Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (30 page)

Gaul nodded. “But I expect her to get closer, in the end. A lot closer.”

“What makes you say that?” Dryden asked.

Holly answered before Gaul could. “Under questioning in El Sedero, Rachel made her intentions toward me very clear. She has no interest in making me commit suicide. Remember how locking works: I would actually
want
to kill myself, in that final moment. That’s no good, for her.” Holly’s voice almost cracked on the next part. “Rachel wants to kill me.
Really
kill me. She wants to be looking me right in the eyes at the end.”

A silence fell over the huge room.

“I’m not naive, you know,” Holly said. “I know what I’m volunteering for.”

She went quiet again.

“That’s it for the briefing,” Gaul said. “We put you two in the farmhouse and you stay there. Holly’s employer in Amarillo will be given the address and a fake explanation for her departure. Rachel will easily get that information once she’s … herself again. Once her memory comes back. Beyond that, we wait.”

“Rachel’s going to see through that setup like it’s cling wrap,” Dryden said. “She’s going to know the farmhouse is a trap.”

“Yes,” Gaul said. “She was always going to find out anyway. When she’s close enough to lock the two of you, she’ll hear your thoughts. It would be impossible for you to hide why you’re really there.”

“So why the hell would she go for it?” Dryden asked.

“Maybe she won’t,” Gaul said, “but I expect her to. This time around she’ll
know
it’s a trap. She can watch for its teeth. Drones, for example—you can spot them with the right equipment, which she and Audrey can probably get. So those are out. Knowing it’s a trap may give Rachel confidence. She might think she can outsmart us.”

“She might be right,” Dryden said.

Gaul simply nodded.

“And Audrey’s going to just let her take this risk?” Dryden asked.

“Do you really suppose Audrey’s in charge of her?” Gaul said. “That she and Sandra were still calling the shots, after all these years? Here are three people: Two of them can hear thoughts across a room; the third can make anyone in the nearest mile do anything she can imagine. Over time, who do you think would emerge as the alpha?”

Dryden thought about that. It clashed so vividly with his own understanding of Rachel that it hadn’t even occurred to him.

“Don’t assume you really know her,” Gaul said. “We know what the real Rachel wants with Holly. As far as how she’ll feel about you, don’t even try to guess.”

The real Rachel.

Seeing the effect of that notion on him, Holly stood from her chair. “I’m like you,” she said. “I know what she would’ve been, if none of these things had ever happened to her. I believe she can be that way again.”

“Then let’s go,” Dryden said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Marcus Till rolled his old hatchback to the end of his driveway, stopped at the turnout, and stared back at the trailer he had called home for all his adult life. The place wasn’t much to look at, but it was his. He watched it and wondered if he would ever see it again, and then he pulled onto the county two-lane and headed east toward town, and didn’t look back.

He was forty-one years old. He had lived all of those forty-one years right here in the little backwater of Clover, Wyoming, ten miles from the somewhat larger backwater of Red City. For much of the early part of his life, he had struggled to stay out of trouble. The trouble had been brawling, mostly, always a result of drink or bad manners—the one led to the other, of course. Around thirty he’d left all that behind; you could only wake up in so many jail cells before you started to do some thinking. He had gone to work for his uncle in the woodshop, making custom cabinets and furniture for building contractors over in Cheyenne. Something in the work had appealed to Marcus at once. He liked putting in a day’s effort and having a new thing to show for it at the end, a desk or maybe a bookshelf. He liked to stay alone in the shop after hours, turn on this light or that one, and see how a newly finished piece gleamed from different angles. He had expected the rest of his life to play out on this clean, simple track he’d gotten it onto. He wasn’t going to be rich, but he also wasn’t going to wake up in jail ever again, and that was fine with him. Everything had been fine, really, until just shy of a year ago when the Ghost had gotten into his head. All these rotten months later—months of denying and resisting and finally giving in like a beaten dog with his snout turned down—here he was, following his orders. What else could he do?

