The Falling Away (24 page)

Quinn watched the Mountaineer turn east toward Lewistown, then approached the front doors of the convenience store and restaurant.

She went to the long counter on the restaurant side of the building, sat on the stool nearest the convenience store cash register, ordered coffee, and kept her ears open, catching conversations around her.

Within a few minutes, she overheard the exact kind of conversation she wanted. Two truckers standing in line at the store cash register were swapping stories of what they were hauling, and one of them said he was on the way to switch out reefer trailers at the HIVE. He'd just popped in here for a quick pack of smokes, because he always felt like he needed a few extra puffs any time he was surrounded by those weird crunchy granola types at the HIVE.

Quinn dropped a few bucks on the counter to cover the coffee, then casually walked outside into the wind and looked around. Most of the trucks were parked around the back of the restaurant and convenience store, just to the south.

About half a dozen rigs sat on the snow-packed gravel of the parking area, two of them with their diesel engines running, a steady fog of white spewing from their exhaust stacks.

One of the idling rigs was pulling an unmarked refrigerator trailer.

Bingo. Even truck drivers left their vehicles running in Montana winters. And as she'd hoped, it had a small sleeper cab on it, meaning she might not have to ride in the trailer.

She went to the truck, took a quick look around to make sure no one was watching, and hauled herself up the passenger side, opening the door and pulling herself in. The sleeper cab behind the truck's front seats was even smaller than she'd imagined—just a tiny bunk. But the driver had a gaudy NASCAR-themed curtain hanging between the sleeper and the front cab. She pushed aside the curtain and folded herself behind the driver's seat.

Within a few minutes she was calm and still, tuned in to the amorphous shapes around her, feeling the pressure inside her body and outside her body beginning to equalize.

A surprising feeling, considering what she was about to do. The first rule of her kind was: you never approach an infested community. Your anonymity was sacrosanct, and if you ever went directly into an infestation, that anonymity would be compromised. You would leave a trail, no matter how careful you were. You would perhaps even become a carrier, because no one was immune to that.

But this was all new territory. Dylan Runs Ahead was a chosen; that's why Li had acted so quickly after having him in HIVE's grasp. If she could take out Dylan before Li made the switch, she could bring down the whole colony.

Maybe.

On the other side of the curtain, she heard the driver open the door on the big diesel and slide behind the wheel. He shifted into gear, let out the clutch, and began inching toward the highway that would take her back to the HIVE a few miles south. Once the truck was inside the compound and ready to switch trailers, she could slip into the HIVE unnoticed. She was quite sure of this.

She hadn't been able to bring her whole toolbox, but the gun inside the snowsuit bit into her hip. She welcomed the pain. It was like an embedded object, and it helped relieve the pressure.

A few minutes later she felt the truck slow and make a right-hand turn, then come to a stop. They were at the HIVE, in the transfer center outside the compound itself.

She listened as the driver opened his door and slid down from the cab, leaving his rig running. Quickly, Quinn put on the snowmobiling helmet and powered on its internal transmitter, tuned to the frequency that carried HIVE's internal communications. After a few minutes she heard a guard call for a loader to meet an empty reefer trailer at the egg warehouse. Moments later the door to the cab opened again, and the driver slid back into his seat. He shifted into gear and edged into the HIVE. After a few more minutes he came to a shuddering stop with a hiss of the brakes, then backed in his trailer and climbed down from the cab of the truck.

Quinn closed her eyes, waited a few moments, then unfolded herself from behind the seat. She pushed aside the NASCAR curtain and peered out into the cab, then slid into the passenger seat and unlatched the door. A few seconds later she slipped lightly to the ground. She walked around the front of the truck, nodded at the driver, who stood there smoking a cigarette. He nodded back, more than used to seeing helmeted figures in snowmobile suits around the HIVE compound.

Quinn began walking west on the circular road, making her way toward the snowmobile storage.

Easy. So far.

A few minutes later she slid into an empty space in the storage shed. Certainly she would have shown up on security cams, but to anyone casually observing, she would look like any of the dozen or so similarly clad people in the community.

