Strange Highways (43 page)

The Labrador was probably excessively cautious. His condition was understandable, but they had to get moving. More forcefully, Meg said, “Doofus, get in here, right now.”

He entered the barn hesitantly, sniffing the air and floor, came to her with a sudden urgency, and jumped into the backseat of the station wagon.

She closed the door, went around to the other side, and got in behind the wheel. “We’ll drive back to Biolomech,” she said. “We’ll tell them we’ve found what they’re looking for.”

“What’s wrong with Doofus?”

In the backseat, the dog was moving from one side window to the other, peering out at the barn, making thin, anxious sounds.

“He’s just being Doofus,” Meg said.

Huddled in his seat, angled awkwardly to accommodate his cast, Tommy appeared to be younger than ten, so frightened and vulnerable.

“It’s okay,” Meg said. “We’re out of here.”

She thrust the key in the ignition, turned it. Nothing. She tried again. The jeep would not start.

7

AT THE HIGH FENCE ALONG THE NORTHEAST FLANK OF THE BIOLOMECH property, Ben Parnell crouched to examine the rat-size tunnel in the half-frozen earth. Several of his men gathered around him, and one directed the beam of a powerful flashlight on the patch of ground in question. Luckily the hole was in a place where the wind scoured most of the snow away instead of piling it in drifts, but the searchers had still not spotted it until they’d made a second circuit of the perimeter.

Steve Harding raised his voice to compete with the wind: “Think they’re in there, curled up in a burrow?”

“No,” Ben said, his breath smoking in the arctic air. If he’d thought that the rats were in a burrow at the end of this entrance tunnel, he would not have been crouched in front of the hole, where one of them might fly out at him, straight at his face.

Hostile, John Acuff had said. Exceedingly hostile.

Ben said, “No, they weren’t digging a permanent burrow. They came up somewhere on the other side of this fence, and they’re long gone now.’

A tall, lanky young man in a county sheriff’s department coat joined the group. “One of you named Parnell?”

“That’s me,” Ben said.

“I’m Joe Hockner.” He was half shouting to be heard above the skirling wind. “Sheriff’s office. I brought the bloodhound you asked for.”

“Terrific.”

“What’s happenin’ here?”

“In a minute,” Ben said, returning his attention to the tunnel that went under the fence.

“How do we know it was them that dug here?” asked George Yancy, another of Ben’s men. “Could’ve been some other animal.”

“Bring that light closer,” Ben said.

Steve Harding shone the beam directly into the five-inch-diameter tunnel.

Squinting, leaning closer, Ben saw what appeared to be snippets of white thread adhering to the moist earth just far enough inside the hole to be undisturbed by the wind. He took off his right glove, reached carefully into the mouth of the tunnel, and plucked up two of the threads. White hairs.

8

TOMMY AND THE DOG STAYED IN THE STATION WAGON WHILE MEG GOT out with the shotgun—and with a flashlight from the glove compartment—to open the hood. The light revealed a mess of torn and tangled wires inside the engine compartment; all the lines from the spark plugs to the distributor cap were severed. Holes had been gnawed in the hoses; oil and coolants dripped onto the barn floor under the jeep.

She was no longer just scared. She was flat-out terrified. Yet she had to conceal her fear to avoid panicking Tommy.

She closed the hood, went around to the passenger’s side, and opened the door. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s dead.”

“It was all right a while ago, when we came home.”

“Yes, well, but it’s dead now. Come on, let’s go.”

He allowed her to help him out of the car, and when they were face to face, he said, “The rats got to it, didn’t they?”

“Rats? The rats are in the house, yes, and they’re ugly things, like I said, but-“

Interrupting her before she could lie to him, the boy said, “You’re trying not to show it, but you’re afraid of them, really afraid, which must mean they’re not just a little different from ordinary rats but a whole lot different, because you don’t scare easy, not you. You were scared when Dad died, I know you were, but not for long, you took charge real quick, you made me feel safe, and if Dad’s dying couldn’t make you fall to pieces, then I guess pretty much nothing can. But these rats from Biolomech, whatever they are,
they
scare you more than anything ever has.”

She hugged him tight, loving him so hard that it almost hurt—though she did not let go of the shotgun.