They were strange, the orders he’d gotten today. They were always strange—and now and again they were as god-awful as anything Marcus could imagine—but these were especially unusual. Until today, the Ghost’s commands had always involved doing things right here in town, give or take a few miles. Now, out of the blue, the voice had commanded him to get in his car, get on the freeway, and head for Kansas. The instructions had specified a particular motel in a particular town, where he was to check in and stay and await further orders.

What those orders would be, he couldn’t guess. They’d be nothing good—he knew that much. Still, he would follow them. God help him, he would follow them.

CHAPTER FORTY

Just before midnight Dryden put aside the book he’d been reading and stepped out onto the farmhouse’s porch. The breeze coming in off the fields was warm and humid. He went to the top of the steps and looked out at the night. In front of the house, the land fell away in a long slope to the road, two hundred yards south. The driveway cut straight down the middle, the fields on either side lying fallow and choked with short grass. The same held for the land on all sides of the place: a vast zone of open visibility stretching at least six hundred feet in each direction, without so much as a tree growing in it. No doubt this geometry had been part of Gaul’s reason for choosing the site.

The house itself was probably a hundred years old, biding the decades out here in the sticks while Topeka grew north to meet it. It wasn’t far off—the busy street Gaul had spoken of lay directly south, running east-west across the near horizon like a scar of neon and sodium-lit parking lots. Rachel could be there right now; Dryden and Holly had been in the farmhouse for ten days.

In the darkness to Dryden’s right, the porch swing creaked in the wind. The swing was a big rough-beam construction, maybe as old as the house itself. He stood listening to it and watching the fields a while longer, then went back inside.

Holly was in her room, asleep. For the sake of staying vigilant, they’d staggered their schedules so they were never both sleeping at the same time. Gaul had given them very few instructions when they’d said good-bye to him, but among them were
Stay close to each other
and
Stay alert.
He’d given them each a cell phone, with his own number on the contact list.
The first sign of anything happening, you call me,
he’d said. That’d been it.

Dryden went to the kitchen. The big pantry leading off of it was stocked with easily two months’ worth of nonperishable food. In the attached garage were three giant chest freezers, also chock-full. There were two vehicles in the garage as well, a Ford Escape and a Chevy Malibu. Keys had been left in both ignitions, though Gaul had said nothing about leaving the place. Dryden had started both vehicles to make sure they ran and had found each to have a full tank of gas.

Holly’s laptop was on the counter, plugged in and charging. Gaul hadn’t objected to her bringing it, or even using it to stay in touch with friends and colleagues; it was a way of maintaining some semblance of normalcy, for what it was worth.

Earlier in the evening Holly had used the laptop to check e-mail. Afterward she’d closed it and gone out to sit on the porch swing, and through the screen door Dryden thought he’d heard her crying. She’d stayed out there for over an hour and gone to bed soon after coming back in.

Dryden slid the laptop aside and started making a sandwich. He got a brick of cheese from the fridge, took a chef’s knife from a block on the counter, and cut two slices. He held the knife a moment longer, studying its edge, its point. What would it be like if Rachel locked him right now? How would it feel to suddenly, inexplicably want this knife in his throat? To want it badly enough to put the tip under his Adam’s apple and shove. He set it in the sink and went back to making the sandwich.

*   *   *

Holly woke four hours later. Dryden went to his room and lay down. He had the window open to the screen, and lay listening to the sounds of crickets and katydids and the wind sliding over the grass. He began to drift, and in the vague space near sleep Rachel came to him. They were sitting in the dark town house again, and she was leaning against him, warm and shapeless and fragile. He tried not to move. Tried to keep the moment from changing as long as he could.

*   *   *

“That’s Arcturus,” Holly said.

It was two nights later. They were sitting side by side on the porch steps, looking at the stars. Even with the city’s outskirts so close, the night sky here was almost ink black.

“You can’t tell, but Arcturus is a giant star,” Holly said. “If you put our sun next to it, it would look like a cherry beside a beach ball.”

“You’ve studied astronomy?” Dryden asked.

Holly shook her head. “I knew someone who wanted to study it. She told me a lot of these little facts.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“What was Rachel like when you were with her?” she asked.

He considered his answer for a while. “Like a reminder that it’s worth it to be alive.”