Okay, now for the touchy part. She keyed the microphone inside the helmet and spoke. “Frank, I need some assistance here,” she said, then clicked off the mike and waited for a response.

She'd heard people call in to Frank the day before, when she'd been here in the guise of a pheasant hunter. Hopefully, Frank was on shift again today; she hadn't heard anything since getting inside the compound.

A few moments later a voice answered on the line. “Yeah, this is Frank. That you, Jennifer?”

Jennifer. Yes, she'd heard Jennifer on the radio the day before too. She closed her eyes, hoped Jennifer wasn't listening, and keyed the mike again. “Yeah,” she answered. “Can you give me a status on the two who checked in?”

“You mean the guys in detox?”

Detox. Interesting. “Yeah.”

“Don't have anything new from Turbine 32 since a note from Jeff this morning. Why do you need it, anyway?”

Turbine 32. Turbine 32. She'd studied maps of the HIVE compound, but she had no real way of knowing which turbine was number 32.

“Scheduling some maintenance for DermaGen,” she said.

“I hear you,” Frank answered. “Let me send out Sam to do a check now.”

Quinn smiled. Sam. She filed that away in her memory for a few seconds. “Great.” She was flying by the seat of her pants, but so far, so good. She'd heard a lot of chatter about status checks and DermaGen the day before.

After a few minutes she heard a snowmobile start outside the shed, rev a few times, then start to move away. She jumped to her feet, left the shed, and found her way to the nearest snowmobile. About a hundred yards away and moving fast, she saw the other snowmobile receding from her.

She slid onto the snowmobile, thumbed the ignition, and revved her own machine. With any luck, she was about to be led to Dylan Runs Ahead.

After about five minutes, the snowmobile ahead of her came to the base of one of the turbines and stopped. The driver climbed off the sled, then turned when he heard Quinn's own machine approaching. Okay, time for some more maneuvering.

She brought her snowmobile to a stop, turned it off, held up a hand. The other driver slid off his helmet, looked at her quizzically.

She slid off her own helmet, gave her best smile. “Sam!” she said enthusiastically. “How've you been?”

“Good,” Sam said. He hesitated, not wanting to ask the question who she was. After all, she knew his name, and there were only a few hundred people in the HIVE community itself; he should know her name. Quinn saw all of this in his eyes, so she pushed her advantage.

“Need to do a transfer,” she said.

“A transfer? Nancy just came on shift a few hours ago.”

Nancy. Remember that. “Yeah,” she agreed. “But Frank told me to transfer her.”

Sam didn't seem convinced. “Transfer her with who?”

“Hmm?”

“If you're transferring, where's the other nurse?”

Okay, that lie didn't work. Think quick. “Well, it's me, of course,” she said. “Who else would it be?”

“Something weird going on here,” Sam said.

“I know,” she said. “We better check up on 'em inside, make sure everything is okay.”

“No, I'm just gonna make a call to Frank,” he said, starting to put on his helmet.

In that moment, she had to act. She sprang at Sam, slipped behind him, put her arm around his neck before he could put on his helmet, applied the choke hold. He thrashed for about twenty seconds, then passed out, his brain starved for the blood-rich oxygen blocked by her arm hold.

Okay, time for Plan B. With any luck, nothing she'd just done had been captured on camera. But Quinn wasn't counting on luck.

She slipped her arms under Sam's shoulders and dragged him toward a door at the base of the giant turbine. Above, its giant blades moved slowly in the wind.

She found a button by the door and pressed it. A call button, she hoped.

“Yes?” a voice answered. Nancy, she hoped.

Quinn did her best to appear frantic; she kept her back to the door and stooped over Sam's motionless body, acting as if she were trying to revive him.

“Oh, Nancy,” she said, putting on her best act. “Something happened to Sam.”

“What is it?”

“He . . . I don't know, he just passed out. Maybe you can look at him.”

There was a pause, and then the speaker on the door activated again. “I'm not really supposed to—”

“You don't want him to die, do you? I think he may be having a heart attack.”

