Your grandfather and one other guy.”
“Did this other guy, you know, could he smell things, too?”
“No, he was the smart guy. Cake would lead us to things, and the Professor would make sense of it.”
“Lead you to what things?”
I smiled at her. “Crazy stuff. The world is so much more, I don’t know, unstructured than you think.”
I drank the last of my coffee and took a stab at explaining it. “This is how Henry, the Professor, explained it to me. He said that people change the world by looking at it, “Pressure of Observation” he called it. We’re hardwired to expect certain things, like cause and effect and the steady passage of time for example.
“No matter what beliefs you may or may not have, we share a primal, unchanging expectation of the world based on how we perceive it. That being the case, as a species we dampen the world’s natural tendency toward unpredictability and a general disregard for what we think of as natural laws.
“And the more of us there are, the more we enforce our world view, and the more stable and predictable things become. So, fast forward to the last couple of centuries where we’ve multiplied and smothered the globe in our worldview, and things are pretty human friendly. Not completely, but close enough. This effect is tied to people, so in places that don’t have very many people, or places that are far away, even underground, that Pressure of Observation is pretty weak and things get a bit wild. You with me so far?”
“I think so, but for the record, this isn’t making you sound less crazy.”
“Fair enough. Now picture the world like a pond, frozen over in the winter. We’re on top making ice and thinking the surface is the whole world, when most of it is really underneath us, and it’s not frozen at all. We walk around right on the top edge of the world, confined to the smallest part, and we think we see it all.
“But, of course, sometimes there are cracks in the ice and things get out. Sometimes those cracks are natural, and sometimes people make them trying to fish for particular things. The world is bigger and stranger than you can imagine.”
“There are more things in heaven and Earth?”
“Pretty much.”
“And you and my grandfather used to find those things in the war.”
“Yep. Or at least the ones that the bad guys were involved with.”
“For the government.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t get old, and my grandfather could smell supernatural stuff, and it was all top secret. You are so full of shit.”
I shrugged into the uncomfortable silence.
Anne toyed with her fork, her eyes far away. “I hated him, you know. I mean, not now, but when I was growing up. I used to think he was deliberately sabotaging any chance of happiness that came my way. It was hard enough not having a dad and watching my mom work two jobs just to buy me clothes I was embarrassed to wear to school. But on the off chance that I did make friends, I could never do anything with them.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was always making me go to the range after school or to shooting competitions on the weekends. Sometimes we’d leave on Friday night, drive for hours to some tiny match in another state, and then get back just in time for school on Monday. He was completely obsessed.
“At first it was fun. I didn’t have a dad, but my grandfather was always there. He started teaching me to shoot when I was ten. It was our special time together, just him and me. After a while he got me coaches and started entering me in competitions, always talking about scholarships and going to the Olympics. After that, every time I wanted to go to the mall or have a sleepover or even go on a date, suddenly I was sacrificing my future.”
“Did it work? Get any scholarships?”
She looked away. “Of course not. I could have, I really was that good. Amazing, in fact. But after I finished high school I just snapped. I moved out, refused to go to college, dropped out of the circuit, pretty much the whole teen rebellion cliche. I even stopped speaking to my family. That really broke my mom’s heart. And Patrick’s.”
Plates bearing wedges of pie slapped down on the table between us, breaking the moment. Anne stopped talking and poked at her pie to give herself something to do. Her fork stopped halfway to her mouth, the green and white layers of key lime quivering in midair. She wrinkled her nose and gave the piece a sniff.
“Ugh. I think mine is bad.” Then her eyes jumped to the window and beyond. Her fork sank back to plate forgotten, while she stared intently at a white minivan as it powered past the diner on the highway. “It’s not the pie, is it?”
My stomach tightened. It had come from the east, the same direction as my farm.
6
I threw money at the table and pulled Anne out of her seat before it landed. We threaded through the tables too fast, and I ended up bumping into our hostess as we neared the door, knocking a stack of menus out of her hand. I yelled an apology over my shoulder, and she yelled something back at me, but I didn’t catch it. I’m sure it was nice, though.
Two seconds later I was standing by Anne’s passenger door trying hard not to yank at the handle as Anne fumbled with the keys. I was in the seat before the car’s unlock chirp faded from the night air, and moments later we were jerking backwards out of the parking space.
“What are we doing?” she asked, eyes darting between her windows and mirrors.
“Going back to my farm. Fast as you can.”
She threw the car onto the road before she started asking more questions. Anne would have made a great soldier. No hesitation and no arguing when taking action. Of course, if I knew anything about good soldiers, the latter would change at the first opportunity. We merged smoothly onto the long, empty highway before she spoke.
“It was the same men, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. I think that van was coming from my farm, and the men who killed your grandfather wouldn’t have had time to get there and back since we saw them. Was the smell the same?”
“Will you stop with that? I couldn’t have smelled anyone on the highway from inside the diner.”
“You smelled them right before you picked out the van. We both know it wasn’t the pie. It’s not even a smell, according to your grandfather, it’s just your brain trying to interpret information from a sense you don’t have an organ for. Now, was it the same?”
She paused to think. “I don’t think so. It was the same kind of smell, like garbage and swamp gas or something, but it was different than back at the home. Like bad fish and bad steak both smell like rotten food, but not like each other. Why?”
“Patty used to say that they all smelled different. He could always tell if the same one came creeping around.”
“The what came around? The baitbags or whatever?”
“Them, or things like them.” I shrugged in the dark car. “Unnatural things, I guess.”
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me! What does that mean, unnatural? They’re people, right? Why do you call them baitbags? Is that some kind of army slang?”
I glanced at the speedometer. She was keeping a steady but brisk eighty on the highway, even while she was frustrated and scared. Patty would have been proud.
“It’s a nickname that Shadroe came up with. Shad was with your grandfather and me in the squad.”
I looked out into the familiar darkness. Each day was different, but every night was the same one, stretching back forever. You might leave it during the daylight hours, but it was always there, waiting for you to come back.
“It was nighttime, and we were hunkered down in a farmhouse outside of Warsaw. The owners had left after artillery had blown off one corner of the building. At least I hope they left, there was part of a bedroom in that corner. Anyway, that had happened months before we got there.