Holly pulled her feet up to the step beneath the one she sat on. She hugged her knees. “It’s a hell of a thing to be truly sorry for something. Sorry with every part of yourself. Do you think she could ever accept that from me?”

Dryden heard needfulness in her voice. He wanted to tell her it was possible. Instead he pictured that last moment between Rachel and her mother, and said nothing.

The wind picked up. Holly shuddered and pulled her knees closer. Dryden looked at her. Her bangs hung past her temples. Her eyes were almost shut. Something in her vulnerability commanded his attention.

She looked up and met his eyes. For a few seconds she seemed almost afraid of him, the way he was looking at her. She was caught off guard, at least. Then she took a deep breath, and her eyes changed. Not afraid—intense. And still needful.

A second later they were kissing. Hands on each other’s backs, grabbing, clinging. Her knees dropping out of the way, her body turning, mashing against his as hard as she could manage. Her mouth alive with her excitement, her breathing accelerating to match his. They were moving, then. Pushing up past the steps, sprawling on the old wood planking of the porch, hands going to shirt buttons, fumbling, pulling. He found her bra clasp and got it undone. She pulled her mouth back from his just long enough to speak.

“I haven’t done this in a long time. If I seem—”

Dryden shook his head. “Same here. You don’t even want to know.”

Kissing again. Shirts coming off. Skin against skin with nothing in the way. Jesus, how had he waited this long to do this with someone again?

She pulled back once more, their foreheads still touching. “Is this a good idea?”

“It’s a great idea.”

“It’s not really staying alert.”

“It’s really staying close to each other.”

She breathed a laugh. Pushed in again. Kissed him. Her hands traced the contours of his ribcage. His sides. Moving downward—

Dryden opened his eyes. He pulled his face back six inches. All his excitement receded like hot water down a tub drain. His thoughts focused.

Holly reacted. “What?”

“Twelve days, and there hasn’t been any kind of spark between us. Not a thing.”

She looked confused. “It seems like there’s one now.”

“You’re not even close to my type,” Dryden said.

“Well—okay, thanks. Jesus Christ—”

“Think about what I’m saying,” Dryden said.

For another half second she remained baffled. Then it hit her like a shove.

“Oh shit,” she whispered.

Dryden nodded. “It’s not us. It’s her. She’s here.”

*   *   *

Dryden got out his phone even as they pulled their shirts back on. He brought up the contact list and tapped Gaul’s number. As it began to ring, he turned and scanned the grassy field south of the house. Holly was already doing the same thing.

It was almost pointless, though. In the near-total lack of moonlight, the terrain lay deep in darkness.

The call rang a second time. Then a third.

Sensing the delay, Holly turned and looked at him.

Four rings.

Five.

“What if she already got to Gaul?” Holly asked. Her eyes were wide at the implications. “What if he’s dead and there’s no plan anymore? No help coming?”

Six rings.

Seven.

Dryden turned and crossed to the front door, keeping the phone at his ear. Holly followed him into the house.

Eight rings.

Dryden hung up and pocketed the phone; Gaul could call back as easily as he could answer.

They stood in the middle of the living room, all indoor lights doused, the night visible through the windows of every room that surrounded it.

“She locked you and then me,” Holly said. “Right? The way you looked at me on the steps—you felt it first, and I didn’t. And then I did.”

Dryden nodded. “She can only lock one person at a time, but—I guess with something like that, you give people a push and they’ll probably keep going.”

“It worked.”

“Yeah.”

She went to the screen door and looked out again. “She wanted us distracted for a long time. Long enough for her to cross the open space to this house.”

Holly turned and faced him.

She wants to be looking me right in the eyes at the end.

Dryden nodded, seeing her point.

All the same, something about the situation didn’t add up. Rachel had locked them each just long enough to turn them on to each other, but she wasn’t locking them now. Why not? If she wanted them preoccupied while she herself approached the farmhouse, she could’ve just
kept
locking them, alternating from one to the other, and made them sit on the floor helplessly. That would’ve been the surest move. So why hadn’t Rachel done it? Dryden had no answer to that. Which put him on edge.