A few seconds later the door clicked, and Quinn grabbed at it, swinging it toward her. Inside, she watched as Nancy made her way up some concrete stairs.

“I don't know what happened,” Quinn said as Nancy stooped over Sam's body. “You check on him, and I'll go call Frank.”

Quinn bounded down the stairs, leaving Nancy behind.

39

Dylan continued to drift in and out of consciousness after Li left; groggily, he was aware of one of the nurses—Nancy or Lisa, he wasn't sure which one—coming in and checking his vitals a few times.

Eventually his head began to clear a bit, and a renewed sense of clarity started to settle. An odd, disconcerting sense of clarity, almost like one he'd never experienced before. A freedom he'd not felt since . . . since he'd lost Joni, he decided.

You didn't lose me
, she said inside his mind.
I'm still here
.

But you're not real. You're just part of my . . . imagination
.

“Dylan?” It was the nurse. Nancy, yes.

“What?” He looked, but it wasn't the nurse. Some other woman. A woman he recognized from . . . somewhere. But his mind was too fuzzy, too drugged, to recall where.

“Time for a transfer.”

“A transfer to where?”

“You're drugged out of your mind, aren't you?” she asked.

“Unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately.”

She handed him the helmet she held in her hands. “Do me a favor, Dylan. Put on this helmet.”

He did as instructed.

“Okay,” she said. “Now, I'm going to key the mike, and when I do, you're going to say, ‘This is Sam, Status Check Clear at Turbine 32.' ”

He nodded.

“Say it once for me,” she said.

“This is Sam, Status Check Clear at Turbine 32.”

“Good. I'm going to turn on the mike now, and you say it just like that.” She gave him a thumbs-up, and he spoke, reciting the line a second time.

“Good,” she said, pulling off his helmet. “Now, it's time for us to get going.”

“Get going where?”

“I'll have to tell you on the way.”

She grabbed his hand; Dylan began putting one foot in front of the other, made his way to the stairs, climbing. He stumbled on a few steps, but the woman caught him, propped him up, urged him to keep climbing.

Outside, he stood, swaying in the breeze a few moments. The nurse was out there with some other man, checking his pulse or temperature or something. What was the nurse's name again? He couldn't remember. It was an odd feeling, not being able to remember these little details. But a nice feeling, too, in a way.

The nurse rose, started to say something, but then the woman in the snowmobile suit slid behind her, did some kind of strange hold on her. After several seconds, the nice nurse slumped to the ground beside the other guy Dylan didn't know.

It was funny to watch, actually. Everything was infinitely funny now. The driver shoved past him, slipped onto the snowmobile, keyed the ignition; the whine of the electric motor revved high, then died down to a dull drone.

A dull drone. Ha. That's what he was becoming now, wasn't it? A drone for HIVE. If only people on the outside knew how fitting that word was when they tossed it around.

The driver motioned to him, so he slipped onto the snowmobile behind her; instantly, the machine shot away from the base of the turbine and out across the white fields.

Dylan noticed the snow sparkling in the sunshine, like bright, clear diamonds. He hadn't noticed that about the snow on the ride out to the detox center. Or maybe he had. He couldn't remember.

They continued toward the HIVE compound for a few minutes until they were about half a mile away. Then the snowmobile shifted abruptly, turning away from the HIVE and veering toward the north. The sudden shift caused the snowmobile to tilt dangerously for a few seconds, as Dylan had been caught off guard without leaning into the turn.

“Hey,” Dylan said, surprised. “Don't you—” Then he stopped, realizing the driver couldn't hear him anyway.

The driver accelerated, pushing the snowmobile as fast as it would go. After several seconds, the driver applied the brakes, and they came to a sliding stop beside a barbed wire fence. On the other side of the fence a white pickup sat, silent.

The driver vaulted cleanly off the snowmobile, removed her helmet. “Okay, Dylan, let's get going.”

After a few hazy seconds, Dylan recognized the face, the crazy, mangled hair, the cut on the forehead now healing. It was the woman who had chased him and Webb on the highway. The bounty hunter sent by Krunk.

He still didn't know her name, though.