He said, “Mom, I saw the trap with the stick in it, and I saw the cereal in the sink all mixed up with the poison pellets, and I’ve been thinking. I guess one thing about these rats is … they’re awful smart, maybe because of something that was done to them at the lab, smarter than rats should ever be, and now they somehow zapped the jeep.”’

“They’re not smart enough. Not smart enough for us, skipper.”

“What’re we going to do?” he whispered.

She also whispered, though she had seen no rats in the barn and was not sure that they had remained after disabling the station wagon. Even if they were nearby, watching, she was certain that they could not understand English. Surely there were limits to what the people at Biolomech had done to these creatures. But she whispered anyway, “We’ll go back to the house-“

“But maybe that’s what they want us to do.”

“Maybe. But I’ve got to try to use the telephone.

“They’ll have thought of the phone,” he said.

“Maybe but probably not. I mean how smart can they
be?
”

“Smart enough to think of the jeep.”

9

BEYOND THE FENCE WAS A MEADOW APPROXIMATELY A HUNDRED YARDS across, and at the end of the meadow were woods.

The chance of finding the rats now was slim. The men fanned out across the field in teams of two and three, not sure what signs of their quarry could have survived the storm. Even in good weather, on a dry and sunny day, it would be virtually impossible to track animals as small as rats across open ground.

Ben Parnell took four men directly to the far side of the meadow, where they began searching the perimeter of the forest with the aid of the bloodhound. The dog’s name was Max. He was built low and broad, with huge ears and a comical face, but there was nothing funny about his approach to the case at hand: He was eager, serious. Max’s handler, Deputy Joe Hockner, had given the dog a whiff of the rats’ spoor from a jarful of grass and droppings that had been taken from their cage, and the hound hadn’t liked what he smelled. But the scent was apparently so intense and unusual that it was easy to follow, and Max was a game tracker, willing to give his best in spite of wind and snow.

Within two minutes the hound caught the scent in a clump of winter-dried brush. Straining at his leash, he pulled Hockner into the woods. Ben and his men followed.

10

MEG LET DOOFUS OUT OF THE STATION WAGON, AND THE THREE OF THEM headed toward the big open door of the barn, past which the storm wind drove whirling columns of snow like ghosts late for a haunting. The blizzard had accelerated, raising a noisy clatter on the roof as it tore off a few shingles and spun them away in the night. The rafters creaked, and the loft door chattered on loose hinges.

“Tommy, you’ll stay out on the porch, and I’ll go into the kitchen as far as the phone. If it’s out of order … we’ll walk the driveway to the county road and flag down a car.”

“No one’s going to be out in this storm.”

“Someone will be. A county snowplow or a cinder truck.”

He halted at the threshold of the open barn door. “Mom, it’s three quarters of a mile to Black Oak Road. I’m not sure I can walk that far with this cast, in this storm, not even with you helping. I’m already tired, and my good leg keeps buckling. Even if I can do it, it’ll take a long, long time.”

“We’ll make it,” she said, “and it doesn’t matter how long we take. I’m sure they won’t pursue us outside. We’re safe in the storm—safe from
them
, at least.” Then she remembered the sled. “I can pull you to the county road!”

“What? Pull me?”

She risked leaving Tommy with Doofus long enough to run back into the barn, to the north wall, where the boy’s sled—
Midnight Flyer
was the legend in script across the seat—hung on the wall beside a shovel, a hoe, and a leaf rake. Without putting down the Mossberg, she quickly unhooked the sled and carried it in one hand to the open door where Tommy waited.

“But, Mom, I’m too heavy to pull.”

“Haven’t I pulled you back and forth over this farm on at least a hundred snowy days?”

“Yeah, but that was years ago, when I was little.”

“You’re not so huge now, buckaroo. Come on.”

She was pleased that she had remembered the sled. She had one great advantage over this high-tech Hamlin plague: She was a mother with a child to protect, and that made her a force with which even Biolomech’s nightmares would find it hard to reckon.

She took the sled outside and helped him onto it.

He sat with his shoe-clad left foot braced against the guide bar. His right foot was covered with the cast except for his toes, and both his toes and the lower part of the cast were sheathed in a thick woolen sock that was now wet and half frozen; nevertheless, he managed to wedge even that foot into the space in front of the guide bar. When he held on to the sides of the sled with both hands, he was in no danger of falling off.

