FBI’s hidden me… well, then sooner or later the government will probably do experiments on me.”
Although his claim sounds outrageous, Curtis is describing what he genuinely believes will happen to him.
Either the caretaker hears truth resonating in the boy’s voice or he is prepared to believe any horror story about a government that values him less than it does a stink bug. “Experiment! On a child!”
“Yes, sir.”
Gabby doesn’t need to know what type of experiments Curtis would be subjected to or what purpose they would serve. Evidently he’s able to stir up endless hideous possibilities in the pot of paranoia that is ever boiling on his mental stove. “Sure, why the blazes not, what better them dirty bastards got to do with my taxes but go torture a child? Hell’s bells, them is the type what would hack you up, cook you in some rice, serve you with salsa to the damn stink bugs if they thought that might make the damn stink bugs happy.”
Beyond the eastern crest of the valley, a pale radiance blooms in the night: the reflected beams of headlamps or searchlights from the two SUVs and the helicopter. Flowering brighter by the second.
“Better move,” Curtis says, more to himself and to the dog than to the caretaker.
Gabby glares at the rising light in the east, the frizzles of his beard seeming to bristle as if enlivened by an electric current. Then he squints so intently at Curtis that his sun-toughened face crinkles and twills and crimps and puckers like the features of an Egyptian mummy engaged in a long but losing battle with eternity. “You ain’t been shovelin’ horseshit, have you, boy?”
“No, sir, and my ears aren’t full of it, either.”
“Then, by all that’s holy and some that’s not, we’re gonna feed these skunks our dust. Now you stay on me like grease on Spam, you understand?”
“No, sir, I don’t,” Curtis admits.
“Like green on grass, boy, like wet on water,” the caretaker explains impatiently. “Come on!” In that quick but hitching gait familiar from his grandfather’s many movies, Gabby runs past the front of Smithy’s Livery toward the hotel next door.
Curtis hesitates, puzzling over how to be grease, green, and wet.
He’s still a little damp from playing at the pump, though the desert air has already more than half dried him out.
In spite of her previous reservations about the caretaker, Old Yeller trots after him. Apparently instinct tells her that her faith is well placed.
Trusting his sister-becoming and therefore Gabby, Curtis lights out after them, past the livery and onto the boardwalk in front of Bettleby’s Grand Hotel. Bettleby’s is a forty-foot-wide, three-story, shabby clapboard building that could no more satisfy a taste for grandness than a cow pie could satisfy when you wanted a slice of grandma’s deep-dish apple.
Suddenly the chop of the helicopter rotors explodes into a boom-boom-boom, no longer muffled by the valley wall.
Curtis senses that if he looks to his right, across the street and over the roofs of buildings on the other side of town, he will see the aircraft hovering at the crest of the valley, an ominous black mass defined only by its small red and white running lights. Instead, he keeps his mind on Old Yeller, keeps his eyes fixed on Gabby and on the hobbling beam of the flashlight.
Past the hotel, tightly adjoining it, stands Jensen’s Readymade, ALL-DONE OUTFITS FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. A hand-lettered sign in the window announces that fashions “currently to be seen everywhere in San Francisco” are now for sale here, which makes San Francisco seem as far away as Paris.
Past Jensen’s Readymade and before reaching the post office, Gabby turns left, off the boardwalk and into a narrow walkway between buildings. This passage is similar to the one by which Curtis and Old Yeller earlier entered town from the other side of the street.
The chopper approaches: an avalanche of hard rhythmic sound sliding down the valley wall.
Something else is coming, too. Something marked by a hum that Curtis feels in his teeth, that resonates in his sinuses, and by a rapidly swelling but also quickly subsiding tingle in the Haversian canals of his bones.
To counter a rising tide of fear, he reminds himself that the way to avoid panicking in a flood is to concentrate on swimming.
The wood-frame structures, crowding them on both sides, glow golden as the flashlight passes. Shadows ebb up the plunk walls in advance of Gabby, flow down again in his wake, and spill across Curtis as he wades after the caretaker and the dog.
Overall the faint fumes of recently applied paint, with an underlying spice of turpentine. A whiff of dry rabbit pellets. So peculiar that a rabbit would venture in here where it might easily be trapped by predators. Tan fragrance of a discarded apple core, fresh this very day, still a human scent clinging to it. Coyote urine, aggressively bitter.
Reaching the end of the passageway, the caretaker switches off the flashlight, and the moonless dark closes over them as if they have descended into a storm cellar and pulled the door shut at their backs. Gabby halts only a step or two into the open dirt yard beyond the west side of town.
If not for the dog’s guidance, Curtis would collide with the old man. Instead, he steps around him.
Gabby grabs Curtis, pulls him close, and raises his voice above the thunder of the incoming chopper. “We goin’ spang north to the barn what ain’t a barn!”
Curtis figures that the barn-what-ain’t-a-barn, whatever it might be, isn’t far enough north to be safe. The Canadian border isn’t far enough north, for that matter, nor the Arctic Circle.
Judging by the sound of it, the helicopter is putting down at the south end of town, in the vicinity of Smithy’s Livery. Near the evidence of the sodden platform and the wet footprints in the dirt around the water pump.
The FBI — and the soldiers, if there are any — will be conducting a sweep south to north, the direction in which Gabby and Curtis and Old Yeller now flee. They’ll be highly trained in search-and-secure procedures, and most if not all of them will be equipped with night-vision goggles.
Peripherally, to his left, Curtis becomes aware of a faint pearly radiance close to the earth. Alarmed, he glances west and sees what appears to be a low skim of mist blanketing the ground, but then he realizes he’s looking out across the salt flats not from a higher perspective, as before, but from the zero elevation of the valley floor. The illusory mist is in fact the natural phosphorescence of the barren plain, the ghost of the long-dead sea.
The hard whack of chopper blades abruptly softens, accompanied by a wheezy whistle of decelerating rotation. The aircraft is on the ground.
They’re coming. They’ll be efficient and fast.
Hurrying north, Curtis is worried, but not primarily about the men in the helicopter or those in the two SUVs that are probably even now descending the valley wall. Worse enemies have arrived.
The intervening buildings foil thermal-reading and motion-detection gear. They also somewhat, but not entirely, screen the telltale energy signature that only Curtis emits.
Because of the natural fluorescence of the nearby salt fields, the night isn’t as black as it was just moments ago. Curtis can see Gabby ahead, and the dog’s white flags.
The caretaker doesn’t run in the usual sense of the word, but progresses in the herky-jerky fashion that his presumed grandfather displayed when, in those movie moments of high jeopardy, he had said, Dang, we better skedaddle. This Gabby moves fast in a skedaddle, but he keeps stopping to look back, waving his gun, as if he expects to discover a villain of one kind or another looming point-blank over him every time he turns.
Curtis wants to scream Move-move-move, but Gabby is probably an ornery cuss who always does things his way and who won’t react well to instruction.
Though the search squads must be pouring out of the helicopter, there’s no light to the south, where they landed. They’re conducting a natural-conditions exploration, because they believe that their high-tech gear makes darkness their friend.
In addition to the buildings, commotion screens Curtis, too, makes it more difficult for the hunters to read his special energy signature, and there’s going to be plenty of commotion coming in mere seconds.
In fact, it starts with screaming. The shrieks of a grown man reduced by terror to the condition of a small child.
Gabby hitches to a halt again and squints back along the route they followed, his pistol jabbing this and that
