her back to the window for a moment, then leaped out of the shadows and dashed past the window as fast as he could. He threw himself down into the grass and lay breathing and listening. There was no sound of pursuit-but no sound of the creature he’d been following, either. Only crickets.
He sat up. Through the archway he could see the huge cement building they’d noticed from their windows, the bomb shelter or whatever it was. The concrete seemed to glow a little in the light of the late-afternoon sun, but it also had lights of its own strung along the side of it, as if for security, and at the moment it looked as mysteriously fascinating as a UFO. Tyler dashed across the grass, out of the courtyard. Up close, the tube-shaped building was even bigger than he’d guessed, more than a hundred feet long. Narrow, high windows started halfway up its side, their bottoms a dozen feet or more above the ground. Tyler really wanted to look through one of them, but knew he wouldn’t be able to climb the sloping concrete wall to reach them, so he crept silently along the edge of the building looking for a door. He found something better at the far end-a metal platform that ran beneath the last three windows. He stared at it for a long moment, listening to the crickets.
“ Don’t go out of the house, ” Colin Needle had told them. “ Just stay in your rooms. ”
Yeah. Right.
Tyler ran toward the platform and began climbing. The ladder was really rusty-it shed flakes when he put his weight on the first rung and it creaked alarmingly. He froze at the top, holding his breath, but the crickets seemed to think all was well and were still making noise. He slid off the ladder and crawled along the platform to the first window, then peered in.
What a disappointment-something really big was blocking most of the window. It gleamed a little like plastic in the uneven light, and was patterned like a quilt or a honeycomb. Tyler’s mind tried to make sense of it. He was probably looking at sacks, he decided at last, sacks of animal feed piled high and then secured with a net.
Tyler crept to the next window. The pile of sacks sloped off a bit here, enough to give him more of a view of the building’s interior. Bright lights were burning inside-the place looked more like something industrial than part of a farm, like an auto repair garage at night-and in their glare Tyler could make out some of the farmhands slicing open more feed-sacks with knives as big as machetes, then emptying them into a huge trough. Nothing very interesting, he decided.
The pile of sacks, just beside him on the other side of the window, heaved.
Tyler’s breath caught so sharply that for a moment he thought he would choke on it. He stared, trying to make sense of the weird motion just a few feet from where he crouched.
The massive pile heaved again and Tyler felt himself go cold all over. They weren’t sacks at all but something alive, something as big as an elephant-no, a dinosaur! Whatever it was groaned, a sound so deep and loud that the window and the platform both vibrated as if a hurricane had hit them. Tyler staggered to his feet in sudden terror and slipped on the slick metal platform, then he was sliding under the railing, scrabbling for a hold…
A strong hand reached down and grabbed his collar. For one second Tyler’s legs thrashed over empty air. Then a second hand curled itself into his hair and Tyler, yelling with pain, was yanked back onto the platform so hard that he hit the wall beneath the window and made it rattle. The thing on the other side of the glass made a groaning, rumbling noise, and the whole platform shuddered again.
“You stupid boy!” somebody shouted next to his ear. “You stupid boy!”
Lights came on suddenly all around the concrete building- fwam fwam fwam! -burning lights, bright as the sun. For a moment Tyler couldn’t see anything. When the spots in front of his eyes finally faded, he was looking up into the very angry face of Mr. Walkwell.
Chapter 5
“G o away, Tyler,” Lucinda said, but the person at the door only knocked again, louder. “I already told you, leave me alone.”
“Lucinda Jenkins? Open up please.”
It wasn’t Tyler but a deep-voiced man. She jumped out of bed and pulled on her jeans. She worried for a moment about opening the door to a stranger, but he didn’t ask again and somehow that reassured her.
The stranger was a big, bearded, fair-haired man in overalls. He looked fit and very muscular, but his whiskers and long hair were both streaked with gray, and the deep wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead suggested he was at least her father’s age, if not older.
“You’d better come down,” he said. “Your brother is in trouble.”
Because of his accent, it took her a moment to understand, then panic exploded through her. “Oh! Is he hurt?”
The bearded man shook his head slowly. She couldn’t figure out his expression-was he hiding a smile or something less pleasant? He had a couple of old, pale scars on his cheeks, which made her nervous. “Not hurt. But I think you must come down.”
She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know this man at all. Their first night in the middle of nowhere, and what had her dumb brother gotten into? “I’m… I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers.”
He looked at her hard for a moment, then he really did smile-the scars disappeared into the crinkly lines around his eyes and it changed his whole face into something much, much nicer. “Fairly spoken, Lucinda Jenkins. Ragnar Lodbrok is my name. Now we are not strangers.”
“But… I still don’t know you.”
He laughed. “And I do not know you, but I will trust you not to harm me. Still, we go downstairs only to the kitchen, and perhaps then one of the women there will speak for me, yes?”
She felt a little better, although she kept some distance between them as she followed him out the door. “What happened? What did Tyler do?”
“What boys do.” Ragnar didn’t seem too put out about it. “But it was not yet time.”
“Time for what?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. The bearded man reminded her a little of the scarecrow in the old Wizard of Oz movie-he had an almost boneless way of moving-but the scarecrow hadn’t been anywhere near so broad across the back.
Scarecrow probably didn’t have tattoos like that, either, she thought. She’d just noticed spikes of blue-black ink sticking up past Ragnar’s shirt collar.
Mrs. Needle was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, pulling a sweater on over her thin shoulders. “You found her, I see,” she said to Ragnar. “I’ll say it again-I don’t think you should bring her. This will be difficult enough.”
Ragnar nodded, but under his polite reply his voice was hard. There was some sort of power struggle between these two, Lucinda guessed-an old one. “Yes. But this secret is broken. She may as well learn now.”
His words frightened Lucinda so much that her knees went weak. Had that grumpy joke she shared with Tyler been right after all? Was this some kind of weird cult like she’d seen on so many TV shows? Were she and Tyler about to be given the chance to join or be killed?
They left by the front door and walked down the driveway, then cut back, skirting what looked like kitchen gardens, until in the distance they saw the big white tube-shaped building she had seen earlier, lit up now like an airport at night. Fearful, she slowed down, but Ragnar’s strong hand closed on her arm, gently but unbreakably firm, and kept her moving.
Long before they reached the building she could see two figures standing and waiting for them, one big, one small. Her flutter of relief lasted only a moment. The way Mr. Walkwell’s hand sat on her brother’s shoulder made it look like he was a prison guard and Tyler was a criminal. At least, she thought the small shape was Tyler: it looked just like him except for one thing-the expression on his face. Her brother was pale as a piece of printer paper and looked absolutely terrified. She’d never seen him that way.
Lucinda was getting more frightened by the second.
Mr. Walkwell let go of Tyler and walked forward to meet Ragnar and Mrs. Needle. Lucinda hurried over to