Doofus circled them anxiously as they got Tommy settled on the sled. Several times he barked at the barn behind them, but each time that Meg looked back, she saw nothing.

Picking up the sturdy nylon towrope, Meg prayed that when they got to the house the phone would work, that she would be able to call for help. She dragged Tommy across the long backyard. In some places the runners cut through the thin layer of snow, digging into frozen ground beneath, and the going was tough. In other places, however, where the snow was deeper or the ground icy, the sled glided smoothly enough to give her hope that, if they had to, they would be able to reach the county road before the relentless gales hammered her to her knees in exhaustion.

11

THE BRUSH ON THE FOREST FLOOR WAS NOT TOO DENSE, AND THE RATS evidently took advantage of deer trails to make greater speed, for the bloodhound plunged relentlessly forward, leading the searchers where the creatures had gone. Fortunately the interlaced evergreens kept most of the snow from sifting under the trees, which made their job easier and was a boon to the stumpy-legged dog. Ben expected Max to bay, for he had seen all the old jailbreak movies in which Cagney or Bogart had been pursued by baying hounds, but Max made a lot of chuffing and snuffling sounds, barked once, and did not bay at all.

They had gone a quarter of a mile from the Biolomech fence, stumbling on the uneven ground, frequently spooked by the bizarre shadows stirred by the bobbling beams of the flashlights, when Ben realized that the rats had not burrowed into the forest floor. If that had been their intention, they could have tunneled into the ground shortly after entering the cover of the trees. But they had raced on, searching for something better than a wild home, which made sense because they were
not
wild, far from it. They had been bred from generations of tame lab rats and lived all their lives in a cage, with food and water constantly available. They would be at a loss in the woods, even as smart as they were, so they would try to press ahead in hope of finding a human habitation to share, travel as far as possible before exhaustion and the deepening cold stopped them.

Cascade Farm.

Ben remembered the attractive woman in the jeep wagon: chestnut hair, almond-brown eyes, an appealing spatter of freckles. The boy in the backseat, his leg in a cast, had been nine or ten and had reminded Ben of his own daughter, Melissa, who had been nine when she had lost her hard-fought war with cancer. The boy had that look of innocence and vulnerability that Melissa had possessed and that had made it so hard for Ben to watch her decline. Peering at mother and son through the open car window, Ben had envied them the normal life he imagined they led, the love and sharing of a family unscathed by the whims of fate.

Now, crashing through the woods behind Deputy Hockner and the dog, Ben was seized by the horrible certainty that the rats—having escaped from Biolomech hours before the snow began to fall—had made it to Cascade Farm, the nearest human habitat, and that the family he had envied was in mortal danger. Lassiter. That was their name. With a surety almost psychic in intensity, Ben knew that the rats had taken up residence with the Lassiters.

Hostile, Acuff had said. Exceedingly hostile. Mindlessly, unrelentingly, demonically hostile.

“Hold up! Wait! Hold up!” he shouted.

Deputy Hockner reined in Max, and the search party came to a halt in a clearing encircled by wind-shaken pines. Explosive clouds of crystallized breath plumed from the nostrils and mouths of the men, and they all turned to look questioningly at Ben.

He said, “Steve, go back to the main gate. Load up a truck with men and get down to Cascade Farm. You know it?”

“Yeah, it’s the next place along Black Oak Road.”

“God help those people, but I’m sure the rats have gone there. It’s the only warm place near enough. If they didn’t stumble on Cascade Farm and take refuge there, then they’ll die in this storm—and I don’t think we’re lucky enough to count on the weather having done them in.”

“I’m on my way,” Steve said, turning back.

To Deputy Hockner, Ben said, “All right, let’s go. And let’s hope to God I’m wrong.”

Hockner relaxed the tension on Max’s leash. This time the hound bayed once, long and low, when he caught the rats’ scent.

12

BY THE TIME MEG DREW THE SLED ACROSS THE LONG YARD TO THE FOOT of the porch steps, her heart was thudding almost painfully, and her throat was raw from the frigid air. She was far less sanguine than she first had been about her ability to haul Tommy all the way out to the county road. The task might have been relatively easy after the storm had passed; however, now she was not just fighting the boy’s weight but the vicious wind as well. Furthermore, the sled’s runners had not been sanded, oil polished, and soaped in preparation for the season, so the rust on them created friction.