the scum of frost had melted under the midday sun. Shoulder didn’t feel as slick as it had this morning. Earl waited for the car to pass.

But the car didn’t pass. It stopped.

It was a little green sports car, or what passed for a sports car these days. Nothing muscley or strong.

A man got out, approaching the bus.

He didn’t walk up to Earl’s window, but headed over to the other side, where the door was. Earl frowned. He stood and took a look down the aisle. The kids hadn’t noticed anything amiss and were making use of the pause to shimmy up as high as their loose seatbelts—really only a nod to buckling—would allow. Taking quick, furtive peeks behind them, trading punches with their friends.

The man stood before the accordion door, separated only by a barrier of glass. Earl peered through his windshield and saw that the sports car blocked the bus’s access to the road.

Some instinct made him lock the door. He couldn’t recall ever doing that before in the course of his career. He hadn’t even been sure the mechanism would operate, and he wondered how it would hold if put to any sort of test.

“Help you?” he called out.

“Can you open up?” the man said.

“Sorry,” Earl replied. “Short of time. Got a busload of kids to get home.”

“I know that.” The man raised his voice. “This won’t take too long.”

Now the kids were starting to become aware, not fooling around as much and craning their heads to see what might be going on in front.

“Why don’t you tell me what you need?” Earl chose the word carefully.
Need
, not
want
. Make this man think Earl was taking him seriously.

“I’ll be happy to,” the man said. “I’d just rather do it face-to-face.”

“I’m sorry,” Earl said after a moment. “I can’t do that.”

The man squinted at him, but sunlight glinted off the glass, blocking sight of his features. Then he stepped out of the glare, and Earl saw his eyes.

“Can I ask you to move your car?” Earl said, hoping the quaver in his voice couldn’t be heard. Good God, he really was an old man.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “I can’t do that.”

Earl caught the eerie echo of his own words. It seemed to escalate things somehow, confirm that this wasn’t just a slightly out-of-the-ordinary encounter. It held the potential for something bad, which Earl could feel swinging slowly, like the heavy bag at the gym.

Without revealing what he was doing, Earl put his hand beneath the dash and reached for his radio. Also not something he’d ever had cause to do in his thirty-plus-year career.

“This is Earl,” he said, low, when it crackled to life. “I got a situation here on Wicket Road.”

A spurt of static, then: “What kind of situation, four-twenty-oh?”

“Don’t know for sure. Vehicle blocking my path. Manned vehicle. The driver won’t move.”

“Can you get out and direct him to leave?”

Earl hesitated. “Don’t know that I want to do that.”

The man was trying to peer inside the bus, but the descending sun blocked his vision. He seemed to catch sight of Earl, though, or else
just piece together what Earl must be doing, because he began pounding on the door with his fist. The bus shook.

In the rear, one of the children screamed, while others started to laugh. Some began banging on their own windows.

Earl turned in their direction.

“Quiet,” he commanded. “Settle down. Let me take care of this.”

The children were still straining to see, but they quit making any noise.

Outside the doors, the man took out a handgun.

Earl registered the sight with a single jolt of fear, then weary resignation.

So this is what it’s come to
, he said to the being he’d never believed in. Yep. Something bad was coming down the pike. He’d known it for a while now, hadn’t he?

“Four-twenty-oh, are you clear?” whoever was on call at the bus yard asked.

“Negative,” Earl said. “Not clear. This is an emergency situation. Repeat. Emergency. Man with a gun trying to board. Send the police.” He spoke hushed and fast so as not to alert the children, who at least for now hadn’t yet seen the gun.

Earl clicked off the radio. He didn’t want it putting out blurps of static or demands for information. There was nothing anyone at radio’s distance could do for them now.

“I want my son,” the man was saying. “If you send him out, nobody gets hurt. If you don’t, then I kill people, one by one, till I get my son.” A pause. “You’ll be last.”